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.
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.