South Korea is running out of children – and this country could be next

Every spring, when warm rays of sunshine herald the start of South Korea’s baking summer, fountains across Seoul’s central Gwanghwamun plaza suddenly burst into life, sending cooling jets of water into the air.

In any other city in the world, such an inviting sight would tempt young children to charge through the spray. But in the heart of the Korean capital, shouts of childlike delight are rare.

Public spaces, including the many beautiful parks crisscrossing Seoul, are invariably the abode of the elderly, who gather in groups to meander, or gossip on benches while sharing fruit and kimbap (seaweed rice rolls).

Playgrounds are geared towards older generations, with workout stations and exercise machines replacing swings and slides. Children’s prams rarely pass by. When they do, they’re more likely to be transporting a groomed dog wearing a tailored coat and hair bow.

For a first-time visitor to Korea, there is a gnawing feeling that something is missing. Then it finally dawns – the children.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, and it continues to plummet, reaching new record-breaking troughs every year.

The latest figures show it fell by another 8 per cent in 2023 to 0.72, which is the number of children a woman is expected to have in her lifetime.

The trend presents such grim prospects for the economy, social welfare system and national security it has been declared a “national emergency” by Yoon Suk Yeol, the president.

Experts such as Ayo Wahlberg, a professor in the anthropology department at the University of Copenhagen, point to the concept of “fertility exhaustion”, which should sound alarm bells, not only for South Korea, but in the rest of the developed world, where birth rates are also slowing. In May, for instance, the Pope hit the headlines by calling for long-term policies to halt Italy’s declining birth rate, which echo declines in the rest of Europe: birth rates in both Italy and the UK are at a record low.

“This is really a global phenomenon where South Korea seems to be an intensified version of what is happening around the world,” says Wahlberg.

“It’s fair to say that looking at countries that have entered the so-called ultra-low fertility phase will provide us with an indication of things to come.”

For South Korea’s kindergarten teachers, the national dearth of children is already painfully evident and impacting their career prospects.

The country’s record-low birth rates are projected to cause the closure of roughly one-third of daycare centres and kindergartens by 2028, a report by the Korea Institute of Child Care and Education warned in January.

This would mean the number of these institutions slipping from 39,053 in 2022 to just 26,637 in 2028, with 12,416 at risk of shutting down.

“Some childcare teachers are preparing for qualifications related to senior care,” reveals “Evelyn”, a kindergarten teacher, who did not wish to give her real name due to the sensitivity of the matter.

Evelyn has seen enrolment numbers dive at the municipal kindergarten for one to five-year-olds in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi province, south of Seoul, where she has worked since 2022.

“The student capacity is about 125 children, but currently, we only have 68 children enrolled,” she says. “The decrease in the number of children affects our financial support from the government, leading to budget cuts.”

“Additionally, the decrease in the number of children has impacted the quality of care provided, as there are fewer support staff available. There has been a reduction in the number of classes, leading to resignations among teachers.”

It’s a situation that London could soon find itself in. In Britain, nurseries are already closing due to government underfunding; babies are also quickly becoming a “luxury item”, says Joeli Brearley, the chief executive and founder of mothers charity Pregnant Then Screwed. “We’re running out of them. It is no surprise to us that fertility rates have hit the floor. We have one of the most expensive childcare sectors in the world, so much so that for three quarters of mothers, it no longer makes financial sense to work. With childcare fees outstripping the cost of housing for more than two thirds of families, almost half of families are borrowing money to pay their childcare bills.”

Among 18 to 34-year-olds, 22 per cent said they were deferring, having fewer or even abandoning their plans for children owing to the cost of living, according to a new financial resilience report by Royal London. That includes the likes of Izzy Brantingham and Cameron Clark, who are both 26 and live in south London. Their concerns about childcare costs were an influential factor when considering parenthood.

“People in our generation have lots of things they want to ‘tick off’ before they tie themselves down with kids,” says Brantingham, a PR professional. “Having children means that holidays, buying a house or moving abroad are all out of the question because of the cost of childcare.”

“I would also be very worried about taking a year off for maternity and then coming back to work and being behind the rest of the people who started at the same time as me,” she adds. “Many people are also finding their partners and settling down later now, so kids aren’t even a question until early 30s for most.”

“I wouldn’t even think about it until the age of 30 because of the opportunities women now have to grow their careers,” adds Jessica Carrick, 26, who works in the wellness industry and lives with her partner Mark, an accountant, in east London. “I don’t have family around for childcare support, so you are very much alone in raising a child. And then there is the cost of living crisis… I can’t even afford to look after myself day-to-day, so having to feed a child and pay for childcare is not doable at the moment.”

