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Defund higher education, focusing on female dominated degrees with little human capital value (eg. slash funding for psychology and education degrees to near zero, but things like medicine or veterinary are fine). Defund 3rd tier and below schools hard across the board, hopefully closing as many as possible altogether. Goals is to get people, and especially women, into adulthood as soon as possible.
Introduce very high tax benefits for married families with small children where mother is not working. Pair this with cuts in maternity leave benefits, might be needed to do these covertly to not increase uproar. Eg. cap the income paid out by social security, make it possible for small businesses to fire the employees who took the leave, in exchange for eg. making the paid leave period longer for the fired mothers, and restarting the paid period when another child is born during the leave. In short, the goal here is to make sure that get as many mothers out of employment as possible, so that they don’t have it lined up and waiting for them. When returning to work is not trivial as showing up at the end of the leave, you might as well have a second and third child, and only go back to work after you meet your fertility goals.
While we’re at it, high benefits and support to young married couples. Goal is to encourage people to marry early. This is the hardest part, not sure how to get good ROI here.
Covertly defund childcare subsidies for infants, and increase costs of private childcare by regulations. Freeze annual budget increases, regulate lower children-to-caretaker ratio to increase cost, increase credential requirements, compliance costs, reporting requirement etc. The idea is to make childcare by anyone other than mother rather silly and uneconomical choice for most people.
Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP. People should plan to first meet their fertility goals, before they start building their careers, because there is little to no support to having kids while you are having a career.
If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood? You'd end up with lots of educated women disincentivized from having kids since once they do their career is over/paused until their kids are teenagers since they can't hire a nanny affordably. Low education women are more willing to do that, but the issue is that people tend to marry people of similar education and you'd have to give pretty massive subsidy to young couples for a low education man to be able to support multiple dependents comfortably.
I'd be kind of worried about a society where all the high income/prestige careers are occupied by childless educated couples and low education married couples with multiple dependents where women can't divorce or else they're impoverished.
No, lots of women have historically done economically-productive work while having kids. In fact, it gets easier to do so the more kids you have, as the elder can be entrusted with child supervision responsibilities over the younger.
What is really messing around with people is the extremely-extended adolescence that expanded access to tertiary education has wrought (well, it might actually just be the uniquely-weird position of the Millennial generation, which first had to deal with a glutted post-secondary job market thanks to the Boomers and offshoring, and then had to deal with a massively depressed post-tertiary job market due to the Great Recession, and so has been seriously behind in going through life's maturation steps like moving out, getting access to promotions and professional networks, and the ability to amass assets like housing stock.)
Yeah there's vast economies of scale with children which makes the current situation a bit weird, both in the sense of within a singular family unit and within an extended family it's easier to conduct childcare when you've got a bunch of cousins reproducing at about the same time.
Well, that assumes that extended families stay in generally the same place, and what with the youth flooding into the megalopoli to seek white collar prestige jobs I don't know that's a sound assumption anymore.
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