> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
> The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
No, actually, it's women's rights. In every single country that has developed, we see birth rates drop as women get more rights.
Why? Because when women have the economic and legal freedom to control their lives, a lot of them choose not to have children. When they don't have that choice, surprise surprise, we don't see that.
Okay, we have a problem here. Turns out having kids, overall, is not a very sweet deal. People by and large only do it if you force them. Okay, we don't want to force them. So now we have to make incentive structures.
Based on the data I've seen it looks more like they're forced into the labor force more so than deliberately choosing not to have children. Most seem to reach middle age with fewer children than they say they want.
I mean, maybe, but we have to acknowledge that women were deliberately kept out of the labor force as a means of oppressing them. It's a lot easier to abuse women when they're not financially free.
It's a tricky problem space because it's tempting to just say "fuck it" and roll back the clock. But I don't think that'll work, because inevitably we'll just re-develop and we're back at square one.
We need novel solutions that incentivize women to have children without pushing them into situations where they can be taken advantage of.
What we have now obviously isn't working. If we don't fix it the people who do just say "fuck it" will be the ones who decide how things work in the future and so far they've rolled it much farther back than all but the most extreme people would want.
TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics.
The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine):
"
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
...
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now.
"
Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid.
Now, there is a reasonable argument that we as a society should put greater value on childcare and should subsidize it as a viable, reasonably lucrative career.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.