UN Babies wanted: Nordic countries crying for kids

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/babies-wanted-nordic-countries-crying-kids-033117429.html

Oslo (AFP) - "Norway needs more children! I don't think I need to tell anyone how this is done," Norway's prime minister said cheekily, but she was raising a real concern.

Too few babies are being born in the Nordic region.

The Nordic countries were long a bastion of strong fertility rates on an Old Continent that is rapidly getting older.

But they are now experiencing a decline that threatens their cherished welfare model, which is funded by taxpayers.

"In the coming decades, we will encounter problems with this model," Prime Minister Erna Solberg warned Norwegians in her New Year's speech.

"There will be fewer young people to bear the increasingly heavy burden of the welfare state."

In Norway, Finland and Iceland, birth rates dropped to historic lows in 2017, with 1.49 to 1.71 children born per woman. Just a few years earlier, their birth rates hovered close to the 2.1 level required for their populations to remain stable.

"In all of the Nordic countries, birth rates started dropping in the years after the 2008 financial crisis," University of Oslo sociologist Trude Lappegard told AFP.

"The crisis is over now but it's still falling."

From Copenhagen to the North Cape, from Helsinki to Reykjavik, demographics across the Nordics reveal two things: there are fewer large families, and women are waiting longer before having their first child.

There's no single explanation, but financial uncertainty and a sharp rise in housing costs are seen as likely factors.

In the long term, this means there will be fewer people of working age to pay taxes that fund the generous state welfare systems.

These systems pay for, among other things, lengthy parental leaves, which in Sweden can last up to 480 days.

- Paying for pregnancies -

Experts present differing diagnoses and prescriptions to remedy the situation.

In Norway, one economist concerned about the effect the slowing demographics will have on economic growth has suggested giving women 500,000 kroner (50,000 euros, $58,550) in pension savings for each child born.

Another has suggested that, on the contrary, women in Norway who reach the age of 50 without having had a child should be paid one million kroner, since children also cost society a lot.

Finnish municipalities have already decided to loosen their purse strings to encourage locals to get busy under the covers.

The town of Miehikkala, home to 2,000 people, is offering 10,000 euros for each baby born and raised in the municipality.

"The number of childless individuals is growing rapidly, and the number of women having three or more children is going down. This kind of fall is unheard of in modern times in Finland," said Anna Rotkirch, a family sociologist at the umbrella organisation Finnish Family Federation.

In Denmark, Copenhagen has meanwhile turned its attention to men, who are in less of a hurry to become parents than women, with a campaign aimed at raising awareness about how sperm quality declines with age.

- Immigration boost -

The Nordic region already boasts a wealth of family-friendly initiatives, such as flexible working hours, a vast network of affordable daycares and generous parental leave systems.

But when all that is still not enough to encourage people to have more children, immigration can be a lifeline -- or a threat, depending on the point of view.

Sweden may have a falling birth rate, but it still comes in second in the EU behind France with 1.85 children born per woman in 2016.

That is largely due to Sweden's decades-long history of immigration: immigrant women tend to have more children than the average Swede.

With 2.6 children per woman in recent years, the town of Aneby in southern Sweden has one of the highest rates in the country, a phenomenon attributed to the fact that it opened its doors to immigrants two decades ago.

"Aneby welcomed around 225 Eritreans in the early 1990s and just after that (it took in) refugees from the Balkans. 1994 was a demographic record for the town," local official Ola Gustafsson told AFP.

But population growth among minorities has also fuelled fears.

A former justice minister in Norway, Per-Willy Amundsen of the populist far-right, made headlines when he called for family allowances to be reduced after a third child.

His stated goal was to stop Somalis who, he said, had a higher "birth production" rate than "ethnic Norwegians".

 

[RadicalCentrist]

Especially considering that this cannot be the first time a population has ever naturally declined in history.

Indeed it isn't. Unfortunately they tend to die out afterwards.

 

[Varis]

The town of Miehikkala, home to 2,000 people, is offering 10,000 euros for each baby born and raised in the municipality.

lol 10k is not going to pay for 20+ years of food, clothes and Pampers.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

lol 10k is not going to pay for 20+ years of food, clothes and Pampers.

It wont, but keep in mind the plethora of benefits that mothers get for popping out babies already, an extra $10K on top of that is not a bad tradeoff is a parents wants to live in a small town.

Although, one would wonder where all this money comes from, and if it is from ludicrously high taxes, if lowering said taxes instead would spur population growth. After all, more money means more breathing room for raising a family.

