We took our 3 year old to Japan and had a difficult time entertaining them with our usual cop-out: playgrounds. Japanese public playgrounds are few and far between, and when we did find them they were typically old and sad (a swing or monkey bars and a metal slide). The swings we found were abnormally low to the ground, making it difficult for kids to actually pump their legs and most end up standing on them instead. We did some research into it, wondering if Japanese people felt as frustrated as we were trying to physicslly entertain a kid.
We came across this interesting piece about physical differences between kids in 2007 and kids in 1985. In short, the average 5 year old in 2007 had the athletic abilities of a 3 year old in 1985. Granted this data is rather old, but anecdotally we did notice our 3 year old playing on equipment specified for (and mostly being used by) the much older children. https://poh.ngo/en/the-state-of-play-in-japan/
The best public and highly used playgrounds we found were in Kyoto (near the train museum), in Osaka called the mountain slides (near the Children's Plaza), and in Arashiyama at the top of the Monkey Park hill. Aside from that, paid entertainment was the way to go.
Happy to share more if anyone is interested in the experience, but I'd rather stop there for now.
70% of Japanese answered "it's hard to find a job which supports raising children". Japanese society is still rooted in women quitting when they have kids and being stay at home moms. Even though now 60% of couples have two earners, this hasn't changed fast enough. The economy is doing badly too, and people have less money than before.
In Japan, marriage = kids, there are few children born outside of marriage. Increasingly people are marrying later or not marrying at all, which has a direct effect on that. There are other reasons: women still end up doing way more of the housework and childrearing than men (on average) in Japan; men work longer hours and don't get to spend time with the kids they're raising; in a divorce women almost always get full custody. Mother in laws used to live with the family and help, but that is less common now. Two earner households are more common. Women are focusing on careers more.
The overall picture is similar to other countries - a rejection of the traditional marriage and kids plan in favour of spending time on other activities in ones 20s and 30s - but unique societal factors make it more prominent here.
It seems these are all structural problems that Japan can address directly.
Universal child care, family leave might help.
Still, I look at the generation younger than me in the US and see them in the same spot. We’d already be in their situation if it weren’t for immigration.
I will tell anyone that there are two truths about children 1) they cost exactly as much money as you have and 2) the heaviest cost is time.
I'm a high earner. I have no money issues, what I have are time issues. I'm a single parent with high flexibility and every single struggle I have with my child could be relieved by having a homemaker to distract my kid and take care of the impacts of my kid. I do more than double laundry and clean more often and burn hours at places I don't necessarily want to be but the kid does. My career has stalled out because I don't have the extra hours it takes to get promoted.
Now imagine this in Japan where they're not just working 40 hours a week, looking at add 5-10 more for advancement. That's the issue of children in my opinion. It's why very wealthy people hire nannies. It's the only way to free the most value resource you spend on children: time.
This. I'm not a single parent and I'm a high earner but my wife has chronic medical issues. I spend a lot more of my time on home things now because I have a kid and it's demanding. When our kid is school, I can focus. When they're not, I struggle to perform. If I had enough spare money to have a full time nanny/housekeeper, my live would be much easier and my kid would probably be happier because our time with them would be higher value. I can absolutely see why people would opt out. It's hard.
I fully agree with your point about time being the heaviest cost - and if you are a person that equates time with money (not every person can transform their time into a lot of money), then yes, it's also expensive in raw dollars. However, for some people in occupations who don't pay a lot, kids aren't THAT expensive in raw dollars, at least in the US South.
That was my point. Which is that Japan being cheap doesn't mitigate anything. Time is the critical factor there. Until they have more free time, no one is having more kids.
that really doesn't explain why they keep having less kids, not more. Since the 80's their fertility rate dropped by some 30% but i doubt the 80's there were any less cutthroat or careerist than today.
Because women entered the workforce. That's it. A couple has collective time. Before one partner has a lot of time. Right now that is not true and every year more and more couples have two workers. Honestly women working accounts for declining birth rates everywhere. Japan just has it the worst because of their work culture and regular culture. A woman knows that the moment that she gets married, she'll be discriminated against and perhaps just forced out of the work place, so she doesn't. In Japan no one has kids out of wedlock. There you do. Continously declining birth rates from women marrying less and more couples with dual incomes.
so according to what i actually looked up, women's involvement in labor force in Japan stayed around 40% for the last 3 decades. So what are you talking about? "women entered the workforce"? "That's it" what, exactly?
