More Than 40% of Japanese Women May Never Have Children
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
We came across this interesting piece about physical differences between kids in 2007 and kids in 1985. In short, the average 5 year old in 2007 had the athletic abilities of a 3 year old in 1985. Granted this data is rather old, but anecdotally we did notice our 3 year old playing on equipment specified for (and mostly being used by) the much older children. https://poh.ngo/en/the-state-of-play-in-japan/
The best public and highly used playgrounds we found were in Kyoto (near the train museum), in Osaka called the mountain slides (near the Children's Plaza), and in Arashiyama at the top of the Monkey Park hill. Aside from that, paid entertainment was the way to go.
Happy to share more if anyone is interested in the experience, but I'd rather stop there for now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikiru
(wikipedia is always a spoiler if you read the Plot section)
EDIT: you can read the full article here: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/more-than-40-of-japanese-women-m... but it does not explain further.
There are so many more outlets for dopamine in the modern world, and with the internet we can post about it and share it with our peers instantly.
Children lock you into a life of servitude. They're "expensive furniture for tiny apartments" as Peter Zeihan says, no longer "free labor for the farm". Unlike dogs, you can't leave them at home unattended.
This isn't just Japan. This is everywhere.
It also doesn't speak to the specific circumstances in Japan either. I'm sure "herbivore men" exist in the West, but they're not common enough that we have a term for it that I know of.
(Sure there are incels, but that's something different).
As a non-Japanese couple in our late 30s who decided not to have kids, I confirm those are exactly our reasons.
While I generally love kids and will be a good uncle, I just can't fathom the financial/emotional/time burden required to raise a couple of them for 18 years. I have just one life and this is my ride. If regret will eventually show up, I'll deal with it.
I fear for people who choose this path. Being childless in your 30s sounds like a blast. But that's just one stage of your life. How fun is life going to be when you're 40+? Or when your health begins to decline? Maybe it will be worth it, maybe not. When I visit older relatives who are childless (at least to me) their lives come off as hollow and sad.
My grandfather willingly moved to Florida, away from the family. We'd be expected to visit for holidays, of course, but he wanted to play tennis in the sun.
We're in our late 30s and are definitely not having any.
That said, I believe that a couple that is 1000% sure they want to have children and know what they are getting into should absolutely do it. The issue is that there are so many parents/future parents locked into the "you'll never be ready" or "you can never be too sure" mentality and fail to fully grasp what you're sacrificing and leaving behind when you become a parent.
Having children is also an opportunity for personal development and growth, just of a different flavor and different direction.
Of course there isnt a single answer, but I think people should question the implicit assumption that the "best ride", most fun, ect is the childfree one.
nobody asked. people asked about why specifically japan stands out here, it is a big statistical outlier.
I always thought dogs were somehow less convenient than kids. At least society is built around the parent/kid dynamic somewhat.
Yes. Yes you can...
You put food in a bowl and leave it on the floor. They eat it when they are hungry. It's quite simple...
Bathroom? If you feed them at the same time every day, the usually go to the bathroom at the same time every day. You build habits. They go out before you go to work, and then when you come home, they go out and relieve themselves.
There are also grass pads for smaller dogs that can be left inside the home.
These are not difficult problems.
"They make noise and destroy things"
If yours does, you have a sh*tty dog that probably isn't being taken care of correctly.
Most cared for dogs just sit around, sleep, and wait for their owners to get home.
If you have all the experience with dogs that you say you do, and yet still hold the thoughts about dogs that you do...i'm not sure what to say about that.
Quite a few of my liberal friends are childless, which is odd because who's going to carry on their values?
It's natural selection, applied to values/religion/etc...
(it's a joke, sorry).
Nobody owes you to make children. It's your own choice.
But it's quite fun (and not that expensive in my country).
How do these people invert that so thoroughly, that they believe that it's not just negative from time to time, but overwhelmingly so and constantly? I hate to stoop to pop psychology, but that's some sort of profound multi-generational trauma going on, isn't it?
Its not saying that there is only one possible experience, but asking where the pessimism is coming from.
So are you stupid or blind? You can’t possibly thing of anything that would make people more pessimistic?
People can either think "being a parent would be miserable" or "being a parent would be fun". The interesting question is what leads them to one conclusion or the other.
In general, my life is pretty great and full of loving friends and family. I think my children's lives will be great too.
Do you have a support team that shares the load with you? We don't have anyone we can rely on. My in-law that does fly out sometimes would rather play with their phone than be a grandparent and we can't trust them to so much as drive a dog to the vet because we're sure they'd get distracted or lost or just crash.
Kids are a ton of of work. Life is a ton of work. Combine those two things and have no "village" to speak of and it's often too much. There's no pop psychology needed to point out that for many people, kids aren't their best life. Kids aren't always rewarding. Sometimes the right answer is the easy answer: if you don't want kids, having one will not be a net positive for your life.
