6 ms·

Japan leads world in childless middle-aged women

24 points by rawgabbit 4y ago

steveBK123 4y ago
Japan seems to be a leading example of - what happens if women become highly educated (more than men on average), able to earn a good income, but still feel like second class members of society?
- snvzz 4y ago
  >In recent years, the share of Japanese women remaining childless due to problems getting married has jumped, becoming the top reason among women between the ages of 25 to 49. >It appears that one major hurdle to marriage is finding a suitable partner with adequate financial resources. To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards, and keeping them until they're past their prime and marriage becomes hard.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - moistly 4y ago
    To me, it looks like a problem of it costing too much to live, such that a couple can’t afford to get hitched and have a kid.
  - bsder 4y ago
    > To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards A woman who marries in Japan generally winds up taking care of both sets of (generally long lived) parents as well as the household and the children. That's a ferocious amount of work with very little social support. Countries keep complaining about women not having children but do absolutely nothing to make having children not suck.
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      There's studies of life satisfaction by age and how it is U shaped. High when you are young, high when you are old, and low in the middle 30s~50ish. However for women, the later years life satisfaction never catches up to men. Caring for both kids, parents, and eventually your own husband are huge factors here. As people live longer, and children manage to remain under the partial care of their parents longer, the miserable middle age gets longer and more miserable. I was remarking to my wife how, due to the wide age range of my siblings, my parents were dealing with children in the home & mothers in declining health for a total of 32 years! For 10 of those years they were dealing with BOTH kids at home & 1-2 mothers in declining health. With children & mothers spread across up to 5 states. Suddenly at age 60 they found themselves empty nested & without parents to care for either. They are clearly much happier than they'd been in a long long time. Right now they are in good health, but statistically it's the men whose health fails first, which would put my mom back in the caregiver stage for 1..2..10 more years, who knows.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    I wonder if there are some stats about cultures/countries who have pushed women into the workforce and child numbers. I have the feeling these will be closely linked. Women generally don't date down and are much more likely to have a better education then men in western countries. Combine those 3 facts and I'd think you get a spiral of sinking child numbers.
    - somedude895 4y ago
      Female workforce participation is very high in developing countries with high birth rates [0], though mostly unskilled labor. Instead, birth rates correlate with GDP per Capita mostly. In poorer countries women have children because they can't afford not to. In rich countries women have no children because they can't "afford to." Be that opportunity cost, e.g. working part time to take care of / deprioritizing your career for your child, or actual cost as in paying for childcare. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_...
      - steveBK123 4y ago
        Precisely this. I don't think any rich countries have figured out a good solution to the modern problem that boils down to "having kids used to be a EV positive, and is now EV negative" due to a confluence of factors of - needing 2 income households, paying off your own student debt, high housing costs, high childcare costs, and then high college costs for those kids. People used to have a lot of kids to help in the home/farm/etc and to offset high childhood mortality rates to ensure they had some surviving descendants. Even after people moved off the farms, say WW1~WW2 era, kids were at least seen as sort of EV neutral, grandma watched them during the day and then they were out of the house and off the balance sheet by 18. Now even people who truly want children are calculating how many they can afford and if that number is 1 or 2. I think a lot of people thinking "I'll just have 1 so at least there will be someone to look after me" will be disappointed with the % that end up too estranged/distant to truly be helpful in that manner later. This problem is even more troubling because I think we almost put too much expectation on middle/upper class parents to do all these things to support their children well into their mid-20s, to the point that birth rates in US are inversely correlated with income & social class. That is - the people least able to care for their own kids, in need of the most state aid, are the ones having more of the kids. Meanwhile the middle/upper class construct more and more levels of cost & time requirements on themselves for child rearing.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Societal expectations can also play a part, I don't know a lot about Japan, but I heard they have crazy expectations for a marriage. Fancy wedding, fancy car, their own house(not rented), etc.
  - bamboozled 4y ago
    Why do you think it's about unrealistic standards? I'm proposing it's the opposite. In Japan, it's a common belief held by men that if a woman is over 30, she's done as a potential mate and wife.
    - kerpotgh 4y ago
      That’s in most places, it’s biological as there’s a very short window to have kids past that point and even then the kids are exposed to increased risks for a host of health issues.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  So treat them like first class members of society then.
  - nhchris 4y ago
    Fertility rate in: Yemen 3.5, Iraq 3.5, Afghanistan 3.9 Fertility rate in: Sweden 1.8, Norway 1.7, Denmark 1.8, United Kingdom 1.7
