Germany Fights Population Drop
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
In college I had a professor from East Germany that talked about this. The communists did a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was an impressive support system for working parents. The preschools and child care programs were excellent, and women were encouraged to work instead of staying home. After the wall fell, these support systems stopped, and his wife had to quit her job and stay home to take care of their kids. He thought it was such a waste of talent because his wife had a PHD and was also a college professor, but there were few other options at the time.
This dovetails nicely into marriage equality, which I don't know if Germany has yet, but I know it will if it temporarily does not.
The kindergarten prices are based on a sliding scale (with a maximum fee), so even a single mother with a relatively low paying job can afford it and rich people don't pay absurd amounts either. The result is that almost all parents work, it is frowned upon to be a "stay at home mom," and single mothers do not struggle so terribly, like in the US where there is very little childcare support.
The other result is that Norway is one of the few countries in Europe with a positive growth rate (not even counting immigration). One could argue that the other factors like paid maternity/paternity leave help, but the affordable child care seems much more important to most parents I know here.
Living in US, that's a huge contrast for me and I'm not entirely sure what options are out there aside from paying private.
It's incomprehensible that a parent should have to pay thousands per month just to be able to have a child and work at the same time.
Paid maternal leave is not the big issue! After six months of leave, the problem remains that a child needs to be looked after and cared for while the mother returns to work.
But why?
I'm young and child-less, so I'm not speaking out of experience, but I really see no reasons why we should be encouraging people to be able to work while having kids. Instead, I think we should enable them to not work and have kids. 50 years ago, it was more than possible to sustain a family with only a single working parent. Nowadays, this doesn't seem even remotely possible (hell, many families barely survive with 2 working parents!). Furthermore, it's not like we're facing a shortage of workforce problems - we're facing unemployment problems. If we could enable e.g. 30% of the workforce (hopefully dads as well - I would love to stay at home instead of working) to stay at home with kids instead, not only would that solve the unemployment issues, but it would also be hugely beneficial for the children's development!
Edited to add: I actually come from a country where most adults worked even 50 years ago. However, when I was young, my grandmother was already retired, so she was able to take care of me and my brother until we started school. Still, I wish my parents had been able to spend more time with me when I was little, and I wish I'll have that opportunity with my kids.
I wouldn't have children with someone unless one of us was willing to take care of the children AT LEAST until school age. I don't think it's evil or sinful or anything to put your kids in daycare, but I am very very glad I grew up with a stay at home mother. Summer daycare(or day camp every single week all summer) just sounds way way too structured(insofar as it has to be, because it has to work around the structured adult schedules of working parents) for children.
I worry that the reason East Germany was so "progressive" in this regard is that they were trying to flatten the social structure to simply the individual and the State. With no communities, families or churches, there's no framework on which to challenge the propaganda of the State.
Similarly, we often meet people who claim to want to stay at home, but can't afford to. Meanwhile they have nice cars, iPhones, etc. In reality they're working to maintain a standard of living, not because they need to. Choices, choices.
Yes, this can be done by taking the kid to a park or other social activities, but two working parents is a perfectly acceptable option too. Daycare isn't unbeneficial to a child.
That's a very simplified observation of a complex reality. Not all daycares are created equal: The National Institute of Child Health Development[1] found that most daycare operations are "fair" or "poor". Only 10% are "high-quality". Obviously the details are what matter in each case: a caring parent at home is far better than a crowded day-care. Conversely, a great daycare can help with a bad home situation.
[1] https://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/pubs/documents/seccyd...
Most children in Sweden have two working parents and start daycare when they are around a year old. Daycare in Sweden is considered part of the school system and the teachers working there have (approximately) the same education as 'regular' school teachers.
Edit: Also, as a related fact in this discussion, in Sweden children that are behind in learning to speak (language development) can actually receive special permission to spend _more_ time in daycare to help speed up their language learning.
There is certainly more to a child's behavior than whether their parents were working or staying at home. There might be a strong correlation to households with two working parents and households with other developmentally-stunting factors like parental illiteracy or low education levels, low levels of parental involvement, etc, but I'm sure you would have a tough time proving to any level that, with all other factors remaining the same, two working parents cause more damage to a child than having a stay-at-home parent.
