beashineeshawol
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May 23, 2013
Apr 04, 1994
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beashineeshawol commented on Dr. Oh Eun Young shares why South Korea suffers from such low birth-rates Posted by Sophie-Ha
Friday, July 29, 2022
Friday, July 29, 2022
For anyone who's wondering my mum got her doctorate in nursing while I was in college and paid for it all without going into debt. Don't buy into the narrative that you have to choose one or the other: your dreams or having a "large" family. You have a whole lifetime to build you career. To be honest, you can even have several of them. I am 100% here to tell you that in this case you can have your cake and eat it too. So don't let this narrative that keeps getting pushed make you fearful. If you think it's worth it, go for it! I fully intend to!
Friday, July 29, 2022
This is a long rant so if you don,t have oatience skip off now.
To be honest, in many cases, people believe having children is a burden because they've made it one in their minds (not because it actually is one). When you start to think of people as comodities and purely from an economic standpoint your thinking has veered off course. People didn't only have kids back in the day because they were easy labor. Living used to be extremely difficult. Surviving to adulthood was not guaranteed so people also had many children, because as morbid as it sounds, they had a reasonble expectation that a good portion of the kids they'd birth would died before even reaching adulthood. They put themselves through all that pain just for some extra hands? When they could have just joined forces with neighboring families to make a living for themselves? I don't think so. They considered children a blessing. Did kids help out on the farm, yes, but that doesn't necesrily mean that that was the primary reason people had them. I know it's shocking that kids were expected to contribute to the family in a substantial way since a lot of industrialized nations have spoiled their kids rotten/severely diminished any real expectations on teens (Korea included). You what kids with no real responsibilities do? They spend all their time on the internet and then start asking you for those useless things they saw on social media rather than gaining valuable life skills. A lot of things that people think their children "need" aren't actual needs. They just want them, because other people have it, and in a society like Korea, that's overly consumed with reputation, being seen a certain way in other people's eyes has likely created a broken cycle that's crowding everyone's judgement. That's not to say that reputation isn't important. It's just not as important as they've made it out to be and their markers for what makes a "good" reputation (going to a certain school, being rich, having brand name things, being well known - not necessarily a celebrity) is skewed in such a way that raising a kid would seem to be expensive. There is absolutely no reason why a tiny country with that size population should be ranked so high for purchases of brand name items. Yes, having and raising kids is always going to cost more than not, but it doesn't have to be exorbitantly expensive.
Case in point, my family immigrated to America when I was really young. My father died a few years later, leaving my mother who hadn't finished school yet as the only source of care and income. At that time, she had finished an associates degree in nursing and was working on her bachelor's nursing degree. When my dad died she had to drop out of school to work. By this point, she had 3 kids, the last of whom was diagnosed the following year with autism (which we knew nothing about at the time). Guess what. We lived just fine. We never once thought we were poor or that we didn't have enough as kids. Yet, when I applied to medical school, they ask about your family's income when you were young. When I asked, my mum told me the number, I was rather shocked. For most of my childhood, we were living basically right above what would be considered poverty by the government. And yet, like I said before, we never felt it. Why? God's grace and a whole lot of common sense. My mom didn't give us stupid things we didn't need just because other families had them. I didn't get a phone until it was absolutely necessary even though most people I knew already had one. We didn't get an extra paid tutoring or cram schools. She did impress on us the importance of education and what it could do for us so we studied hard, but never to the point where we didn't get to do other things that we enjoyed outside of school as well. We've turned out pretty great if i do say so myself. We got into good schools with sizable scholarships ao as not to be a financial burden on mum, and now I'm a graduate student (getting paid pennies for all the work I do and yet I still manage fine because I'm a hustler) with goals of being a professor like my father was. I've pretty much always maintained that I want to have 4 children and that doesn't seem unreasonable considering how I was raised, and yet I always get these strange looks, surprised voices when I tell people. They always say something dumb related to how I plan to do all that and have such a demanding career or how expensive it is. I always just inwardly roll my eyes and plaster on a smile. I know a middle class family with 7 kids in America who are doing just fine. So really the expense of raising kids is really what you make it.
The awesome thing is, you don't have to go the route I did either! I know people hate to admit it, but you can also make a good living without going to college and working a job that's a little less traditional. I recently read a story of a janitor who died leaving 1 million to his family that they didnt even know he had amassed. All he did was live below his means and invest the rest. You don't need a college degree to do a lot of things. You can start a business. That's actually why I really liked watching shows like Baek Jongwon's Alley Restaurants and Unexpected Business. That ahjumma from Unexpected Business is basically holding her whole community together with her store and she doesn't need a degree to sell some things. We've got to start getting our kids to think outside the box as far as work is concerned since modern day higher education has also turned into a way for people to prey on those with less resources.
I just get so infuriated when I see articles like these. People say having kids is expensive because they don't want to say the alternative - that they're selfish. Just say you don't want to have kids because you'd rather spend all your money on yourself living above your means or spend all of your time on your career or don't think you'd make a good parent. Stop making cheap excuses like it's too expensive. I'd rather you just be honest. And I'm not just pointing the finger at Korea. It's the same thing with all industrialized nations and the same old story over and over again.
A few cultural caveats specifically about Korea that I find interesting and informative to the discussion. Note that these are anecdotal. Generally speaking, people in Korea get married at later ages on average than say Americans. It's pretty standard to get married early, mid to even late 30s I believe. (I thought it was juat a thing for celebrities but it seems the rest of Korea also follows this trend). Biological clocks are a thing so getting started later inevitablably means that you're also likely going to have less children than someone who started earlier and that doing so is more dangerous for the mother. I asked a friend (native Korean) why people get married later and yet date the same person for 10,000 years over there and she said that usually a lot of people delay marriage in order to save up money to take care of their aging parents first before saving for things related to their own lives (like a wedding and children). I though that was kind of odd. Do people in Korea not invest? Maybe someone else can comment on this. I know it's pretty standard to live with your parents when they get older as it's a part of my culture too, but at least in the American context, my parents would have their own nest egg that they can pull from even if they live with me later so they would continue contributing to expenses even after retiring.
