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Japan paying people to have kids
Japan, concerned about a graying population, is now paying its citizens to reproduce. Since Japan’s birth rate has slowed to 1.37 children per average women, there will be fewer people to shoulder the burden of a huge debt and a graying population. The Wall Street Journal reports that the nation will now give new parents monthly payments–about $3,300 a year–for every new child until the age of 15. It is also offering state-funded day care, tuition waivers and other incentives. As noted on this blog in July, China may also be reconsidering its coercive population control policies.
But the WSJ also says that the bias against having children goes deeper than not having the cash, and that there needs to be deeper cultural change before people start having kids again. It makes sense. People choose not to have kids not because they can’t afford them but because of an entire vision of how they want their life to be. They have other priorities, like finding the perfect husband or wife first and getting started in a good career. Having a child takes a greater sacrifice than $3,300 a year can cover, right?
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As I finished reading this post, it concluded with the very thoughts I had in the beginning. We know many international students who attend our local university and as the article says, cash isn’t the problem — an entire generation (or two, or three…) has been changed to believe small families, tiny families, are acceptable while larger families are … highly unusual and even undesirable. When most of these students come face to face with our LARGE (seven kids) family, they are stunned, amazed, incredulous that people have families of this size. As they get to know us, most seem to enjoy us — but still think that it’s out of the realm of reality to have so many kids in their culture.
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And I realize it’s quite different having *7* children than having 2-4, which is probably more in line with what the government is after. That plays into my insight of course.
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They should consider immigration. It would be a lot easier than changing moral values. Cheaper too. There’s no lack of willing people, as the American experience testifies.
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I’m not sure I buy the whole “graying population” argument. Japan is a first world country. I imagine it’s possible to build a healthy retirement all by oneself.
The national debt is the clincher of course.
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Having too many children is as bad as having too few.
Having too few children is as bad as having too many.
Your mileage (and your children) will vary.
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Who decides what is too many or too few?
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This is mostly conjecture and personal experience, so take it with a grain of salt..
According to a NY Times article I read a year ago, Korea has the same problem. (Practically the only developed country that doesn’t have this problem is the US. We are having babies at almost exactly the rate necessary to maintain a stable population… 2.1 per couple.) I’ve been to Korea a couple of times, and I have a lot of Korean friends. As I’ve met more educated Korean people, I’ve learned that culture is partially to blame, but it’s also a matter of finite resources. The population density of these places is HUGE. The land area of Korea is about 1/10 that of the state of Texas, but it has about double the population. Everyone except the very wealthy lives in high rise apartments. Both the Korean and Japanese languages have words for “death by overwork”.. and it happens. People believe that hard work is their only resource. Education and the job market are incredibly competitive. Young Korean women feel pressured to get plastic surgery to improve their chances of being hired. During the school year, kids go to school all day, then go to “cram sessions” at private schools or with tutors until late at night, and they do the same thing during the summer. One of my Korean co-workers is forcing all three of his kids to learn two musical instruments. Husbands and wives often live apart because they can’t both find work in the same area. I know a professor in a smallish coastal town that sent his wife and kids to Seoul because he didn’t believe that the local private schools were up to snuff. He drives 4 hours (the breadth of the country) to visit them every weekend.
All that to say.. the situation in places like Japan and Korea really is quite different.
Btw, Endyblue, I’ll wager that most of the international students you know study engineering or science and are supported by research grants. In that case, their schooling isn’t costing their families anything, and in some cases, they might be sending money home.
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Japan would never let lesser mortals immigrate in and dilute their ethnic homogeneity.
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The anti-child bias is definitely strong in this country, too often even in churches, unfortunately.
