Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.
I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?
That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.
There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.
I'm glad they have the option, but some evidence is needed that slaving away in a 3rd world factory actually makes you better off than having a man provide for you in exchange for child bearing. I suppose maybe it's better to be the slave of some random boss (who maybe also uses sexual assault and other coercion) than the slave of some man you or your family has picked, but who knows.
------ re: throttling "children" -----------
The person I responded to said "young women" not "children."
Well I wouldn't prefer children are slaving in a finger or limb slicing factory nor bearing children, but here we are. I'm guessing in rural Nigeria a 15,16,17 year old is making adult decisions either due to circumstances, being forced, or economics. We can't facially say the factory is the best or better one vs marriage, although I'm sure there are instances where it is.
It's wild how much Western people in topics like this use a mindset of complete black-and-white thinking, and an assumption that everywhere should be exactly like us - to hear these people talk, in sub-Saharan Africa, the age of majority should be exactly 18 like us, marriage should be strictly an individual decision undertaken purely for romantic love like us, women should consider working outside the home as their most important activity in life like us, etc.
I don't understand where people get so much confidence that their own particular culture has correctly solved every question of how life should be lived, as though it's a math problem that can be checked.
Now, I'm not saying 10-year-olds should be sold to the highest bidder and never be allowed to leave the neighborhood. But describing a 16-year-old having an arranged marriage in a way that is traditional in her culture as a "child bride" with heavy doses of sneering judgment is being dishonest.
I agree that some arranged marriages are poor matches. Some certainly have a power imbalance which is a bad thing if it leads to abuse or domination. But:
1. Let's not pretend that young people, even in our culture that values their autonomy, don't make their own terrible decisions too. Look at the divorce rate and the rates of reported DV in the West.
2. The Western way ("love marriage" + "women must work or the family will be in poverty") has led to most Western countries being on a downward spiral to literal extinction, so arguably we can't claim we've solved anything. We've just made a different tradeoff: More perceived freedom for women ("You're free to work any job as long as it's outside the home, for money, so your family can afford the high rent") in exchange for population collapse and kids being mostly raised by strangers. I'm not even arguing whether that tradeoff is worth it... I'm sure some families are happier 'our way'. but I bet others are more miserable.
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.
I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
This subthread has people using "improve" to mean "increase" and "improve" to mean "decrease". Maybe you guys should stop talking past each other and converge on replacement rate?
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.
I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], of Forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented or stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.
So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.
A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.
What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.
But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.
I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.
Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
This is misleading. Education is not the panacea. I am saying it's a "whole of family" approach. Governments need to also provide more support to families. This is clear to any parent.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
"Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body."
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
So, the solution is to... not provide education? The logic doesn't make sense. You say this yourself: "I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be"
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
They've tried this in several countries, and it's never resulted in birth rate near replacement. And it'd be even lower if they didn't have immigrants from more family-oriented countries.
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
What if you're wrong? What if, all else being as it is but with "lotsa child support programs and credits" and education, on average people who could give birth decide they're not keen and we do not hit replacement reproduction rates?
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If the population halves each generation the biggest problem is total societal collapse. The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age and the infrastructure cannot be maintained by a dramatically dropping population: even with AI and robots, roads don't fix themselves and train tracks don't get fixed by robots. We will not even have enough doctors and nurses to care for the seniors and no economy to make retirement possible (money will be worth their value in paper as there will be no people to provide services and goods for it).
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
Yeah but in poor/developing countries raising birth rates are not something they're looking for but the opposite, (the most important thing is reducing teenage pregnancy). I lived in Colombia and they had programs where they have free antibcoceptives, free antibcoceptives implants that last a few years, like a lot of effort is spent in preventing birth rates, since a lot of people without the resources have a lot of kids. I don't think the problem of birth rates is related to financial reasons when in poor countries you see people with multiple kids without being able to afford It. I know personally people that have 10kids.