Workplace standards. Men work too much and earn too little to support a family and be a present father. Having a child destroys women’s careers and they are stuck at home with a child and an absent husband. These are issues in many countries, but in Japan in particular, employees work much longer hours, and company loyalty is culturally enforced making it hard to find a new/better job.
Different countries use different methods so you can’t use this as a comparison.
“ The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation.”
Nevertheless according to that same data the avg has been decreasing. In the 70s the Japanese worked 2200 hours per year and now it's closer to 1600 hours.
Since the 80s, labor unions in Japan have been pushing for less hours worked and more holiday days. Currently the Japanese have between 10-20 PTO days per year.
My point is that this idea the Japanese are overworking themselves to death is mostly a myth from previous decades.
The data from the previous link shows that Japan has increased from 11% part time workers in 1970 to 25% part time workers in 2022. It's entirely possible that full-time workers are overworked while part-time workers are under-employed, leading to a decrease in average hours worked. Full-time workers can be time poor, while part-time workers may be money poor.
It is a consistent trend that increasing levels of education and equality naturally (i.e., without external pressures such as a One Child Policy, extra taxation, etc.) reduce childbearing rates.
On top of that, Japan's work culture of being more wedded & committed to work than to family strongly discourages it. When you are expected to work 12x6, then go out drinking with the boss, and still are living paycheck-to-paycheck it becomes very hard to see how you would have time to raise children. I've heard (PBS, no link now) abt studies where they reduced work hours in a town and fertility rapidly and significantly increased.
Give people a little breathing room and you'll get kids.
Why do you think it exclusively a Japanese problem? Nearly every western nation is experiencing the same set of trends, Japan just happened to get their first.
One part of the problem is that this is so compartmentalized. If you work at a place where people have children... they all have children for the most part. If you work at a place where they don't have children, then nearly all of them are childless (or have just the one). Same for non-work social lives.
This means there's some significant fraction of people who look around them and can't notice that it's happening here in the US too, their own personal experience contradicts the trend too thoroughly for them to believe it to be some sort of fluke.
In Japan, at a guess, I'd say that exact nature of the discouragement, they just keep putting the pressure on that "here are the 10,000 things you must do first" until children become an impossible achievement.
It is actually a problem everywhere except Sub-Saharan Africa. For example, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Taiwan, China are going through a massive demographic decline. India will likely be there in 15 years.
the problem isn't the policy, it's that when they repealed it China was facing the same issues as Japan, Taiwan, the US, Europe, etc. which is that no one is having kids.
Like Japan never had that law and is still having serious consequences
People want to focus on themselves. Career goals. Trips. Wealth. Fun.
There are so many more outlets for dopamine in the modern world, and with the internet we can post about it and share it with our peers instantly.
Children lock you into a life of servitude. They're "expensive furniture for tiny apartments" as Peter Zeihan says, no longer "free labor for the farm". Unlike dogs, you can't leave them at home unattended.
> People want to focus on themselves. Career goals. Trips. Wealth. Fun.
As a non-Japanese couple in our late 30s who decided not to have kids, I confirm those are exactly our reasons.
While I generally love kids and will be a good uncle, I just can't fathom the financial/emotional/time burden required to raise a couple of them for 18 years. I have just one life and this is my ride. If regret will eventually show up, I'll deal with it.
We're in our late 30s and are definitely not having any.
That said, I believe that a couple that is 1000% sure they want to have children and know what they are getting into should absolutely do it. The issue is that there are so many parents/future parents locked into the "you'll never be ready" or "you can never be too sure" mentality and fail to fully grasp what you're sacrificing and leaving behind when you become a parent.
>couple in our late 30s who decided not to have kids
I fear for people who choose this path. Being childless in your 30s sounds like a blast. But that's just one stage of your life. How fun is life going to be when you're 40+? Or when your health begins to decline? Maybe it will be worth it, maybe not. When I visit older relatives who are childless (at least to me) their lives come off as hollow and sad.
