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The quality contributions roundup has a lot of discussion of fertility. I found it pretty disconcerting to read, since it all seemed to assume that the only way to get women to have kids is to enforce a top down dystopia. This is not my personal experience in my social surroundings★, but of course I live in Israel so I don't count‡.
Anyway, here is my follow-up question:
If you had the ability to set policies that will encourage increased fertility, what policies would you be implement across the board for both men and women simultaneously?
In other words, not "women can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children", but "people of child-bearing age can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children". Or "new parents of children are given twenty additional paid vacation days", or whatever. Are there any such policies you think could actually be effective?
★ if anything what I see is women regretting not being able to have more kids
‡ In Israel, fwiw, having kids is simply by default assumed to be a shared responsibility of men, women, and society. It is expected that men take (government paid) sick days to stay home with sick kids. It is not blinked at for the manager to show up to a meeting remotely with a sick kid in his lap. It is expected that men will leave work early several times a week to pick up kids from school — at least in all the places in Israel I have lived I have seen reasonably close sex splits of the parents at pickup/dropoff. I am not clear on whether or not this is equally the case in America — I don't get that impression, but as my knowledge of America is limited to TV and internet discussions, I could be wrong. But I see fathers at the park supervising their kids all the time, and the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids... So I assume there must be some difference...
Last year secular Jews fertility rate in Israel declined for the first time below replacement level (slightly under 2.0). They still do get more kids then their peers in the west, but conservative/traditional families still get more.
Any theories as to what would be causing this? Was this just a temporary decline? What I see around me socially is still a strong expectation of a 3 kid family (especially if you're more rural*), perhaps 2 if you're urban and too poor to afford the third (or a single mother by choice, where 2 also seemed to be the default number they all wanted).
*(The same rural/urban split seems to appear - again, by anecdotal observation only - among religious non-haredi families, where 4 or 5 is an acceptable urban amount but sad and small in a rural context. However, there's too much noise coming from
If you want to have a larger family and "quality family life" you are more likely to move out of the city (ads for rural areas explicitly target this)
Zionist religious families strongly tend to be more religious the more rural they are)
You're right, I meant to reply to your original comment. My mistake.
I'll delete and repost where it is meant to go.
I don't appreciate the vitriol, especially from a day-old account. Maybe lurk more before breaking out the invective.
Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.
And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.
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I looked a source up, ignore the tweets, the picture with the graph is from the Economist:
https://twitter.com/NxlAnglo/status/1616874516566736900
You are right, Jewish fertility are astonishingly stable if one looks at the last 40 years instead of zooming into recent trends. In the 90s secular fertility also dipped under 2.0, so is not a new thing. But 10 years ago it was again slightly above.
The discrepancy between the normalcy of 3 kids families and a fertility rate of a third less, is I guess because childless women are less visible? Maybe they also emigrate?
This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)
https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/
That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so
But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)
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