Japan wants 85% of men to take paternity leave but they’re too scared to take it
cnn.com
cnn.com
Japan has a Hikkomori problem, which means a 30% reduction in birth rate because those people stay single forever.
Japan also has the issue that large parts of the country will be heavily affected by global warming and you can already see the increase in typhoons right now. Parents are scared if their children will still have a safe home.
And lastly, the economy has stopped growing and turned into a zero sum game. It's a cutthroat competition for who gets promoted because new leadership positions typically only open up if someone dies or retires. That means young families are broke.
The paternity leave is catnip for western newspapers, but in my opinion almost irrelevant.
about 0.5% of the Japanese population are estimated to live like hermits, how are they responsible for 30% in birth rate reductions? If anything this is the Western media catnip, because it's the most overhyped, Japanese stereotype I've ever seen.
"About one-third of women (37.4%) and men (36.6%) aged 18 to 24 described themselves as single and not interested in a relationship."
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-japanese-increasingly-disinter...
Herbivore men and hikikomori are very much not the same. To say they are is tantamount to saying that incels are part of a wider "hoarder" movement, these groups might be affected by similar societal dynamics but they're not related at all
There are a number of syndromes that look superficially like the Hikikomori syndrome, of about 10 people I know in the US who are chronically depressed and fit the “NEET” (No Employment, Education or Training) criteria there is one who I think really is a Hikikomori (can’t seem to tell the difference between Hololive and reality), the rest all differ in some major way.
Also a lot of the, let's call it "citizen resistance" against the prevalent extremely toxic Japanese work culture, is not captured by statistics. Japanese are different people and they will not just admit "yeah I would only see my wife and kid for 1 hour before I dine and collapse, preparing for yet another 16 hour workday" if asked on the street. Written workplace surveys? Forget about it, to them it's a disgrace to badmouth their employer; never happening.
It's obvious the Japanese have a problem. You arguing doesn't change that.
In the early 2010s, Bay Area startups were famous for "unlimited vacation" policies that resulted in less overall time off because everyone was well aware that taking even a standard amount of vacation would signal a lack of devotion.
What's the solution? Mandatory benefits: make everyone use their allotment, even if they don't want to. Many large banks force all staff to take holidays not only to combat a culture of overwork, but also to prevent fraud by making sure everyone has a block of time where they have to hand over their work to someone else.
If the Japanese government were truly serious about the "ikumen" ideal, it would pass a law requiring 6 weeks of paternity leave. Of course, I doubt that's politically or culturally feasible.
Japan does much better than the USA on child care so the parents can go back to work.
It's great that the WA leg passed Fair Start, but it only helped the demand side of child care. So now if you needed help paying for child care you have the means to do so - but because the demand side is broken, you still can't get the child care you need. Unfortunately this is a trend in American politics on a range of issues - let's throw some money at one side of the equation, never mind the root causes of the problem.
> We have a family leave pay roll tax in WA, though I’m not sure how hard it is to use for paternity leave.
I'll admit - I don't know either, as my children of the Evergreen State were born before that came into effect. The payroll tax is a good start, but like many of these well-intentioned laws it leaves behind a lot of people.
Almost any country does. If Japan gives you more freedom in something than at home, then at home doesn't give any.
Spain provides 6 weeks of mandatory paid parental leave that come into effect once the child is born, and an additional 10 weeks to be used during the year.
I didn't know this is idiom.
My first intuition was white shoe law firm meant you wear white sneakers instead of black leather shoes. I.e. it was more of a shady, cheap law firm.
Interesting that it means the opposite.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
There is something else going on, I feel a kind of ambiant negativity induced by the global warming news, which seem to block people to have kids.
Even for those stable engineers, it's hard to afford a home. Also you start earning money late at 25, because you needed those pesky degrees. Now you are 30, have a modicum of money, and want to live a little first. So you have fun until 35. Now you're looking for a life partner, you find them at 40. But you need to be financially stable, so you save up for a downpayment, you wait a few years until 45 to start a family.
You now notice you can't have kids because you're too old. The end.
I keep warning them how tiring it is to raise a child, and you better do it while you're healthy.
I've never understood the whole "party it up in college" thing. Like number one, I had to go to class and then do school work. I also had to work a shit job to try and not end up drowning in debt for school. I basically did the "996" thing (12 hour days 6 days a week) between school and work for years. It was not a party for me. Also I have zero interest in putting a child through that or many aspects of the modern world.
Now I am having fun by doing cycling trips several days with my son. We are eagerly waiting for the sun.
