“I want to be very hands-on. I want to be able to give my child whatever they want,” said Lee, who got married last year.
These expectations, however, have steered Lee and her husband away from starting a family in Singapore.
“If the child is going to come and tell me, ‘Oh mommy, I want you to stay at home with me all the time’ — that’s not something we can give the child because both of us have full-time jobs and we are not willing to give up our jobs to be stay-at-home parents,” Lee said.
Declining birth rates have been a huge bugbear for Asian countries like Japan and South Korea.
On Wednesday, Japan’s Internal Affairs Ministry revealed that the country’s total population has declined for the 15th straight year in 2023.
Likewise for Korea, which has the world’s lowest fertility rate, at 0.72 births per woman for 2023.
The double whammy of an aging population and a shortfall in births have raised alarm bells among their governments, which seek to avert the economic and social consequences that come with a demographic crisis.
Years of pro-natalist policies, however, have barely lifted their birth rates. Cities like Tokyo and Seoul have started to roll out extreme measures to encourage people to start making babies — but demographic experts caution that such policies may address the symptoms, but not the roots, of the problem.
Asian governments really, really want their people to have kids
Earlier this month, Tokyo’s government said it invested $1.28 million in a dating app for its residents, per the local newspaper The Asahi Shimbun. The app is expected to be launched this summer.
“We hope that this app, with its association with the government, will provide a sense of security and encourage those who have been hesitant to use traditional apps to take the first step in their search for a partner,” a Japanese official told The Asahi Shimbun.
The dating app has even caught the attention of billionaire Elon Musk, who has often warned of the disastrous consequences that come with low fertility rates.
“I’m glad the government of Japan recognizes the importance of this matter. If radical action isn’t taken, Japan (and many other countries) will disappear!” Musk wrote in an X post in June.
Meanwhile, in Seoul, the South Korean government is offering up to $730 in incentives to people looking to reverse their vasectomies or tubal ligations.
This is on top of the country’s extensive policies to encourage childbearing, which include subsidies for women to freeze their eggs and an allowance system for parents with newborns.
“These, in a way more radical proposals, are probably a result of policymakers feeling this sense of desperation,” Paulin Straughan, a sociology professor at the Singapore Management University, told BI. “All the traditional ideas that we had don’t seem to work. So we have to try more novel ideas to push the needle.”
Poh Lin Tan, a senior research fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Policy Studies, says there still could be some value in rolling out micro-interventions like Tokyo’s and Korea’s.
“It may actually be rational to pursue policies at the fringe, due to the high difficulty of engineering the societal change that addresses root causes, and instead look for low-hanging fruit in the form of low-cost interventions that can make a difference,” Tan said.
Countries who find themselves turned off by the financially onerous policies implemented by Nordic countries like Sweden and Finland — including heavily subsidized childcare and housing allowances — may want to score a bigger bang for their buck through one-off handouts.
And it doesn’t have to be as radical as making a dating app. Countries like Singapore and Hong Kong have given families cash bonuses when they welcome a newborn.
In Singapore, parents can receive $11,000 each for their first and second child and $13,000 for each subsequent child.
But such measures do not seem to appeal to young women like Lee, who believe that having a child is a big commitment.
Vanessa Lee
Lee, who owns two dogs and a cat, said that governments may be overestimating the effectiveness of one-off interventions in bolstering birth rates.
“Sure, you can get more people to get married, and then the chances of people having kids maybe will increase a little bit. But I think unless you solve the main issue of making it easier for parents to care for their kids sustainably, it will still be hard,” Lee said.
She added that a shift in societal mindsets toward work and family needs to occur for her peers to consider having children.
“It’s not just about popping a kid out. It’s about becoming a parent and thinking long term — how will I take care of the kid?” she continued.
Some would-be parents are put off by the financial costs of starting a family, which aren’t solved by one-off baby bonuses.
“I wouldn’t choose to spend a part of my income on children because it’s expensive,” content creator Emily Huang, 29, told BI earlier this year.
“The biggest thing on my mind right now is how I am going to fund my retirement. I feel like with my current income level, I can’t retire comfortably anytime soon,” she continued.
Governments need to rethink their approach to the demographic crisis
Experts that BI spoke to said that while the measures may be well-meaning, they are unlikely to reverse their countries’ demographic trajectory.
Stuart Gietel-Basten, a social science and public policy professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that governments are tackling the “wrong problem” if they think that low birth rates are simply due to people not having sex.
“Of course, it’s the wrong problem. Most people in order to have children have sex, that is true. But it also doesn’t guarantee that having sex brings children and that not having sex is the only reason why people are not having children,” Gietel-Basten said.
“We’ve got plenty of policies which have been designed to increase birth rates, and there is very little, if hardly any, evidence at all to show that these policies have worked,” he added.
SMU’s Straughan said that countries would be better off trying to realize the potential of their aging and graying populations.
“At some point, we have to accept that there’s going to be a greater proportion of people who want to stay single. That’s okay,” Straughan said. “But concurrently, we then have to say, if we’re going to have more seniors now, then what do we need to do differently in order to maximize their potential?”
Having more seniors, Straughan said, need not be a bad thing for societies. They can still contribute to society as volunteers, even after retirement, she said.
But governments should not brush aside their dwindling fertility rates entirely.
Low birth rates, according to HKUST’s Gietel-Basten, are a “barometer of the challenges in society” and should thus be seen as “symptoms of problems in a society.”
“Just hectoring and bullying young people into having more children is not the answer, right? Because people don’t have children for the state, and people certainly don’t have children to save a pension system,” he said.
“We have to listen to young families and genuinely try to support them. And until that happens, we’re not going to get anywhere by coming up with funny ideas and imposing them in a top-down way,” he added.
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