> When I visit older relatives who are childless (at least to me) their lives come off as hollow and sad.
My grandfather willingly moved to Florida, away from the family. We'd be expected to visit for holidays, of course, but he wanted to play tennis in the sun.
I think that the prevailing view of parenting vs individual actualization isn't particularly accurate.
Having children is also an opportunity for personal development and growth, just of a different flavor and different direction.
Of course there isnt a single answer, but I think people should question the implicit assumption that the "best ride", most fun, ect is the childfree one.
I'm probably a bit older than you, my peer group is either having kids or they are never going to have kids. We are on that precipice.
The people who really don't want kids, the ones sterilizing themselves, are all depressed. They have miserable lives. They aren't traveling and having great vacations, they aren't becoming CEOs, they aren't living in the lap of luxury. They're mostly alone.
Oddly, the people who have kids travel a lot more despite it being much harder with a kid. We have a lot of family demanding we visit and who wants to visit. We have a lot of things to show the kids.
The folks with kids are generally the ones with more illustrious careers, the ones higher up the food chain. Some of that may be that it's easier to have kids when you have more money.
Wealth is not just money. It is the whole of your circumstance. Your home and whether you want to be in it, whether you like your life partner, and how your family unit gets along. You need enough money for things of course.
Your theory sounds great on paper, but I don't think it holds up.
I only have one sterilized friend (he's 32) and he definitely living the best life out of everyone I know. He has a sailing ship, two girls (that I know of). We went to the Canarias together in mars before he left for the Antilles, I think he was in Miami recently and he's sailing back with new friends this month.
But I earn more money, and have a child on the way. Hopefully that means I'm worth more!
Japan may be becoming more individualistic, but it is still highly collectivist by the standards of many parts of the world. So I'm unconvinced that individualism is the cause here.
This seems like a very narrow take and doesn't match up to my experience at all.
It also doesn't speak to the specific circumstances in Japan either. I'm sure "herbivore men" exist in the West, but they're not common enough that we have a term for it that I know of.
(Sure there are incels, but that's something different).
This may describe your experience, but it is not a good description of what is going on Japan. What is going on in Japan is much more rooted in economic insecurity and a disillusionment with the expectations of society.
You can't really leave dogs at home unattended either. You can't really take them on airplanes on vacation, you can't take them into many hotel rooms. You'll have a hard time getting a rental with them. You can't insure them on your health insurance and they end up costing a lot with medical problems. You can't claim them on your taxes.
I always thought dogs were somehow less convenient than kids. At least society is built around the parent/kid dynamic somewhat.
You put food in a bowl and leave it on the floor. They eat it when they are hungry. It's quite simple...
Bathroom? If you feed them at the same time every day, the usually go to the bathroom at the same time every day. You build habits. They go out before you go to work, and then when you come home, they go out and relieve themselves.
There are also grass pads for smaller dogs that can be left inside the home.
These are not difficult problems.
"They make noise and destroy things"
If yours does, you have a sh*tty dog that probably isn't being taken care of correctly.
Most cared for dogs just sit around, sleep, and wait for their owners to get home.
I've had dogs, lived with people with dogs, lived in apartments with neighbors with dogs. I know how it's "supposed to be" and I know how it "actually is."
If you have all the experience with dogs that you say you do, and yet still hold the thoughts about dogs that you do...i'm not sure what to say about that.
Parents had 4 kids by 35, I'm almost 36 and don't even want the added stress of being a responsible dog owner. Even if the world was on a more positive trend upwards I can't imagine myself being inclined to bring children into this hellscape.
Why doesn't the government pay for the time spent raising children (for example at 3x minimum wage), and cover expenses (e.g. rent, food, clothes, education, school uniform etc.)? I think then for some women it would be more profitable to raise kids rather than work at Walmart for example.
If that is too expensive for the budget then you could grant citizenship to families with many children from developing countries.
I feel like this is the most selfish thing ever. The only reason you're here enjoying these dopamine outlets is because someone decided to bring you into the world. We should pay it forward.
Quite a few of my liberal friends are childless, which is odd because who's going to carry on their values?
