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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 2026

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What we need is to change the narratives around children, families, and growing up.

Yep. And, counter to the suggestions in other comments about "having siblings gets you into Harvard", invest heavily in support during pregnancy and after the birth up to about four or five years of age. Childcare, but not just childcare: advice for the new parents so they're not left on their own trying to ask Claude "is my baby sick with something serious?", social supports of all kinds, making it feasible for men to take time out to help look after the baby and not have their career nuked, the whole nine yards. Very damn expensive and resource-intensive, but if you want people to have babies, then you need to make it - and I hate to use the phrase, but it fits here - 'it takes a village to raise a child'. Change it so that no, you won't be stuck in the house on your own with a screaming newborn while your husband flees to his job as a refuge, both of you won't be missing out while your child-free friends are having fun and zooming ahead in their careers, you won't be struggling with "okay so we're thinking of having a baby, what should we do now - vitamins? what baby book advice is best? how the hell do we manage this, anyway?" and nowhere to turn.

Because we've chopped away a lot of the previous supports and now new parents are faced with "congrats, here's your baby, now drive home and figure it all out yourself on your own", so why would anyone want to saddle themselves with three kids by the time I'm thirty and I have no life?

Scandinavia does all that(men are actually required to take parental leave).

The highest fertility rates in the EU remain France and Czechia- although outside the EU, the faroes and Georgia have them beat.

You're not required to take parental leave. 90 of the 480 available days of are exclusive to either parent but you don't have to use then if you don't want to, which is something that happens in very unequal earning situations or small business owners.

For France does that include the European French or is that entirely driven by immigration?

A lot of it is driven by the catholics in France, who have a tfr of some 2.4, are ~40% of the population. Only some 10% of immigrants are Catholic.

Good question.

There’s certainly pockets of native high fertility in France. But the same is true for holland, Switzerland, etc, which do not have a fertility advantage, so it’s probably not just them- and there’s lots of immigrants in places like Sweden and holland as well.

France’s fertility mix looks similar to other parts of Western Europe- but it has final results in between red and blue states, rather than average for the continent. The precise demographic breakdown can’t be all high-TFR minorities(and France has a few that are native Europeans), because other countries without the TFR advantage have them too. So normie French Europeans have to have some fertility advantage compared to other parts of Europe- but it’s certainly less than, say, conservative Americans or even Afrikaners.