    - jacooper 4y ago
      So? In these societies, its important to have lots of kids to be able to live(more workers = more income) Also a family is way more valued in the east than the west, where it seems to be popular to leave your family for any inconvenience(Oh your father insulated you once when he was angry? Go no contact immediately, how dare he!). An example of this is how many Europeans and most of north americans have bad relationships with their parents, compared to someone like an Egyptian or an Iraqi, even though Westerns had arguably better upbringing.
      - luckylion 4y ago
        I believe the point of the GP was that treating women "like first class members of society then" does the opposite: it lowers the number of children. You should still do it, because obviously, but if you expect more children to be the outcome, you'll be in for a surprise.
        nhchris 4y ago
        > treating women "like first class members of society then" does the opposite I wouldn't go that far. Just that you can't blame low fertility on poor treatment of women, and that "I will protest society by having fewer children" is a convenient fantasy, not a stance held by a significant number of women. I would wager the true cause of low fertility is something merely correlated to women's rights, because e.g. the UAE have a fertility rate of 1.3, while in Israel it's at 3.0. Source for all the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
- Eleison23 4y ago
  [dead]
- kerpotgh 4y ago
  [dead]
- limitedsupply 4y ago
  Is that a conclusion based on some research? Do you think they refuse to have children in protest?
  - hourago 4y ago
    > Do you think they refuse to have children in protest? If a woman has children she is expected to stay home and take care of them. It's the death of her career. So, to delay when to have children seems just a practical decision to being able to keep a job that she may find rewarding. If part-time work had more prestige and men also took part of the responsibility and joy of rising children that motivation will disappear. Housing in Japanese cities is still crazy high so there will still be problems to solve as couples delaying when they have children has many motivations.
    - limitedsupply 4y ago
      Interesting! Didn’t realize that in Japan women are still treated so poorly. Wonder how long it will take for the cultural norms to change.
- rawgabbit 4y ago
  I believe it is more of the Japanese economy has been stagnant for 30 years while social norms have not adapted. Many Japanese are still victims of karoshi death by overwork. They are expected to spend 9am to midnight at the office Monday through Saturday. Meanwhile their jobs are no longer guaranteed for life and they still cannot make ends meet.
narrator 4y ago
[flagged]
- moistly 4y ago
  You convinced her, she did not convince herself?
  - narrator 4y ago
    Yeah. I worked on her quite a bit. She actually did not know she couldn't have kids after her early 40s with her own eggs. She didn't believe me and had to actually check with her obgyn. My main argument to her was "What are you going to be doing with your life when you're 70? The same stuff you're doing now?"
    - snvzz 4y ago
      >She actually did not know she couldn't have kids after her early 40s with her own eggs. This is unsettling. How does a woman not know this? Where in the world is this?
      - nhchris 4y ago
        > How does a woman not know this? How often is this issue even hinted at in popular culture?
        defrost 4y ago
        Pretty damn often in, say, UK, Canadian, Australian popular culture. It's not something that gets banged on about on a daily basis, but it gets a few mentions on Kath and Kim and comes up across the board (in pop culture drama shows) about as often as, say, young boys masterbating into their socks, etc. In high school health and reproduction type classes it rates a few mentions. Where do you live that most people are unaware of universal reproductive truths?
      - julianlam 4y ago
Sunspark 4y ago
The solution to acquiring children is pretty simple. Pay the mothers an income. Raising children is a full-time job. Children are expensive. If they receive additional $ for each child they have, there is no reason why there wouldn't be more homemakers as a career. And when I say pay them, I don't mean a small token amount. I mean literally a starter salaryman income for 1 child, and each additional child is a promotion with the attendant income boost. It's not even a problem. That money will be used to buy goods and services in the economy. Unemployment will go down because more men will be needed to meet this increased demand.
- yucky 4y ago
  This is exactly the approach that has led to unwanted kids being born to poor single moms who just pop the kids out to increase their government benefits. The end result is not pretty. Single motherhood shouldn't be a goal of government, considering how destructive it is to society.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    There is a difference between benefits and a salary. If it helps, like all professions, you can certainly require that people take certification courses to maintain their designation. Single motherhood is not destructive to society. What is destructive to society is single mothers who live in POVERTY. I have a friend who is a single mother, she lives in poverty in a dump and can't break free because she can't get a job that will pay enough for daycare/afterschool. Where we live, the govt set the rules that if you get a part time job they will claw back the income you earn, which means you work and still get to stay in poverty.
    - yucky 4y ago
      > Single motherhood is not destructive to society. Strong disagree, and the data backs it up. The single largest predictor of kids having depressions, teen suicide, criminal activity and drug use is being raised by a single mother. You can break the data down by income level and see the dysfunction continues.

