Familial Traditions as Cause of Lower Birth Rates
When a person hits 30, the topic of marriage and having children become more and more frequent as a conversation topic among friends. Some undoubtedly extol the joys of the family and how children give meaning to the daily grind that is becoming increasingly monotonous. Others complain about the unaffordably high costs of child-rearing, especially factoring the need for bigger residence, better food, and high-quality education that are pretty much a given if the child is to have any sufficient choice to grow up when both healthy mental and physical conditions.
Listening to the two sides often feels like a tug-of-war between traditional ideals and financial pragmatism. In other words, not being able to have kids because of financial difficulties is regrettable, but entirely understandable. And it is for that reason, governments across the world are acting to mitigate the high costs of child-rearing. Even when tradition, rather than finances, is cited as primary reason for foregoing children, the underlying reason is ultimately practical, including detrimental effects to career advancements as well as taking away time, money, and energy to further gaining skills and knowledge..
Yet, even those who are most sympathetic to people unwilling to step into parenthoods seem to hesitate on attacking the very traditional ideals that seem to motivate people having kids in the first place. The ideal situation, for them, is for people to be able to combine the best of singlehood (being able to partake in fruitful employment, learning, and entertainment for personal satisfaction, without bothersome process of raising children) with the noble cause of procreating humanity's next generation. They seem to assume that people, in the end, are still in favor of procreating if the costs of doing so is drastically minimized.
But what if such assumption is fundamentally not the case? What if people are turning away from familial traditions not because those traditions present practical costs in financial and lifestyle terms, but for a much more straightforward reason that they do not agree with the traditions in the first place? What if people just hate kids, not because how kids intrude on the personal lives of their parents, but because certain adults hate the very concept of kids and the very idea of having to be around them, even if doing so present zero cost to their own lifestyles and finances?
Perhaps decline of birthrates in the more developed world in the recent decades can be attributed not just to the rising costs and opportunity costs of having kids, as many governments and NGOs choose to believe. Instead, it is a much more dramatic shift in the very ideology of the general public toward the idea of having children. "The joy of family life," as so cherished in the old days, is no longer there, even if the alternative, supposed joy of being single, is also very much exaggerated. Even if individuals are not happy today, few are convinced how having a family would increase the level of day-to-day happiness.
Part of sporadic irritance toward children among some people becoming more of a social norm among many more members of society can at least partially be attributed to the old-fashioned assumption among policymakers (who are generally of a much older generation) that people will choose to have kids if the cost-benefit analysis is in favor of child-rearing. Their refusal to believe that some people see no benefit whatsoever in having kids is grounded in their continued faith in invisible "traditions" that strengthen people's biological drive for having children.
If anything, such antiquated belief in traditions is driving more and more people to not have kids. The continued strength of traditions among people of older generations mean that "following traditions" remains a valid argument for exerting social pressure on those people with the right financial conditions for having children. Those who are refusing to have kids, then, are not only running away from responsibility of shouldering financial and social costs of raising children, but also the responsibility of maintaining a tradition with which they do not want to associate.
The counterintuitive role that traditions can dampen enthusiasm for the younger crowds to have children may be particularly significant in Asian countries. With centuries-old social mores that stress the importance of familial integrity and unity above all, the region is having hard time adjusting to rise of a more individualistic generation. Clumsily resorting to discussions of centuries-old familial traditions by older generations against rising individualism will only serve to further alienate the youths and reduce their desires to have families. A new approach that abandon talks of the all-important-sounding "traditions" is needed,
Listening to the two sides often feels like a tug-of-war between traditional ideals and financial pragmatism. In other words, not being able to have kids because of financial difficulties is regrettable, but entirely understandable. And it is for that reason, governments across the world are acting to mitigate the high costs of child-rearing. Even when tradition, rather than finances, is cited as primary reason for foregoing children, the underlying reason is ultimately practical, including detrimental effects to career advancements as well as taking away time, money, and energy to further gaining skills and knowledge..
Yet, even those who are most sympathetic to people unwilling to step into parenthoods seem to hesitate on attacking the very traditional ideals that seem to motivate people having kids in the first place. The ideal situation, for them, is for people to be able to combine the best of singlehood (being able to partake in fruitful employment, learning, and entertainment for personal satisfaction, without bothersome process of raising children) with the noble cause of procreating humanity's next generation. They seem to assume that people, in the end, are still in favor of procreating if the costs of doing so is drastically minimized.
But what if such assumption is fundamentally not the case? What if people are turning away from familial traditions not because those traditions present practical costs in financial and lifestyle terms, but for a much more straightforward reason that they do not agree with the traditions in the first place? What if people just hate kids, not because how kids intrude on the personal lives of their parents, but because certain adults hate the very concept of kids and the very idea of having to be around them, even if doing so present zero cost to their own lifestyles and finances?
Perhaps decline of birthrates in the more developed world in the recent decades can be attributed not just to the rising costs and opportunity costs of having kids, as many governments and NGOs choose to believe. Instead, it is a much more dramatic shift in the very ideology of the general public toward the idea of having children. "The joy of family life," as so cherished in the old days, is no longer there, even if the alternative, supposed joy of being single, is also very much exaggerated. Even if individuals are not happy today, few are convinced how having a family would increase the level of day-to-day happiness.
Part of sporadic irritance toward children among some people becoming more of a social norm among many more members of society can at least partially be attributed to the old-fashioned assumption among policymakers (who are generally of a much older generation) that people will choose to have kids if the cost-benefit analysis is in favor of child-rearing. Their refusal to believe that some people see no benefit whatsoever in having kids is grounded in their continued faith in invisible "traditions" that strengthen people's biological drive for having children.
If anything, such antiquated belief in traditions is driving more and more people to not have kids. The continued strength of traditions among people of older generations mean that "following traditions" remains a valid argument for exerting social pressure on those people with the right financial conditions for having children. Those who are refusing to have kids, then, are not only running away from responsibility of shouldering financial and social costs of raising children, but also the responsibility of maintaining a tradition with which they do not want to associate.
The counterintuitive role that traditions can dampen enthusiasm for the younger crowds to have children may be particularly significant in Asian countries. With centuries-old social mores that stress the importance of familial integrity and unity above all, the region is having hard time adjusting to rise of a more individualistic generation. Clumsily resorting to discussions of centuries-old familial traditions by older generations against rising individualism will only serve to further alienate the youths and reduce their desires to have families. A new approach that abandon talks of the all-important-sounding "traditions" is needed,
Comments
Post a Comment