What can governments do to make fertility rates go up? Pay women to make ’em and watch ’em. Great info on policies in other nations. (via Megan)
Spain now offers a 2,500 euro bonus for every baby born. South Korea, which has one of the world’s lowest
fertility rates, shells out $3,000 per couple for in-vitro
fertilization. And in Germany, where women have an average of 1.3
babies, Angela Merkel proposed up to 1,800 euros a month for
stay-at-home parents, and more day-care centers to improve the public
image of working moms.
Megan doubts that these policies actually work. She points out that the US has a higher birth rate than Canada. Of course, US has more immigration from Latin America than Canada does. There are other cultural differences here that makes America a bad comparison to Europe.
(Here’s another article about work-family issues in the Netherlands.)
Question of the Day. Would you have an extra kid, if you recieved a $5,000 bonus, $2,000 per months that you stay home, and then a more flexible workplace with five weeks of vacation every year?
Apt. 11d 
Only if my husband could earn the SAH $ instead.
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No: money would not have been an incentive here but it might have for some others I know.
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No, not just for the financial incentive. But when we were pondering going from 2 to 3, it would have been on the pro list. Hell, it would have been on the pro list for number one.
Our decision to have children always came down to “do we really desire another child?”. I don’t think money could have changed anything if the answer had been “no”.
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I think the easiest thing would be to extend the amount of time women can take off when having a kid. 6 weeks is insane for 1st time moms.
9-12 months of paid time off is the way to go, same as they do in europe and else where.
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The effectiveness of pronatalist policies is unclear. Birthrates are under replacement everywhere in Western Europe except (I think) France. However, the real question is where would those birthrates be *without* the social welfare support for parenting.
In the US, the only ethnic group reproducing above replacement is Hispanics. Most people I know have either one or two children; two seems to be widely considered as the ideal family size (at least in upper-middle-class suburbia).
Everybody, of course, is talking about this because the story about the Russian regional governor promising large rewards to couples who manage to produce a baby born on a particular date. Russia is undergoing a demographic crisis, where the population is rapidly aging and is expected to shrink dramatically in the next 25-50 years. From an economic and social standpoint, this is potentially disastrous: looming on the horizon is a pension crisis, a health care crisis, a long-term care crisis, and a labor shortage crisis.
What I find really interesting is the contrast with the rhetoric put forward by some environmentalists, who argue that a sharp drop in the number of human beings would be “good for the earth”–I heard Alan Weisman on NPR last week talking about his book “The World Without Us,” and he strongly advocated single child (or no child) families, but no one (not the host or any of the callers) asked any questions about any impact of such a societal choice from an economic or sociological standpoint.
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As I posted over at Megan’s place, there seems to be some sort of city ordinance in DC that says that you need to have 2.0 kids, spaced exactly three years apart.
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No.
But that’s because my wife and I really want kids, are both from big families, and married late; just because of biology, we are not likely to have as many children as we’d like.
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First of all, on principle, I’m in favor of declining birth rates. I understand this is going to wreak major havoc for social security and taxes, but when peak oil and global warming finally suck dry the paltry remaining resources we have, we’ll be glad we have fewer people.
But onto the question at hand: the financial incentive wouldn’t do it for me. The important thing would be the guarantee of more family-friendly policies–better maternity leave, better breast-feeding support, better child care options. Compared to those things, the money is a joke. Maybe they can use it in Europe because they’re already a lot better on some of these issues than we are. Although, that said, it doesn’t seem to be helping their birth rates anyway.
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When our first was in kindergarten, his teacher told me that in his class there were 10 onlies, 10 from families with 2, and our guy was one of only 3 from a family with 3 or more.
In our area, it seems clear that houses are so damned expensive that nobody can buy (and then feel that it’s the right time to start breeding) until they are so old that one or two is all they can manage. I have run into envy from parents of onlies for our family, folks who wish they had more.
Do the math: graduate college at 22, couple-four years for some kind of graduate work, miserable little apartment for 6 years while saving for a down payment, you’re in your mid thirties before you can even think about it. Why are the red states outbreeding the blue ones so decisively? The blue states are where houses cost an arm and a leg and two ears.