 

[registered 2 hide avatars]

I am liking the usual feminism sperging though. Guys I hate feminists the same as you when they are calling me a born rapist and demanding I apologize for having a penis, so I don't want to sound too cynical, but some of you seem to think society fell apart because we allowed women to go to college and divorce bad partners and that's a little autistic.

Why? I don't blame feminism for it, but I can't blame them for doing so. When the common element among progressive ideologies is that personal liberties are more important than the society as a whole, you can't be surprised when people think that this is just an extension of that mindset, especially when they push issues like abortion. Like I said I don't think it's that simplistic but I can understand people who think that way.


Also paying people to have kids is retarded. It's just gonna encourage poor parents (who want that money the most) to have even more kids they can barely feed.

 

[Alec Benson Leary]

When the common element among progressive ideologies is that personal liberties are more important than the society as a whole

I think that's the complete opposite of progressive ideology. Progs think people are disposable cogs to be thrown away for some bizarre forced utopia. People who think individual rights matter more are people like me, as well as a lot of other kiwis.

For the record, I was just fine calling myself a feminist when it meant letting women have equal access to jobs/school/self reliance. I just don't like the label anymore because there's 50 different crazy political schemes it obligates you to, and most of them contradict so signing on with one group still gets you labeled a misogynist by a bunch of others. I suspect a lot of kiwis would also be on board with that.

 

[Roast Chicken]

Assuming society doesn't collapse before then, perhaps we'll enter a Huxley-esque future where children are grown and birthed in artificial wombs and then raised in large creches by robots and paid nannies. The most the biological parents will do is donate their egg and sperm cells to the labs.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Although, one would wonder where all this money comes from, and if it is from ludicrously high taxes, if lowering said taxes instead would spur population growth. After all, more money means more breathing room for raising a family.

High taxes and people make a lot of money plus they have no national debt. They have the oil fund but they're sitting on that one for a rainy day and it's a big shit show anytime politicians wants to take some money from it. In that way they have a good buffer to have time to figure things out when the oil dries up.

With all that money it is like in the places in the US where they raised the minimum wage to $15 or something and to the surprise of no one it results in prices going up to compensate for the cost of staff. This means that Norway is expensive, very expensive, to the point where domestically grown vegetables like potatoes(one of three things not allowed to take into Norway, the other two is guns and narcotics) is at a price point where potatoes grown in Israel is transported by ship and sold at a lower price. It's almost like the rice situation was in Japan.
Rent and housing costs are also very, very special, but on a Norwegian salary it's tolerable.

For comparison, the prices and salaries in Norway is pretty much twice of that in Sweden, with some exceptions. On the flip side, imported goods like electronics and things like that cost almost exactly the same as in the rest of Europe, with the exception of the PS3 that at launch cost the equivalent of ~$1100, so they have great purchasing power in that way.

 

[Cryin RN]

I kind of lean on economic factors as the biggest issue, specifically the cost of additional bedrooms to house babbies. In most big cities and economic centres in the west a 4-bed house is a ridiculous luxury, in Canada you're basically dreaming. Not everywhere can be Oklahoma City. Most people want kids to have their own rooms, or at least not to share with opposite-sex siblings, which is reasonable. The other BIG factor as noted in this thread is grandparental involvement, because it cuts the cost of daycare down by a huge amount and lets moms rejoin the workforce to avoid (as much) of the mommy pay penalty. This is really critical if mom is the breadwinner, which is also happening much more now than it used to. Mothering children is incompatible with maximum workforce productivity no matter how you slice it and the west is really, really competitive. It's not surprising that women without very high-earning partners, or who are extremely high-earning themselves, choose to avoid it altogether.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

It's not surprising that women without very high-earning partners, or who are extremely high-earning themselves, choose to avoid it altogether.

I was sitting around one day thinking about what would be good to invest in, something that would be a future luxury, like buying a house on the country side and growing tomatoes. I remember the days when I could buy a house for 3k and now it's ten times that.
But I realized what it was, the next big luxury, the thing ordinary people in the future wouldn't be able to afford: traditional gender roles. I can't put in money in that, fuck!

In Sweden at least.

 

[Fareal]

he next big luxury, the thing ordinary people in the future wouldn't be able to afford: traditional gender roles.

You aren't wrong, certainly for the UK. This is a very interesting article from the FT, with lots of exciting graphs:
https://www.ft.com/content/c3bd628a-6f2e-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914

ETA: the phenomenon that occurs in the UK (I don't know if this is true in the US or in mainland Europe) is that mortgage lending criteria in the UK switched post crash from lending around 3 times the primary salary to around three times the household salary.

