Both to you and the parent:

I don't think that in a 10k ski-town there aren't kids. They definitely got 'young' people living there having kids.

I was reading the Systemantics yesterday and they discuss how a 'system' does not 'solve' a problem, but it breaks it down to smaller (easier to hide) problems. The book uses as an example the "garbage collection in a town", and how this one-big-problem breaks down to 100-small-problems. So the "we need rebalance our fiscal blah-blah" eventually breaks down to "no extended leave for new mothers", "not every doc-specialization in towns below 50k", and so on.

Absolutely. I seem to recall South Korea having a TFR well below one last time I checked. That doesn't mean we're not facing problems in the west, and specifically the Nordic countries, which is what TFA is about.