I was hiking with Christian neighbors recently, and we met several women pushing strollers, some with young children walking beside them as well, clearly a mother’s group of some kind. One obviously pregnant woman was pushing a stroller with a child who was probably a youngish two. Now, in my mind the closer one’s children are in age, the better, and I definitely don’t see siblings who are two and a half years or so apart as unusually close in age. (That may be partly because my brother 38 months younger than me was separated from me by our sister, and thus those three years between us seemed unfathomably large!) My neighbor lady, seeing the pregnant lady, commented, “I guess she wants to get her family over with quickly.” I said, “Or perhaps she wants to have more than two children.” “True,” she said, and it amazed me to realize that two has become such a “typical” family size even within the church that a woman could simply assume that a woman who has a child and is pregnant with another is having her second and last (and is having them somewhat close together because she wants to get the task “over with” as a somewhat unpleasant duty).
I’ve told before about going with other women students from my Bible college in a developmental psych class to visit a hospital nursery, one of several options we had for fulfilling one of our assignments . . . and sitting in silent shock all the way home as my fellow students compared notes on how very much they didn’t want a baby themselves for a good many more years. How could Christian women, easily of childbearing age, respond to the presence of babies with a “not me”?! It truly saddened me. Granted, none were married yet, but isn’t the natural response of young women holding babies to look forward to the day they’ll hold their own?
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Rostin, actually the students we know are short-term ESL students so they don’t fit that description. But we do know some “regular” international students such as what you describe as well.
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Aside from the issue of what world population is too high? A very subjective issue.
There is the issue of how many people really should have children, and why.
A great many people have children by accident. A great many people have children to please other people, such as spouses, grandparents, neighbors, fellow church members, etc.
I am the oldest of five. My wife is the youngest of five. At least two of my siblings are seriously disturbed people. At least one of my wife’s siblings is a seriously disturbed person.
We chose to have one child and no more and tried very hard to be “good” parents. Our daughter and her partner had one child, who so far considers it perfectly normal to have two mommies and two daddies, all of whom are obvious (to my eyes) trying very hard to be good parents.
In my biased opinion, a lot of people who have children would be better off not doing so. I do not advance this as an argument for abortion. However, I think better methods of birth control would be good for the world, as well as more “choice” in regard to having children.
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A very subjective issue indeed.
Obviously, the Japanese government sees that their nation’s future resides with their children, and there are not enough, not enough by far.
We need better parents. But we also need more children.
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A great many people have children by accident.
A great many people don’t care about tomorrow enough to consider cause and effect.
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Again, a comment that may be true, and is usually ignored, or perhaps sneered at:
It may be that what E. O. Wilson called “sociobiology” (and, I, being a fairly stupid person characterized in my blog as “genes in tight jeans”) is the most powerful determinant of human behavior.
That is: our purpose is to reproduce. Early in our evolutionary history, this may have helped us survive, and out compete our competitors, but now will likely lead to the doom of our species.
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No society has ever lasted whose rate of reproduction got lower than 1.9. Europeans, Russians, Japanese, USAns are disappearing. Which culture is averaging 6 or 7 babies each? Our children should learn their language. Also, our children should compassionately be willing to take care of other old people when we are old, because some people will not have children to take care of them. Isn’t it amazing that the most responsible people are limiting their own family sizes and using the reason that irresponsible people shouldn’t have children? If you think the world is overpopulated, move to a less populated state. Move 2 hours away from any big city. It is positively empty out here. The people who claim our world is overpopulated think of children as consumers. People are producers. God calls children, “blessings”. Who are we to disagree with God?
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That is: our purpose is to reproduce. Early in our evolutionary history, this may have helped us survive, and out compete our competitors, but now will likely lead to the doom of our species.
An outlook I do not share. An outlook that lacks the meaning that would make the doom of our species matter.
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Italy has one of the lowest birth rates, and even some areas already pay people to have children, but the people are too selfish, and don’t want children to get in the way of their nightclubbing. Now with all the immigration they have problems with the muslims taking more control. Japan has only two options, let in immigrants whom they despise, or let their elderly die alone and hungry. It’s already too late. The US would have already been in more trouble demographically if it wasn’t for immigrants like me coming over to raise up children to care for you all when you get old, and pay for your Social Security.
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Actually, I think a round of thanks is in order, especially from Random Name et. al. how boring their lives might be if I wasn’t here to annoy them so much!
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