However, like I said above, the interesting part of the question is the why. I think the lack of a village and support network is a very plausible answer. My friends that are the happiest with children also have a robust Village and social life which is supportive of raising children. This includes social activities that don't force adults to choose between parenting and personal enjoyment. This can be as simple dinner parties a couple times a week where one parent will watch The Children Play while everyone else takes a load off.
I think another similar plausible explanation is a cultural expectation that parents replace their lives with that of their children opposed to integrating the children into their own lives.
If parents like camping, travel, gardening, or reading, they should what they love with their kids.
Fuck watching the wiggles or elmo 8 hours a day. That's insanity and needless suffering.
Generation Z is the most risk adverse and cautious/fearful cohort of humans in US history.
Even if parenting is on average extremally rewarding, it is also very scary at first and things can go very badly in some rare cases.
You see all kinds of trends related to this, like declines in sex, dating, risky behaviors, ect.
They are also one of the most pessimistic/cynical cohorts in general.
Taken together, I think these trends have huge impacts on how people view parenting.
Memetic continuity doesn’t require genetic continuity, and IME plenty of the people forgoing the latter are also putting considerable effort into the former.
Little children do, but they don't stay little
If that is too expensive for the budget then you could grant citizenship to families with many children from developing countries.
The people who really don't want kids, the ones sterilizing themselves, are all depressed. They have miserable lives. They aren't traveling and having great vacations, they aren't becoming CEOs, they aren't living in the lap of luxury. They're mostly alone.
Oddly, the people who have kids travel a lot more despite it being much harder with a kid. We have a lot of family demanding we visit and who wants to visit. We have a lot of things to show the kids.
The folks with kids are generally the ones with more illustrious careers, the ones higher up the food chain. Some of that may be that it's easier to have kids when you have more money.
Wealth is not just money. It is the whole of your circumstance. Your home and whether you want to be in it, whether you like your life partner, and how your family unit gets along. You need enough money for things of course.
Your theory sounds great on paper, but I don't think it holds up.
But I earn more money, and have a child on the way. Hopefully that means I'm worth more!
I wouldn't choose to be a mom in this world. They're far too underappreciated.
Well, that old one child policy from back in the day may have had lasting consequences?
Like Japan never had that law and is still having serious consequences
I suppose Korea is like that too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment#/med...
Since the 80s, labor unions in Japan have been pushing for less hours worked and more holiday days. Currently the Japanese have between 10-20 PTO days per year.
My point is that this idea the Japanese are overworking themselves to death is mostly a myth from previous decades.
From what I understand, traditional Japanese family model is a stay at home mother with an almost stay at work father.
Society is organised around this model, e.g. no day care, mothers not expected to build a career, and probably being a father comes with pressure about being a reliable provider (getting overworked). I remember that a lot of father losing their work preferred abandoning their family than enduring the shame of losing their job during the late nineties asian crisis.
Regardless of immediate material complications of begin parent, the additional social burden certainly not help.
What makes US culture change faster?
On top of that, Japan's work culture of being more wedded & committed to work than to family strongly discourages it. When you are expected to work 12x6, then go out drinking with the boss, and still are living paycheck-to-paycheck it becomes very hard to see how you would have time to raise children. I've heard (PBS, no link now) abt studies where they reduced work hours in a town and fertility rapidly and significantly increased.
Give people a little breathing room and you'll get kids.
In Japan, marriage = kids, there are few children born outside of marriage. Increasingly people are marrying later or not marrying at all, which has a direct effect on that. There are other reasons: women still end up doing way more of the housework and childrearing than men (on average) in Japan; men work longer hours and don't get to spend time with the kids they're raising; in a divorce women almost always get full custody. Mother in laws used to live with the family and help, but that is less common now. Two earner households are more common. Women are focusing on careers more.
The overall picture is similar to other countries - a rejection of the traditional marriage and kids plan in favour of spending time on other activities in ones 20s and 30s - but unique societal factors make it more prominent here.
Universal child care, family leave might help.
Still, I look at the generation younger than me in the US and see them in the same spot. We’d already be in their situation if it weren’t for immigration.
Why the average family in Tokyo can own a new house for $850/month https://archive.curbed.com/2017/2/3/14496248/tokyo-real-esta...
I'm a high earner. I have no money issues, what I have are time issues. I'm a single parent with high flexibility and every single struggle I have with my child could be relieved by having a homemaker to distract my kid and take care of the impacts of my kid. I do more than double laundry and clean more often and burn hours at places I don't necessarily want to be but the kid does. My career has stalled out because I don't have the extra hours it takes to get promoted.
Now imagine this in Japan where they're not just working 40 hours a week, looking at add 5-10 more for advancement. That's the issue of children in my opinion. It's why very wealthy people hire nannies. It's the only way to free the most value resource you spend on children: time.
[*] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?locat...
This has nothing to do about money and is about time. A couple busy for 12-16 hours every day can't raise even an houseplant.
Costs: $40k equivalent [1]
Income: $37k equivalent [2]
Combine that with an expectation for women to stop working once they marry and surprise, people rationally find that it doesn’t make sense.