For what it's worth (as long as your anecdotal experience means something to you), my brother-in-law is a college administrator and my sister is a first grade teacher and they have two children who don't seem to have any developmental issues. But my sister has kids in her class with a stay-at-home parent who certainly do.
One relevant source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17381797
Why is it incomprehensible? Watching a kid takes time, time costs money. Someone has to pay for it. Maybe you don't think it's right that the parent should be the one to pay for supervision of their kid, but I'm still lost as to how you arrived at "incomprehensible".
As I see it, it was just an easy way to gain votes. It's easy to pass laws that your own government doesn't have to apply, but _someone else_.
So yeah, I guess we don't require kindergarten, but I've never encountered anyone in the US who did not attend kindergarten. So it still sounds odd that Germany doesn't have universal kindergarten zumal das Wort ist Deutsch.
In Germany school is mandatory until you're 16 (if I'm not mistaken), but kindergarten is completely optional. Most people - if they can afford it - would send their kids there, though, because it gives them (the parents) more time off, and it's good for the kids to spend some time with other kids.
There are public and private kindergartens here (same with schools), and for the public ones the price depends on the parents' income. It seems that the costs vary by county and by the number of kids you have (as an example I found this page: http://www.netmoms.de/magazin/kinder/kindergarten/kosten-fue... ). Looks incredibly cheap (I'm honestly surprised), so maybe it's time to plan for some offspring.
School teachers prefer kids to go to kindergarten for the social and verbal skills they acquire there, but it's not mandatory.
However, it's systematically under attack from the government since. It's politically easier to cut kindergarden budgets rather than health services or corporate welfare. Another important need is for better parental leave so that both parents can raise their children and have a full time job.
We also need more qualified workers, as everyday I see German dumbos who are seriously unqualified for their job ;-)
But yes, if the day should come that German dumbos should be replaced with skilled people from Spain, Turkey, or Greece, many people might end up very pissed.
Edit: if you vote me down, maybe you'd like to elaborate on where our opinions or observations differ?
It seems that in the 1800s, we were more R type than we are today. We had lots of children (though not thousands) and weren't all that concerned with education, welfare, or health as to each one. At least in comparison to today.
Now, we seem to be much more K type. We take care of our children to an incredible degree. Mortality is very anomalous in child birth, it is rare in the 1st world to encounter an illiterate person, all but the true wackos get vaccines, etc. As a consequence, it takes a lot of time and resources to raise a child. Heck, we are even talking about the 20's being years of 'extended adolescence'[1]. I don't know if this is a mistake of correlations and causation, but they sure do seem linked.
Hans Rosling's TED talks are just so good here for extra material too.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
[1] http://www.primermagazine.com/2013/live/wasting-your-20s-wit...
I wonder if this is actually true or if its like the typical American sob story of we can't get PHD's to work for minimum wage so we need to outsource.
The difference is in the objective: Our tech lobbyists (luckily quite incompetent) would like to reduce the minimum mandatory wage for skilled immigrant workers which exists to avoid pressure on locals.
As if even lower wages make working in Germany more attractive to skilled labor that can choose between countries - including the US (where at least the gross pay is noticeably higher for skilled jobs).
Aside: I love the show Connections with James Burke and highly recommend it. Many of the threads weaved in the show come start near this time period because the labour crunch required machines otherwise there just wouldn't have been enough labour to run the society left.
In my opinion that is a very inefficient way to talk about demographics.
"But bogged down with failed banks and dwindling budgets, few are in any position to do anything about it."
The reasoning is something like "We can not save ourselves from collapse because we are collapsing." This is not a serious line of reasoning. Whenever people are faced with 2 problems, they need to make a decision about which problem is more urgent. If you honestly feel that problem B is more important than problem A, then you have a good reason to allow A to become worse so as to do something about B.
I could make an analogy to heart disease: aspirin can help lower the risk of a heart attack, but it has a risk itself: internal bleeding. Is aspirin worth the risk? That is something to be decided by a doctor and the patient. One needs to carefully weigh the risks of both decisions. One needs to examine all of the circumstances. However, where the risk of heart attack is serious, then the medical establishment is in agreement that it is better to take aspirin than to run the risk of a heart attack.
