Why Korean couples do not have children
Statistics show 42.5 percent of couples in Korea who have been married for five years have not had children due to the financial burden or fear of taking a career break. gettyimagesbank
Trillions of won in gov't financial support not enough to ease fear of career break, financial burden
By Jung Da-min
Kim Ji-yeon, 33, an office worker in Seoul, got married in 2016 but she and her husband have not had a child.
She said there was pressure to have a baby as the next step in their married life, and both her parents and in-laws wanted the couple to have a child.
“But I kept postponing my plan to have a baby as I was afraid of taking a career break due to childcare and felt it would be too difficult to keep parenting and working at the same time. I also felt we were not financially ready to have a child,” Kim told The Korea Times.
Kim said that when she does eventually decide to have a child, she only plans to have one and wants to wait until she is financially able to handle any child-related expenses, such as education.
“As I would want to give full support if we were to have a child, I want to make sure that we are financially ready before having one. You never know what's going to happen,” she said.
Kim's situation is very common in Korea, which has the world's lowest birthrate. The total birthrate, meaning the number of babies a woman chooses to have during her lifetime, was 0.918 in 2019, but fell to 0.84 for the second and third quarters of this year. Korea is the only country among OECD members in which the rate has been less than one for two consecutive years.
In fact, a growing number of couples who have been married for five years or less, especially those in which both partners work, are not having children.
According to data from Statistics Korea, Dec. 10, the number of couples who had been married for up to five years was 1.26 million as of Nov. 1, 2019, a 6.4 percent decrease from the previous year. Among them, 42.5 percent did not have children, up 2.3 percentage points.
In particular, the data showed that the higher the income of the couple, the less likely they were to have a child. For those with an annual income of less than 10 million won ($9,129), for example, 63.9 percent had at least one child, while 56.5 percent of those with an annual income of 50 to 70 million won had one or more children. The rate went down to 49.1 percent for those with an annual income of more than 100 million won.
The data show a shortage of money is not a decisive factor affecting the birthrate, and thus a fundamental change is needed in government policies to encourage childbirth, which have so far been focused on cash handouts, said Cho Young-tae, a public health science professor at Seoul National University.
“The government has put a lot of effort into improving the childcare system and spent over 200 trillion won,” Cho said, referring to administration spending since 2006 when it rolled out its first plan to counter the low birthrate.
Along with the expenditure, the country's childcare environment has improved, such as an increase in the number of public daycare centers, the provision of childcare allowances and expanded chances for childcare leave. But Cho said improving the childcare environment and expanding cash-based support for married couples has not encouraged people to marry or have children as the continued decreasing birthrate shows.
For many married women, they mostly fear that they would be forced to sacrifice their careers if they choose to have children.
“These days, you are over-informed, so you know in advance how your lifestyle will change if you have a child,” said a 31-year-old woman living in Hanam, Gyeonggi Province, surnamed Kim, who runs a piano academy.
“What I'm worried about most is that I might have to give up my job,” she said, as her students would leave for other academies if she takes months off for maternity leave.
Kim's concerns reflect the situation that only 1.8 percent of new fathers who were eligible took their allotted paternity leave in 2019, according to Statistics Korea, meaning women still bear most of the burdens of childcare and thus have a higher chance of quitting their jobs. The rate for new mothers was 63.6 percent.
Cho said the population concentration in Seoul and the surrounding metropolitan area is another cause for the low birthrate as the high population means higher competition for housing, jobs and education opportunities among other social factors.
“According to my recent studies … the birthrate is usually lower in countries with a higher population density. The more intense the concentration is, the lower the birthrate gets,” Cho said.