[1] https://www.candyjapan.com/life-in-japan/what-it-costs-to-li...
One part of the problem is that this is so compartmentalized. If you work at a place where people have children... they all have children for the most part. If you work at a place where they don't have children, then nearly all of them are childless (or have just the one). Same for non-work social lives.
This means there's some significant fraction of people who look around them and can't notice that it's happening here in the US too, their own personal experience contradicts the trend too thoroughly for them to believe it to be some sort of fluke.
In Japan, at a guess, I'd say that exact nature of the discouragement, they just keep putting the pressure on that "here are the 10,000 things you must do first" until children become an impossible achievement.
The documentary Birthgap tries to seek a cause.
But the immediate followup question should definitely be, why would it stay at 40%, when it can go higher? Every woman who (for whatever reason) does not have children exerts a cultural influence on those around her, normalizing the behavior. Making it seem less out of place. Inadvertently teaching young girls within their social sphere that this is option, an acceptable one.
If this number does go higher, the problem accelerates... it's not necessarily some theoretical demise of their nation centuries from now.
We already surpassed that point of equilibrium long ago. Humanity is now consuming 1.7 Earths of resources every year. Some countries like the US consume a lot more than that.
https://www.overshootday.org/how-many-earths-or-countries-do...
If you are spending 1.7x your income, how much money you have in the bank becomes extremely relevant. Are you broke tomorrow, or do you have enough savings for 1,000 years
In some cases we've already passed the peak of certain resources. See this paper about peak minerals from 2012.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09593...
If you have a finite, non-replenishable resource, then you need a budget for how long you want it to last to come up with a consumption Target.
No little girl who grows up seeing few, if any women, have children will think to herself "I want 2.1 when I grow up!". But, all must do this, or fertility rates never recover. If not all girls do that, then some must instead say "I want 4.5 when I grow up" or "I want 8.9 when I am a woman"... which seems even less likely.
It's an inevitable, inescapable mathematical fact.
All women will not need to have 2+ children for an equilibrium. Some women and families will want 0 or 1, and some will want more. But in any case, people obviously respond to incentives, and the people who think there is an "inescapable mathematical fact" that population will simply continue trending to 0 ignore this fact entirely.
It might even be true that with the right incentives, they could convince the childless to have children. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to get that just because there is a theoretical incentive that could work doesn't mean that same theoretical incentive is anything anyone could hope to afford.
Assuming that fertility decline is irreversible, this would mean that you should have specific examples of entire populations that have died not of disease or conquest, but reproductive ennui. I don’t think so.
2. The "ennui" as you refer to it, is clearly a modern phenomenon. It couldn't have happened before now.
3. We've already seen this verified experimentally with animal models, multiple times. Despite having unlimited food, water, and entertainment, the populations crash and never recover.
If you don't think so, it's just because you haven't bothered to think about it.
I’m somewhat familiar with Calhoun’s studies if that’s what you’re referencing, but I don’t think they’re perfectly applicable to human societies where there’s no outside force maintaining everything for us. Reproduction slows, accompanied by economic stagnation and infrastructural failures, and all of a sudden we’re not in our little mouse utopia anymore. These little collapses aren’t necessarily bad. It’s artificially pushing onward in the name of GDP that I think leads to even bigger collapses down the road.
no i shouldn't
you should give examples of this trend reversed, the original claim is "this is easy", "humans respond to incentives".
but guess what? there are no examples of this trend reversed. Briefly, for a decade, Iran maybe. Your turn to defend the original claim that "just give them some incentives and everything will be just fine".
In 50 years, the childless people will be dead, and the children of breeders will be alive with children of their own. Rinse and repeat every 50 years.
Unless every person on earth is in agreement to not have children, the problem solves itself.
If they convert children more quickly than others can have them, then this still goes downhill. How do you even model that? Is it fertility rate - conversion rate = 2.1?
I suspect that conversion rate to be significant. I'd be shocked if it's not closing in on 1.0 (or already blown past it).
We can do a gutcheck mental exercise here. The Duggars have 20ish children. Will they reach 400 grandchildren, or even come close?
Duggars might not have 400 grandchildren, but I bet big money that they'll have more than 2.1 grandchildren.
Fertility rates tend to fluctuate in relation to stressors like resource availability.
> No little girl who grows up seeing few, if any women, have children will think to herself "I want 2.1 when I grow up!".
Why not? Baby booms are very real. This is normal human behavior.
Edit: Just one example would be the short-lived COVID baby boom. Remarkable how responsive people are to changes when you think that this is mathematically impossible.
Then you have those who genuinely have no choice stuck in the middle of this nonsense.
Ultimately society is going to have to accept some higher proportion of people being childless than in the 19th century, and work out how to maintain an appropriate balance that enables everyone to have a shot at actually leading a fulfilling life without the moralising in either direction getting to critical mass.
Somehow, I don't see how this can be turned around...