The practical effect of that is that if you are a one income couple trying to buy a house, you will always be outbid by a two income couple. But swings and roundabouts: the one income couple can afford to keep the roof over their head if one of them quits work to stay home with the children; whereas the two income couple have to both keep working and try and figure out a way to keep their crippling childcare costs down enough that they can still afford the house they bought.

We always intended that when we had children, I would stay at home full time with them, so we always bought on one income. Priced us out of the market at some very hot times, but it's allowed us flexibility later in life that we wouldn't otherwise have had.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

You aren't wrong, certainly for the UK. This is a very interesting article from the FT, with lots of exciting graphs:
https://www.ft.com/content/c3bd628a-6f2e-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914

That's either a bum link or an invitation to the socvit software groupe. But yeah, the idea of pods and the green movement trying to compress space...

 

[Fareal]

Ah shit, didn't realise it would paywall. Ugly C&P of the text within spoiler.

Spoiler: ugleee

The rise of working mothers
Sympathetic policies help families in the UK, but childcare costs are still a problem

© Tolga Akmen/FT

Janina Conboye and Valentina Romei OCTOBER 9, 2018

Catherine Petts, an economics graduate, started working at a chartered accountancy firm in the City of London in 1964. At that time, many women felt that returning to work after having a baby was impossible.

“There were no [childcare] facilities for you to work,” she says. In the late 1970s, the only option was to hire a full-time nanny, and there was little part-time work. “Generally jobs were full-time, for everybody at every level.”

Attitudes have changed, but an FT analysis of long-term data shows how decades of government policies in the UK and parts of Europe have had a significant effect in boosting the numbers of mothers who go back to work. The latest annual Eurostat figures show that in the UK, 73 per cent of women aged 20 to 64 are in employment — against an average of 66 per cent in the rest of the EU — a proportion that has been rising steadily for the past decade.


However, the overall UK figure hides a significant drop in employment rates among mothers of very young children, compared with other advanced countries.

Ms Petts returned to work in 1979, more than seven years after the first of her two children was born. Some things do not change: the school holidays then, as now, took considerable planning. Ms Petts and her husband, an engineer, used annual leave to share the holidays between them, as well as sending their children away on holiday schemes and to grandparents for care.

When her youngest child was 11, Ms Petts took a job at British Gas in London. Even in the 1980s, the company encouraged women’s networks.


Catherine Petts at her home in Steventon, Oxfordshire © Tom Pilston/FT
Women had started to return to work after maternity leave, Ms Petts says, and she put together a staff handbook on childcare options.

PRE-SCHOOL CHILDREN: A RISE IN MOTHERS’ EMPLOYMENT RATES
By 1996, less than half of mothers of pre-school age children in England were in employment. Today the figure is about two-thirds. In that time, the UK government introduced policies to encourage women to return to work. In 1998, the Labour government introduced 12 and a half hours per week of free, pre-school education for four-year-olds in term-time, extended in 2004 to include three-year-olds.


In 2010 the number of free weekly hours increased to 15, and last year doubled to 30 hours. The extension of free childcare hours (for dual earners only) was followed by a further increase in employment rates of mothers of young children to 67 per cent.

Jenny Melbourne, a performance and planning manager at Transport for London, has three children. Her youngest receives 30 free hours of childcare a week. She returned to work full-time after each was born, and says: “Without the [then] 15 hours, the cost of having two children in full-time nursery is really high.” Ms Melbourne now works condensed hours over four days, saving the cost of a day’s childcare.


Expensive childcare could explain why many women drop out of the workforce while their child or children are of pre-school age © Charlie Bibby/FT
The downside is that she and her husband have to split annual leave to cover the holidays, and only get about one week off a year together. But the 30 free hours will mean extra cost savings, which, she says, could allow them to put the children into childcare for a week or two over the summer and then take more time off together as a family.

EMPLOYMENT RATES FOR MOTHERS OF YOUNG CHILDREN REMAIN LOW
About one in four mothers of young children in England are not in the labour force, but the employment rate of mothers increases by 12 percentage points as soon as the youngest child reaches school age.


In 2016, the latest comparable data available, some 78 per cent of mothers of children aged six to 14 were in employment in the UK, above both the EU and the OECD rates.

The proportion falls to 66 per cent for UK mothers of children aged three to five in employment — lower than the EU and OECD average.


CHILDCARE COSTS ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM
The cost of early years childcare in the UK is higher than in most other developed countries. “I know people have given up work because it is not worth them working because of the cost of childcare,” Ms Melbourne says.

“I am sometimes surprised that the government does not do more for one to two-year-olds, because that is when nursery is the most expensive,” she adds. “You get no assistance from the government at all. And you are suffering from the post-maternity leave lull, so that can be difficult.”