> Quite a few of my liberal friends are childless, which is odd because who's going to carry on their values?
Memetic continuity doesn’t require genetic continuity, and IME plenty of the people forgoing the latter are also putting considerable effort into the former.
I can understand selfishness. The part that is incomprehensibly bizarre to me is that the only long-term 100% positive experience in my life has been my children. I don't think it could possibly be otherwise.
How do these people invert that so thoroughly, that they believe that it's not just negative from time to time, but overwhelmingly so and constantly? I hate to stoop to pop psychology, but that's some sort of profound multi-generational trauma going on, isn't it?
Why is your experience the only one? Congratulations on feeling good about your decision but you're not everyone and your opinion is narrow and selfish.
In the context of the rewards and satisfaction of being a parent, I think it is a valid question.
People can either think "being a parent would be miserable" or "being a parent would be fun". The interesting question is what leads them to one conclusion or the other.
In general, my life is pretty great and full of loving friends and family. I think my children's lives will be great too.
My parents sucked and half of them definitely didn't enjoy kids, despite having many. My wife's parents sucked and still suck. My kid's parents don't suck but my life is definitely not made more enjoyable anywhere near 100% of the time because I have a kid. It has moments but it's also a huge financial and time commitment. My wife and I would be better off financially without a child and her health would be far better. (Having a kid was the catalyst to many medical problems.)
Do you have a support team that shares the load with you? We don't have anyone we can rely on. My in-law that does fly out sometimes would rather play with their phone than be a grandparent and we can't trust them to so much as drive a dog to the vet because we're sure they'd get distracted or lost or just crash.
Kids are a ton of of work. Life is a ton of work. Combine those two things and have no "village" to speak of and it's often too much. There's no pop psychology needed to point out that for many people, kids aren't their best life. Kids aren't always rewarding. Sometimes the right answer is the easy answer: if you don't want kids, having one will not be a net positive for your life.
As I said in a sibling comment, I don't think there is one correct choice for everyone. If someone doesn't want kids they probably shouldn't have them.
However, like I said above, the interesting part of the question is the why. I think the lack of a village and support network is a very plausible answer. My friends that are the happiest with children also have a robust Village and social life which is supportive of raising children. This includes social activities that don't force adults to choose between parenting and personal enjoyment. This can be as simple dinner parties a couple times a week where one parent will watch The Children Play while everyone else takes a load off.
I think another similar plausible explanation is a cultural expectation that parents replace their lives with that of their children opposed to integrating the children into their own lives.
If parents like camping, travel, gardening, or reading, they should what they love with their kids.
Fuck watching the wiggles or elmo 8 hours a day. That's insanity and needless suffering.
As someone who has no ties to Japan but reads way too much news articles… it really seems like a lot of cons for women in Japan compared to women in the US? Having a kid and then sending them to daycare while you maintain a career seems way less common / harder. So it’s either have an actual career and money or be a stay at home mom.
We're not doing so hot on the expectations for women either. People still assume Mom is going to quit and stay home more often than dad and her level of care is expected to be significantly higher. I'm a great dad when I go to a birthday party for one of the school friends. My wife is just mom, despite debilitating pain and chronic illnesses that people are aware of. She also plans all of the logistics and the gifts and everything else. I'm really good at showing up and playing though. Score!
I wouldn't choose to be a mom in this world. They're far too underappreciated.
(foreword, I'm far from well versed in Japanese society)
From what I understand, traditional Japanese family model is a stay at home mother with an almost stay at work father.
Society is organised around this model, e.g. no day care, mothers not expected to build a career, and probably being a father comes with pressure about being a reliable provider (getting overworked). I remember that a lot of father losing their work preferred abandoning their family than enduring the shame of losing their job during the late nineties asian crisis.
Regardless of immediate material complications of begin parent, the additional social burden certainly not help.
Lies and misdirection? To think we've evolved past that is a mistake. We pay lip service to it but we haven't moved on. We still shame working women because they don't have or don't spend enough time with their kid(s). Then we shame stay-at-home mom's for being lazy. We're fun!
While I definitely see shame toward working women with children, I don't think I've ever seen anyone shame a stay at home mom for being a stay at home mom.
