I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.