24 points by rawgabbit 4y ago

Japan seems to be a leading example of - what happens if women become highly educated (more than men on average), able to earn a good income, but still feel like second class members of society?

snvzz 4y ago
>In recent years, the share of Japanese women remaining childless due to problems getting married has jumped, becoming the top reason among women between the ages of 25 to 49. >It appears that one major hurdle to marriage is finding a suitable partner with adequate financial resources. To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards, and keeping them until they're past their prime and marriage becomes hard.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moistly 4y ago
  To me, it looks like a problem of it costing too much to live, such that a couple can’t afford to get hitched and have a kid.
- bsder 4y ago
  > To me, it looks like a problem of women having unrealistic standards A woman who marries in Japan generally winds up taking care of both sets of (generally long lived) parents as well as the household and the children. That's a ferocious amount of work with very little social support. Countries keep complaining about women not having children but do absolutely nothing to make having children not suck.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    There's studies of life satisfaction by age and how it is U shaped. High when you are young, high when you are old, and low in the middle 30s~50ish. However for women, the later years life satisfaction never catches up to men. Caring for both kids, parents, and eventually your own husband are huge factors here. As people live longer, and children manage to remain under the partial care of their parents longer, the miserable middle age gets longer and more miserable. I was remarking to my wife how, due to the wide age range of my siblings, my parents were dealing with children in the home & mothers in declining health for a total of 32 years! For 10 of those years they were dealing with BOTH kids at home & 1-2 mothers in declining health. With children & mothers spread across up to 5 states. Suddenly at age 60 they found themselves empty nested & without parents to care for either. They are clearly much happier than they'd been in a long long time. Right now they are in good health, but statistically it's the men whose health fails first, which would put my mom back in the caregiver stage for 1..2..10 more years, who knows.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  I wonder if there are some stats about cultures/countries who have pushed women into the workforce and child numbers. I have the feeling these will be closely linked. Women generally don't date down and are much more likely to have a better education then men in western countries. Combine those 3 facts and I'd think you get a spiral of sinking child numbers.
  - somedude895 4y ago
    Female workforce participation is very high in developing countries with high birth rates [0], though mostly unskilled labor. Instead, birth rates correlate with GDP per Capita mostly. In poorer countries women have children because they can't afford not to. In rich countries women have no children because they can't "afford to." Be that opportunity cost, e.g. working part time to take care of / deprioritizing your career for your child, or actual cost as in paying for childcare. [0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.FE.ZS?most_...
    - steveBK123 4y ago
      Precisely this. I don't think any rich countries have figured out a good solution to the modern problem that boils down to "having kids used to be a EV positive, and is now EV negative" due to a confluence of factors of - needing 2 income households, paying off your own student debt, high housing costs, high childcare costs, and then high college costs for those kids. People used to have a lot of kids to help in the home/farm/etc and to offset high childhood mortality rates to ensure they had some surviving descendants. Even after people moved off the farms, say WW1~WW2 era, kids were at least seen as sort of EV neutral, grandma watched them during the day and then they were out of the house and off the balance sheet by 18. Now even people who truly want children are calculating how many they can afford and if that number is 1 or 2. I think a lot of people thinking "I'll just have 1 so at least there will be someone to look after me" will be disappointed with the % that end up too estranged/distant to truly be helpful in that manner later. This problem is even more troubling because I think we almost put too much expectation on middle/upper class parents to do all these things to support their children well into their mid-20s, to the point that birth rates in US are inversely correlated with income & social class. That is - the people least able to care for their own kids, in need of the most state aid, are the ones having more of the kids. Meanwhile the middle/upper class construct more and more levels of cost & time requirements on themselves for child rearing.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Societal expectations can also play a part, I don't know a lot about Japan, but I heard they have crazy expectations for a marriage. Fancy wedding, fancy car, their own house(not rented), etc.
- bamboozled 4y ago
  Why do you think it's about unrealistic standards? I'm proposing it's the opposite. In Japan, it's a common belief held by men that if a woman is over 30, she's done as a potential mate and wife.
  - kerpotgh 4y ago
    That’s in most places, it’s biological as there’s a very short window to have kids past that point and even then the kids are exposed to increased risks for a host of health issues.
Sunspark 4y ago
So treat them like first class members of society then.
- nhchris 4y ago
  Fertility rate in: Yemen 3.5, Iraq 3.5, Afghanistan 3.9 Fertility rate in: Sweden 1.8, Norway 1.7, Denmark 1.8, United Kingdom 1.7
  - jacooper 4y ago
    So? In these societies, its important to have lots of kids to be able to live(more workers = more income) Also a family is way more valued in the east than the west, where it seems to be popular to leave your family for any inconvenience(Oh your father insulated you once when he was angry? Go no contact immediately, how dare he!). An example of this is how many Europeans and most of north americans have bad relationships with their parents, compared to someone like an Egyptian or an Iraqi, even though Westerns had arguably better upbringing.
    - luckylion 4y ago
      I believe the point of the GP was that treating women "like first class members of society then" does the opposite: it lowers the number of children. You should still do it, because obviously, but if you expect more children to be the outcome, you'll be in for a surprise.
      - nhchris 4y ago
        > treating women "like first class members of society then" does the opposite I wouldn't go that far. Just that you can't blame low fertility on poor treatment of women, and that "I will protest society by having fewer children" is a convenient fantasy, not a stance held by a significant number of women. I would wager the true cause of low fertility is something merely correlated to women's rights, because e.g. the UAE have a fertility rate of 1.3, while in Israel it's at 3.0. Source for all the numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Eleison23 4y ago
[dead]
kerpotgh 4y ago
[dead]
limitedsupply 4y ago
Is that a conclusion based on some research? Do you think they refuse to have children in protest?
- hourago 4y ago
  > Do you think they refuse to have children in protest? If a woman has children she is expected to stay home and take care of them. It's the death of her career. So, to delay when to have children seems just a practical decision to being able to keep a job that she may find rewarding. If part-time work had more prestige and men also took part of the responsibility and joy of rising children that motivation will disappear. Housing in Japanese cities is still crazy high so there will still be problems to solve as couples delaying when they have children has many motivations.
  - limitedsupply 4y ago
    Interesting! Didn’t realize that in Japan women are still treated so poorly. Wonder how long it will take for the cultural norms to change.
rawgabbit 4y ago
I believe it is more of the Japanese economy has been stagnant for 30 years while social norms have not adapted. Many Japanese are still victims of karoshi death by overwork. They are expected to spend 9am to midnight at the office Monday through Saturday. Meanwhile their jobs are no longer guaranteed for life and they still cannot make ends meet.

