Spain found that parental leave resulted in fewer children. Ha.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472...
These honestly sound like good things to me. Fathers raising children increased the chance for women to participate in the labour force, men become more aware of what it takes to raise a child, and the quality of child rearing increases.
Don't think more children was necessarily the point of the policy.
We are literally a dying breed, and on our way to extinction, we’re wholly unable to even have a conversation about the problem.
almost any Western country
I suspect the same is true to a lot of other western countries.
(this doesn't mean I'm otherwise of a different opinion than you regarding whose welfare to optimize - a state is for its people not its corporations)
Surely people in poor countries can afford to have kids even less than people in rich countries?
Nevertheless OP made their claim about more than 0-1 kids, not >2.
Yes, of course, humanity's biggest problem is currently that we're basically going extinct because we're not reproducing enough.
People in Western countries don't do any calculus because they can't afford children, they have fewer children because that's what people want if they're not under pressure. In fact economically speaking, the opposite is true, the birth rate is high precisely in places in which people are poor, because children are the social safety net as well as the work force for manual labour.
Also if we reproduce at say, a modest rate of 1.7 there will be still more people in 2200 than there were in the 1950s. How are we heading for extinction exactly?
That's long been known to be true of social support and safety nets generally, so it's not a surprise that it would be true of parental leave, which is a subset of that.