“The average number of children per woman in Switzerland has fallen to 1.29, its lowest level since records began. The desire to have children is also declining.”
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/various/birth-rate-in-switzerland-at-a-new-low/90306805
Birth rate in Switzerland hits new low
byu/insaneplane inSwitzerland
Posted by insaneplane
33 Comments
I totally get it, with living space being so limited and, hmm, profitable.
We do want children, we can’t afford them tho. So we got 2 cats and a dog.
Well when most people are closer to suicide than having children, you might start asking questions indeed
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It’s expensive to have a baby/toddler in CH.. afterwards i hear it’s not that expensive anymore but still..
They cut down hild benefits while costs are rising. Shocker
Extend maternity leave to 18 months.
Extend paternity to 6 months.
Actually punish anyone stupid enough to ask „are you going to have kids soon“ in interviews both criminally and socially.
Introduce stupidly high taxes on property capital gains and just normal high taxes on rental income for corporations.
Increase the stupidly low child subsidies.
Limit migration to prevent downward pressure on wages.
There you go, fertility problem solved.
What a surprise /s
Renting is freaking expensive, KiTa full time can go up to almost 3k/month…
Oh Bünzli will be replaced in 50y :..(
Wow the 3 first comments here are concerning. I know it’s kind of a meme, but not entirely…
What went wrong? Definitely something. I don’t see this at all looking at previous generations. Yes cost of living and renting and whatnot, but there is something deep and far more important there.
Something that so few people note is that the new dating norms, the normalisation of bashing men in society and the completely unfavourable court decisions for men, have been internalised also by men. This resulted on both sides of the table retreating from the interest to create families and progress, but instead “live their best life”.
Most people ask for free Kita, free maternity leaves of X years, …
I am not sure this helps. I know several couple, earning over 200k+/year that do not want children because it is too much work. It makes life complicated and they enjoy being free.
So the problem is deeper than “just throw money” (=rising taxes) at it to solve it.
I mean they have the perfect politics to make people not want children.
Life becomes more and more expensive.
Intense pressure to lower salaries and the quality of life at work using frontaliers and foreigners as Europe is going downhil in such a fast rate than lot of EU skilled people would sell their mother to come to work here with their PhD for the salary of a cashier.
You need two hard working people to basically afford to live comfortably, expecially in bigger cities. Rent is increasing intensively because as I said the whole continent is coming in that field between two mountains that is this country
Kita is so expensive unless you are earning 10k/month it’s a better calculation to stop working altogether as a woman than actually paying for it.
If you are a woman, you can’t afford to lose months/years of your career and come back later because of the higher competition than before, so staying at home to not pay Kita is a real hit at your career, which is not something you can afford in this economy
Even if you really really really want kids, it became so expensive to do so that you can afford to do it only when your career is well set so between 30-40 years old but it’s quite late biologically to make plenty of kids if you wanted to. And at 30+ you probably have higher responsabilities in your job, and we alerady have a lot of worked weekly hours for an european country, so you are probably too tired to think about kids altogether. It’s a complete trap from every side.
Getting married will cost you more taxes-wises than not being married just in the case you didn’t get the information that they really hate the idea of you making a family.
Of cours no access to private property, but it’s not new, Switzerland has quite been historically the country where there is the fewest % of people who are landlords. Now everything belongs to Rolex what you gonna do
Gosh, even if they wanted to plan carefully the absolute destruction of any possibility to have kids (or motivate people to do so) in this country, they would never have come up with such brilliant ideas. And they dare do the pikachu face when people don’t make kids?
Which is quite a shame because Switzerland is such a rich and safe country to live in, it’s a heaven to raise kids and we lack absolutely nothing, how comes it’s one of the worst western countries to make kids for some reasons?
This is dystopic and probably one of the main problems of that country
Lol meanwhile in Africa there is not a single benefit and they have no problems having kids.
In 1980, a family looking to buy a house faced 4-6 times annual income (median) vs today where it is 10-15 times. Rent was about 15% of take home pay, nowadays 35% is not unusual and it is getting worse each year.
Couple the above with employers expecting more and more from employees whilst laying people off at the drop of a hat and we are left with the world we have today. Many people are too busy getting by without worrying about kids.
I had one baby. I would have loved to have two more, but we couldn’t afford it. I never want to be in a position to take Sozialhilfe due to preventable life choices. One was the maximum we knew we could take care of even if we ever lost our job or our health. I feel so bad I can’t give my baby a sibling, but I’d rather not risk our finances. It is what it is.
But why? If Switzerland makes it very easy to have children…
If anyone wants to understand the situation and its consequences this podcast (actually lecture at the oxford university) is probably one to listen
https://overcast.fm/+AAFw6PdVUJU
From this guy David Coleman
https://share.google/1EQwdx3i3cTY26hgh
And our politicians will turn around and say we need even more immigration because of this: when young swiss people cannot even find a flat to start a family, let alone a house. Also there has been basically no real wage growth for the last 10 years, especially for junior positions, partially also because of pressure from migration. Even as someone very liberal, the economic and demographic trend becomes extremely worrying imo.
