Lady Dopers- What does the state have to put on the table for you to make more babies?

Re this article Spain’s birth rate is now 1.3 for every 2 people and they are trying to figure out ways to increase it so there will be someone paying taxes in the future. Birth rates are compressing across the more advanced economies. Let’s say at some point the US said “We need more baby production!”.

What would have to happen in the way of things the state would have to put in the table for you to consider making more kids or a kid? How big will the bribe have to be?

Spain appointed a special commissioner to convince citizens to have more babies

Moot point for me, but a generous PAID maternity leave, government supplied child support and subsidized child care would go a long way…

I have two kids. The question of having a third was right out because daycare and college are so expensive, because children’s carseats are so freaking enormous you can’t put a family of five in a normal-sized sedan, and really everything just seems to be targeted to families of four. But really, pregnancy is just such a miserable experience that there is no way I would have done it again even if childcare and education were taken care of and we had magical carseats that fit three across in a Civic.

For me, back when I was still young enough to potentially have kids, nothing would have worked. They could have offered me a million tax-free dollars and I wouldn’t have done it (though I would have regretted the fact that I’m so adamantly opposed to the idea of being pregnant/raising a baby that I’d pass up a million tax-free dollars!)

I had three. Number three scared me enough to quit and be thankful for what I had. No state or federal gimmicks could change that.

Having babies is a hell of an experience. This is a truth that seems to get brushed aside, somehow–or maybe I was just blind to it before I had one myself. I mean yes, wanting to be a parent is a deep urge for many people, and you love your kids to the moon and back once you have them…but having them is hell. And life for women before modern birth control must have been a special kind of hell that I can’t even wrap my head around.

But about me: after my daughter was born I lost five pregnancies in a row, so apparently more kids just weren’t on the table for me. Had it been an option, free health care, paid maternity leave, free child care, and a reasonable cost of college would have all helped.

I am not a woman but it takes two to tango. There are too many people in the world already. A population decline is painful in the short to medium term but that is what you get when your build economic models on a pyramid scheme. There shouldn’t be any incentives for anyone to have more kids. Take it as a blessing.

Ok, my sincerest apologies for starting off by fighting the hypothetical - really, I know it’s wrong - but I can’t help wanting to up and yell THE FUCK! WHY!!! when I read these stories about wanting to encourage more baby making. They want more young people? There are literally millions of existing young people all over the world who would be more than happy to help them out here. Hell’s bells, this is Spain we’re talking about, they could fill up their country even with native language speakers, if they were so inclined.

Now I’ve got that off my chest…

Probably, I could be persuaded to have just one more child if I was convinced that it was an actual service to the community. That is, if we really needed more people rather than it just being an exercise in trying to avoid having brown people in your country. I don’t think anything could ever convince me to have five children though. Everyone has their limit - that’s mine.

We are talking positive encouragement right? Not the old "Reproduce now! 3 kids in 5 years or you get a 9mm to the back of the head!’ Since although I am male, I suspect that would work, for a while at least.

First thing, have a productive economy whose benefits are widely shared.

Seriously, if prospective parents look at the future and see no happy ending ahead, but just a life where every few years, you’re thrown out of a job and have to spend what savings you have just to keep afloat until you find decent employment again, no, you’re not going to be eager to have kids.

That’s a lot of people’s experience, these days. And the economies of countries like Spain make the U.S. look like paradise by comparison.

Immigration is obviously another way to solve the birth dearth, to steal Ben Wattenberg’s phrase. (Good Lord, we’ve been talking about this for half my life! That book came out in 1987.) But when there already don’t seem to be enough jobs to go around, you’re not going to want to let in more people to fight you for those jobs.

