2023-06-25 16:12:45
Controversy is increasing in South Korea, which is considered the country with the lowest fertility rate in the world, regarding “prohibited areas for children”, as many people reject them, especially parents, while others support them, and contradictions emerge regarding their usefulness and adverse results to the country’s endeavor towards raising the fertility rate.
For a country that has spent huge amounts of money trying to encourage women to have more children, the idea of banning children from going to places like cafes and restaurants may seem counterproductive and a bit counterproductive, according to a lengthy report published by the Network.CNN“, Saturday.
In South Korea, “children’s restricted areas” have been gaining popularity in recent years. Hundreds of them have been set up across the country, with the aim of “ensuring disturbance-free environments for adults”.
There are nearly 80 such areas on the holiday island of Jeju alone, according to a local think tank, and more than 400 in the rest of the country, according to activist groups.
However, doubts are emerging about the feasibility of banning children from many places, amid concerns about the country’s growing demographic problems.
In addition to the lowest birth rate in the world, South Korea has a high aging rate, as do the rest of the countries that suffer from high rates of aging, and this in turn creates several problems related to how to finance pensions and health care for a growing group of retirees, in light of tax income It results in a slowly fading class of workers.
South Korea’s problem is more acute than most countries. Last year, its fertility rate fell to a record low of 0.78, which is less than half the rate of 2.1 needed to stabilize the population, and far less than the fertility rate of Japan (1.3), which is currently one of the most aging countries in the world.
And at the beginning of this June, the Japanese Ministry of Health said that the birth rate fell for the seventh consecutive year in 2022 to a record level, which sheds light on a demographic crisis, with a shrinking population and a rapid rise in the proportion of the elderly.
The fertility rate, which is the average number of children a woman gives birth to in her lifetime, was 1.2565, compared to a previous low of 1.2601 in 2005, far below the rate of 2.07 considered necessary to maintain population stability.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has made halting the declining birth rate a top priority, and his government plans to allocate 3.5 trillion yen ($25 billion) annually for childcare and other measures to support parents despite high debt levels.
“The number of young adults is going to start to decline dramatically in the next decade,” he said this week while visiting a day care center. “The time period until then is our last chance to reverse the decline in births.”
The Corona pandemic exacerbated the demographic challenges in Japan, as the decline in the number of marriages in the past few years contributed to a decrease in the number of births, and the pandemic was one of the reasons for the increase in deaths.
And since young South Koreans are already facing various problems, such as high housing costs, long working times and increasing economic pressures, critics of these areas say that “the last thing the country needs is something else to make them think twice about starting a family,” according to CNN.
They noted that the government should know this, especially as it has spent more than $200 billion over the past 16 years trying to encourage more people to have children. Critics suggest that rather than spending more money, work is needed to change society’s attitudes towards young people.
Opinion polls indicate that the majority of South Koreans support no-go areas for children, and changing these mentalities will not be easy, according to CNN.
“Families with children (…) feel resentful if they go to places and tell them that their children are not allowed to enter,” says Bonnie Tilland, a university lecturer specializing in South Korean culture. Others argue that the establishment of child exclusion zones is unjustified, discriminatory on the basis of age, contravenes the Korean constitution, and violates the right to equality.
It is widely believed that South Korea’s embrace of child-free zones dates back to an incident in 2012, when a child was accidentally burned with hot broth.
The incident caused an uproar online at the time, after the child’s mother made a series of posts on social media attacking the restaurant.
Initially, there was a lot of public sympathy for the mother as this case seemed to echo other incidents in which institutions have been forced to pay compensation following accidents involving children.
But the public’s mood began to change after CCTV footage emerged of the boy running moments before the accident, Teeland said. And many began to blame the mother for not curbing her child’s behavior.
“Koreans in their 20s and 30s, in particular, tend to nurture personal spaces and are less tolerant of noisy children in their midst and noisy seniors,” says Teeland.
She noted that such mentalities need to be redirected if the country is to control its population problems, and “reflect a disturbing intolerance of anyone in public who is different from them.”
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