Young Chinese Parents Don’t Want to Have A Second Child
Between COVID lockdowns forcing couples to be stuck at home, and new policies allowing families to have 2 children, government officials and demographers hoped there would be a baby boom this year. But preliminary data shows that the opposite actually happened.
According to China’s Ministry of Public Security, the number of newborns in 2020 was 10M, which was 4.6M fewer than in 2019 and between 5-6 million fewer than 2018.
Recently Liang Jianzhang (梁建章), Chairman of the Board at China’s largest online travel agency Ctrip (also known as Trip), said that although 2020 has the lowest number of births that China has seen in the past several decades, it might be the year with the highest number of births over the next 10 years.
Liang also pointed out that unless the government actively encourages people to give birth and those policies are really attractive to parents, his prediction will definitely become true.
To encourage women to give birth, officials are thinking about all kinds of policies, such as giving discounts when buying new houses, and in Shanghai and other cities, local governments are thinking about giving paternity leave for fathers.
But none of these incentives seem to be good enough. Why is that?
Chinese Couples Don’t Have Time, Energy, or Money for Two Children
Because of high housing prices, busy, demanding careers and the expectation of endless extracurricular classes for children, many couples don’t have the courage and energy to give birth to a second baby.
In fact, an online poll involving nearly 57,000 Weibo users, Sina Finance found that more than 75% of the respondents cited “high living costs” as the primary reason for their decisions to not have babies.
Recently, Global E-businessmen (天下商网) interviewed 4 post-80s and post-90s women from a mix of first, second and third tier cities, about their reasons for not having a second baby. Here are some of the key insights:
Yang Zhilan
- Age: 36
- Location: Beijing
- Industry: Media
“We have a home in the coveted Dongcheng school district. I have a great job that people look up to – we have absolutely no interest in having a second child.”
Insights:
- Some people would think being the only child in the family, s/he must be lonely. But they are wrong. My husband and my friends and I were only children and we weren’t lonely, we felt free and happy. And now, with advanced technology, children’s lives are full of joy.
- Located in the first or second tier cities, you are surrounded by excellent people. Your children must be excellent too. Nowadays parents aren’t signing their kids up for ping pong, they’re signing them up for horseback riding lessons. If parents don’t grasp the unique learning opportunities and sign their children up for these types of extracurricular activities, it will be no different than if they stay in lower tier cities.
- School district apartments are really hard to get. First, their quantity is limited, and second, they are expensive. In Beijing, one square meter in a good school district can cost 100k RMB.
- For us and younger generations, the development of science and technology and the improvement of social welfare systems will alleviate the pains of society. The country does not need to pin all its hopes on the bellies of women. In addition to taking care of our families, taking care of our children, developing the next generation of highly educated citizens, we must also deserve to have our own lives.
Mrs. Li
- Age: 31
- Location: Hangzhou
- Industry: Internet
- Child: 3 year old son
“Our family’s annual income is over 1 million RMB, yet in order to take care of my son and invest in his education, I haven’t bought a bag that costs more than 1k RMB in over two years.”
Insights:
- Before I used to think having a child meant there was just another mouth to feed. I didn’t realize all the additional costs. Once you have a child, it’s like a flash flood, the expenses are out of control. I never actually sat down and calculated it, but then one day another mother with the same age child said to me that, between travel extracurricular activities, they spent about 200K RMB a year on their child. I was shocked, so I went home and added up our expenses:
Early education classes：55,000 RMB
Swimming class：12,000 RMB
Lego Class：4,200 RMB
Painting Class：5,200 RMB
English Class：5,200 RMB
Our child is 3 years old and we’re already spending over 80K RMB a year on him.
- We must consider very carefully before planning vacations. We’re already working hard to find a balance between controlling family expenses while making sure our child is keeping up with the children around him.
- I haven’t bought a bag that costs more than 1k RMB in over two years. And my husband, who used to care a lot about his looks, now has a closet full of Uniqlo. Now his biggest expenses are shampoos and hair growth products.
Mrs. Zhang
- Age: 33
- Location: Shijiazhuang
- Industry: Commercial Real Estate
“My child is only in 2nd grade, and we’ve already spent over 300K RMB on extracurricular classes, but I feel the money was well-spent.”
Insights:
- Shijiazhuang is a strange city. We’re near Beijing and Tianjin, but our economy is behind these areas and we don’t tend to attract top talents, but we are actually one of the areas in the country where many people have decided to have a second child. When the laws started changing in 2015, I saw many people around me who were eager to try and have a second child. So our birth rates have actually been much higher than many cities larger than ours. For example, in 2019, Shijiazhuang’s birth rate was over two times higher than Harbin’s, and exceeded that of both Wuhan and Hangzhou.
- Even though I live in this type of environment, I don’t want to have another child, it’s just too tiring and expensive. The biggest expense is education. My child is in second grade and we have already spent over 300K RMB on our child’s education. Our salaries aren’t high, so grandparents on both sides of the family also pitch in. That’s the only way we could be spending this much.
- Some people question – then why do you have your child take so many classes? But I think these classes have actually been very beneficial. Before, our child was very shy, now she loudly speaks up in class, and is even able to introduce herself in English. Her personality has really changed. This gives me a big sense of achievement and makes me feel like these classes were worthwhile. But if you want me to have another child and do it all over again, you could beat me and I still wouldn’t do it.
Ping Ping
- Age: 34
- Location: A county in Changzhou, Jiangsu
- Industry: Runs an after school childcare & education center
“Needing to pay for over 20K RMB worth of educational classes every year forced me to open my own after school child care business to earn enough money.”
Insights:
- Living in a small county, I don’t have to worry about buying a house in a good school district, but there are still a lot of costs to raise a child, especially education. One semester of preschool was over 3,000 RMB, and this was just an average public preschool. If it was a private preschool it could have been over 10k RMB a semester.
- Currently our child takes basketball and piano classes. Those are each around 5,000 RMB a year, not counting all the extra costs for recitals, tests, etc. Everything added together it ends up being around 20K per year for extracurriculars. This may not seem like a lot, but for a family in a more rural area that is not a small number.
- In 2018, I rented a small commercial space near the schools and opened an after school child care and tutoring center. Nowadays, teachers will have online chat groups with all the parents and every day they will assign a lot of tasks for the parents to help the children complete, but many parents don’t have the ability to. Whether it is that their work is too busy, they don’t have the knowledge, maybe they have another child to take care of and it’s too noisy at home for the child to concentrate – whatever the reason, they will send their children to my center after school and every night for 3 hours they will have teachers help them finish their homework.
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