To raise the birth rate, China should rely on its own tradition of a strong, stable family, rather than follow the permissive West
- A proposal to encourage more women to have children out of wedlock is not the solution for a society that values a strong family. Instead, China should improve its support system for families to have more babies, including by expanding parental leave and lowering the cost of living and raising a child
China’s falling fertility poses a big hurdle to the “Chinese dream” – President Xi Jinping’s plan to boost economic opportunity for ordinary Chinese by mid-century. That’s because fewer workers usually translates into lower growth and less economic dynamism.
To boost fertility, some civic groups, scholars and lawmakers in China are calling for a more welcoming approach to out-of-wedlock births. They would like to take a page from the West’s more permissive approach to parenthood and overturn China’s long-standing norm against non-marital childbearing in the hope of increasing the birth rate.
Instead of encouraging women to have more children out of wedlock, however, China needs to do more to make marriage and family life appealing. When it comes to renewing family life for the future, China is better off honouring its Confucian heritage of strong and stable families.
There are good reasons for this. First, we know that it takes a lot of time and money to raise children these days, and it is much harder to raise children well with just one parent. And recent research on children from low-income families, led by Harvard economist Raj Chetty, shows that in addition to factors such as economic and racial segregation, communities with lots of single parents in America have low rates of economic mobility and high rates of incarceration.
Does China really wish to repeat the West’s failed experiment with single parenthood on its own children?
Second, even in the US, married women end up having more children than their unmarried peers. In fact, the fertility rate among single women is lower than it is among married women in the US. While, on average, married women in America are expected to have more than two children during her lifetime, never-married women are estimated to have only one child.
Therefore, if increasing fertility is the goal of policy intervention, it would seem that boosting marriage is a better strategy than promoting childbearing among single women.
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Finally, having a child out of wedlock is likely to have negative economic consequences on young adults themselves. That’s because it increases the odds that men and women move in and out of relationships, accumulate kids across households, and end up as single parents. All this family turmoil – from the costs of moving house to supporting a child without the benefit of a partner – is expensive.
This “marriage before baby carriage” sequence is familiar to many people on this side of the Pacific Ocean. China and other Asian societies have long been influenced by the Confucian principles that emphasise marriage and the stability of families as the basis for a better society.
So, how can China boost its fertility rate while keeping the best elements of its Confucian-inspired marriage and family culture?
First, to make it easier for new parents to care for their children, Beijing should expand paid parental leave and offer a child allowance to families. Parents can use this allowance to help pay for childcare or have one parent stay at home and care for their children.
Since many young families in China also rely on grandparents to take care of their children, this allowance can help subsidise grandparents as caregivers.
Second, China should reform housing policies to make urban housing options cheaper. Young people (especially young men) in China are expected to buy a house before they get married, and this is harder to achieve in large cities these days. Rising housing costs are pushing marriage rates downwards, which in turn affects fertility.
Third, China should start a society-wide campaign to lower the cost of raising a child. Even with the end of the one-child policy, more than half of Chinese families do not want to have a second child, mainly because they “can’t afford it”. A big problem here is the way in which education costs have skyrocketed. The government needs to work to rein in these costs for Chinese parents.
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Finally, China must encourage its new dads, and their employers, to invest more in parenting. One reason women are reluctant to have more than one child is that they feel like the men are not really engaged on the home front.
As Chinese women make strides in the workplace, they expect more involved husbands and dads at home. It’s imperative, for the future of the Chinese family, that men see they have a significant role to play on the home front.
Without measures like these, the future of the family in China is likely to falter and so, too, is its fertility rate. This demographic stagnation will imperil Xi’s plan to revive the Chinese dream. Affirming the importance of marriage while at the same time advancing new policies and norms to support married families will prove vital to the country’s population growth and long-term prosperity.
Wendy Wang, PhD, is director of research for the Institute for Family Studies in the US