Would money help? Money can always help! I think Lisa V is right, most middle class people are not going to have a baby to get paid for it. But making it less of an obstacle can enable folks who want kids to go forward. When I was an ambulance driver, I did take one fifteen-year-old to the hospital to have her baby and she told me that she had gotten pregnant to get out of school and go on AFDC, though.
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I would have a 3rd kid if I were 5 years younger. Can they offer an anti-aging device?
I’m not in DC anymore, but I do have 2.0 kids, spaced 2.8 years apart.
I don’t know if financial incentives would matter. I think the costs of raising a child would outweigh any (financial) benefit of an incentive. If we were to have another child (which we are not!), money wouldn’t really be a factor.
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I’m also not in DC anymore, but do have 2.0 kids, spaced 2.75 years apart. It seems to be a common feature in the affluent private school my kid attends, too. And, oddly enough, the children/woman ratio is 2.13..
I don’t think paying people will change child-bearing practices except among the affluent, for sure. But, it might have a huge effect on the poor (kind of like army bonuses). It might also have some effect on the middle class.
But, the US is at replacement value — we have no need to encourage childbearing. I very much doubt that straight cash is going to have much effect in either Japan or Italy. I find Italy particularly strange, because the people there seem to love children so, but find the cost-benefit analysis in their disfavor.
bj
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As somebody was saying on Megan’s thread, part of what’s limiting the birthrate in some countries is the fact that the men aren’t much use at home. A single child and an unhelpful husband are functionally the same as two kids, so one can see why under those circumstances women don’t want more, thank you very much. So an ultra-low birth rate may not be so much a sign of female liberation or empowerment as a primal scream of resentment. In my own family, I had a very short run as uber-housewife (cooking, cleaning, washing, scrubbing, etc.), which formally ended with the beginning of morning sickness in my second pregnancy. I couldn’t cook or do dishes because of the smells. When that passed, I couldn’t do the dishes because I literally couldn’t reach the sink with my belly in the way. And I kept falling asleep and having a hard time getting up off the floor while watching the toddler, etc. And then the baby came. And so passed my very brief run as a superSAHM. Nowadays, I naturally do a lot more routine childcare than my husband, but the housework is split 50/50. In case of a further pregnancy, my share would fall significantly below 50%.
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The ultra-low birthrate countries seem to be the ones that are both economically advanced and full of men who shirk housework and childcare. I wonder how much cash payments can do, under the circumstances, but I suppose one could use one’s government check for commercial household help.
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I have a friend who lives in a very up scale neighborhood in DC. She said the trend is to have four kids. It’s a status symbol. You are showing off to everyone that you can afford to send four kids to private school, have multiple nannies, and a private cook. A bit gross.
I think the useless man theory makes sense. Also, middle class couples are just having more fun in Europe than we are. They are traveling more and hanging out late in nice restaurants. Who wants to be burdened with another kid when there are good dance clubs in Ibiza?
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Hmh, the useless man theory. I do agree that could go a long way to explaining both Japan & Italy. Historically, though, in countries with useless men (which we’ll use to mean those who expect to be taken care of, and not to care for, the children or the house), one’s partner at home was other women — an extended family, grandparents, sisters with whom to share the duties of home and share childcare.
I don’t think cash payments can do much to fix the lack of a partner (as opposed to help). I’m a happy user of paid childcare, but it doesn’t replace the support you get from people who are partners in raising your children.
bj
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I think bj is correct about other women traditionally being each other’s partners. I suppose that structure doesn’t work anymore in a highly mobile society where grandma works 9-5 two thousand miles away.
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For me, affordable, reliable childcare plus the promise of an affordable college education for all my kids would have led me to have at least one and maybe two more.
The $300-400/week childcare expense effectively stopped us in our tracks.
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BJ’s and Amy’s points are excellent: the useless man effect used to be canceled out by extended family living. I also think that in today’s society, extended maternity leaves and other support would make a difference as well. I had a tough first pregnancy, not life-threatening, but the idea of doing it again is daunting, especially as I consider that I will likely be unable to work consistently for the duration of the pregnancy should the second follow the path of the first. The first time was a surprise, but it’s hard to go into it again with eyes wide-open.
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Another factor for a change in domestic arrangements is the steady shift in the paid workforce from hard, dirty, backbreaking toil to button punching. In many families in the US, the dirtiest and physically most challenging work done by family members is the stuff at home.
