A special report on ageing populations: Suffer the little children

The Economist:

IN GERMANY a mother who neglects her children is known as a Rabenmutter (raven's mother). Many older Germans slap that label on women with small children who go out to work. Young women in Germany, as elsewhere, are torn. They enjoy their jobs but find it hard to combine them with having a family, for a host of practical reasons such as school hours and lack of child care as well as public disapproval. Faced with that dilemma, some give up work. Others give up having children. About a quarter of the current generation of German women in their 40s have remained childless. The country's fertility rate (the number of children a woman can expect to have in her lifetime) is now a rock-bottom 1.3--the same as in Japan and Italy, where similar attitudes prevail (see chart 3). The chancellor, Angela Merkel, has acknowledged that her country needs to be more child-friendly.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 28, 2009 1:32 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas