It feels pretty obvious that everyone is crunched financially by the ruling class.
Its simply too effin' hard for most of us that have actual jobs, started from 0 and are not cruising on money/possibilities our parents showered us with. After 2 kids, I simply don't see the point in 3rd, the 'parental fulfillment' won't get higher, definitely happiness won't as numerous studies proven, just more chaos, less sleep and patience, more conflicts. People I casually ask about this all seem to agree, why more than 2, heck some are fine with 1 (I would call it parenting easy mode, it didn't feel like that back then, but when looking now with 2nd it was a very chill period).
Also tons of young now feel far from rest of family which is cool for independence and such, but when SHTF with kids you realize that often grandparents and rest of family are not so bad despite their flaws.
The bar for being a good parent is so damn high these days, compared to 'most kids survived into adulthood' not so long ago. And even most western countries do give very little in terms of support for new parents. So no wonder it looks intimidating to many
If anything they're going to decline further, Republicans are back to their "obstruct literally everything" agenda that they always have when they're the minority. Any potential pro-natalist government policies will almost certainly require government spending, which will now die in the house. So we're stick with the status quo, which is low birth rates.
It goes to show that political tribalism trumps just about everything these days, including truth, objective facts, and the obvious.
It should also be obvious that just about every single leftist movement is destabilizing towards both the family as a unit and society in general, which, as you can guess, results in people having fewer kids. But don't let your tribalism get in the way of that either.
Chuck Schumer recently said that the solution to our population problem is to essentially encourage more illegal immigration. Note that his solution had nothing to do with supporting families. He couldn't do that even if he wanted to, because he would offend his left flank on every attempt.
I can blame Democrats for a bunch of stuff too, but at least every once in a while they get something through that actually helps people. The current generation of Republicans are in "burn it all down" mode, and they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The fact that they have more kids on average (perhaps unwisely) means nothing. If you want to get into quality of life statistics, Red States also on average have the highest suicide rates. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/suicide-mortality/...
There’s pretty good evidence that weak public social safety nets, particularly around old age, disability, etc., contribute to higher birthrates, [0] so you should be applauding the Republicans and their attacks on Social Security and Medicare, if that is your highest concern.
[0] speculation is because in the absence of state support, family are your social safety net, and particularly younger family members.
Theoretically you could increase the birth rate by using the army to force people to breed at gunpoint. But it probably isn't going to result in a high quality labor force, social cohesion, or high quality of life for those involved.
My point was not that you should actually support Republicans, or the particular policies most likely to increase birth rates.
But do you really? Because, for instance, children in Sweden have shown a far more rapid decline in mental health than in other similar Nordic countries without government child care:
https://www.imfcanada.org/archive/1107/swedish-daycare-inter...
"An official Swedish government investigation in 2006 showed that mental health among Swedish 15-year-olds declined faster from 1986 to 2002 than in eleven comparable European countries."
https://www.aei.org/events/the-unintended-consequences-of-un...
If you cared about the well-being of children, you'd think you'd fully consider the effects of various policies on children before advocating for them.
Indeed, most things done by the Democrat party harm the well-being of children. They could care less, for instance, that their open border policies facilitate child trafficking: https://www.dailywire.com/news/gop-senators-introduce-end-ch...
“Children are tragically being trafficked across the border by illegal immigrants who falsely claim they are related,” Ernst added. “This needs to stop — for the wellbeing of these children and the security of our nation. ... Of the 100,441 arrests for illegal border crossings in February, unaccompanied children accounted for nearly 10%"
Democrat lockdown policies harmed children tremendously while saving statically zero child lives. From the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/opinion/coronavirus-schoo...
"Children have suffered because many mayors and governors were too willing to close public schools."
Education quality in Democrat-run cities is the lowest in the nation: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/05/big_city_sc...
However, instead of supporting measures like school vouchers and charter schools that have been proven to help the most in inner cities, democrats have fought these policies tooth-and-nail at the behest of teacher's unions, who themselves have openly admitted they care about teachers, not students. https://www.amazon.com/Charter-Schools-Enemies-Thomas-Sowell...
And, of course, the Democrat-supported transgender movement has presided in a "Sharp Rise in Transgender Young People in the U.S.": https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena....
In case you need it spelled out, no, that's not good for children. Many lives are being ruined as the number of detransitioners also rises: https://www.dailywire.com/news/chris-cuomo-hosts-first-natio...
Have you considered that your "care for quality of life of children" could instead be empty virtue signaling and a desire to parrot the partisan views of your political party, which has proven itself time and again to be bad for children?
Which are these supposed Nordic countries you're talking about without government childcare?
Oh, look, the source is a religious thinktank that is ideologically opposed to out-of-home childcare, who conveniently ignores that Norway, Denmark, and Finland has a very similar childcare system, because it doesn't fit their narrative.
Using cash-for-care, as I understand it, resulted in mothers working less and spending more time at home.
This article also claims Finland had a cash-for-care program much earlier, and also had a higher proportion of mothers who chose to be homemakers: https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/id/09079.pdf
It looks to me like you are being overly dismissive because this information doesn't fit your preferred narrative.
The majority of the last half century has been characterised by steady expansion of daycare, just like in Sweden.
> that was used by 91% of citizens?
That is a ridiculous exaggeration by omission, given that daycare takeup for the covered group consistently remained relatively fixed, reflecting that in most cases it changed parents behaviour very little.
In 2000, two years after that policy was introduced, 37.1% of the eligible age group was in daycare, by 2005, a majority of the eligible group were in daycare. By the time it was removed for 2 year olds, the number was 78.1%, and today >85% of the originally covered group is in daycare. This steady growth in takeup has closely followed the overall increase in takeup of daycare.
Overall the long term percentage takeup of daycare in Norway has gone up year over year nearly every year since the mid 70's, just like in Sweden, the exception being with lowering of school starting age.
Today, 93.4% children between 1 (after majority of parental leave is over; some extends past one year and so contributes to pulling the 93.4% number down) and 5 go to daycare in Norway according to Statistics Norway.
So the point remains: If it was Sweden's use of day care that has supposedly led to these supposed problems, you'd expect to see the same issues in Norway (half the references were 404's or had no links and no full titles of papers, so I'm see little reason to trust that they've not been equally selective in their treatment of their sources as their convenient failure to address this).
"The conventional wisdom goes like this: ... countries such as Sweden, with its heavily subsidized, always-available daycare, generous parental leave shared by both parents, and a culture ordered around community and family life rather than work, hit the "sweet spot" of replacement-level fertility rates."
"Except that the notion of a replacement rate fertility in Sweden is itself a bit of a fantasy. As of 2018, the total fertility rate in Sweden was 1.76 children per woman. Among native-born Swedes, it was even lower, at 1.67. To be sure, this rate is higher than that of such countries as Germany (1.59 in 2016, or 1.46 among women with German citizenship), and even slightly higher than the record low rate of 1.72 recorded in the United States in 2018, but it's still not the replacement-level of 2.1."
Instead of just poking holes, what's your solution? What do you think the developed world needs to have more children? I can't see how making it easier through government spending would hurt.
Belief in God results in increased fertility rates: https://www.guttmacher.org/journals/psrh/2015/02/association...
Instead, our government has been increasingly hostile towards the practice of religion, especially from the judicial bench, for most of the 20th and 21st centuries. We need to do more to encourage and support religious belief and expression, but we are instead doing the opposite.
Really, religion results in happy marriages in general: https://www.dailywire.com/news/ny-times-op-ed-admits-somethi...
From the article:
======
The study, titled, “The Ties That Bind: Is Faith A Global Force for Good Or Ill In The Family,” made some statements sure to upset the anti-religious members of the Times staff, including:
“When it comes to relationship quality in heterosexual relationships, highly religious couples enjoy higher-quality relationships and more sexual satisfaction, compared to less/mixed religious couples and secular couples.”
“When it comes to fertility, data from low-fertility countries in the Americas, East Asia, and Europe show that religion’s positive influence on fertility has become stronger in recent decades. Today, people ages 18-49 who attend religious services regularly have 0.27 more children than those who never, or practically never, attend.”
======
Next solution. The sexual revolution and 2nd-wave-and-beyond feminism were highly detrimental to the family and to fertility, and the sooner we can unite against both, the better. The soviet union's sexual revolution predated ours by decades, but they were smart enough to roll it back after realizing just how disastrously it affected the country: https://poloniainstitute.net/recommended/the-bolshevik-sexua...
It's interesting to note that the Bolsheviks also wanted mandatory universal child care. That's not a coincidence, by the way! From the linked article:
"The Bolsheviks also wanted to take care of all children at birth, taking them from their parents and placing them in nurseries. Officially, they intended to free women from taking care of children so that they could devote themselves entirely to their work. In fact, for the indoctrination and creation of the so-called new man. Zlata Lilina, an official of the People’s Commissariat for National Affairs, stated in 1921 that when children were placed outside the home, one acted for their good: “The family is individualistic and selfish, and if a child is raised in it, it becomes largely anti-social and develops selfish tendencies … Raising children is not a private matter of parents, but the task of society .”"
Next solution. Reducing government spending means the people will have more money because there will be less inflation, less taxes, and less national debt. This will make it easier to raise families and for one parent to stay home and be a full-time parent.
Next solution. We need school vouchers, first and foremost because the public school system is doing terribly and it needs competition as an incentive to improve. Second, the morality and ethics generally taught in public schools and in our universities is anti-family and the opposite of what is needed to support families and society. As long as we are spending money on education, we should fund more private and religious schools that do a better job of both educating and teaching good morals.
We also need a return to a belief that Western civilization is something to be proud of and worth preserving. When you believe our very civilization is corrupt to the core, you're less likely to want to have children. This will be more likely to happen with school vouchers, but also by having government spend less money and time funding ideologies like CRT and the transgender movement, both of which are extremely anti-family.
We also need to instill a greater sense of personal responsibility in people towards society. We don't just have children for ourselves. We do it for the next generation. Really, we need to restore the moral principles we used to have and even took for granted. Instead, today these very morals are labeled as "white supremacist" by CRT activists.
https://www.amren.com/videos/2021/11/the-nuclear-family-is-w...
https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...
Here's the best part: being happier makes you want to have kids more, and conservatives are happier than progressives: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/20/opinion/conservatives-lib...
None of these things are accidents. Leftist movements are fundamentally atheist, anti-Christian, anti-family, and anti-Western civilization. Supporting them makes people unhappier in general, makes them have unhappier marriages, and makes them have less kids. It comes down to your core belief system, and "progressives" are about as regressive as it gets in that arena.
Check who the major political donors are, who funds the NGOs, think tanks, and PACs which guide policy-making. Check who employs politicians after they leave public office and who pays their speaking fees. Check who owns the major media outlets. Check who funds the endowments of academic institutions. Check declassified CIA documents which show direct collaboration with entrenched monopolies in carrying out foreign coups and military interventions.
It’s a big club, and you’re not in it.
Till voters wake up and realize that the problem is not with other people’s representatives or the other party, we are doomed to repeatedly make the same mistakes.