These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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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.
I totally get what you’re saying but I think there’s just so much pressure from society that it’s all terribly biased. Last week I saw another very long article from a woman wondering if she should have kids or not and the comment section was full of people talking like they just realized having kids is optional. Watch any American TV show and you’ll see how ingrained the idea that having kids is mandatory is. Average person is so programmed by society and media to have kids people think it’s just what you have to do and yes, they will try to justify it but saying that it’s actually very rewarding. I’m not saying that no one should have kids but I actually think that very few people have kids because they enjoy it. We’re talking couples with good jobs, good benefits, lot’s of family support and lot’s of money. Most people don’t have any of this but they still have kids.