alt Hacker NewsSo support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
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Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
> like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
Right train of thought, but as others have pointed out, this is spitting on a fire.
in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough.
Right why would we change the behavior that got us here? Just provide some incentives and problem solved right?
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
More like guaranteed housing because not even having a college degree is a sufficient condition to enter the middle class in this day and age.
Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc.
The incentives just aren't there.