Japanese women in particular can be locked out of career growth once they are married. The expectation is that after they get married they will quit their job and become a housewife. Add that to the issue that having children out of wedlock is frowned upon, and you get less people having children. Make it so women can have both children and a prosperous career and you'll fix the fertility issue.
The first question, I think, would be: if 40% will never have children, and if that remains true into the far future, how long before there are no Japanese left?
But the immediate followup question should definitely be, why would it stay at 40%, when it can go higher? Every woman who (for whatever reason) does not have children exerts a cultural influence on those around her, normalizing the behavior. Making it seem less out of place. Inadvertently teaching young girls within their social sphere that this is option, an acceptable one.
If this number does go higher, the problem accelerates... it's not necessarily some theoretical demise of their nation centuries from now.
That probably won't happen. The families that have children will die out, and the next generation will be almost exclusively have parents that chose to have children even when cultural norms were turning against it. That'll probably lead to a rebound in fertility, which funnily enough we're already seeing - the lowest it's been was 1.26 in 2005 and since then it's gone up a bit. But we'll need to give it another few decades first.
My hot take, as we approach the equilibrium population in the world (perhaps the sustainable carrying capacity), fertility rates will naturally decrease. Some countries have already exceeded their equilibrium populations; therefore, their fertility rates will decrease below replacement rates for some time until they reach equilibrium (which is not 0, which fearmongers may promote). As climate change progresses, it may be the equilibrium population is even lower than we expect right now.
> My hot take, as we approach the equilibrium population in the world (perhaps the sustainable carrying capacity), fertility rates will naturally decrease.
We already surpassed that point of equilibrium long ago. Humanity is now consuming 1.7 Earths of resources every year. Some countries like the US consume a lot more than that.
Oh, I agree. It's just strange to me that there seem to be more and more alarmists that speculate that populations will go to 0 or something. With greater and greater amounts of automation available to us, I personally don't see a falling population to be a huge problem.
I dont think that is a particularly helpful metric.
If you are spending 1.7x your income, how much money you have in the bank becomes extremely relevant. Are you broke tomorrow, or do you have enough savings for 1,000 years
I hear what you're saying and that is an important consideration as well, but it's very different than saying 1.7 Earths. If someone makes a fraction like that the denominator is relevant. The charitable assumption is that it is 1.7 of the replenishment rate for a given resource. If it's a non replenishable resource, the fraction doesn't make any sense. We're not using 170% of a finite resource per year every year.
If you have a finite, non-replenishable resource, then you need a budget for how long you want it to last to come up with a consumption Target.
Please explain how a population that sees its fertility rate voluntarily drop below replacement will ever have it raise back up to replacement level.
No little girl who grows up seeing few, if any women, have children will think to herself "I want 2.1 when I grow up!". But, all must do this, or fertility rates never recover. If not all girls do that, then some must instead say "I want 4.5 when I grow up" or "I want 8.9 when I am a woman"... which seems even less likely.
It's an inevitable, inescapable mathematical fact.
People are responding to incentives. Costs, including opportunity costs, increase substantially when we're beyond the equilibrium population. As population declines and constraints ease, the costs of having children will decrease, and fertility rates will increase.
All women will not need to have 2+ children for an equilibrium. Some women and families will want 0 or 1, and some will want more. But in any case, people obviously respond to incentives, and the people who think there is an "inescapable mathematical fact" that population will simply continue trending to 0 ignore this fact entirely.
this has never been done for any sustained period in any society ever, despite incentives of all kinds that were tried in the past. All human experience so far has been: this trend is irreversible. But, you came up with this random idea that a little economic reshuffling will quickly fix things when needed. How do you know that? You also came up with the idea that it's really no big deal, even though the prime minister of Japan and other authorities publicly say that they are losing their ability to function as a society and this trend is hurting them very much already. So much for "not a huge problem" and "it's just silly fearmongering".
He seems to think that the "constraints will ease" as the Japanese economy implodes even further.
It might even be true that with the right incentives, they could convince the childless to have children. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to get that just because there is a theoretical incentive that could work doesn't mean that same theoretical incentive is anything anyone could hope to afford.