Willem Adema, a senior economist in the OECD’s social policy division, says the high cost of childcare for children “is an obstacle to mothers returning to full-time work”.

A UK government survey last year showed half of mothers in England working part-time said affordable childcare would be a key factor in helping them increase their working hours.


A dual-earner, two-child family in the England spends about 40 per cent of its disposable income on childcare, according to the OECD. This is significantly higher than France, at 10 per cent, and Germany, at 5 per cent.


“French people are always complaining about childcare and the lack of places, but it is much better than the UK,” says Béatrice de Montille, an entrepreneur with four children. She lived in the UK for 14 years, before returning to France last year.

Another possible reason for a higher rate of French women returning to work sooner, says Ms de Montille, is that they are concerned about the damage a longer maternity leave may have on their careers.

Ms de Montille decided to start her own jewellery company, Merci Maman, in 2007, after her request to work flexibly was rejected by her employer. She says starting a company gave her the opportunity to fit work around family life.


Béatrice de Montille, founder of Founder of Merci Maman, has four children
During her time in Britain Ms de Montille noticed that the approach of British women to having children seemed different from that of women in France. In the UK, she says, women “have children a bit older — they seem to wait and then change their lives completely and be more dedicated to the family — quitting London, moving to the countryside,” she says.

Parisian women, she says, prefer to keep their jobs and have children earlier so “they are a bit more integrated into life”.

London’s expensive childcare and housing costs could go some way to explaining why some women have children later and often abandon professional careers. Latest figures show that in some London boroughs employment rates of mothers are nearly 30 percentage points below the national average, while the gap with fathers’ employment rates is larger.


But a more flexible labour market in the UK could also be part of the low employment rates of mothers of young children.

The gender employment gap — the difference in employment rates between men and women — narrows for those aged 40 to 50 in the UK more than in other countries. “It is difficult to say just exactly why this is, but a flexible labour market makes it easier for women to re-enter the labour market, so that is likely to make a contribution,” the OECD’s Mr Adema says.

MOTHERS STILL TAKE ON MORE CHILDCARE
Women with younger children continue to take on most childcare within families. About 69 per cent of mothers in a couple with at least one child under the age of two are in work, compared with 94 per cent of fathers.


If the UK wants to help women get back to work sooner, what policies might work?

“The government needs to streamline the current hotchpotch of childcare support into a simple and responsive childcare system that makes sure every parent is better off working,” says Megan Jarvie, head of policy at the charity Coram Family and Childcare, “and that there is enough high-quality childcare for every child.”

Ms Petts says the solution is free or heavily subsidised childcare and sympathetic employers. “We need a much more radical system that doesn’t see the solution to working parents as bundling the children into some kind of care and expecting the parents to work as if they did not have children,” she says.

She believes that employers and governments must realise that future prosperity depends on how parents are helped to bring up their children now. There is a limit, she says, to the extent that the UK can rely on immigration to solve economic problems.

“Currently we are, quite literally, throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” she says.

 

[Foreskin Salesman]

One idea that I have only ever heard suggested once, for countries that value socialism, would be to simply make benefits such as old age security and medical care limited to those who have children, and only fully covered for those with multiple children.
This is not unfair to those without children as the hundreds of thousands of dollars they save are more than enough to compensate for the loss of benefits. It would also

1. Eliminate the crisis of funding the social system.
2. Make socialism sustainable as the only people recieving it are those who produce offspring to fund it. It is no longer a ponzi scheme if payout is tied to pay in.
3. Make children much closer to cost neutral in the long run, freeing up those with children to spend less money on retirement savings immediately to cover the cost of children.
4. Massively reduce the crippling burden of the few children of previous generations paying for a much larger population of elderly people, ending the farming of other peope's children for ones retirement.
5. Free up the younger generations financially to have their own children, strengthening the safety nets.
6. Deal with the current caustic situation where young people vote knowing they will never see the money they pay in to social security.
7. Reduce the incentives to sell the country to foreign peoples to 'pay your pension'. Not that the 'refugees' of recent years have any intention of ever doing so once they are the voting majority.
8. Because of 7, reduce housing costs, making it more affordable to have a family, strengthening the safety net.
9. By encouraging people to have kids and making it affordable for one parent to stay home, reduce the workforce, increasing wages.
10. Balance out the costs of 9 to companies via less taxes required to pay for social security and more people to sell to.
11. Make me laugh as millions of people, who relied on farming other peoples children (us) for money and pissed away their savings on frivolous goods, generate enough salt to supply the world for centuries.

