Oh there will be a boom of… abandoned babies for the fostercare system.
Which will cost every “mother” $10k. Their system is bulletproof 🙃
So that’s $5k per month, right? Right?
In Germany the parents (and later, the children themselves) receive a little over 250€ per month until the child is 25 or finished an apprenticeship or uni.
Germany has a very low birth rate.
Edit: copy of a text where I laid out the benefits we get in a similar discussion:
In Germany we have protection of pregnant people from when their doctor deems them unfit for work until delivery – continued payment of full wages. Two months after delivery with 70% wages and 12 months to split between both parents, which can be taken together and stretched by taking half the money for twice as long. Until your child is six you may (with some exceptions) take unpaid leave for parenting. Your employer has to keep your position for you. Childcare from 1 till school is affordable (ca. 250€/M). Healthcare is paid as a percentage from your income (ca. 15%) and has very little extra cost. You get 250€ per child per month just for having a child. Tax credits. If you are still struggling: Assistance for rent, school materials, clothing and more.
We have (compared to the US) pretty solid workers protection laws. We have a (not great but you won’t starve) state pension. We have unemployment benefits, that don’t run out (conditions apply). We don’t have the weird Japanese shut-in young men on a scale that’s worth a mention.
We also have one of the lowest birth rates in the world.
Yes, the oppressiveness of a capitalist society is a factor – Germany is far from free of that, and getting worse. But compared to the US we should be popping out babies like crazy. But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education, that afaik are the most decisive influences of a low birth rate.
But it’s emancipation of women and it’s education
Hey, so, funny story about what MAGA is working hard to eliminate…
I think the Germany benefits are amazing but I suspect people undersell how important baseline pay is for deciding on if you want to have kids. I’m a software engineer in Germany, I get paid a decent thriving wage, but I’ll never own a home as long as real estate is an investment option for large businesses and conservative governments continue to get elected.
Who would raise a child without a home to call their own? That’s what goes through my head. Even if all the costs for raising a kid were offset, I’d still be behind what I need to be in my opinion. I think some people answer that question and say “I would” and I think a greater percentage agree with that sentiment.
Couple that with the predictability of the political climate and you get an even more clear picture. Who would raise a kid in a world that’s getting worse? I might need to leave Germany if the CDU and AFD stay in power for too long. I may need to leave to a country that is making progress against inequality instead of expanding it. At the current pace of the world we are approaching another major Multi-national war in the next two decades, why would I have a kid in such an unstable time.
Having spoken to a couple women now in Germany about this subject - some of them broach the subject from a place of never wanting to but the few I’m spoken to also claim the factors above as major reasons against it.
I think countries need to start considering that extra pay and benefits for parents is not as effective as fixing the economy and political system for everyone is if their goal is to have kids.
How many friends are we talking about?
Place where I live also gives about the equivalent of 5000 USD for a birth. My wife got a single room in the hospital (very basic public hospital, but not a room with 4 other mothers). The 5k just about covered the medical costs for the pregnancy, birth and the additional cost for the room for 3 days …
🤔 is your country having an election soon
Nah, this system has been in place for years.
In my country the government decided to give hundreds of euro each month for 6 years to who have a baby (my friend gets €400/month) but SURPRISE! Birth rate didn’t increase
In Germany it’s something like 260€ per month until the child turns 25 if still in education (university, apprenticeship) (26/27 if the child served one or two years as a soldier or in a social or climate project)
And yeah birth rates didn’t increase either AFAIK
It’s been in place in more or less its current form since 1975, have a graph. Colours are generally for 1-4th child if there’s a fifth one then that’s a tax deduction. Before that there were schemes but they would not kick in for the first child and generally speaking it was even more of a pittance. In primary school, in the 80s, our maths teacher actually did a run-down of how much that money didn’t pay for our new shoes.
That’s West Germany in the east they spent a lot on free daycare which seems to have had much better results. Plenty of states nowadays do have free daycare at least for poor parents, and generally make the fees income-dependent, but the level of service still isn’t anywhere like it was in the GDR where you could also offload school-age kids to the state when they had holidays, summer camps and stuff, but you didn’t. Which isn’t exactly rare kids get more holidays than workers.
Overall, the reason our birthrate is only stabilised at a low level instead of at a reasonable level is because conservatives care more about supporting family models few people want than about solving the issue. Nah not even “conservatives”, it’s specifically Catholic conservatives.
And, no, I’m not advocating for re-introducing the FDJ, blue scarves and everything. How about handing organisations like the Scouts some money so they can offer summer camps for pretty much the cost of food. It’d be mostly money to allow adults to not work while running those camps (that is, extend their holidays) as well as some materiel costs. Increased tent wear.
Accessible social programs for vacations and the like is something we definitely need, if only to stabilise the youth from turning criminal and/or radicalised.
As for your guess that the higher birth rates in the east are due to free child care, I think the fact that flats were handed out preferentially to families with kids was the more significant factor. And that seems to have become something of a normal lifemodel as I still this. Longer education and entry into a stable career is also a big factor.
