Solved problem in Scandinavia. I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies. And a big part of the reason is that things like child care, parental leave (paid and unpaid) are taken care of. So, you see a lot of women have kids and then resume their career a year or so later. In some extreme cases it can be longer. When I started there, our secretary came back from nine (!) years of a mix of paid and unpaid leave after having three kids.

However, what I noticed in Finland was a relatively high proportion of women in tech and leadership roles. That's what happens when people can combine a career and a family instead of having to choose. Most women are basically full time employed.

The Netherlands where I'm from has a lot less of this. Result: a lot of women are working part time (something that is relatively rare in other countries) so they can take care of their kids or pausing their career entirely for until their kids are old enough to go to school. Labor participation of women is lower and working part time means the career perspectives are also a bit limited. Companies don't put part time people in important roles. And of course it means less money as well. Child care is expensive to the point that working barely covers that cost. So, many women just quit their jobs. That's a form of hidden unemployment. It's not counted in the statistics but it has a cost.

I currently live in Germany which has a bit better system going more towards the Scandinavian direction. People moan a lot about availability of child care but it is pretty affordable and mostly people seem to manage to get some in the end. Likewise, parental leave is a bit more generous.

The demographics in a lot of places are not great. Populations are shrinking. And that's also going to have an economic impact. There are two ways to fix that: make it more affordable for people to have kids or just get a lot of immigrants. The irony is that the same people blocking the first are also not that keen on the latter happening.

>> I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies

According to the most recent data from the United Nations Population Fund, Finland has a birth rate of 1.4 which is lower than both Germany (1.5) and the Netherlands (1.6). Sweden is only slightly higher at 1.7, which is the same as the U.S.

> It's a good thing to take care your own children

If you want to, yes.

If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing

There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to

The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else.

I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.

It's a bad thing taking care over your children does not count as GDP.

And how to sustain themselves during the time they can't work, have to take care of the children, and might also become ill during that period.