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They achieved this by offering day care and encouraging female employees not to quit upon getting married or having children, a common occurrence in Japan.
However, they attribute most of the reason to "early morning overtime" in which employees are encouraged to come in as early as 5am or 6am to get extra work done, versus staying late. Free breakfast is provided, and people are requested to never work past 8pm.
This interesting approach, in a country that traditionally has pressured its workers to stay until 10pm or 11pm, has helped married employees to have predictable schedules, thus making child care more manageable.
Though Japanese appear very traditional and set in their ways, they are a culture that is constantly seeking better ways of doing things. When a convincingly superior way is found, it tends to get adopted almost universally.
For example, someone long ago found that rice "breathes" better when it is stirred into little hills right after cooking. Now everyone in Japan stirs up their rice. There are a million other examples. This is both Japan's greatest strength and its weakness; they have a deep humility and willingness to learn from others, but they are also a monolithic culture that takes a while to change.
Anyway, raising their national TFR to 1.8 or 1.9 would put them on par with, or ahead of, the United States and most other western countries. They would also jump ahead of China (1.45) and South Korea (1.11). It will be interesting to see if they can manage this change over the next 10-15 years. Certainly, it won't happen overnight. But if they can pull it off, it will be a model for other advanced industrial nations to emulate.
Education constantly improved the abilities of the population to cope with and succeed in our world and is one key to an even better future -- if we maintain a focus on education.
I would respectfully dispute this. Ignorance and superstition are fabulous motivators to keep-on-keeping-on. We simply do our duty, not recognizing that alternatives exist, let alone that alternatives are philosophically defensible. Ignorant peasants had lots of kids, not because of rational economic analysis, or because they desired the joys of parenthood, or even because they lacked access to birth control... but rather, because their holy-book and their preacher told them, and their village headman and their mother-in-law told them, that such is their duty.
Ignorance also means that we listen to our Master, our boss, our feudal lord, without question. Who are we, to question? Our role is to obey! Thus we gamely go to war, we work in the mines, we plow the soil, we spin the hamster-wheel.
It's harder to keep the educated people unreflexively patriotic, or community-focused, or willing to amiably sustain blow after blow. Greater knowledge leads, if not to greater individualism, at least to a big-picture questioning of whether society has potentially gone wrong, and hence, whether it merits much dedication to the official-line for how to behave and to what to dedicate oneself.
However, they attribute most of the reason to "early morning overtime" in which employees are encouraged to come in as early as 5am or 6am to get extra work done, versus staying late. Free breakfast is provided, and people are requested to never work past 8pm.
Ah, the age-old corporate tactic/happenstance of filling up people's schedules with so much bureaucratic ceremony they feel pressured to come in early or stay late or both to get their actual assigned work done.
It's an encouraging story but I suspect it won't translate nationally. I would suspect there might be a selection bias if that corporation is known as family friendly, but the rigidity of the Japanese labor market makes this more like a random sample of the working population.
All the evidence I've seen suggests that women fall into two camps in this modern era. One camp desires children and wants to have two to three. The other camp desires none. You can only move the needle with the first camp.
Ah, the age-old corporate tactic/happenstance of filling up people's schedules with so much bureaucratic ceremony they feel pressured to come in early or stay late or both to get their actual assigned work done.
It's an encouraging story but I suspect it won't translate nationally. I would suspect there might be a selection bias if that corporation is known as family friendly, but the rigidity of the Japanese labor market makes this more like a random sample of the working population.
All the evidence I've seen suggests that women fall into two camps in this modern era. One camp desires children and wants to have two to three. The other camp desires none. You can only move the needle with the first camp.
Certainly there could be a selection bias, but the “two camps†analysis doesn’t necessarily hold up.
There are countless examples of women who wanted children but felt they couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t find the right partner, or just waited too long and their biological clock stopped.
If you are surrounded by colleagues who are successfully raising a family, you are likely to feel a bit of peer pressure, especially in a close knit society like Japan. The more people are having kids, the more pressure there is not to feel left out. A snowball effect.
If daycare in Japan were free, they would have a baby boom. Why not? After the expense of pregnancy and diapers, stroller, car seat, toys and clothes, a second baby is almost a no brainer. You have the infrastructure already, your lifestyle is set up for kids, your home has been kid-proofed (child locks on cabinets etc.).
The problem is daycare to enable both parents to work. Solve that, and your country’s TFR will shoot up.
Certainly there could be a selection bias, but the “two camps†analysis doesn’t necessarily hold up.
There are countless examples of women who wanted children but felt they couldn’t afford it, or couldn’t find the right partner, or just waited too long and their biological clock stopped.
If you are surrounded by colleagues who are successfully raising a family, you are likely to feel a bit of peer pressure, especially in a close knit society like Japan. The more people are having kids, the more pressure there is not to feel left out. A snowball effect.
If daycare in Japan were free, they would have a baby boom. Why not? After the expense of pregnancy and diapers, stroller, car seat, toys and clothes, a second baby is almost a no brainer. You have the infrastructure already, your lifestyle is set up for kids, your home has been kid-proofed (child locks on cabinets etc.).
The problem is daycare to enable both parents to work. Solve that, and your country’s TFR will shoot up.
I would agree. Daycare is incredibly expensive. My daughter has 2 in daycare in a high COL area. They pay 74K a year in daycare costs. For comparison, a year at Harvard costs 78K. The daycare tax credit is only 6K. No way are they considering a third kid based on daycare cost alone.
The visible suffering of the elderly will put fear into young people about their own futures, and they will revert to the age-old retirement plan of having children.
