These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
…
If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
Yeah, my last sentence sounds wrong in hindsight. Should have said “That is just not a traumatic thing to me at all” or "That was not a traumatic thing at all.
I absolutely agree that a line should be drawn where you expect children to prematurely… well… mature and be parents/adults.
In my case, I was 12 or so and my sister was 6, so we both came home from school and were alone until our parents got home from work. They never expected me to make her do things or something. When we hadn’t done our homework when they got home, the consequence was that the homework needed to be done still and we couldn’t go out and play. That’s it. My job was to make sure my sister got a warm meal (reheated; pre-cooked by my parents) and basically didn’T die. They asked us to do certain things while they were away (vacuum the living room or something) but they never really made a fuss when we failed to do it. They just made us do it later then.