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Notes -
Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:
https://archive.is/T6thJ
The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.
One problem is that a job doesn't just provide money, it provides social status. Being a stay at home mom is just dull, repetitive drudgery but working in HR for $40k/yr is an exciting and challenging Career. Paying women to stay at home and have kids won't be enough if they'll be more respected for working a job. There needs to be a cultural change that makes having kids high status. I doubt there's a western government in existence that has the will and ability to make that happen though, maybe not a government anywhere given that Japan/China/Korea are doing even worse.
Another problem is that don't just want people to have kids, you want the right people to have kids. In the US we get a $2k/yr tax credit per child. That's a negligible amount of money if you're middle class and up so it really only incentivizes the poor. I'd prefer a deduction instead of a credit and make the amounts much, much higher so that a single income family with kids can have more or less the same lifestyle as a DINK family.
I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.
Seems to me SAHM is boring because it is lonely, especially for wives in a higher economic bracket. There aren’t ten other women from the same social status that live nearby whom you can converse with while little Johnny and Jill play. That is, there is a collective action problem at work.
It wasn’t as if the wife of a moderately successful professional man in 1910 was raising her own children or scrubbing kitchen floors the way modern “SAHMs” are expected to; she had maids to do that because wealth inequality was much higher back then and domestic staff much cheaper. Even a skilled artisan or low-level clerical worker would often have a maid in the house.
I'd also point out that college-educated rich women in 1910 were also doing basically non-profit work, they just weren't paid for it. There were many ideological varied movements being led by middle class and rich women of the time, no different from today. This idea there was a time when rich/UMC college-educated in urban areas were just sitting around, doing nothing but taking care of their kids has never really been true in like, the past probably 150-200 years, because of what you said.
In some ways, the 50's were the worst of both worlds, which is what led to feminism - technology has risen to where even middle class women didn't need to spend all day doing household work and because they were in atomized suburbs, there wasn't much to do but kvetch with your fellow other college-educated but at-home mothers about your life.
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