narrator 4y ago

[flagged]

moistly 4y ago
You convinced her, she did not convince herself?
- narrator 4y ago
  Yeah. I worked on her quite a bit. She actually did not know she couldn't have kids after her early 40s with her own eggs. She didn't believe me and had to actually check with her obgyn. My main argument to her was "What are you going to be doing with your life when you're 70? The same stuff you're doing now?"
  - snvzz 4y ago
    >She actually did not know she couldn't have kids after her early 40s with her own eggs. This is unsettling. How does a woman not know this? Where in the world is this?
    - nhchris 4y ago
      > How does a woman not know this? How often is this issue even hinted at in popular culture?
      - defrost 4y ago
        Pretty damn often in, say, UK, Canadian, Australian popular culture. It's not something that gets banged on about on a daily basis, but it gets a few mentions on Kath and Kim and comes up across the board (in pop culture drama shows) about as often as, say, young boys masterbating into their socks, etc. In high school health and reproduction type classes it rates a few mentions. Where do you live that most people are unaware of universal reproductive truths?
    - julianlam 4y ago

Sunspark 4y ago

The solution to acquiring children is pretty simple. Pay the mothers an income. Raising children is a full-time job. Children are expensive. If they receive additional $ for each child they have, there is no reason why there wouldn't be more homemakers as a career. And when I say pay them, I don't mean a small token amount. I mean literally a starter salaryman income for 1 child, and each additional child is a promotion with the attendant income boost. It's not even a problem. That money will be used to buy goods and services in the economy. Unemployment will go down because more men will be needed to meet this increased demand.

yucky 4y ago
This is exactly the approach that has led to unwanted kids being born to poor single moms who just pop the kids out to increase their government benefits. The end result is not pretty. Single motherhood shouldn't be a goal of government, considering how destructive it is to society.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  There is a difference between benefits and a salary. If it helps, like all professions, you can certainly require that people take certification courses to maintain their designation. Single motherhood is not destructive to society. What is destructive to society is single mothers who live in POVERTY. I have a friend who is a single mother, she lives in poverty in a dump and can't break free because she can't get a job that will pay enough for daycare/afterschool. Where we live, the govt set the rules that if you get a part time job they will claw back the income you earn, which means you work and still get to stay in poverty.
  - yucky 4y ago
    > Single motherhood is not destructive to society. Strong disagree, and the data backs it up. The single largest predictor of kids having depressions, teen suicide, criminal activity and drug use is being raised by a single mother. You can break the data down by income level and see the dysfunction continues.