Exactly the same reasoning should apply to Germany and the issue of population. Which issue is more pressing, the issue of national debt, or the issue of declining population? One can make an argument either way, however Germany has a level of debt that is better than France, Italy, and many other European nations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_deb...
More so, Germany's public debt is less of an issue than it seems because the public is itself not highly indebted (as opposed to the public in the USA, which carries immense private sector debts).
If you project Germany's debts 50 years in the future, the situation seems bleak, because of rising retirement costs -- but that problem exists exactly because of the low birth rate, so if it was possible to solve the low birth rate, then the debts in 50 years would cease to be a problem.
The reality is, Germany has the financial resources to take some action against the low birth rate, if it wanted to. While there are important issues to be discussed, both pro and con, the financial arguments tend to be fake arguments.
Germany is restrained in its actions because of the continuing cultural force of "Kinder, Küche, Kirche". Aggressive action to raise the birth rate would automatically mean a change in the private sphere of life. More so, it would likely mean a revolution in the social status of women, and there are many in Germany who are wary of changes in gender relations.
Between the years 1874 and 1899 my great grandmother gave birth to 16 children. My family lived on a farm in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At that time, children as young as 5 were used for farmwork. A child as young as 12 could bring in a surplus -- they were, in a sense, "profit centers". Over the last 150 years children have transformed from units of production to units of consumption. Raising a child is now very expensive, and it is against the law for children to do any work that might offset their cost. Because of that, people have cut back on the number of children they have. Whereas my great grandmother had 16 children, most of my friends are content to have 1 or 2 children. Nowadays, having 3 children seems like a large family.
If Germany were serious about lifting the birth rate, it could take aggressive action to mitigate the costs of raising children. I am sure each of us can imagine some program that we think might work: free day care for children of all ages, or a huge bonus at birth such as $100,000, or some method of feeding children such that food is effectively free for children, and parents are saved the cost.
The important thing is to imagine what aggressive action would really look like. It would make some people flinch: their instinct would be that whatever program you suggest, the program is "too expensive". But, to repeat the point I made above, the financial arguments are nonsense. If you believe that Germany faces crushing debts in the future because of rising retirement costs, then raising the birth rate is the solution to Germany's financial problems.
But if you believe that the money simply doesn't exist, and that we are, in 2014, unable to do what my great grandmother did in the late 1800s, then the entire narrative of the Industrial Revolution needs to be re-examined, because you are suggesting that we are all poorer now than we were 120-140 years ago. Ask yourself, do you honestly believe that today's technology has left us poorer? Most economic historians would argue that, even with the reduction of child labor, most families are better off today than they were 120-140 years ago. If you assume that more per-capita wealth exists in the world now than circa 1880, then it should be possible to pay families for the cost of raising 3 or 4 children.
I'm also thinking that back in the day, your children were your retirement plan, so better have enough of them to make sure you will be taken care of. But now that the state is our retirement plan, even less reason to have kids.
But actually, I think the general theory is that people have less kids precisely because they are richer as opposed to being poorer, since they don't need kids in order to labor on the farm and don't need kids to pay for the parents retirement.
And working children don't usually bring in lots of money, but back in the day they would care for their elderly parents, which was a good reason to have kids.
I think it's not mainly about money (why do Germany's academics have the fewest children?), but about creating a children-friendly climate and a culture where raising children is considered a good thing and not just a burden that keeps you from consuming. Children and modern consumer culture - bad fit.
This is so interesting; I was thinking about this exact problem (consumerism vs. child rearing) the other day after noticing some anti-child undertones on Reddit. Some themes I saw were workplace discrimination toward women in their 20's ("Why should I have to pay to train a female employee when she's highly likely to get pregnant and leave? I'd rather just hire a male."), shaming parents experiencing financial hardship ("It doesn't matter if you got cancer; you should have accumulated more savings before deciding to have kids!"), and an overall positive view of a child-free lifestyle ("All of our friends with kids are poor now -- I'm happy without kids so I can buy whatever games and gadgets I want.").