I don't see what young people see, what is bad about the modern world? We are not at war, we have an incredible comfort, I don't get why it is not a good time to have children (if you want one of course). I think people should just stop trying to plan everything and just do something and improvise.
Disclaimer: having children is a money sink and limiting factor when want to pursue your career, but it is not blocking you.
Expensive housing on the other hand is a real problem. Requiring a long degree for nearly everything is also dumb.
The reasons vary based on who you ask and their bias. My bias will be obvious. Here's my list:
- War on traditional family values. That includes marriage and having kids.
- War on men.
- Toxic and degenerate pop culture promoted to teens.
- Hookup culture, dating apps, easy and promoted and celebrated divorces
- Daddy government is there aleays to provide a huge cushion for badly picked marriages. For women at least.
- Men are scared away from marriage due to the legal system being skewed against them.
- Promotion and glorification of party culture. Having kids and a stable marriage is Hard. If everything is handed on a platter to you from an early age and you're shielded from the realities and difficulties of life, this is going to seem like a huge life decision that is too hard.
- We don't realize how much our collective fiddling and tweaking with various parts of our world with laws and incentives is having on society and culture. We're fucking it up royally. Just look at how degenerate pop culture is atm, and look at it honestly, and wonder if it's healthy for society on the aggregate.
I am sorta on the opposite side of this I want to have kids, get married, I'm willing to support my husband if I make more then him (whenever I get one), but I feel like I'm just not stable enough yet. Most of my tech jobs are short lived, I'm also trying to run my own business and just don't have the time to do a lot right now. I grew up with parents with hugh issues with money and they divorced and I don't want that for my future. I don't want to fight over money or jobs or small stupid stuff that doesn't matter in life.
I think honestly a lot of people just don't feel like they are in a stable position, we also don't have strong communities anymore that helps out when stuff does get hard like marriage or raising kids. I think honestly a lot of people are really lonely and just live with it because they don't know how to fix it. We don't have systems or places in place that make it easy to hang out nor do we have the time nowadays. Or at least I don't. I'm in my 30's though and I'm in a long distance relationship but it sounds really hard to imagine actually getting married anytime soon I just have so much going on. I really believe people want to feel loved and have someone to love, I think a lot of our society now though is hyper competitive, commercialized and no longer built for families. People don't trust anymore and it's a fear driven culture.
At the end of the day. Ask them why. Then poke and prod till they tell you the core of why they think that way. Then see what in recent culture or happenings might have caused them to think that way.
When parents expected young children to perform unpaid manual labor the net cost of upbringing was negligible or even profitable.
Now many people only start earning at 21 or later, and aren't even able to support their parents at the point due to the huge size of mortgage and college loans.
I love this!
People think kids are too expensive because of the expectation of what kids cost. Not just monetarily but also in terms of time.
You see it especially in Asian countries like South Korea. Kids mean hiring tutors, violin lessons, test prep, etc. Because of course my kid won't be average, he's going to be a next Bill Gates and that costs a lot of money.
Plenty of well intenioned policy, but its not considering the actual social stigmas/structures behind the issue.
Either pay companies to achieve paternity leave targets, or fine them if they don’t, and we’ll see what happens to paternity leave rates.
And for those of you who haven’t been through the process yourself, it’s hard to imagine trying to go through the first couple of weeks after a baby is born without it.
For one, if your wife/partner/baby mommy has had a c-section, they will have to stay in hospital for a few days after the birth, because a c-section is nontrivial surgery that they will need to recover from.
They and you will also need to start feeding/changing/bathing/soothing the new baby. If it’s your first, you’re learning how to do all this from scratch. And sometimes this is easy, sometimes it’s not. The logistics of simultaneously using a breast pump, and formula supplementation…let’s just say it’s a lot of work that nobody prepares you for. If it’s not, you’ve also got other kids who still require the usual amount of looking after, plus a bit extra because they’re often peeved about this new bundle of pooh, wee, and crying getting all the attention.
And then you’ve got the logistics of all the friends and relatives who turn up and want to see your bundle of joy.
And then, frankly, it’s your kid, and most fathers I went through the process with at roughly the same time wanted to be involved in all of this stuff, unlike their Boomer parents. I certainly did.
The wealthiest oligarchs of the boomer generation have done everything they can to ensure the consequent generations are unable to attain that one entirely reasonable primal need.
Women's rights have had an affect on birth rates, yes, but I'd rather take away the oligarch's right to own all the single family homes than my girlfriend's right to decide what to do with her life.