‘The odds are stacked against women’

For a country in the developed world to increase or maintain its population it needs a birth rate of 2.1 children per woman on average. This is known as the “replacement rate”.

In England and Wales, the average birth rate declined to 1.49 children per woman in 2022, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics. With its birth rate of just 0.72 children per woman, South Korea’s fertility rate is so critically low that experts predict the population will have halved by the year 2100.

But the impact will be felt much sooner. A report in May by the Korean Peninsula Population Institute for the Future said the economically active population, aged 15 to 64, is anticipated to plunge by nearly 10 million by 2044.

This decline “will damage consumption, leading to the collapse of the domestic market. It will also increase the burden of supporting the senior population, leading to an economic slowdown and prolonged low growth,” the institute said.

The shrinking workforce in relation to the number of pensioners means ageing societies suffer from a smaller tax base to fund care of the elderly. More pensioners for each person of working age necessitates higher taxes or lower spending per pensioner or, most likely, a combination of the two.

A smaller population would also shrink the pool qualified to take part in South Korea’s mandatory military service, weakening its defence capabilities in a region that sees regular threats from nuclear-armed North Korea and a potential flashpoint over the Taiwan Strait.

The dire projections have triggered panic in successive governments, which for nearly 20 years have poured more than £220 billion into solving the problem, offering financial incentives, from baby bonuses to housing support.

Recently there has been a cascade of ever more creative solutions.

In Seoul, where the birth rate has sunk to 0.55, the city authorities have offered subsidised egg-freezing procedures for hundreds of women, and senior politicians have suggested hiring foreign nannies at below the minimum wage.

The government has pledged to scrap “killer questions” from intensely competitive university entrance exams to crack down on private school cartels and reduce the exorbitant cost of education. And it has launched a £78.8 billion high-speed rail project to slash commuting times.

“With a two-hour commute on the way home, for example, how can anyone make time for babies? The idea is to give people more leisure time after work,” said Park Sang-woo, the land minister, announcing the Great Train eXpress (GTX) to Seoul’s outlying areas.

President Yoon personally inaugurated a section of the first line, which will cut the journey time from Suseo, southern Seoul, to the township of Dongtan from 80 to 19 minutes.

Just weeks later, in early May, he announced the creation of a new cabinet-level “low-birth response planning ministry” to co-ordinate education, labour and welfare policies.

And yet nothing, after years of inducements, appears to be turning the tide.

“Financial incentives help but they are not the full story,” says Wahlberg.

“Work pressure, combined with living pressure and living costs, is a driving factor. East Asia is renowned for its work culture. In China, they call it 996 – from 9am to 9pm, six days a week,” he says.

“Number two is the discrimination of women,” he adds. “If there is some kind of a social contract, if women read the small print, the odds are stacked against them.”

This is especially true in South Korea, where women are the most highly educated of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries but experience the worst gender pay gap.

At home, women are still expected to carry the weight of childcare, housework and catering to the needs of their in-laws, decreasing their chances to return to work. Those who do go back often find themselves overlooked for promotions as they struggle to balance their career and home life.

Faced with such a binary choice, more women, especially those who have strived for years through Korea’s tough education system, are choosing to embrace a child-free life and stick with their career path.

Khim Jangsu, and Lee Hyo-jin, both now 40, made a firm decision eight years into their marriage to remain a so-called dink (double income, no kids) couple.

Ms Lee, a freelance social media influencer, initially wanted to have children but calculated it would mean giving up her job and their hard-won financial freedom.

Mr Kihm, an IT worker at an insurance company, says he supported his wife as “in Korea, raising a child puts a massive burden on women”.

Cultural change, especially in the private sector, is needed to reverse the birth rate crisis, he says.

“Many corporations have a regulation saying men can use paternity leave, but the actual atmosphere is very different. They would be asking ‘Why do you need to use that?’,” he says.

Under Korean law, both parents are entitled to a year’s leave during the first eight years of their child’s life, but few men take this opportunity. In 2022, only 7 per cent of new fathers took time off, compared to 70 per cent of mothers.

When women returned to work after maternity leave, they often found themselves forced into more junior positions or facing pressure to put in long hours to earn a promotion, says Kihm.

For Lee, another strong disincentive to having children is the fiercely competitive education system she hated as a child.

She grew up in Gangnam, one of Seoul’s most status-conscious neighbourhoods, and graduated from a foreign language high school geared to groom students to apply for the best universities.