I don’t foresee this happening. Women are driving this bus, and there’s no going back to the bleak era of unpaid childrearing.
Just touching on this point, which comes up in several threads around CD from time to time discussing the age-old question of "should I have children?":
As a non-female, but married to one and with a female daughter... I don't notice that women consider child rearing to be a bleak and dreary task. At worst, friends tell me that it gets boring. But at best, it is a joyful and fulfilling experience that childless people tend not to appreciate.
I watched a few episodes of Flack, a British series starring Anna Paquin, about a cynical PR consultant who helps her detestable clients get out of nasty situations, usually of their own making.
The consultant's stay-at-home sister has a baby and makes no secret of her dislike for mothering. Breast feeding seems to be a painful experience. There's a kind of contempt for the whole process of motherhood running through this series and I had to give up after 3-4 episodes. Not a single person was likable and sympathetic, and I found myself wishing they'd all die a fiery death in the finale (if they did, I'd watch it for sure).
This is, in my opinion, a pretty typical representation these days, of the travails of parenting in the modern era. Yet, for those of us who have actually experienced it, there is a special joy in parenting that is hard to describe, and hard to really understand unless you've done it.
As we spiral into the ground, fertility-wise, and as fewer and fewer people choose parenthood in developed societies, the traditionally shared and universal experience of parenthood becomes ever less shared and universal, people with children are viewed with contempt by childless others, and it becomes a vicious cycle. Young people are not told they should have children, they are inundated with images of the joys of singlehood, and so they do not do it. I know many.
Part and parcel to raising a nation's TFR will have to be a concerted effort to paint childhood and parenthood in a more positive light, and combat Hollywood's frequently anti-family messaging. I am trying not to get political here, but I think most people are aware of these trends. Having children should not be viewed as a defeat, a surrender to biological imperative; it should be seen as a triumph.
Not sure how much fulfillment women are getting out of their careers
Ah the continued efforts to convince women that we really don't want to work, we would be so much happier staying home and devoting our lives to raising kids. If it was such an awesome gig, men would be doing it in droves, or at least make up a significant portion of stay-at-home parents. But they do not. 'Nuff said.
Work is not everything. But I am generally satisfied with my job, and it is much preferable to full-time motherhood. Either way you deal with annoying people.
Ah the continued efforts to convince women that we really don't want to work, we would be so much happier staying home and devoting our lives to raising kids. If it was such an awesome gig, men would be doing it in droves, or at least make up a significant portion of stay-at-home parents. But they do not. 'Nuff said.
Work is not everything. But I am generally satisfied with my job, and it is much preferable to full-time motherhood. Either way you deal with annoying people.
Well, this is a "Great Debate" on the topic of the shrinking global population, so one person's sour view of children does not really mean much, except as a data point.
That said, it spurred me to do a little reading on this topic. Do women in developed countries prefer working over motherhood?
A Pew Research study from 2018 suggests that U.S. women are starting motherhood sooner than in most other developed countries. This may have changed in the last 5 years, largely because of Covid-19.
But all the developed countries are still making children. Families are simply smaller than they once were, largely for financial reasons but also because of "changing norms" as CNN put it. The NY Times, BBC, CNN, and a few other sources generally seem to agree that this variety of factors account for falling rates.
The countries that are exceptional -- Israel and Hungary -- are interesting in that they deviate in different directions. Israel doesn't seem to try too hard to raise birth rates; its population innately yearns for large families, particularly the religious, but also the secular population.
Ultimately, I believe we will see a sort of bicameral system emerge, in which a fairly large population of anti-family people will live out their lives, grow old and die off, while a slightly smaller but growing population of pro-family people will replenish the population until we are at a lower overall population but one that is stable and no longer shrinking.
I know Listener is going to come in here and explain mathematically why the population will continue to shrink, so I'll leave it right there. Human civilization will definitely not disappear (though, A.I. and its offshoots may make life interesting for a while).
Well, this is a "Great Debate" on the topic of the shrinking global population, so one person's sour view of children does not really mean much, except as a data point.
I see I struck a nerve here. Your personal experiences are all relevant and revealing of some universal truth but mine don't count, because they don't align with the viewpoint you are promoting. And as special as I'd like to think I am (<= joke for those of you who can't tell), I'm clearly not the only one with the view I articulated or we wouldn't be having this discussion.
If you've never done it before, take the kids/grand-kids for a week - by yourself, no assistance. Then get back to me about the joys of raising children.
I'm actually not sure there's much more to say on this topic that hasn't already been said in this thread. Numerous posters have repeatedly outlined the practical reasons why people are not having to choose to have children at the same rates they used to. But it's not what the "OMG the population is going to shrink WHY WHAT DO WE DO" crowd, or the "we just have to move it from 1.7 to 2.1" crowd wants to hear, so it's falling on deaf ears.
There is no joy in raising children for most of us. That's the whole point and is why population will decline, and probably decline forever. Once given the choice people (both men and women) realize they really don't want to raise children. Lots of exceptions, of course, but that's the trend.
Governments want to increase TFR, not people. (Let's assume governments are not people for the moment) And they have tried all sorts of schemes and prizes to make TFR rise. None have really worked. Some efforts may have moved the needle a little, but only enough to change the date of extinction, not the event itself.
So stop waving your arms and barking about someone who is trying to get you to change your mind. Your mind - and the mind of millions of others - cannot be changed. We, The People Who Read Data, already know that and that part of the discussion is over.
We have now moved to the part where we discuss what a world with a falling population may be like. Some say it will be heavenly, some say it will be a permanent labor shortage, and others say it will be one long recession as humanity and the economies of countries dwindle.
And you say.....?
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