If France is anything like my native Portugal, people aren’t having kids mainly because housing is so stupidly expensive - how exactly do you expect people to have the 2.something average number of kids needed to maintain population levels when they can’t leave their parents home until their mid 30s and even just going from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom to have a room for one child costs many years’ worth of a couple’s after-tax income?
Meawhile salaries in real terms have stagnated for a decade.
Even with the best of intentions, even in the middle class people are entering their 40s by the time they can afford to have a second child so most stick to 1 or even don’t have any children.
What’s required is not flashy bullshit letters like this one which very pointedly ignore the housing bubble and the politicians’ blame in pumping it up, but instead measures to make housing affordable, such as building lots of public housing to increase the Supply side of the Market and limits on multiple house ownership and non-resident ownership to stop (local and foreign) investor speculation in Housing and thus weaken the Demand-side price pressure.
Of course, what the Neolibs in power have done instead is increase immigration claiming that “we have a lack manpower” (after decades of making it unaffordable for people to have children and give them a good life, what else was to be expected?!) and then the Neolibs’ Fascist mates can use that to claim that it’s really all the fault of immigrants (rather than fatcats and the corrupt politicians in their pockets) that life is getting worse.
Can’t you all make illegal settlements called invasions like in south america?
So much skill issue
The world is on fire, genocide is being committed out in the open, living expenses are out of control, the good parts of technology are becoming enshittified, the bad parts of technology are becoming increasingly invasive and controlling, wealth inequality is increasing.
No thanks, I’m good.
/I’m not French, but I think this sentiment is widely applicable
NO FUCK OFF
Do you not want to be notified about free healthcare options available to you? Because if you ignore the ragebait headline and filter the article for its rage potential, the following quote explains it pretty nicely:
"The letter is being sent to 29-year-olds because women are able to have their eggs frozen at that age without a medical certificate. Women will also be reminded that social security in France covers the cost of freezing eggs for women between 29 and 37. "
So woman are being told how to keep the option for kids open for longer. That is quite the opposite of pressuring them into anything if you ask me.
People can’t have kids earlier because living costs are so high relative to salaries, so to afford merelly the 2-bedroom appartment for a 1-child (much less the 2-3 needed to maintain population levels) family even a couple of two university-educated full-time workers has to work years.
Even if people stay in schooling for longer now and start working older, even somebody with a degree finishes studying at the age of 20 or 21.
Further and for women specifically, the lack of availability of quality and cheap kindergartens often means that childbirth will totally torpedoe a woman’s career because often and due to local cultural expectations the woman is the one who ends up staying home for a couple of years to raise a child and that has been show to majorly delay career progression in a way that is seldom possible to later recover from.
Both of these things can be address with appropriate government policies to make housing and kindergartens cheap, but successive neoliberal governments actually do the opposite (insane house prices are great for realestate investors and you can’t have cheap public kindergarten provision competing with private businesses) and instead push forward solutions like this so that couples can have children later, something which should not have been necessary in the first place.
The problem is far more upstream and these “solutions” from the very people who are guilty for the root causes of the problem are just political theatre and hypocrisy.
At last! The country demographic is saved!
All these people were desperately waiting for the government to ask, now they can finally get to it!
Yeah just remove all the insane ppl in power around the world and we’ll hump like dogs
Give us a reason to want to bring kids into this world
Yeah, as soon as there’s dramatic climate action, representative just government, and universal healthcare + pre-K!
Governments spent decades pushing for delaying children and get higher education, promote persuing careers, moving to child unfriendly cities for high paying jobs so everybody can maximize their consumion of goods so the economy grow, and are now shocked when that all means less children.
I doubt it. Much of the same would happen with sane people in power.
The demographic transition:
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means longer life spans (which means that older people use resources which would be used by new generations in a pre-transition society)
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means lower infant mortality (which means that people don’t need to reproduce a lot, as their children have good chances of surviving childhood)
Whatever additional processes are in play, likely aren’t amenable to change either.
