The article emphasizes socioeconomic conditions as a root cause for the declining birth rate. Whilst those factors do not help, it's not why the birth rate is d

The article emphasizes socioeconomic conditions as a root cause for the declining birth rate. Whilst those factors do not help, it's not why the birth rate is declining. It's a universal trend. The exact same issue is happening in countries that are far more family-friendly. The world used to REQUIRE you to have children. As your personal pension plan. By cultural or religious force. Or because of the lack of education or contraceptives. Now in most parts of the world, you're not required. It becomes a question of WANT instead of MUST. And when you ask people how many children they want, the answer is typically 0, 1 or 2. Most people still want children, and quite a few prefer 2. But that averages out to 1.5-1.8 in the aggregate. Which is far below replacement level. People still want children, just not many per household. Why the cut-off at 2? Because 3, 4, 5 does not fundamentally improve upon the joy of having children whilst it adds a lot of challenges. Bigger home, bigger car, many more trips to take them everywhere, cooking is more complex, it's a mess. Anyway, the point being is that the article is largely wrong. People that do not want any children because of their focus on career will still not want children when policies are more family-friendly. There's plenty of evidence of this not working. It doesn't move the needle. You should still go for better policies, just don't expect it to fix this problem.