Rafe Fletcher is the founder of CWG Speakers.
“Population collapse” is humanity’s greatest crisis, claims Elon Musk at the start of Stephen J Shaw’s film, Birthgap.
The demographer screened the film at our recent Carry the Fire event. Featuring alarming data and moving stories of childless regret, it finds no easy policy fix to arrest declining birth rates.
Shaw focuses on the societal as well as economic implications. Without a religious or moral agenda, he does not judge anyone who is childless by choice. But he suggests modern cultural norms that glamourise independence make people deeply unhappy later in life.
Changing this requires a combination of traditional conservatism and radicalism. The first is with regards to marriage. Conservatives must emphasize the benefits of that institution. The case can be empirical rather than moral: children and parents fare better in nuclear families.
The second concerns careers. Checked momentum adds to the far greater burden women face in parenthood. Rather than focus on parental leave or other rights, governments should slash taxes for returning working mothers.
Policy without these structural changes reaps little reward. Sweden has long been the poster child of generous parental leave. New parents are legally entitled to 480 days, to be split between them as wished.
Increasing fertility rates in the 1990s and 2000s encouraged policymakers to believe this was part of a magic formula. Pre-2010 Cameroons looked to Sweden for inspiration; this childcare policy was a centrepiece of its own liberal-conservative coalition. But last month, Sweden’s fertility rate dropped to a record low.
That coincides with falling marriage rates. Sweden has the 10th highest rate of children born out of wedlock globally at 55 percent. Unmarried couples have fewer children than their married counterparts. Just 23 percent of babies born to married parents are unplanned versus 51 percent for cohabiting couples and 67 percent for those living apart.
Marriage provides stability and a long-term outlook conducive to bigger families. So it’s also problematic that the median age of first marriages is rising. Sweden has the third highest ages for both sexes in Europe at 36 for men and 34 for women. Post-peak fertility, children become less common and more numerous.
Marriage has been central to a more conservative birthrate drive in Hungary. Fertility rates have risen by about 25 percent since Orban took power in 2010. His government offers several incentives – tax breaks and low-interest loans for families with children, free IVF treatment, and student debt forgiveness for certain mothers under 30 – as it seeks to reach the population replacement rate of 2.1 by 2030.
Marriage rates are rising in every demographic. The most significant spikes are in 25-29 and 30-34. These increases started soon after Hungary’s 2011 constitution which promoted a more socially conservative society with family as its bedrock.
That constitution did not suddenly turn Hungarians into zealous Cromwellian moral reformers. It’s a middling European country when it comes to God, slightly more religious than the UK and far less so than Ireland. But its show of support – rhetorical and financial – raised the institution’s value.
Birthgap is littered with regrets of men and women who put this off. It’s an attitude encouraged by modern self-help gurus who advise constant introspection. “Love yourself before you can love others.” In the absence of other values, people adopt this banal nonsense and find it only leads to loneliness.
Older does not always mean wiser when picking a spouse. While marrying under 25 is statistically ill-advised, Nicholas Wolfinger shows divorce rates increase every year for those taking their vows after 32. Perhaps a long journey of self-love does not make one such a great partner.
Too often we present marriage and kids as the end of the road, settling down after enjoying life’s finer pleasures. But hedonistic sacrifice is part of the reason married people are more successful. This bears out in the workplace where they earn somewhere between 4.5 to 32.6 percent more than unmarried peers.
But this boost is greater for men. Attitudes persist that earmark married dads as responsible assets and working mums as liabilities. As one Japanese law student in Birthgap says, “I feel like I should give up my career for my dreams of having children.”
I see this in Singapore. It should be the ideal child-rearing environment. There is readily available and cheap childcare with nannies from the Philippines and Indonesia. Education is brilliant with all Singaporean children obliged to attend state schools, regardless of wealth or background. There are no sink schools or truancy. Finally, Singapore has one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world at over 80 percent. Government-built flats are available on a highly subsidised basis.
Yet even a government-sponsored “National Night” where Singaporean couples were encouraged to “let their patriotism explode” failed to amend miserable fertility rates. The birth rate has now fallen below 1.
Easier access to childcare increases pressure on women returning to work. Employers expect returnees to be fully present after 16 weeks of statutory maternity leave. Women feel understandably torn between career responsibilities and the stigma of being an absent mother.
Maternity policies should instead recognise women’s essential biological role in babies’ early lives without penalising them financially. For instance, Hungary exempts women with 4 children or more from income tax. Why couldn’t the UK offer returning mothers a tax holiday to ease the financial burden of a paused career?
Birthgap’s interviewees put off children because they were too preoccupied with immediate concerns. It’s partly the fault of pervasive “live your truth” individualism but also the failure of governments to provide traditional routes to economic security e.g. home ownership.
But abstaining from or delaying marriage only heightens this insecurity. Governments need not be morally or religiously prescriptive in promoting marriage. Instead, it should be acknowledged empirically that the institution tends to benefit people.
And far from resorting to the “tradwife” movement favoured by US conservatives wanting a return to more traditional domestic roles, policy should help women’s professional aspirations.
Fixing the birth gap means helping parents see a better future.
The post Rafe Fletcher: Fixing the birth gap means helping parents see a better future together appeared first on Conservative Home.
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Author: Rafe Fletcher
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