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| Four out of 10 adults said unstable personal finance is the No.1 reason for not having a child./ Korea Times file |
By Kim Se-jeong
Four out of 10 adults said financial instability was the No.1 reason for not planning to have a child, according to the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, Friday.
The local think tank surveyed 2,000 adults ― 1,029 married and 971 single ― between the ages of 19 and 49 years old, and found that 44.7 percent of unmarried people though their financial situation wasn't good enough to raise children.
Among married people, 37.4 percent answered similarly.
Beside finance, the responders mentioned the high cost of raising children and the lack of child-friendly housing. More than 10 percent in each group said they would remain childless because they simply preferred their freedom.
The think tank's survey only served to confirm Korea's notoriously low ― already clearly documented ― birthrate.
In 2018, there were 326,900 births in Korea, down 30,900 from the previous year, the lowest since 1970. The fertility rate, the average number of babies women of childbearing age choose to have was also down from 1.05 per woman in 2017 to 0.98 in 2018. The figure marks the lowest among OECD countries and well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children, the number a society needs to maintain its population without immigration.
The low birthrate is a big socio-economic challenge for the Korean society, which saw a 6 percent of birthrate in the 1960s.
As more women became educated, they moved into the job market, instead of getting married and becoming staying-home mothers. Childcare has been a particularly big burden for women in the traditional and patriarchal society of Korea where it is an additional workload for many women who are also expected to do household chores.
The government turned its attention to immigration, mostly migrant Southeast Asian women marrying Korean men who are unable to find a Korean woman, to ease the population crisis. Yet, its policies fail many migrant women who face racial and sexual discrimination in society and often abuse from their husbands and in-laws.
As far as personal economics are concerned, rising housing prices and a decreasing number of stable jobs also make people more reluctant to have children.
Boosting the birthrate has been high on the agenda for almost all presidents and political parties that have taken power and yet none so far has been able to achieve any notable success on the issue.
In the previous decade, the government spent more than $70 billion attempting to increase the birthrate by giving out cash bonuses to families with young children, and offering incentives to companies that offer maternity and parental leave.
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