When I was a kid, my dad split his time between cattle ranching (60 mama cows), cutting cedar shake bolts in the woods during the winter (for roofing), and whatever else he could turn up. When he came home at night, we would immediately have dinner and he would then collapse on the sofa for the evening with a newspaper. When I was a pre-reader, he would read me the adventures of Nancy Drew or Annie Oakley, and when I was in high school, he spent an hour or two every night getting me through my math homework. But the sofa was command central. My mom was an SAHM with three kids, and I think their arrangement was more or less fair, but in my own white collar household, that would not fly.
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I envy those of you who have academic spouses. Mine is coming home later and later. So, he can only handle one household chore on the weekday — tidying up the kitchen. He has an hour, tops, to spend with the kids before they go to bed. He can never go in late for a teacher meeting. He is gone before the kids wake up in the morning. During the week, I’m entirely on my own. I wouldn’t call him useless, because he would do more if he was here, but…
My age is the prime reason for not having any more kids. If that reason wasn’t there, the useless (or absent) man theory would certainly be a major factor in capping the number of kids at two.
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It occurred to me while I was out this morning that we should also consider children, and their role in the household economy. I’m thinking children’s chores are less studied than they ought to be. There has probably been (though not everywhere) a shift away from chores, with children spending more time on extracurriculars and less time helping out at home, either with housework or younger siblings. Purely anecdotally, I don’t think I’ve ever encountered (in real life or on the internet) a large family where mom does everything–mothers of large families seem to delegate. So to get a clear picture of the domestic front, one needs to know what mom is doing, what dad is doing, what the kids are doing, and what tasks get outsourced. It would be interesting to see which formulas go with high fertility, and whether children are ultimately harmed by doing fewer extracurriculars but taking on more responsibility at home.
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This thread is interesting to me, because Australia has gone very much down the path of baby bonus payments at birth and then tax breaks for children (“middle class welfare”). Meanwhile, paid parental leave is being discussed in parliament to deafening cries of “We’ll all be rooned, and I’ll sack all my female workers and life as we know it shall cease” from the business lobbyists. I believe there has been a mild baby boom but that represents the Gen-Xers getting older and recognising they have to do it now rather than the financial incentive.
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Nope. Number Three is on the way, arriving mid-December if all goes well. We’ve been very fortunate, and also both wanted the same number of kids from the beginning.
Some thoughts on childcare in Munich were posted in frustration here. Yurp is not the place it’s made out to be in many US-based commentaries. And the devil is very much in the details.
M. Gemmill, above, where would birthrates be without W. European welfare spending. It’s fair to look at Eastern and Central Europe for answers to this question, which is roughly, about the same though a tad lower.
Also, Russia’s demographic decline would slow significantly if Russian men drank less. This is the kind of issue that leads policy people to aver that God gave physicists the easy problems. (It’s been a while since I looked at the data in detail, but at the time Russia was the only advanced economy in which ‘unnatural causes,’ i.e., accidents, murder and suicide, were among the top five causes of death. That’s alcohol all the way.)
Helen, your business lobbyists sound like ours. Is there ever a subject on which their wailing and gnashing of teeth cannot be heard?
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I blame Alan Greenspan! Or, at least, the crazed runup in house prices which he among others enabled, and the house-price-caused unease about their situation which this led to for young couples.
AmyP – now that you have moved to the burbs, and have a yard (and a minivan?! tell me you have a minivan!) do you personally feel more like having your own basketall team? You are our natural experiment here.
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Re: Russian men
Purely anecdotally, when I lived in provincial Russia, I noticed that generally speaking, single mothers had one child (over the years, almost all my Russian women friends have been divorced moms with one child). The two child families that I knew were almost always mom-and-dad families. Mom-and-stepdad families deserve a category of their own, but I don’t know whether they more resemble single mother families or mom-and-dad families. The two families that I was close to that produced silver medalists (that’s like a valedictorian or salutatarian in an American school, roughly) were both mom-and-dad families. One of the dads had a huge drinking problem for many years, but his balancing virtues (drive, work ethic, ambition for his kids, etc.) ensured that his presence was a net plus to the family.
