• @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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    12 years ago

    Detailed support policies listed in the guideline included promoting prenatal and postnatal care, further developing nursing systems, improving the mechanism for maternity leave and insurance, offering preferential house-purchase policies to families with more than one child, adding high-quality education resources, creating a fertility-friendly employment environment, and setting up a complete service system on population.

    None of these address the elephant in the room: raising a child is expensive here. REALLY expensive. If they don’t address the actual, direct, out-of-pocket costs to parents, they’re not going to get their birth rate increase. All of these other things are fine. Nice. But not worth a wet slap if you literally can’t afford a child.

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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      12 years ago

      Aren’t things like maternity care, house purchasing, and so on out of pocket costs, and does the government provide any subsidies for parents currently?

      • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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        12 years ago

        “Promoting natal care” is not “paying for natal care”. “Preferential purchase policies” is not “paying for housing” either.

        The major cost of raising a child here is education. It’s the gigantic elephant in the room and it’s the one that is not going away in any of these initiatives. If they don’t deal with that, they’re not going to get people having second children in any numbers, not to mention third.

        Unfortunately it seems the people coming up with these solutions are vastly out of touch with the real world of parenting in China. They’re treating it as an “incentive” thing when it’s an “existential” thing. Almost every parent I know in China wants a second or third child. Yet most of them are not getting them because they can’t afford it. Until that divide is bridged, China’s population will continue running headlong into a wall of demographic collapse.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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          12 years ago

          I don’t know much about cost education in China, could you elaborate more on this. Given that the government is pushing for domestic technological development and independence it would seem that making education accessible would be an important part of that.

          • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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            12 years ago

            Public education in China, after primary school, is free, but largely shit. (My son is in a public middle school and one that’s even well-regarded! I get to see the processes and outcomes with my own two eyes.) The teachers tacitly assume that the parents are shoving their children into so-called “cram schools” anyway, so they don’t do much of anything in the public school. They act like an enormous babysitting service. Even the recent ban on schools-for-profit hasn’t changed this. It’s just caused some problems for the larger cram schools for a while until they creatively reworded things so they’re not “for profit” despite profiting greatly.

            So if you want your children to succeed in what is arguably the single most competitive work environment in the world, you send your children to extra classes or to private schools. (The people with the real money do both.) So while technically you can go through your schooling all the way with minimal cost (outside of books, uniforms, etc.) in reality, if you want your child to actually have a meaningful future, you spend through the nose to cause permanent mental and emotional scarring by making them live lives from dawn to dusk (and beyond!) slaving away at classes and homework.

            And this shit costs. A lot.

            My wife and I just bought a new home: a really nice four-bedroom apartment that’s conveniently located near a major commercial and transportation hub in Wuhan. That new home cost us less than my son’s education has thus far … and he’s only in grade 8 (starting next semester). We have a minimum of four more years of (more expensive) education to get him through senior middle school, and then the REAL costs start pouring in: universities don’t even have the pretense of a free path. You pay through your nose from day 1, and again, if you want the diploma that is issued at the end to have any meaning, you pay for the expensive “famous” universities. A degree, for example, from Wuhan University (ranked ~8 nationwide) or Huazhong University of Science and Technology (~10) will carry a whole lot more weight than a degree from Hankou University (~650). Can you guess which ones require you to basically mortgage your soul to pay the fees? (This is also handwaving over the whole exam thing. The pressure cooker that kills a scary number of children each year by suicide.)

            And this isn’t likely to change because the government knows that the Chinese will pay anything to get their children educated. Chinese veneration of education predates the People’s Republic of China by a couple of millennia, after all. And until the rather out-of-touch senior Party members, who’ve never had to make any meaningful sacrifice to fund their children’s educations, figure out that this is the single largest expense any child-rearing involves there won’t be a lot of third children, and indeed not very many second, even.

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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              32 years ago

              I’m sure your analysis is quite accurate for your financial demographic, but it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that people in general won’t have more kids because education is competitive. This is largely a problem for upper class people as opposed to majority of the population.

              • @ttmrichter@lemmy.ml
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                12 years ago

                Again, assumptions.

                I’m not upper class. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

                And the assumption that it’s only the upper class that wants their children well-educated betrays very western assumptions about how people think.

                • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆OP
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                  12 years ago

                  I’m going to guess your financial situation is a tad better off than the median given what you’ve described about it already. You’re also twisting what I said, which isn’t that people don’t care about their children being well-educated, rather that not being able to afford tutoring won’t prevent people from having kids.

                  Meanwhile, you’re making lots of assumptions there yourself. I grew up in USSR, people very much valued having education for their kids there. Those who could afford it got additional tutoring, but that was also a small percentage of the population.