I agree. A large contingent of women want to be mothers without the stress and distraction of workplaces, but it is increasingly uneconomical to do so. So inste

I agree. A large contingent of women want to be mothers without the stress and distraction of workplaces, but it is increasingly uneconomical to do so. So instead we resort to daycare, but with how expensive that is there is a natural cap on having more than 1-2 kids during your most fertile years. No surprise the fertility rate is less than 2. Regarding benefits - I don't know about South Korea, but where I grew up in Hawaii some of my peers or their parents purposefully had kids out of wedlock to collect the additional welfare payments that single parents were eligible for, even though they otherwise were still partnered and even living together. However, with less practical need to maintain a family over the long run, parenting quality and outcomes suffered and atomization increased. A "Great Society" era benefit intended to help those caught in tragic edge cases ended up being a perverse incentive for those in the next generation who may have avoided that situation otherwise. While doing payments for married mothers instead may have been a net-outcome better design in retrospect, there is an opposite possibility of perverse incentives for toxic families to stay intact. I don't know if marriage-agnostic UBI for parents is the best answer, though it would at least balance the currently misplaced incentives. In an ideal world it would be better to first resolve current inflated costs by making it easier and cheaper on the supply side to provide housing, healthcare, and education.