“I felt like I was at the centre of the competition itself,” she says. “Children who were freshmen in my high school had already studied the curriculum for senior year.”

To do so, they would have spent hours at private after-school lessons in crammer schools known as hagwons. Close to eight in 10 pupils in Korea have some sort of private tuition, as parents scramble to give their children an advantage in the cutthroat fight for top university places.

“I do not have happy memories about my high school days. From 8am until 10pm I was in school studying, and even after 10pm we would all go to hagwons,” says Kihm.

The pressure parents face to ensure their children have a headstart in life makes Korea one of the most expensive countries in the world to raise a family.

In 2022, families spent a record 26 trillion won (£156.5 million) on private education, setting children as young as four on the path to passing the gruelling suneung – an infamous eight-hour college entrance exam.

“We have been through all that,” says Lee, adding she doesn’t want to face it again with children.

The eye-watering cost of education comes on top of the battle to find affordable housing. Seoul faces a housing shortage despite its population decline, and young people struggle with soaring prices and alarming levels of household debts.

“I think a lot of married couples now are afraid because having a child carries great responsibility. One main reason is that the housing prices are crazy,” says Kim Yoon-ji, 37, who runs a small restaurant in Seoul’s Myeong-dong district with his wife, Min Jaeki, 38.

“Mindsets have changed a lot. You have to make big sacrifices when raising a child. People would rather spend that time and money on themselves rather than raising a child,” he says.

The couple have a son, Kyeungdoo, eight. “One of the best things I have ever done in my life was to get married and have Kyeungdoo. It’s brought me much happiness,” says Min.

But she admits that while she previously wanted four children, after the first she realised it would require giving up work to have any more.

The flexible schedule of running their own business offers more leeway for raising a child, but they still believe the government should offer better tax cuts and a more robust childcare support system for young parents.

Public preschools appear to be locked in a vicious cycle of forced closures due to falling birth rates, which in turn makes educational costs more prohibitive for prospective parents.

“Public preschools are subsidised so that it barely costs anything, but the problem is that the public ones are hard to get into, so a lot of parents are forced to send children to costly private preschools,” says Min.

But in her view, some of the most profoundly negative influences on birth rates is the judgmentalism within Korean society, competition between parents, and the expectation that couples should have reached certain status symbol milestones, such as owning a house and a car, before having children.

“People are way too self-conscious about how other people view them because they are constantly judging each other,” she says.

The couple are among a small minority of parents who have decided to shun the educational rat race to seal a place at a prestigious university. They say they would not send Kyeungdoo to extra tuition classes unless he chose to do so himself.

“We don’t really care what other parents think about us, as long as our family is happy,” says Kim.

But in Korea’s high-pressure society, few are willing to take such an unconventional stand.

Many would rather opt out of family life altogether, even as the country hurtles towards demographic disaster.

“This very low fertility rate is really a symptom of so many institutional, social, economic malfunctions, so many different problems within society,” says Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor of social science and public policy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Within two generations, South Korea has transformed itself from an impoverished dictatorship in the mid-20th century into a global economic powerhouse.

But not without a societal cost.

“Everything was focused on economic growth and development, and so all of the investments of the state were put into health and education,” says Prof Gietel-Basten.

“Then supporting the family, things like gender equality… were an afterthought. This was not even considered until much later, maybe even too late. Economic change has been much faster than cultural changes,” he adds.

“I think what we can learn is that if you just chase growth, more than anything, and you forget about people, you forget about families and you don’t value the contribution that families make to society.”

The question hanging over Korea now is whether its severe birth rate decline can be reversed?

In the face of such an issue, a government has two main avenues it can pursue. It can keep its population healthier and in work for longer, or have large-scale immigration.

In December, Han Dong-hoon, the country’s justice minister, warned it needed to embrace immigration or face “extinction”.

Han said the government no longer had the luxury of delaying crucial decisions on the issue, calling for the rapid creation of a new government agency to oversee immigration policies.

But any radical overhaul of immigration policy in Korea’s relatively ethnically homogenous society would likely meet stiff public resistance and would not happen overnight.

Whatever measures the government takes now to tackle the birth rate crisis would need decades to bear fruit, says Wahlberg.

“That means we need to prepare for the future that awaits and that is absolutely one with an ageing population, more chronic conditions, care needs and less young people, unless you also have a migration policy around that,” he says.

“It’s a really complex situation. In a way, maybe preparation rather than mitigation is the right idea – prepare for a kind of inevitability that has snuck into South Korea.”

Additional reporting by Alex Barton