'Economic reasons prevent Koreans having children'

By Jung Min-ho

Koreans have fewer children than they would like to, mostly for economic reasons, according to a study released Wednesday.

The gap between how people perceive the ideal-sized family and economic realities was the biggest in Korea among nine countries, which were surveyed in 2012 by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs (KIHSA), a state-run research center.

The average number of children that Koreans wanted to have was 2.72, but they actually ended up with 1.24. The actual gap was 1.48 in Korea, followed by Taiwan’s 1.27 and Japan’s 1.06, which were far larger than the average of the nine countries at 0.64.

After the French and Taiwanese, Koreans felt the financial pressure of raising children most strongly, the survey showed. Second to Germans, Koreans also felt strongly that “having children restricts the employment and career chances of one or both parents.”

“Money is one of the reasons why I decided to have just one child,” Heo Kyung-ah, 40, who works at a private English institute in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, said.

For her five-year-old son, she spends at least 2 million won ($1.700) monthly. The tuition fee for his English language kindergarten alone is 1.2 million won, she said.

“If I had two children, the cost would have been twice as much, which is unimaginable,” she said. “Before marriage, I knew that raising a child would be expensive, but not this much.”

“I’m not a special case. I do not know many mothers that have a plan to have more than two children. Many of them say that it would be way too expensive.”

But at the same time, Koreans felt strongly that “Children are parents’ pleasure in life,” and “Having children increases people’s social standing.”

“Koreans think children make them happy but are financially too burdensome,” a KIHSA researcher said. “To increase the nation’s birthrate, it seems important for the government to financially support people in their 30s and 40s.”

The study provided evidence that financial issues contribute to keeping the nation’s birthrate the lowest in the world.

In 2013, the Ministry of Health and Welfare reported that it costs over 300 million won ($263,400), from the moment a child is born until the day he or she graduates from a university.

The ministry also said a single household spends 1.18 million won monthly on average for each child, a more than 50 percent increase from 748,000 won recorded in 2003.

The figures bode ill for the future of Korea; many say that the low birthrate is a big concern in Korea’s rapidly aging society in the long run, shrinking the work force, eroding economic growth and increasing the burden on the nation’s social welfare system.