- people have an increased tendency to have children after achieving economic certainty
Result: some never achieve it, some achieve it when less fertile or infertile, some when their own parents already need care.
- people have an increased tendency for solitary lifestyle
Result: people live separately from their parents more often, and expect it as a criterion of normal life, as a result of which grandparents are less available to help with child care.
- people have better education about their fertility
Result: children aren’t had accidentally.
Changing some politicians seems unlikely to change that, unless a new social agreement forms. What that agreement might be, I don’t know. I speculate it could be “consider having children before building a career, to enable this, very strong welfare guarantees are offered to parents raising kids”.
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No shit. The rise of Christo-fascism has been a direct contributor to not wanting more kids.
First fucking words of that trash article :
" … France plans to send letter … "A lot of people are becoming more pessimistic and don’t see any logic or reason to having babies. And it’s not just in France, it’s all around the world. I’m a millennial and I’ve been pessimistic since the 80s (😎) when the world wasn’t as cooked as it is now. I can imagine how the newer generations are feeling these days. Future? Hopes? Dreams? They’re going fast down the drain.
In Matthew McConaughey’s voice:
I was doomscrolling before there was scrolling.
Hehehe
10 years ago I was pretty fringe for being childfree. Today more and more people are accepting it for themselves or are not sure its even worth the time and effort, even if they wanted a kid
It’s kind of sad for people who truly want kids but it’s not feasible for them to have any. What a world.
We spent 100 years engineering the world to decrease birth rates and punish people for having children “they cannot afford”, then immiserate the majority of people, eliminate any kind of opportunity to enjoy life, community, family, or recreation without spending ungodly amounts of money to enjoy simple human pleasures that have been part of being human for hundreds of thousands of years, work them relentlessly 24/7/365 (or as close as we permit them) for the sake of business efficiency, destroy the environment so survival itself becomes dependent on the business cycle, and we wonder why no one wants to raise a child in this environment?
Honestly, we have spent a century ruthlessly punishing people for even thinking of making a marginally irrational decision and then wonder why they won’t indulge in an objectively irrational activity for the emotional fulfillment.
The birth rate will recover when children can play games and run free among the ancient grass-covered ruins of abandoned suburbia.
I’d have upvoted anyway, great comment, but you had me at
immiserate
What a perfect word.
So the French government can do it but when I go out and tell people to get fucked, it’s a problem.
The decline in birth rates is perfectly solveable by reducing wealth inequality, overwork, and long term pessimism about the direction the world is headed. They just don’t want to do that. The hoarding class is defined only by two things: demanding that their own wealth doesn’t just grow, but grows faster than it used to, and making sure responsibility and consequences are someone else’s problem.
Are they offering the $400 monthly payments per child until they turn 28 that Israel offers their citizens?
Lol.
The ones who want to do it will do it regardless (look at the fertility rates of poor immigrants), those who don’t want to won’t be convinced by a letter from the government, IMO.
fertility rates of poor immigrants
For the 1st generation. The 2nd is only slightly higher, and the fertilty for the 3th generation is practically the same as the native population as they have adapt to the cultural and social norms in the new country.
Certainly. Because, like I’ve said before, ideology is what’s behind fertility rates in the West. 🤷
You dumbass, this is happening in every country on Earth.
She emphasised that the role of politicians is “not to dictate whether or not to have children”, but to educate women further on fertility and remind them of the option to freeze eggs.
Is it even that, though?
yup. that is about the right time to get em. so glad I went to to much school and changed careers because if I had a steady enough job at like 26 I might have made a big mistake.
Reasons not to have kids.
Ai taking jobs
Income not keeping up with cost of living
Healthcare costs(in some countries)
Reasons not to have kids:
Not wanting kids.
Ecological collapse leading to food scarcity and water wars
Women who think the guy should do everything and they can just be a passenger princess, which makes finding a good lady that much harder.
Uhhh I think you have some unresolved issues there though
Don’t feed the troll. Just look at the username andrewta(te)
I love how everyone always assumes what the ta stands for. And almost everyone gets it wrong.
Mind clearing the air on what it actually stands for?
