The Context for Child Care
This ought to be the best time to become a parent that there has ever been. The stream of scientific information about fetal, infant, and child development is at an all-time high and still rising. There's more government and media interest in families, parenting, and small- child-related issues than ever before, and parents and stepparents—grandparents, too—are increasingly thoughtful about what and how they are doing.
Not everyone is interested in becoming a parent, of course, but not everyone has to. This millennium-spanning generation of women has an unprecedented amount of control over its childbearing. An active sex life and no children is socially acceptable and physiologically possible in most of the developed world, and many people opt for it. Low fertility (or no male partner) and children is not quite so easy, but assisted conception is now available in most of the Western world (though whether as a right or a big business depends on where you live) and is astonishingly widely used, often by individuals who would not have seen themselves as prospective parents a generation ago, including women past menopause and gay couples.
Throughout the postindustrial world, however, women are having fewer babies than ever before, and while mondially falling birth rates may do something to slow the overpopulation of the planet, falling birth rates in developed areas mean "aging populations" and, thirty years into the future, a real threat to economies. The 2006 Canadian census shows that the number of people over age sixty-five has gone up by almost 12 percent since 2001, while the number under age fifteen has dropped more than 2 percent in the same period. An aging population, better described as a shortage of young people, not only means that a larger proportion of the population will be retired and dependent on pensions and care arrangements that a smaller proportion of people of working age are going to have to finance; it also means fewer young people acquiring and disseminating the new skills on which employment will increasingly depend. So, in the long term, we need our populations to produce the next generation of workers, and countries that do—such as the United States, which saw a fractional increase from 64 infants per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 1996 to 66.3 in 2004—will be at an enormous advantage if it is maintained. The assumption that countries with very low birth rates can turn to migrants instead ignores the real math. If a country such as Italy continued with its current fertility rate of about 1.3 (instead of the 2.0 that would replace each couple with two offspring) for more than a generation, its labor supply would drop by about 10 million workers. It is inconceivable that Italy, or indeed any nation, could attract such a large number of employable immigrants or absorb them.
It is difficult to see a future shortage of labor as an urgent problem in countries where unemployment rates are high, as they have been, for example, in Germany and Spain. However, it is now generally realized that current unemployment comes about less because there are too many workers than because too few of the available workers have the requisite skills. Indeed, if the birth rate stayed so low that there was a catastrophic shortage of labor in thirty years, there would probably still be a high rate of unemployment among inadequately skilled workers, many of them approaching retirement age, who were no longer employable in the jobs available.
What do birth rates now and labor supplies in the future have to do with child care? The link is women's participation in the labor market. A generation ago, the women who didn't work outside their homes were the ones who had the most children, and that is still the case in some parts of the world. In most countries, though, that situation has now reversed so that it is countries with high rates of female employment that have higher fertility rates. In Iceland, for example, 90 percent of women are employed, and it has the highest birth rate in Europe—two children per woman. Countries that have lower rates of female employment have low fertility rates because the governments do not make it possible for mothers to work. Germany, which has a low birth rate and fewer women working, is addressing the issue with new tax breaks and state-funded welfare programs. France has instigated even more direct incentives to childbearing: not only well-paid maternity leave and some paternity leave but monetary benefits up to a child's third birthday and a presidential medal for parents of several children!
More and more countries are announcing direct financial incentives for having an "extra" child. In Australia, there is a baby bonus of $4,133 per child, and there is soon to be a "bumper baby bonus" of $10,000 on the birth of a third or subsequent child. The governor of the Russian province of Ulyanovsky went even further, suggesting September 12 be designated a public holiday on which to conceive a baby. It was announced that on June 12, 2008, a refrigerator or television would be awarded to anyone giving birth on that day—exactly nine months later. It is not clear if this actually happened, but in Russia as a whole, Putin's government gave vouchers worth about $8,500 (£10,500) to any woman having a second or third child.
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