I just find it weird that people can forego such a defining element of any life form (reproduction) for the sake of consuming more "things". To take it to the extreme, could consumerism lead to the end of the human race?
Generally, it's a personal decision. However, consumer people might well remove themselves from the gene pool this way. The problem is that their culture is everywhere, and all kids catch that virus in school ("mom/dad, Timmy has a PS4, when do we get one?", "I also need to collect all Pokemon, or I'm not cool.") and want to grow up to be models/popstars/celebs or other meaningless things. Here's hoping my (future) kids will grow out of that phase quickly.
The cost to give birth is multiple times lower than somewhere like the US, the cost to raise again multiple times lower than the US, children are given much greater independence (freedom of movement and choice comes much earlier). Granted somewhere such as the US with an increasing rather than decreasing population, has little incentive to create a child-friendly climate. In Germany however this problem has made it very child friendly.
Second, the comment on "consumption" is a critique that may apply to humanity as a whole but largely German is very low in the list of OECD countries when it comes to economies based on consumption.
Still, I think consumer culture is what's keeping growth low, in most industrialized countries these days. (I may be wrong.) I'm not sure how high or low Germany's consumption level is in absolute numbers, but I think it might look low because the country is producing/exporting so damn much.
We have lots of bad things, specially in the current times, but I would say day care options in Portugal are way better for working parents.
Having the option to drop the children between 8 am and 6pm is already a big help.
One fascinating book I read a couple of years ago compared Western European nations with each other vs the "European counterparts that settled America", i.e. the Caucasians in North America. It's interesting that in this particular comparison America (main difference: less social welfare, more individualism, more religion) still has the highest of all ethnic Caucasian birthrates approx. 2.4 [2]
One economist's work that is very interesting to follow on this topic is Gunnar Heinsohn[3] who publishes his findings in intriguing essays usually backed by a lot of statistics and numbers.
But back to the article: the whole topic raises a couple of important fundamental questions: What do you mean by "Germany's" birth rate plummeting? The population overall, of course, has been steady for the most part and was recently admitted publicly by the ministry of federal statistics (a few years back) [4] Germany itself will be a majority Muslim country by 2050. So the population itself will probably not change or not much, it will rather turn into a different cultural entity, one with a small and shrinking "original" ethnic group (similar to the Japanese, for instance) but being replaced by a (mainly) Turkish/Middle Eastern cultural group that will incorporate their own beliefs and traditions into the aging German society and probably eventually dominate it (it is, after all, just a number's game). It's also not really a workforce problem as the article alluded - some here have already pointed out increases in productivity and automation that might offset these issues. The whole notion of population decline is inherently a cultural/ethnic question IMHO - even if a desire to shrink the population to improve the quality of life is your goal and immigrant birth rates fall over time: the fact of the matter remains this that you might be looking at a new "Voelkerwanderung" and all that comes with it.
Personal anecdote: I used to work for an IT company in Germany about 10 years ago - I had roughly 40 co-workers in an age-range of 20 to 40 (I was 25 at that time). I was the only one with 2 kids - nobody else had kids! Zero. My colleges had dogs, cars, expensive vacations and lived for the most part in those parts of town that shielded them nicely from the mass immigration taking place in what they called "(immigrant) ghettos". The life style benefits were non-negotiable for most of them but left not much for kids either (taxation is tough if you have to fund healthcare and mass immigration :-). The girls were brought up to loathe the idea of being a mother (and all the single mothers at the edge of society were an effective warning sign). So they were all headed for their careers, making it near impossible to have their first child before the age of 30-35. Not much time left after that. The climate in the bigger German cities that attract all those young and bright Germans looking for work is quite detrimental to raising children as well: very often our experience was that kids were seen as nuisance (in the US we had quite the opposite experience which might be one reason for the difference in birth rates - the US provides (in many emotional daily interactions) a way more supportive place to raise children than Western Europe).
At this point, sadly, it seems to me that population growth is linked to (a lack of) education and / or religious indoctrination. It does not seem to make much of a difference when some European countries pump millions into their social projects to support families (Sweden, France) or when they do not (Germany, Britain) - the birth rate decline is almost the same for all of these countries (again, I am talking native population, not immigrants) [5].