This is a long rant so if you don,t have oatience skip off now.
To be honest, in many cases, people believe having children is a burden because they've made it one in their minds (not because it actually is one). When you start to think of people as comodities and purely from an economic standpoint your thinking has veered off course. People didn't only have kids back in the day because they were easy labor. Living used to be extremely difficult. Surviving to adulthood was not guaranteed so people also had many children, because as morbid as it sounds, they had a reasonble expectation that a good portion of the kids they'd birth would died before even reaching adulthood. They put themselves through all that pain just for some extra hands? When they could have just joined forces with neighboring families to make a living for themselves? I don't think so. They considered children a blessing. Did kids help out on the farm, yes, but that doesn't necesrily mean that that was the primary reason people had them. I know it's shocking that kids were expected to contribute to the family in a substantial way since a lot of industrialized nations have spoiled their kids rotten/severely diminished any real expectations on teens (Korea included). You what kids with no real responsibilities do? They spend all their time on the internet and then start asking you for those useless things they saw on social media rather than gaining valuable life skills. A lot of things that people think their children "need" aren't actual needs. They just want them, because other people have it, and in a society like Korea, that's overly consumed with reputation, being seen a certain way in other people's eyes has likely created a broken cycle that's crowding everyone's judgement. That's not to say that reputation isn't important. It's just not as important as they've made it out to be and their markers for what makes a "good" reputation (going to a certain school, being rich, having brand name things, being well known - not necessarily a celebrity) is skewed in such a way that raising a kid would seem to be expensive. There is absolutely no reason why a tiny country with that size population should be ranked so high for purchases of brand name items. Yes, having and raising kids is always going to cost more than not, but it doesn't have to be exorbitantly expensive.
Case in point, my family immigrated to America when I was really young. My father died a few years later, leaving my mother who hadn't finished school yet as the only source of care and income. At that time, she had finished an associates degree in nursing and was working on her bachelor's nursing degree. When my dad died she had to drop out of school to work. By this point, she had 3 kids, the last of whom was diagnosed the following year with autism (which we knew nothing about at the time). Guess what. We lived just fine. We never once thought we were poor or that we didn't have enough as kids. Yet, when I applied to medical school, they ask about your family's income when you were young. When I asked, my mum told me the number, I was rather shocked. For most of my childhood, we were living basically right above what would be considered poverty by the government. And yet, like I said before, we never felt it. Why? God's grace and a whole lot of common sense. My mom didn't give us stupid things we didn't need just because other families had them. I didn't get a phone until it was absolutely necessary even though most people I knew already had one. We didn't get an extra paid tutoring or cram schools. She did impress on us the importance of education and what it could do for us so we studied hard, but never to the point where we didn't get to do other things that we enjoyed outside of school as well. We've turned out pretty great if i do say so myself. We got into good schools with sizable scholarships ao as not to be a financial burden on mum, and now I'm a graduate student (getting paid pennies for all the work I do and yet I still manage fine because I'm a hustler) with goals of being a professor like my father was. I've pretty much always maintained that I want to have 4 children and that doesn't seem unreasonable considering how I was raised, and yet I always get these strange looks, surprised voices when I tell people. They always say something dumb related to how I plan to do all that and have such a demanding career or how expensive it is. I always just inwardly roll my eyes and plaster on a smile. I know a middle class family with 7 kids in America who are doing just fine. So really the expense of raising kids is really what you make it.
The awesome thing is, you don't have to go the route I did either! I know people hate to admit it, but you can also make a good living without going to college and working a job that's a little less traditional. I recently read a story of a janitor who died leaving 1 million to his family that they didnt even know he had amassed. All he did was live below his means and invest the rest. You don't need a college degree to do a lot of things. You can start a business. That's actually why I really liked watching shows like Baek Jongwon's Alley Restaurants and Unexpected Business. That ahjumma from Unexpected Business is basically holding her whole community together with her store and she doesn't need a degree to sell some things. We've got to start getting our kids to think outside the box as far as work is concerned since modern day higher education has also turned into a way for people to prey on those with less resources.
I just get so infuriated when I see articles like these. People say having kids is expensive because they don't want to say the alternative - that they're selfish. Just say you don't want to have kids because you'd rather spend all your money on yourself living above your means or spend all of your time on your career or don't think you'd make a good parent. Stop making cheap excuses like it's too expensive. I'd rather you just be honest. And I'm not just pointing the finger at Korea. It's the same thing with all industrialized nations and the same old story over and over again.
A few cultural caveats specifically about Korea that I find interesting and informative to the discussion. Note that these are anecdotal. Generally speaking, people in Korea get married at later ages on average than say Americans. It's pretty standard to get married early, mid to even late 30s I believe. (I thought it was juat a thing for celebrities but it seems the rest of Korea also follows this trend). Biological clocks are a thing so getting started later inevitablably means that you're also likely going to have less children than someone who started earlier and that doing so is more dangerous for the mother. I asked a friend (native Korean) why people get married later and yet date the same person for 10,000 years over there and she said that usually a lot of people delay marriage in order to save up money to take care of their aging parents first before saving for things related to their own lives (like a wedding and children). I though that was kind of odd. Do people in Korea not invest? Maybe someone else can comment on this. I know it's pretty standard to live with your parents when they get older as it's a part of my culture too, but at least in the American context, my parents would have their own nest egg that they can pull from even if they live with me later so they would continue contributing to expenses even after retiring.