10/28/2026
Yesterday, I came across an article titled “超低生育率的另一个解释：谁该带孩子？” (Chāo dī shēng yù lǜ de lìng yí gè jiě shì: Shéi gāi dài háizi? “Another Explanation for Extremely Low Birth Rates: Who Should Take Care of the Children?”). It caught my attention for two reasons.
Just last weekend, my sister in Beijing told me that her son’s girlfriend had made it clear that she did not want to have children. At the same time, I am helping my own son care for his newborn baby. These two experiences made the question in the article feel especially relevant to me.
The article discusses research seeking to explain why fertility rates have fallen so dramatically in South Korea and several other countries.
In 2006, David Coleman, a professor of demography at the University of Oxford, warned that if South Korea’s low fertility rate persisted, the country could eventually become the first to face the prospect of disappearing through natural population decline.
The warning may sound dramatic, but the underlying demographic problem is real. The total fertility rate estimates the average number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if current age-specific birth rates continued. A rate of about 2.1 children per woman is generally needed to maintain a stable population over the long term without immigration.
South Korea’s rate fell below 1.0 in 2018 and reached just 0.72 in 2023. It rose slightly to 0.75 in 2024, but remained far below the replacement level.
South Korea is not alone. Japan, Italy, Spain, and other countries have also experienced persistently low fertility, although the causes differ from one society to another.
The research discussed in the article offers an intriguing explanation: the problem may not be rising wages for women themselves, but the gap between women’s changing economic roles and society’s slower-changing expectations about childcare.
As women earn more and take on greater professional responsibilities, the opportunity cost of leaving work or reducing working hours to care for children increases. Yet in societies where traditional gender roles remain strong, mothers may still be expected to shoulder most of the childcare burden.
When fathers are discouraged from taking on a larger share of childcare, mothers bear a disproportionate cost in time, career opportunities, and personal freedom. For some women, the prospect of having children under these conditions becomes much less cheerful.
The researchers analyzed data from 62 economies between 1990 and 2019. They found that fertility tended to decline more rapidly where women’s share of labor income was rising quickly, particularly in societies with more rigid social norms. Their model, calibrated using South Korea’s historical experience, suggests that the mismatch between economic change and traditional childcare expectations can deepen the decline.
The researchers are not arguing that women’s economic progress is the problem. Rather, social expectations about who should care for children have not kept pace with that progress.
This raises an important question for families and policymakers alike: if both parents work, why should childcare remain primarily the mother’s responsibility? More equitable sharing of childcare, along with social policies that support working parents, could help reduce the conflict between career and family life.
Reading this article while helping care for my grandson has made me think about how much our expectations of parents need to change. Raising a child is not simply a woman’s responsibility. Perhaps it should not be a burden that families must manage alone.
If societies want more people to feel that having children is possible, they must do more than encourage births. They must make sharing the responsibility of childcare a realistic option.
