/s
I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals.
Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
It's also affecting Bangladesh.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertili....
You can see this clearly by looking over at Pakistan, which has almost double the fertility rate despite being at a similar level of economic development. If it was dictated by economics rather than culture and policy, you wouldn’t see that.
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co... [2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/06/childcare-puzzle-wh...
I can't comment on Iceland.
However, South Korea has one of the most crushing work cultures in the world, with insane work hours. Most people are not even in a relationship yet alone with kids.
In Portugal you have a huge problem of disposable income. Median salaries are insanely low and stagnant when adjusted to COL. To the point that by now most former 'Iron Curtain' EU members have surpassed Portugal in workers income both adjusted and absolute.
Now, I am not having children either, but I will not deny that even in the best of countries, when controlling for all of these factors, people still aren't having children simply because they have no want or need of having them. That's it, that's the reality. Now it is an uncomfortable truth for many, but many people nowadays, me included, just don't want them, for no particular reason at all.
Apparently, married people are having kids at roughly the same rate as they did decades ago. However, fewer people are getting married and far fewer kids are being born outside of wedlock.
These are not necessarily negative developments, at least at the individual level, but they do point towards a significant change in human culture and society: increasingly, only people with a strong intrinsic drive to have kids will do so.
I don't think that we can predict the effect of this trend a few generations from now.
But stay at home parent isn’t a thing nowadays.
If you look at the numbers, around 1/3 of families have one stay at home parent.
If you just look at families with kids too young to stay at home by themselves after school, it’s even higher.
The number of stay at home parents of both genders has been growing since the late 90s.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
This is what you get for living in a car-bound society. In a walkable society, the kids can just walk home if they're 6 years old or so.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?