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From the parliamentary halls of Sweden to the ketamine-fueled visions of Elon Musk, there is concern over population decline. Countries like Japan and Spain are unable to keep their populations at replacement level. Theoretically, the United States is in better shape, because under normal conditions, we replace our population through immigration. But we’re not currently experiencing “normal conditions,” so give us a new President, and we’ll hopefully (re)develop a more productive relationship with immigration. Until then, we’re seeing, for the first time in decades, more foreign-born people leave the country (or be deported) than the number coming in.
What’s more shocking is that in other countries these declines are happening despite policy measures designed to foster the procreative spirit. In Poland, the government sends parents $220 per month, per child. South Korea has extended parental leave to 1.5 years with a full salary. In Hungary, any woman who has a third child is exempted from income taxes for life! These measures feel like they should work, but still populations are in decline.
This has been particularly baffling in Nordic countries that for years have been the global exemplars of providing stability. They famously give and give—health care that makes Americans salivate, formally recognized work-life balance, generous annual leave—creating conditions that should spark babies. And yet, it’s not enough.
I am exactly the type of person these policies are meant to target. At the time of this writing, I have one child who is six years old. On paper, I’m the kind of person who would have a second, and maybe even a third, child. I have a career, a husband, some measure of resources. But why have I stopped at one? And what would it take to get a person like me to have more babies?
The Polish example of $220 per child, per month, looked good to me. I would love to have that, and in the United States, in fact, during the COVID-19 pandemic, our government did send out a maximum of $300 per child, per month, as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. On a national scale, those checks decreased child poverty by nearly half.
Our experiment with monthly payments lasted only a brief time. But the reality of $300 is that while these amounts feel like a baseline for keeping one child going, they do not feel like an incentive to have more. I also wonder about education. The perception of the quality of education in the United States has flagged steadily over the years. But if high-quality education were paired with—and this is important—high-quality after-school care, we could be on to something. If arranging school and after-school care wasn’t a constant source of agita, that could at least get me a fraction of the way to having another baby.
The recent seeding of so-called Trump accounts by Michael and Susan Dell—of Dell Technologies—is an interesting idea. Each eligible child can get $250—or $1,000 for those born during the second Trump Administration—and then watch that amount grow through to high school. If adults around them are regularly contributing, that account could render something significant by the time they graduate.
But if you’re the child of a working-class mom, how would she be able to regularly contribute? Because without ongoing contributions, that $1,000 nets out to $5,839 by age eighteen. That’s something, but it doesn’t remove the stress of paying for college by any means. These policies, frankly, are not enough. If the accounts were seeded with more money, or if the government made regular contributions to them—such as New Jersey Senator Cory Booker’s original idea for baby bonds—we could talk.
I’m not opposed to incrementalism. I believe we must build compromise and work with the entire spectrum of political ideology, mounting baby steps toward a progressive future. But when it comes to actual babies—to the question of what would make me have another baby today—we can’t do baby steps.
If the $300-per-month check could be closer to $600, and if it could alleviate the burden of some child care costs, or put a dent in the wild cost of summer camp, then maybe my uterus would perk up.
I’ve written about maternity leave in these very pages because I didn’t get to do that as a freelancer, and it is something that has always rankled me. But caring for parents just at the beginning of their babies’ lives is only the opening salvo of the battle. What parents need is ongoing support as they’re actually raising the child. At the risk of sounding like a 1980s Wall Street character: Kids need big, fat checks and big, sparkling, baby bonds that will last through the long haul.