In the U.S., Mother’s Day is celebrated annually on the second Sunday in May. This year it is on May 14. In Korea, May 8 is Parents’ Day. It is tradition to express your gratitude with a carnation and gift.

Giving birth to a life, raising it, and helping the child grow as an independent individual is an indescribably difficult and incredible process. Buying maternity clothes, waking up with the sound of babies crying at the top of their lungs every 2-3 hours, and explaining to children what they are curious about are absolutely tough.

Korea is infamous for its low fertility rate. In 2022, Statistics Korea announced that the average number of children a South Korean woman will have in her lifetime is just 0.78. This broke its previous record in 2021, which was 0.81.

CNN analyzed Korea’s low fertility rate for three big reasons. First, the social atmosphere does not accept various kinds of families such as single parents, same-sex couples, or unwed couples. Lee Jin-song, who has written books about the trend of young people choosing not to get married or have a baby, pointed out through CNN that non-traditional partnerships and people who have disabilities, diseases, or poor reproductive health, are excluded from society and face discrimination.

Lee also highlighted the pressures of having children on women in a patriarchal society that is slow to evolve. “Marriage, childbirth, and childcare require too much sacrifice for women in a patriarchal society especially over the past decade. So, they are beginning to explore the possibility of being able to live well without getting married.”

Lastly, business culture does not support child-rearing. In Korea, there is a “team building” culture after hours even though the work is over. People usually have dinner and drink together to bond peer ties, but this is more like an extension of work. It is implicitly necessary, which is frowned upon to miss, so it is remaining as coercion.

Lee Se-Eun, a woman who used to work in a brokerage firm before launching her own start-up, has not worked in seven years and feels there was no option to continue her career as she did not want to put her boys in childcare. “Raising a child is a very valuable, meaningful, and very good thing from a personal point of view, but sometimes it feels like it doesn’t get valued in society,” she said.

During a visit to a nursery in September, Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol admitted that more than $200 billion has been spent trying to boost the population over the past 16 years. However, this is just a repeat of what the previous government did, and it has not been effective. Many experts believe the current throw-money-at-it approach is too one-dimensional and that what is needed instead is continuing support throughout the child’s life.

There are lots of problems government have to resolve such as expanding public childcare facilities, women’s career break, and excessive private education costs. Not only this, according to a survey conducted by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs in June last year on the awareness of pregnancy and childbirth policies of 2,000 men and women aged 20 to 44, most of them were less than 30%. In order for the policies to work, people should be aware of them at the stage of planning a child.

Northern Europe countries enforce family policies and social policies that are including gender equality, child development, and demographic changes, not simply focusing on raising the fertility rate.

The fertility rate in the U.S. has been dropping since the Great Recession of 2008. But as stated by CNN, a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that about 50,000 more babies were born in the U.S. in 2021 than in 2020, marking the first major reversal of the downward trend. Experts think probably the pandemic influenced it in more ways than one.

“For people who were able to work from home and experience the pandemic as a time of more financial stability, that might have been a good time to have children without sort of the challenges of commuting or being in the office,” said Sarah Hayford, director of The Ohio State University’s Institute for Population Research.

BBC designated that a declining population could put a country under immense strain. Apart from increased pressure on public spending as demand for healthcare systems and pensions rises, a declining youth population also leads to labor shortages that impact the economy.

I saw the obstetrics and gynecology hospital, which had been in place for a long time, has been changed into a welfare center for the elderly. Also, I heard some elementary schools that my friends graduated from have been closed because of a lack of students. Trot, which is a popular music genre among seniors in Korea, is taking over all the TV channels these days. It is because young people who mostly consume the K-POP genre moved to other platforms like YouTube. Changes in social age groups are visible.

There is no future in a world where children have disappeared. Respect all the parents in the world, and I would like to take this opportunity to thank my beloved parents.

Juri Kim is an international intern from Korea.