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If it were easier to be a parent in this country, I might be far less ambivalent about having a second child. Maybe my parents would have too, if my mother hadn't felt that a second one would ensure that they would be too harried by all the mundane juggling to devote themselves fully to me, or to work, or to living a pleasurable life—not to mention the financial constraints of a bigger home and a second education to fund. Certainly, many of the advantages to having one would still hold. But the entire equation would shift, because the variables of human and financial costs would be radically different.
As I often say, only half in dreamy, theoretical tones: maybe we should move to Europe. On the continent, a variety of policies intended jumpstart fertility have done much for women's careers and familial sanity-while some have really missed the mark. Panic is rife there at the dwindling numbers of children born annually. The mounting number of only childrenrings an economic-and nativist-alarm. In the early sixties, Europe represented 12.5 percent of the world's population. About a century later, those numbers are projected to drop to about 5 percent. In cities like Milan, most parents are choosing to stop at one to be able to afford their lifestyles and maintain their careers.
Which is why in Italy, officials are offering mothers cold cash rewards to deliver more native citizens (about $15,000 in one town). Such policy is doing little to increase the sibling production. In Italy, women have some of the highest rates of PhD per capita, and the most asymmetric gender relationships on the continent. Italian fathers contribute the least to household labor and parenting, and policy does little to nudge them towards the kitchen, and their wives back to work. Local governments are literally paying their female citizens to procreate because they are terrified of the economic fall-out of a population that had normalized singletons. Between now and 2030, demographers agree that the EU will lose 20.8 million-or almost 7 percent-of people ages 15 to 64, or working-age. Meanwhile, the number of people over 65 will increase by more than 50 percent. Who will care for disproportionate numbers of elderly citizens? Who will make up the workforce? Hundreds of economists, policy wonks, and population experts have predicted the economic and social implosion of Europe due to such low fertility. In other words, only children will be responsible for the fall of the continent.
In the countries of Northern Europe the government pays for day care, guarantees a year of paid maternity leave-and six weeks of paternity leave, which Norway is debating making mandatory. More supportive policy has helped Dutch fathers to win the top spot worldwide in studies of shared parenting responsibilities. Meanwhile, in France—where 80 percent of the women work—fertility has leapt from 1.8 to 2.0 in just a few years, owing to government policies (only one-fourth of that rise is due to immigration). There, government-based incentives for parents make life easier for mothers and fathers alike. Mothers are given four months paid maternity and guaranteed job security whenever they choose to return to work. The state subsidizes rent and transportation, offers tax deductions for childcare, and pays 1,000 a month for third children.
Don't think those policies are just the product of feminism: they're designed not just to adjust the unavoidable pre-modern familial pressures (nursing, sleeplessness, the pesky need to have someone caring for a child 24 hours a day) to a modern world in which women want more from their lives than motherhood, and families need more than one income. Yes, they have that affect, and the policies that best marry parenting realities with contemporary desires and needs are the most effective ones. But without a dwindling white and native-born population in the face of massive waves of immigration from darker—and more Muslim—climes, would the state and its populace care so much about funding child care? Somehow, here in the States, we've gotten anti-immigration fever without any of the benefits. Which makes me wonder—archly, reader, quite archly—-in Europe, do they even do racism better?
