Why are city-dwellers not having enough babies to replace themselves? This article looks at two factors: shift in traditional gender roles and pro-family policies.
Low birth rates is a common problem across most developed countries. The recommended fertility rate for populations to replace itself after a generation is 2.1, but most cities, like Singapore, have fertility rates hovering around 1.5. In the most recent report, Singapore’s total fertility rate was recorded at 1.16 for 2017. To prevent the population from declining, immigration is the next most immediate solution to make up for the lack of natural rejuvenation of population. However, increasingly high rates of immigration may unsettle certain groups of citizens, thus bringing forth new social issues.
To form our opinions on low birth rates issues, it may be useful to first try and understanding what are some underlying reasons. It is no doubt that having children is a hugely personal choice for women and their partners. However, external factors can also play an important role in affecting these choices.
Shift in traditional gender roles
More women are pursuing higher education and entering the workforce to climb the corporate ladder. This means that there are more households with both parents working. However, despite having more women transit from mainly operating at home to the workplace, men were not sharing the load by shifting from workplace to the household. In effect, the role of taking care of the family and household chores still mainly fall on the shoulders of women. In 1989, researcher Hochschild termed it as ‘The Second Shift’, that is, the dual burden of paid and unpaid work experienced by working women.
It is no surprise that couples would want to have fewer children when their time available to spend on family life is declining due to work. On a more optimistic note, 30 years later, the second shift may have declined and become less of an issue due to the rise of the service industry and changing gender norms. Laundry, food preparation, child care, and chores that need to be done around the house can now be easily outsourced by paying for such services, and working mothers can spend significantly less time on them. Gender norms are also becoming less stringent as more couples choose to take the egalitarian approach of sharing the load of household chores and caregiving responsibilities (although it may not be shared as equally as perceived).
This spells a dilemma for women who are thinking of starting a family, but who also wish to pursue a professional career. In many cases, the sacrifices of time and financial resources have to be made in order to maintain a family with children.
Pro-family policies
As people are working longer hours (as discussed in this previous post), couples would need better pro-family policies and community support to nudge them towards taking time off work and focus on family life. These policies include paid maternity and paternity leaves, and companies offering more flexible working arrangements for employees to manage their time taking into account child care hours. In Singapore, these policies are continually improved over the years, and information on the latest policies can be found on this site.
It is no surprise then that European countries, such as France, have relatively higher birth rates largely due to their progressive family-friendly policies, in addition to cultural mindset shifts about the roles of males in the family.
Tackling the problem of low birth rates is a long-drawn battle where policymakers need to get to the heart of the problem in their respective societies in order to incentivise their citizens to procreate. Altering mindsets and official policy are definitely two steps in the right direction.
Questions for further personal evaluation:
- Do you think the current pro-family policies in Singapore are effective in encouraging young couples to have children? Why or why not?
- What are some other examples of countries with high birth rates, and how are they different from those with low birth rates?
Useful vocabulary:
- ‘stringent’: strict, precise, and exacting
- ‘egalitarian’: believing in or based on the principle that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities
Here are more related articles for further reading:
- The Washington Post: 2014 interview with Hochschild on how the Second Shift has evolved in 25 years.
“In the Second Shift, I argued that we are in a stalled revolution — that women have gone into the workforce, that was the revolution, but the workplace they go into and the men they come home to have changed less rapidly, or not at all. Nor has the government that could give them policies that would ease the way, like paid parental leave, paid family medical leave, or subsidized child care – the state of the art child care, that too is stalled. So what you’ve got are three sources of stall. What’s happening to men. What’s happening to the workplace and missing government help.
Today, I think we are in stall number two. There’s good news, there’s old bad news and there’s new bad news. And the good news, is that, the revolution continues and women are now half the labor force and they’ve moved up in it, they’ve earned more. And have gotten into more training, and broken ranks in a number of professions. And men have changed substantially. We’re all beginning to understand that the family has been a shock absorber of larger trends. And we’re finally seeing that these are not individual, private problems, but that they point to a larger cause”
- BBC: An interesting pro-family policy in Finland – a baby box given to all expectant mothers by the state.
“Mothers have a choice between taking the box, or a cash grant, currently set at 140 euros, but 95% opt for the box as it’s worth much more.
The tradition dates back to 1938. To begin with, the scheme was only available to families on low incomes, but that changed in 1949.
“Not only was it offered to all mothers-to-be but new legislation meant in order to get the grant, or maternity box, they had to visit a doctor or municipal pre-natal clinic before their fourth month of pregnancy,” says Heidi Liesivesi, who works at Kela – the Social Insurance Institution of Finland.
So the box provided mothers with what they needed to look after their baby, but it also helped steer pregnant women into the arms of the doctors and nurses of Finland’s nascent welfare state.
In the 1930s Finland was a poor country and infant mortality was high – 65 out of 1,000 babies died. But the figures improved rapidly in the decades that followed.
Mika Gissler, a professor at the National Institute for Health and Welfare in Helsinki, gives several reasons for this – the maternity box and pre-natal care for all women in the 1940s, followed in the 60s by a national health insurance system and the central hospital network.”
Picture credits:https://unsplash.com/search/photos/babies