Not too long ago, Finland was the model for how a wealthy, egalitarian culture could be pro-family and thus have a lot of babies.
“Finnish baby boxes” were held up as a synecdoche of how a social democracy supports mothers and thus gets a higher birthrate.
Finland is home to “world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare,” as a new article in the Financial Times lays out.
But this new look at Finland is in the context of the country’s plummeting birthrate.
From 2000 to 2010, Finland’s birthrate was climbing and went from 1.7 babies per woman to 1.9. Since then, it has collapsed, down to 1.27, according to the Financial Times. The United States has also seen a birthrate collapse in that period, but it’s still above 1.6.
Feminist, egalitarian Finland has converged on birthrates with Italy and Poland, which for 20 years were held up as the conservative, traditionalistic, patriarchal society with really low birthrates.
Feminism and “social democracy” were supposed to make a society happy and fecund. What’s happened?
Anna Rotkirch, research director at the Family Federation of Finland’s Population Research Institute, spoke about this riddle to the Financial Times:
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on,” she said. “The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
In the U.S., we are just starting to wrestle with the problem of sub-replacement birthrates that keep falling. Most of the answers from commentators and politicians involve child subsidies — specifically government-funded or government-run day care.
“When you work with politicians, you always see the same things,” Rotkirch commented. “‘Oh yes, we should have one month’s more paternity leave!’ All the scholars are like: You should, but it won’t change anything.”
The problem causing our baby bust is a problem of culture and values. Rotkirch noted one interesting aspect of the Finnish culture, as paraphrased by the Financial Times: “Now starting a family means sacrificing independence.”
This points us toward the key issue here. The super-individualistic culture of Europe and the U.S. is not a fitting habitat for family formation. Also, a society that values career above all else is not a place where families will bloom.
Demographers Laurie DeRose and Lyman Stone did a study a couple of years ago looking at the “workism” of Nordic countries compared to their “familism” — how much did the populations of various countries value work versus family?
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Here’s what they found: “Denmark, the only Nordic country with a decrease in work importance, also had the smallest decline in fertility over the period measured. Finland, meanwhile, had the biggest rise in work importance, along with the largest fertility decline.”
Maybe the pro-family subsidies in Finland made it easier for parents to work, but subsidizing day care mostly served to subsidize work — which in turn made the Finnish people more workist and less familist. The Finns didn’t necessarily start working longer hours, but it seems they did start structuring their lives around their careers, which meant they were intolerant of attachments that could drag them away from career optimization.