Conclusion: Religion might be one(?) way that natural selection ensures a population's continued growth - I like to be proven wrong, but I can't think of a nation where the growth rate is high and Atheism and Enlightenment reigns the day. A positive outcome would be a gently declining population overall on planet Earth that becomes supported by automation and a growing population on Mars while leaving violent fanaticism in the past...
--- [1] http://www.trykkefrihed.dk/interview-a-continent-of-losers.h... (could not find a better one, but there are numerous essays describing his theory of "youth bulge" on the web [2] http://www.pop.org/content/fertility-decline-in-western-euro... [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Heinsohn [4] http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/german-population-plunge-ir... [5] http://www.pewforum.org/files/2012/07/MDII-graphics-webready...
I think that's exactly backwards. Afghanistan has the highest birthrate. The less gender equality, the higher the birthrate. You get astronomical birthrates in the Hasidim and Islamic parts of Africa where women hold a subservient place to their husbands and have a constrained gender role. The Nazis had some success raising the birthrate by promoting and elevating stay-at-home motherhood, not by promoting equality.
I think there's a strong case to be made that banning women from colleges and professions would dramatically raise the birthrate. I'm not advocating this, I'm just saying it's what the data suggests. The more professional status is available to women the less they reproduce. This is very clear all over the world across cultures.
Basically, if you work not because you need it, but because you have something to contribute, you should be able to do that while raising a family at the same time.
Ie. I think that citizen revenue would help greatly in this aspect.
> "If you look closely at the numbers, what you see is that in developed countries, the higher the gender equality, the higher the birthrate,”
edit: Every German will upvote this comment
Please stop generalizing people using their nationality.
I am a German and I certainly do not agree with your views.
But it is not xenophobic to say that people want to keep German families German. Did you know that China has less than a million immigrants in the entire country? Maybe it is time you respect your people, too. Your group of 4 sounds like some xenophile party.
With this article we have the sexual relations of Germans strewn about and we are expected to just sit back and let the whole world morph the demographics of a nation they aren't a part of. I don't agree with it.
So they stop having children with other Germans. Makes sense.
Or else, we're failing as a species.
An individual, or any group of individuals, should be able to sustain themselves by their own work, as long as there are enough resources in the environment (or ecosystem).
Given that children are not self sustaining, individuals, or rather couples, but even more so, groups of individuals (villages, tribes, countries), should be able to get even more resources than their own need by their own work, so as to feed their children, their women and their olds. Or better, capitalize resources so they can feed themselves when they're old.
A society that would really need fresh blood, that had too many taxes or retirement pensions to pay, and where women cannot bear children because they have to work to sustain themselves, since men aren't retributed enough to feed their families all by themselves, those societies are beyond failure. They have effectively failed. It's done.
But I'm not sure that's the case in Europe or in the USA. I still think that there are enough resources, and even more than ever, given techological and scientific progress; eg. 200 years ago, 98% of the population had to work to feed the remaining 2%; nowadays 1% of the population has to work to feed the remaining 99%; therefore people should be able to work productively 4 days a year (not at those useless jobs), and earn enough resources to feed himself. Working 12 more days a year, he should earn enough resource to feed his wife and two children. Similarly, to shelter and clothe oneself shouldn't require much more work. All the rest goes to pay taxes of all kinds, that we shouldn't have to bear with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proletariat
Quote: "... children—proles (from Latin proli, "offspring")—were listed instead of their property; hence, the name proletarius, "the one who produces offspring"."
In Rome the proletariat were nothing less than baby factories. Many were completely indoctrinated in this role, regarding it as their duty.
And this class has existed, with different names, to the present.
Wow, in 50 years robots will do most of the work. They will drive our cars and clean our houses. They are starting doing it.
In fact 50 years is so much time we could had done great breakthroughs like the discovery of nuclear fusion, or the manipulation of DNA so we remain young forever(and most people will not die from age).
I am more worried about what will happen THIS YEAR if Germany continues supporting USA invasion of Ukraine and Russia closes the gas key.