 

[Medicated]

I am liking the usual feminism sperging though. Guys I hate feminists the same as you when they are calling me a born rapist and demanding I apologize for having a penis, so I don't want to sound too cynical, but some of you seem to think society fell apart because we allowed women to go to college and divorce bad partners and that's a little autistic.

I don't believe that it's possible to have todays modern culture and economy AND a baby boom. It's not going to happen. Feminism is a feature of this new modern culture, and I only see birth rates dropping continually. Whether you think that's good or bad is up to your personal viewpoint. But the simple fact is, modern western culture doesn't support birthrates.

 

[Android raptor]

I don't think it's feminism as much as the internet in general. Pregnant women and mothers do not paint a pretty picture. I wouldn't know that pregnant women sometimes piss themselves, or what their naked bodies look like after pregnancy if they themselves didn't post this stuff all over the internet. Then there's the people confessing their special needs kids ruined their marriage, or they actually just don't like their kids that much. I feel everything I needed to know is posted freely by parents without getting into the weird feminist childfree corners of the internet.

Not to mention plenty of people grew up constantly hearing their parents complain about how much they hated having kids. If you've spent your whole life being told something is horrible, would you choose to do it?

Either way I though the migrants had plenty of kids.

 

[Shitmonger]

There's plenty of blame to be spread around to all governments, economies, and genders. I haven't seen this one yet so I'll contribute to the coal-raking.

How many middle and upper-middle class millennial teenage girls had to watch their douchebag fathers waltz out of their lives in pursuit of banging, marrying, and having a new family with some younger woman? Comforting your sobbing mother will have quite an impact on an impressionable adolescent brain of either gender. Their daughters end up thinking that men are untrustworthy, unreliable, faithless assholes that will hurt them, and also that they themselves are worthless unless they are young and attractive. This type of split is much more common than the wife flouncing. Girls in particular that witnessed this with their own parents are going to be very, very cautious about who they marry and have kids with, if they do at all.

 

[Buer]

^I'll add that the mother more than likely was kinda young when she got married/had kids so the daughter, if she ever has kids, will get married/have kids much later than their mother thinking that her parents age was a factor in their divorce. And it's not a wrong way to think, I've heard of several parents who got married young and decided much later that they missed something from their youth be that partying, having sex with a bunch of different people, etc. and either cheated, divorced or ended up in a weird poly situation. Honestly it's basically almost all of r/polyamory.

 

[Azovka]

I'm always amazed by the fact that European countries think mass migration from the South is the solution to a declining birth rate.

The issue with these social / welfare states is that, with a declining birth rate, there's less people to shoulder the burden of very high taxes to pay for the elderly.
How would uneducated, poor migrants solve that? If anything, they'd be even more of a burden on the State during their "education" period, and for those many that don't care enough to develop skills, they would remain a burden, as will the children they'll pop out.
How the fuck does the State plan on taxing them when they got nothing to begin with? (And many of them don't even try to acquire anything, just being content leeching from the government, because anything is better than their shit-filled countries of origin).

If anything, they should encourage migration of skilled workers.
Woke people (in France at least) love bringing up the fact that the country was always a crossroads of cultures, and a popular migrant hub, citing Italian, Polish, and East European migration waves from the early 20th century. What they fail to mention however, is that these people were on average skilled, and adapted very well, what with their own cultures not being so different from the Western one.
It's a completely different story from the African migrants that often aren't skilled, and do not adapt. And if they do, it takes them way longer (period during which, they are an additional burden on these straining countries' budgets).

Another thing that always struck me as odd and few people tend to mention is that, by encouraging mass migration to palliate the "defects" of your countries, namely here a declining birth rate, you're basically telling your citizens they aren't good enough, that you don't believe in them.
As in "We have a problem. Can our people solve it? Fuck, no. Just bring in new ones."

 

[RadicalCentrist]

I'm always amazed by the fact that European countries think mass migration from the South is the solution to a declining birth rate.

The issue with these social / welfare states is that, with a declining birth rate, there's less people to shoulder the burden of very high taxes to pay for the elderly.
How would uneducated, poor migrants solve that?

Democratic societies don't value long term solutions. Also the political class benefits from dividing its enemy, the citizenry.

 

[Azovka]

Democratic societies don't value long term solutions. Also the political class benefits from dividing its enemy, the citizenry.

Fair enough. Just wonder how long "democracies" will last under African-majority populations. Doesn't seem to be working too well in their own continent. (Wouldn't even be an issue if they would just adapt. But very few of them do).
Inb4 we get ethnic conflicts between the Paris tribes and the Lyon clans give or take a hundred years.