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I've previously posted on the Motte about the state-funded Swedish Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility. Recently the Committee released its second report more closely detailing the root cause of the decline – which women are not having children anymore? As before here's a link in case you know the Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-2-fran-hoga-till-sjunkande-fruktsamhetstal-hur-ser-situationen-i-sverige-ut/
The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.
Beyond that the report also has a few tidbits of interest here and there. The common narrative of a foreign underclass quickly and decisively outbreeding the native population isn't quite on the mark for example, as the report points out that second-generation immigrants tend to have about as many children as natives (first-generation is another story, and a large part of the very justifiable demographic anxiety in Europe). On the other hand that also means immigration cannot possibly solve the issue long term or even medium term; while many children of immigrants often learn Swedish quite poorly, commit more crimes than average and remain largely unintegrated for vast periods of time, they at least seem to take our individualistic childless culture to heart.
This is less meaty than the previous post on the subject, but I think that's enough to bring some fodder for discussion. What do you think should be done to support our DICKs? Should DINKs be made to pay to make their lives easier? Is the reports take naive on the questions of immigration and demography?
As others have said, low fertility is fundamentally about the desire for a comfortable life (charitable) or hedonism (uncharitable). I think the latter is often uncharitable because I don’t think DINKs mostly want to party and do drugs and eat 17 course three star tasting menus in all their free time in the way the natalist caricature often suggests, I think they mostly just want a quiet, peaceful life that doesn’t involve waking up throughout the night, spending all weekend ferrying kids to and from various activities and babysitting for years.
That desire can be overridden by material or extreme ideological (as in the religious examples) circumstance. But ‘extreme’ is important. Moderately conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims who believe the same things their 7 tfr ancestors did 100 years ago have far fewer children today.
@4bpp is essentially correct. Give every DINK a taxpayer-funded nanny to look after the kids, handle the night nurse stuff for the first 3 years, then take them to school and home, to stuff on the weekend, pay for camp in the summer, and most would happily have children. This was - by the way - the norm for middle class and above households until about a century ago. Mothers of a certain class in 1926 were not spending dozens of hours a week looking after their children, and even working class moms pooled resources.
I expect children but I couldn’t do it on a normal income, not because kids themselves are expensive but because I don’t believe in a form of atomized, isolated, high investment nuclear family parenting that leaves the two parents (mostly the mother it has to be said) as slaves to their own children until they graduate college.
It used to be that parenting was much more low investment (both in terms of money and time and emotional involvement). Some older women in the local community would look after your kids for a pittance if you ever wanted them to, you saw them for an hour a day, certainly you weren’t expected to devote every minute of your free time to them.
The motherhood narrative post-1950 of kids becoming your life and central to every waking minute of your day (and into which men are, post-1990s, also increasingly indoctrinated) just isn’t compelling, presently or historically, to a lot of people. This has (and this is a conservative mistake) nothing to do with women working or not working. An upper class mother in 1890 who saw her children every day before dinner wasn’t working long hours at a merchant bank, but she still had various things she did every day that mostly did not involve constantly looking after her kids.
If you want more women to have more children, the best way is to lower socially expected levels of parental investment, especially in terms of time, and build institutions that essentially let you drop off your child whenever you want and pick them up whenever you want. Free, 24/7 daycare for everyone under 16.
Which only works when you get other women to not have their own kids but instead work in childcare taking care of yours. And if you never bother raising your own child at all (24/7 daycare) then what is the point of having a child? Might as well go full bore "surrogate mothers, raised by state carers" in that case.
Solaria from "The Naked Sun" when? Where "children" is a dirty word and asking does anyone have children is the most embarrassing and disgusting thing you can do:
It’s the ‘option’ of 24/7, I don’t think most people who wouldn’t today put their kid up for adoption would take it. But yes, even things like travelling as a couple while leaving your young kids at home with extended family or friends (which were normal in my grandparents’ day) are now looked down upon.
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