Second, make being a parent more affordable, in terms of both money and time. Paid maternity leave at one end, affordable college at the other. (Starting in the 1980s, conservatives argued that the taxpayers ought to pay a bit less for college, and the students themselves - the direct beneficiaries, ought to pay a bit more. Made sense then, maybe, but now we’ve gone way too far in that direction. And the benefits of a degree are a lot less of a sure thing at the individual level than they used to be.) And in between, in an era where many people can’t get by on one income, subsidized day care, subsidized before/after care through the pre-teen years, and subsidized summer programs for the kids that are compatible with the parents working full time.

And of course, universal affordable health care, because giving birth places great stress on one’s body as well as on one’s everyday life, and while most women recover from labor without long-term consequences, those that don’t recover quite so well need to know that they’re going to get the medical attention they need.

That’s not a complete list, but I think it hits the high points.

Speaking anecdotally as a mere man, I’ve heard of two big issues:

Difficulties and complications in pregnancy. My sister-in-law had great difficulty in becoming pregnant - the issue being on her side - and had a serious scare in her second pregnancy. A friend had a birth which meant that she was no longer able to carry a child. Another, older, friend had a severely autistic child, likely caused by medical treatment.

Money. Children are expensive and I’ve commonly heard people say that they’d love more children but cannot afford them. A particular cost here in the UK is the cost of housing.

UHC doesn’t seem to be relevant: the TFR is 1.83 in England and Wales.

In the end, it boils down to economics.

When women are expected to be primary homemakers and primary parents, pregnancy is an application for two full-time jobs where you may occasionally get “help”+ from the other party who was there while you made the kids. Add job insecurity; add that if you’re decently qualified you’re likely to have much better chances (or at least chances that look much better) abroad, where legend has it machismo doesn’t exist*; add the machismo itself… and you end up with a lot of women who have or will wither have few children and late, not have them or have them abroad.

  • as long as people refer to the man’s share of housework as “help”, the underlying notion is that it’s not really his responsibility
  • definitely a legend. And note that the Spanish word doesn’t quite have the same meaning as the English one; the actual translation would be closer to “male chauvinism”.

In the end, it boils down to economics.

When women are expected to be primary homemakers and primary parents, pregnancy is an application for two full-time jobs where you may occasionally get “help”+ from the other party who was there while you made the kids. Add job insecurity; add that if you’re decently qualified you’re likely to have much better chances (or at least chances that look much better) abroad, where legend has it machismo doesn’t exist*; add the machismo itself, which keeps rolling back ceilings you thought you’d already broken… and you end up with a lot of women who either have few children and late, not have them or have them abroad.

  • as long as people refer to the man’s share of housework as “help”, the underlying notion is that it’s not really his responsibility
  • definitely a legend. And note that the Spanish word doesn’t quite have the same meaning as the English one; the actual translation would be closer to “male chauvinism”.

Me personally? No way in freaking hell - my body resists popping out kids [haven’t been able to carry past 7 months, and that one damned near killed me so I got a tubal ligation]

Other families? I will reiterate what everybody else is going wit - organized health care, financial support for clothing, feeding and educating the kid [that can take the form of liberal maternity leave, child care to get the mother back to work or just give her a few hours WITHOUT a kid underfoot to do stuff around the house or go out and run errands. I detest having to go for groceries and get stuck near a woman with 3 squalling monsters interfering with her getting HER shopping done] and an educational system that encourages both the university and the technical/manual streams. There is NOTHING wrong with manual labor, or telephone customer service, plumbing or waiting tables if there is a living wage and it isn’t ‘shameful’ to work a blue collar job. Not everybody is mentally able to do university work - and that is not a bad thing, we need blue collar workers. It doesn’t matter that my plumber has to use a calculator and doesn’t understand string theory … or that my barrista only really can do that work and had no intention of ever going to college and doing anything different. He loves working in a coffee house and people watching. [And he makes wicked fantastic coffees in lots of different styles] Why should he have to become a psychologist or financial investment counselor?