Yep on second thought I don’t think it’s so much stable career or the availability of childcare as security overall, any way to answer “We can do this for 18 years no matter what” in the positive. And yes that’s where capitalism and CDU bashing of “lazy moochers” strikes hard. Having a different job every six months and occasionally none would be right up many people’s alley if it didn’t put you into all sorts of economic trouble.
And the “we can do this for 18 years no matter what” thing was easy in the GDR: Don’t do things the Stasi doesn’t like, done. The SED went to great lengths ensuring that if you kept your head down, and push come to shove are willing to fill a hole another is digging (because duty to work), you really didn’t have to worry.
That’s € 28 800 btw, to compare to Drumpf’s measly 5000.
Anyhow, same here and afaik it continues in some form or other until they’re 18?
40k a year? So at least 3200 a month for daycare? Who on gods dying earth can pay for that? That’s more than 3 times my rent and my landlord is bleeding me like a stuck pig, what the fuck
When you have 3+ kids that are young.
People live in way different fuckin worlds man, and the weird part is a lot of us just go through life thinking our “version” is normal. The folks who do this and whose friends do this and whose parents did this - it’s normal to them.
I don’t think I’m conveying this well. There are whole communities, made up of individual people, for whom this is standard, expected, because it’s what they’ve always been surrounded by, grew up practically breathing it as normal. And for these folks, the reciprocal realization to the one you made, realization that MANY people do not (can not) do this - comes as a similar level of surprise.
It’s really fucked up. And it’s something deeper and harder to fix than just pointing to one guy or class of people as The Problem (to be clear, that guy and class of people I’m referencing ARE an enormous, hideous problem).
Oh, it’s easy to fix, just very painful. Nobody wants to fix this because it means dismantling capitalism and bringing those responsible to justice. This is why there is so much support for fascism. They run from the boogeyman they know into the arms of the ones that promise a return to normalcy.
I think you mean simple, not easy. Getting a large group of people to do anything is not easy.
I mean yes? I feel like there’s an implication that you never quite said that the quality of life for people that are paying that much for child care is better and that’s just not true. I was living far better in a cheap area making far less than I am now in the bay area. This is just the cost of living here. There’s absurdly wealthy people here and there’s, compatible to the median, absurdly wealthy people in rural areas. This price does not mean they’re living in luxury, this can easily be them scraping by. This is literally the cost of child care for the middle class in the highest cost markets in the US.
Alright. I don’t really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person’s sense of astonishment, because it’s cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it’s - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don’t mean you), that they’re astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
Bay area and I’m sure NYC
After we had our first child we went to some institutions to fill required papers. In the waiting area, there were informational posters everywhere to tell people to not get pregnant too early. One read:
A child costs you 160.000 € until its 18th birthdayit’s? Maybe its? Or their?
Probably neither, seeing as it was most likely not written in English but OP translated it for your benefit.
y’all understand why they want conservative christians to have a ton of babies, right? the only reason that american conservatives have become as atrocious as they are is that they have the big, dumb numbers. they need another generation of idiots - forcefully uneducated - to continue their legacy of shit.
and of course to be wage slaves
sure, if you need to throw some 4chan jaron into the jumbo that’s fine.
The irony is that these conservatives often can’t afford large families without welfare, the exact things Republicans are cutting. Those give a lot more than onetime 5k payments.
They have to ensure that the large families are also poor, thus flooding the armed forces with young people in need of a paycheck with no alternatives.
But the orange leader said that tariffs will pay for child care
“What could a childcare cost, ten dollars?”
In Canada, yes.
As of February 2025, eight provinces and territories are delivering regulated early learning and child care for an average of $10-a-day or less, and all other jurisdictions have reduced parent fees by at least 50%.l
Wow way to rub THAT in XD
Just kidding, I love that for y’all. Every parent should have that (or better!)
That’s the goal. Maybe I’m in an exceptional area, but I’m not aware of any parents who are effectively paying $10/day unless their income is low enough to trigger additional benefits.
Still HUGE improvement over the last few years though. I think we had an option for 18$/day if we packed our kid a lunch. Our daycare would feed them for an additional 3$/day. I think overall average care costs have practically halved in the last few years so even if it’s not perfectly universal and perfectly $10, it’s HELLA better. Strong improvement. Honestly a MAJOR factor in trying to figure out the feasibility of having more kids for us.
My friends are paying $1400 a month, I don’t think this is working in Ontario.
Ontario has been extremely stingy on paying out their share of the fees (Program is part funded by federal, rest by provincial), leading to most daycare centres still not registering for the full reduction to $10/day. But most are still reducing their prices from what they were at previously.
Sadly, I could see this convincing people desperate enough for cash…
Those poor fucking kids.
I saw ads before Christmas incentivizing people to refinance car loans and get cash in hand :<
Lmao anyone who thinks this is a lot of money has clearly never raised a child in the recent past. (Let’s say 10-15 years? idk)
$5k is gone, like that
I wonder how much woke stuff we can get for the purpose of making babies.
Mandated paid maternity leave?
Child tax credit?
Maybe some universal medical coverage for the mothers and children?
What are you, a socialist?
Only $40k?
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