When did we go from overpopulation to not enough people
Serious question, i really dont get it
Also many more women than men want children and men often want children later when it is too late for many women. But somehow nobody blames this dynamic for the low birth rate??!!!
There is also a bunch of couples (me included) who want to have a baby with their spouse but can’t because of fertility issues.
A logical consequence of shitty maternity leave, shitty family leave, rampant birth trauma and skyrocketing Kita costs (and of course it’s also people’s choice not to have kids, but that’s not who I’m taking about).
How does this get recommended to single me 😭😭
I have a few ideas here and there to fix this
Let’s add a 14th month of avs payments, increase health insurance premiums for underages, cut childcare financing and ofc the most important one: make illegal to build 5.5 o larger apartments and focus exclusively on 2.5 and 3.5.
The commenters saying it can’t be solved by free / massively cheaper / truly affordable childcare do not know what they are talking about.
Don’t take my word for it.
Here’s the science from [Sweden](https://www.ifo.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3210.pdf) (“A typical household planning another child experienced a reduction in expected future child care costs of SEK 106,000 (USD 17,800). This reduction resulted in 3-5 more child births per 1,000 women during an 18 month period, which corresponds to a 4-6 per cent increase in the birth rate.”)
Here’s the science from [Germany](https://www.wiwi.uni-passau.de/fileadmin/dokumente/fakultaeten/wiwi/lehrstuehle/bauernschuster/Publikationen/ba_he_ra_JEEA_preprint.pdf) (“Our precise and robust estimates on birth register data reveal that increases in public child care have significant positive effects on fertility. The fertility effects are more pronounced at the intensive than at the extensive margin, and are not driven by changes in the timing of births or selective migration”).
Here’s the science from the [United States](https://abigaildow.com/assets/docs/dow_childcare_fertility.pdf) (“A 10% increase in the price of childcare leads to a 5.7% decrease in the birth rate (4 births per 1000 women). Reduced form results show that changes in the regulations directly impact birthrates. Declines are largest amongst women aged 30 and above. I propose a theoretical model to explain this age gradient: older women earning higher wages face a greater opportunity cost of their time and thus outsource childcare, making them more sensitive to its price. Consistent with the model’s predictions, older parents spend more on formal childcare, and more educated women (with higher incomes) exhibit greater price sensitivity.”)
AFFORDABLE KINDERGARTEN, AVAILABLE TO ALL. Everything else is secondary. But the biggest obstacle to making children is knowing that you will need to struggle to find a place (often quite far from your home/job) and then pay it thousands of CHF per month. Everything else can be managed.
We need to breakaway from this assumption that we need constant population growth.
Anyway, whatever we do, infinite population growth is impossible. We’ll have to face demographic stagnation and decrease at some point. Might as well face it now and have the boomers pay the price. Rather than pay the same price in a few decades.
The only need for this demographic growth is to feed the financial ponzi scheme. But it will collapse one day anyway.
Not exactly surprising.
Having childern is a long-term financial risk for everyone involved.
The system (taxes, cost of childcare etc.) tendentially incentivises the tradtional model with one stay-at-home-parent.
The stay-at-home-parent (usually the mother) will have an impact on carreer chances as well as retirement funds. So their long-term earning chances are diminished and their dependency increases.
On the other hand, the work-for-money-parent (usually the father) also carries a risk of being divorced soon after birth and then having to pay for the ex-spouse and a child they rarely get to see almost until retirement. (From the cases I know, the “standard” seems to be that the court decides that the stay-at-home-parent doesn’t have a good chance of earning money anyway, so the work-for-money-parent should work as much as possible to finance two households. Hence they also can’t have the children too often, because having the children would impede their ability to work as much as possible and finance two households.)
So knowing about the high divorce-rates, having children seems like a big gamble for everyone. The more successful and independent a woman is, the more she will ask herself if she wants to take the risk of becoming a stay-at-home-parent and becoming financially dependant on the partner. Vice versa a successful man has a lot to lose in family court if he affords himself a stay-at-home-partner that then divorces him and takes the child(ren) away (using the stereotypical role-model in this example, could also be inverted).
In the end, those who don’t have much to lose are the ones who don’t have to think so much about having children. Because in their case it will be society who pays. But many of those who have something to lose are thinking and considering risks until it’s too late.
I mean there’s also the general change in social norms – people are talking about the downsides of having children more, it’s more acceptable to be childfree. There’s definitely people who want children not having them but it’s also great that people who don’t want them aren’t having them!
I mean I think we all know some older people who should NOT have had children…. But it’s all about the social script isn’t it?
As a parent of 2, I can honestly say it would not have been possible without the help of our parents.
It just feels like everyone is under max shareholder value squeeze and basically expendable.
Add to that punishing family via taxation, basically no help with childcare and ridiculously small maternity / paternity leave, what other result could they expect?
The SVP should celebrate this, after all it works against the 10 million CH
have you seen this he kids nowadays? no wonder nobody wants to put one of these into the world