And it would help if the stay at home mother wasn’t stigmatized as ‘just’ a housewife - managing a house and juggling a budget, scheduling for the kids and adults, cooking, cleaning, laundry and everything associated with it is a lot of WORK …

These were my thoughts too. There are enough people (some say too many) already on the planet. We just have to figure out a fair way of sharing resources peacefully.

But leaving that aside, what would encourage me to have another?
[ul]Knowing that, should any health complications arise during my pregnancy, I would get good, unbiased medical care up to and including a termination if I need it i.e. that discussions regarding how we proceed are between me, my doctor and the father and NO ONE ELSE and that my decision regarding what happens to my body is final
[/ul]
[ul]That protecting my life and health during pregnancy will take precedence
[/ul]
[ul]Good, paid maternity leave
[/ul]
[ul]Subsidised childcare
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[ul]Good, reliable healthcare should I suffer any long-term health damage arising during pregnancy
[/ul]
[ul]If the child has special needs, guaranteed provision of decent healthcare and financial support for my child (e.g to get appropriate schooling, equipment, housing etc.) and support for our family in dealing with the challenges e.g. employment protection, part-time employment opportunity or full-time carer allowance with respite care opportunities
[/ul]
[ul]Employment laws that protect me from discrimination for becoming a parent. Flexible working opportunities for both me and the child’s father so that we can share childcare responsibilities
[/ul]
[ul]Lower college fees
[/ul]
[ul]A statutory pension that does not penalise me for taking time out of work to rear the all-important future citizen(s)
[/ul]

And I could go on. Realistically, it’s normal that women will vote with their feet regarding how many kids they have. Such decisions have many variables and really boil down to individual desires and circumstances.

Overall, I think it would help if a society that acknowledges the benefit of balanced demographics would accept that this comes at a collective cost, be that the cost of providing the above protections for women to encourage them to have more children OR to accept that immigration is probably part of the solution.

Another thing I’d like to add. I’d love if the prevailing working patterns/ employers would change to acknowledge that, while pregnancy and breastfeeding certainly do require special treatment for women, it is not only women who become parents. Having a family would not cause so much anxiety if we all worked for employers and with co-workers who accept that people do have children, aged parents, sick friends or other people to look after in their lives. The ‘on-call 24-7’ mentality does society no favours and is a mug’s game.

OK, let’s ask - is any modern western country doing things already that would seem to support raising the birth rate? If so, are these policies successful in encouraging a higher birth rate?

I would submit that Germany ticks off many of the boxes: healthcare for all, free college tuition, maternity leave with 18 weeks paid a and 1 year job protection, free daycare for under 3 year-olds. But with all that, their birth rate is still only 1.5 children per woman, which is actually an increase over time.

So, it would seem that there would be other factors. This opinionsuggest that a combination of economics and culture contribute to the lower birth rate.

To Spain I say, good luck with your social engineering!

Cuba, at 1.7 births per woman, checks off all those boxes and is adding paid paternity leave for grandparents in an effort to encourage more babies!

ETA: Of course, their population problem is compounded by a sizeable net emigration as well.

Absolutely nothing. Having a child would kill me. Not figuratively, literally.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking when I was reading the answers here. Lots of other countries already do stuff like paid maternity leave. I do think paid maternity leave is a very good idea, but it doesn’t seem to be especially effective in raising the birth rate.
I personally think cultural, religious and social factors probably influence people’s decisions to have big families more than a rational cost-benefit analysis does. You have kids if your peers are having them or you belong to a culture/religion that tells you that big families are a blessing.
If someone belongs to a culture that makes a big fuss about what a pain in the ass it is to have kids and that it ruins your life until they move out of the house, having a paid maternity leave isn’t going to help make you want them.

Personally, I have one kid so far and hope that I am able to have at least 1-2 more. The main reason I probably won’t have more than that is that I just waited too long to start having kids. If I had known then what I know now, I actually would have started having kids earlier in life. I put it off because I was scared of all the negative things people say about parenting. In fact, I ended up enjoying parenthood a lot more than I expected.