> this has never been done for any sustained period in any society ever, despite incentives of all kinds that were tried in the past
Assuming that fertility decline is irreversible, this would mean that you should have specific examples of entire populations that have died not of disease or conquest, but reproductive ennui. I don’t think so.
you should give examples of this trend reversed, the original claim is "this is easy", "humans respond to incentives".
but guess what? there are no examples of this trend reversed. Briefly, for a decade, Iran maybe. Your turn to defend the original claim that "just give them some incentives and everything will be just fine".
2. The "ennui" as you refer to it, is clearly a modern phenomenon. It couldn't have happened before now.
3. We've already seen this verified experimentally with animal models, multiple times. Despite having unlimited food, water, and entertainment, the populations crash and never recover.
If you don't think so, it's just because you haven't bothered to think about it.
1 and 2 directly contradict the point I was responding to. If you want to claim that this is a novel phenomenon, fine (I agree at least in part). But I was directly addressing the claim that this is a historical one. I don’t think so because, as you agree, it hasn’t happened before.
I’m somewhat familiar with Calhoun’s studies if that’s what you’re referencing, but I don’t think they’re perfectly applicable to human societies where there’s no outside force maintaining everything for us. Reproduction slows, accompanied by economic stagnation and infrastructural failures, and all of a sudden we’re not in our little mouse utopia anymore. These little collapses aren’t necessarily bad. It’s artificially pushing onward in the name of GDP that I think leads to even bigger collapses down the road.
> Please explain how a population that sees its fertility rate voluntarily drop below replacement will ever have it raise back up to replacement level.
Fertility rates tend to fluctuate in relation to stressors like resource availability.
> No little girl who grows up seeing few, if any women, have children will think to herself "I want 2.1 when I grow up!".
Why not? Baby booms are very real. This is normal human behavior.
Edit: Just one example would be the short-lived COVID baby boom. Remarkable how responsive people are to changes when you think that this is mathematically impossible.
Unless everyone feels exactly the same way, natural selection will dominate and behavior will change.
In 50 years, the childless people will be dead, and the children of breeders will be alive with children of their own. Rinse and repeat every 50 years.
Unless every person on earth is in agreement to not have children, the problem solves itself.
None of this happens in isolation. The people who have no children don't hide in their basements... they're out there in public, teaching the children of others how awesome it is to be childless. Or, if I'm less hyperbolic, being the wrong sort of role model.
If they convert children more quickly than others can have them, then this still goes downhill. How do you even model that? Is it fertility rate - conversion rate = 2.1?
I suspect that conversion rate to be significant. I'd be shocked if it's not closing in on 1.0 (or already blown past it).
We can do a gutcheck mental exercise here. The Duggars have 20ish children. Will they reach 400 grandchildren, or even come close?
It is amazing/scary how wide the gulf in comprehension between the parents and non-parents of the world is becoming. Both groups can reasonably argue the other is being selfish as part of some core moral failing, and both seem to consider their choice of group membership to be the universal cure to the woes afflicting the other.
Then you have those who genuinely have no choice stuck in the middle of this nonsense.
Ultimately society is going to have to accept some higher proportion of people being childless than in the 19th century, and work out how to maintain an appropriate balance that enables everyone to have a shot at actually leading a fulfilling life without the moralising in either direction getting to critical mass.
I wonder if it would really play out that way. I was surprised just how many personality traits were apparently genetic when I learned about the "lost identical twin" cases. Only the children who received their genes from their "selfish" parents will make it to the next generation, so I wonder how sustainable a down-trending population will be in the long run.
We came across this interesting piece about physical differences between kids in 2007 and kids in 1985. In short, the average 5 year old in 2007 had the athletic abilities of a 3 year old in 1985. Granted this data is rather old, but anecdotally we did notice our 3 year old playing on equipment specified for (and mostly being used by) the much older children. https://poh.ngo/en/the-state-of-play-in-japan/
The best public and highly used playgrounds we found were in Kyoto (near the train museum), in Osaka called the mountain slides (near the Children's Plaza), and in Arashiyama at the top of the Monkey Park hill. Aside from that, paid entertainment was the way to go.
Happy to share more if anyone is interested in the experience, but I'd rather stop there for now.