These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.
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If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.
In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.
I hope you don’t have children that you’re forcing to be babysitters. I know people who did that growing up, their relationship with their parents is… not good.
What are you talking about?
I’m 6 years older than my sister and when we were younger, I have babysitted her every day after school until my parents came home a few hours later. That’s just not a traumatic thing at all.
The problem is that a child is the responsibility of the parents, and the parents alone. Could you have said no if you wanted to? You should have been able to, every time.
I personally take offense in strangers who tell me how my family life which I’m rather fond of “should have” been. You have no right to stamp your ideas of family onto me and my relatives. Period.
That isn’t happening. Stop trying to play the victim.
Oh? So uranibaba did not postulate their opinion on how responsibilities in a family “should be” and formulated them as absolute rights or wrongs? Did we read the same comment?
Uranibaba did not postulate an opinion. He stated a fact:
“a child is the responsibility of the parents, and the parents alone”
Parents created the child. So they are the ones responsible. It’s the same reason parents can be held legally accountable for the actions of their children. Just because parents can force someone else to raise their children doesn’t mean it’s ok.
He also indirectly told me how my parents “should have” handled the situation. No knowledge on what was on, nothing. But a “uhm, you know that your parents were wrong, don’tcha?”
I’m a freshly baked father myself and have noticed how easily many people just blame parents with wholesale statements and without the slightest bit of knowledge about how being a parent is and how raising a child actually works, yet everybody claims to be an expert.
I think we need to clear something up here. The term in question was “babysitting” not “raising”. Just as I would not expect someone to “raise my children” when I hired a babysitter, why would that term be different when siblings do it?
I was 12, my sister was 6 and we were home alone after school until my parents came home from work. That’s “babysitting” to me.
The fact that ppl just assumed I meant something completely different and started the judgement train speaks for itself.
I apologize for offending you, but your earlier comment seemed to imply that a child should reasonably share a parents responsibility of their children.
My oldest daughter is a bit over 6 years older than our baby. I might ask her to do something similar to what you are describing. Most people on here seem to think helping the family out equals trauma because birthing someone automatically means you retain full responsibility for them existing. It’s more complicated than that and I think the thing people are mad about is choosing to have kids in a way that you expect them to take care of each other.
For me, this always went under “caring for each other” which is something children should learn and practice. Besides, we always had a grand old time. They always made absolutely sure there was food to be warmed up, so that was.taken care of. After that, I’d play computer games upstairs, she’d watch cartoons downstairs and then shout for me when she heard someone coming. Then we’d tell our parents how we practiced piano or some shit and they knew what was up, yet let us go on.