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As I said, it’s been a while since I looked at my statistics (and since my better half’s dissertation is on the Russian social system after the collapse of communism, what I really ought to do is ask her), but Amy’s anecdotes match with the statistics. Lots of first child at a young age followed by divorce, thus leading later to step-parents and gap of ca. 10 years between first and second child. Murray Feshbach is your go-to source on Russian demography. On which publicity stunts like “conception day” will make no dent whatsoever.
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My sister is married into a Bavarian family and has spent a lot of time in a village about an hour from Munich. A couple years back, she told me that she looked around and it finally dawned on her that she and her MIL were the only employed/career-minded mothers in the village.
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dave s.,
Actually, I’m more like your cautionary tale about the difference between correlation and causation. We’d always planned to live in a low-cost area and have a larger family, but my husband’s only initial job offer was DC. At the moment, I’m just not in good enough shape for it to be a good idea to pack on another 40 pounds. I’ve got probably another 8 or 10 years to work with, so who knows?
We just bought our very first car (a 2004 Ford Taurus) a month or two ago after my husband got his driver’s license. I’d like to finish unpacking before starting my driving instruction, but I’ve been enjoying the convenience (a car would have been a pain in DC, though). We were advised that a minivan would be harder for beginner drivers, so we held off. They’re also kind of expensive.
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in answer to the question – absolutely not. but i knew right away after our son was born that i was done, done, done. the decision to not have any more kids has nothing to do with finances (we’re quite comfortable) and everything to do with my inability to fathom taking care of another one. this introvert has all she can do to give (barely) enough attention to one child.
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My husband and I had our youngest when I was 34. We never had any trouble conceiving, and physically I think I could have kept going. But it was all just too much; the full-time work, the efforts to breast-feed, the end of all spontaneity, the end of ever having a free moment. We were still rehabbing our fixer-upper at the time. It was too much.
I retrospect I’m not sure what would have induced us to start a family earlier. Maybe a lower student-debt load? That would have enabled us to save for a house much earlier in life. If I’d had any sense at all we would have finished the work on the house first. But you know how it is; you get the fever for a baby and nothing can stop you.
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trishka, the trick is, they will in fact play together, with any kind of luck. Two is in some ways easier than one. We nearly stopped after one for exactly your reasons, but decided against it for the sake of blood – all our families are continents away, we thought our singleton needed company and more family on the same continent.
I’d second laura’s comment that the fabulously rich are having more kids. In the wealthy hinterlands from which our school draws (that would be on the other side of town from our poor quarter), families of five kids aren’t unusual. The dads are typically entirely absentee, present only on weekends and not all of those either, busy making those big gobs of money. They are useless from the aspect of helping with bringing up children, but they provide enough money to hire good help. Many men (vide Mr. Laura) have to work jobs that force absenteeism from the family, without the consoling effects of CEO pay: which obviously makes for smaller families.
To the QOD – yes, we’d almost certainly have had a third, given those conditions. I was opposed on population grounds, but would probably have been broken down in the end by those arguments from the family. The money is less important than the availability of support for two working parents. Current US corporate policies are profoundly hostile to working mothers. Of course if we’d stayed on our home continent instead of haring off, this would be less of an issue..
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If I had the options of a more liberal leave policy and ongoing financial support for 12 months, I would most likely have had a second child. Husband has a significant disability so cannot do childcare for an infant/toddler for more than a couple of hours a day, nor work full time. I could not face going back to work when the child was 3 months old. After a year it would have been fine. I was an older mother (36) for the first and at age 39 when we were ready again, it was financially not feasible (and logistically, too).
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I believe that heart disease is another major factor in Russia in the dismal male life-expectancy, yet another symptom of the collapse of the public health system. However, social benefits in EE and CEE tend to be (nominally) quite generous w/r/t to maternity and childbearing. So, I don’t think you can necessarily look to EE and CEE for an indication of what birth rates would be in France if there were less generous social welfare spending. But baby bonuses and maternity leaves are window dressing–cost of housing is a major issue in Russia, as has already been noted. People are reluctant to make babies when they are sharing a two (or even one) bedroom flat with the inlaws.
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I don’t know how things are today, but in the mid-nineties in Russia, daycare lost a lot of subsidies and Russian families were getting sticker shock at the price. (Single mothers were still subsidized.) That and other factors like the ludicrous salaries paid for “girl” jobs ($50 a month for a doctor, if you can believe it) led to the reappearance of the Russian housewife, who had been extinct for decades.
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