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Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure. Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to sup
by jtheory 16y ago
Look at fertility in France.
It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure.
Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising -- high-quality free daycare, long school hours (so both parents can get back to work and mothers don't have to sacrifice careers), hefty tax breaks per child, medical care (for birth & pre/post natal, but also pediatric care).
And (a bit more oddly) the medical care a mother gets after giving birth has a heavy focus on getting her back into shape for restarting her sex life -- it's standard to be prescribed a course of physical therapy to retrain the perineums of new mothers for exactly that reason.
All of these programs designed to help mothers keep working, etc. are not because at heart the French are feminists; they are not. Sexism is rampant. BUT they want mothers to have babies, so they figured out how to make that happen.
The system isn't perfect by a long shot, and it's not always ideal to have the state raise your kids as much as tends to happen here, but it's certainly quite successful: the birth rate is about 2 births per woman and slowly rising.
- cpr 16y agoThe fertility rate in France (as in other parts of Europe) is highly skewed (up) by the immigrant Muslim population.
- barry-cotter 16y agoThe birthrates of Muslim women in Europe have been falling significantly for some time. In the Netherlands, for example, the TFR among Dutch-born women rose between 1990 and 2005 from 1.6 to 1.7. In the same period for Moroccan-born women in Holland it fell from 4.9 to 2.9, and for Turkish-born women in Holland from 3.2 to 1.9. In Austria, the TFR of Muslim women fell from 3.1 to 2.3 from 1981 to 2001. In 1970 Turkish-born women in Germany had on average two children more than German-born women. By 1996 the difference had fallen to one child and has now dropped to 0.5. These sharp falls reflect important cultural shifts, which include the impact of universal female education, rising living standards, the effect of local cultural norms and availability of contraception. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walkers-World-French-births-soar/UPI-20871209568785/ http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Walker/2008/04/30/Walke...
- zeteo 16y agoFalling, but still much higher than the 'native'. Also, the increased fertility rates of the second-generation immigrants are absorbed by these statistics into e.g. "Dutch-born", which skews the comparison.
- zeteo 16y ago"Look at fertility in France. It's not because people here are highly religious, for sure." Not exactly true, see my comment above: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2354758
- anamax 16y ago> Instead, the government simply put lots of programs into place to support family raising Those programs don't actually make raising kids cheaper. They just time-shift the payments, much like a loan would do. Remember, govt programs are paid for by taxes. Those parents are being taxed. Oh, and if we're going to argue for using govt money to buy kids, shouldn't we put the process out for bid? I'm sure that we could get high-quality kids for less from other suppliers.