Birthrates at or below replacement rate are ultimately a good thing as we improve automation and AI. Infinite population growth is not a realistic model. We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
> We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
Roger Freeman, then advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1970, said "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat" [7], leading to Reagan unwinding the free college of the UC system and this was a progenitor to the current student debt crisis.
But beyond college education, there's also an attack on education at K-12 levels. Homeschooling and a lack of sex education contribute to perpetuating abuse and trapping children (primarily girls) in this cycle.
Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
This is not a one-off study. There is a long record of similar studies showing that the number of years of education a girl receives delays marriage, and while longer schooling delays marriage longer, it is not just because girls are busy. Schools inherently provide female social support, and education provides increased self-reliance.
This is pretty easy to reason through: if a girl knows nothing about the world, a safe place for her to be is with someone who knows more. If a girl knows how to function in the world on par with a boy/man, or at least has visibility into a future where she can, there is no longer that fear/dependence cycle locked in.
eg How Much Education Is Needed to Delay Women's Age at Marriage and First Pregnancy? https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/...
The power of education to end child marriage - UNICEF DATA https://data.unicef.org/resources/child-marriage-and-educati...
Indeed, we know this, "educate girls to fix society", already for many years. The other "societal fix we know for year to work" is reducing economic inequality.
https://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson_how_economic_ine...
I think so. These girls still live with their family, it’s not like they’re in some cordoned off area where marriage if forbidden. It’s just a few hours of school every weekday.
Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
I think you may be reaching a bit for the "it's not this it's that" when it's obvious that a "get kids to stay in school" program is never "do exactly nothing besides make a kid be inside the school building reliably".
Every problem solved involves fixing dependencies.
Or, potentially, you have less time to marry (among other things) when you go to school?
> Basically there is social pressure to marry early if you’re not occupied in some way or have less prospects for employment after education.
The way this is phrased makes it seem like the children are making the choice to marry.
Many traditional cultures have a communitarian approach to decision-making. What an individual wants is often a small part of the equation, especially for girls and women.
That doesn’t sit well for a western individualist mindset but… it happens there too. Parental pressure in particular is the conduit for broader social norms.
I'm here to make somebody feel old: The Graduate (1967) came out almost 60 years ago. I wonder how long the norms portrayed in that film persisted or have evolved since then.
I had no idea where you got your interpretation from, then I realized it was lack of interpretation.
the social pressure is traditional society on families, and then elders in families exert significant pressure on younger dependents, not to mention the strong economic pressure of nonproductive mouths to feed in circumstances without significant surpluses. It's exactly how westerners lived a century ago so it should not appear mysterious.
> simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
"Stayed in school" is a clear, binary condition that's easily measured and has obvious benefits to everyone because everyone is at least a little educated.
If I ask you "is your house temperature livable?" and you say "the thermometer says 20", answered. You didn't say "well, I purchased and installed a heat pump and duct distribution system capable of forcing warmed air to be distributed to the remainder of the house, which keeps the temperature in a habitable range, then ensured power supply remains connected and kept it on" and say I didn't really explain the important part.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
not familiar with nigera perse but in most places with child marriage, the marriage is the reason girls drop out of school.
other then that often its financial reasons. they will put boys to school because those are classically expected to take care of the family while girl will be married off to some guy. (ofc this is changing in a lot of places bits its the historical reasons afaik)
> Am I misunderstanding something here?
No, you are right - especially in Northern Nigeria.
Northern Nigeria is in the midst of a protracted Islamist insurgency by Al Qaeda and ISIS where jihadis have often targeted government institutions like schools and kidnapped and subsequently assaulted and trafficked female students, such as in Chibok [0], Papiri [1], and Kebbi [2].
Marriage is viewed from an economic and safety lens in these kinds of communities - if education can provide both then a girl can continue to be educated. If not, marriage is the easiest solution.
This Pathways program had added security monitoring that reduced the risk of girls potentially being made a "war bride" (ie. sex slave) by a jihadist, and never to see their family again, which incentivized families to continue to support their daughters education instead of deciding to marry them off early.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chibok_schoolgirls_kidnapping
[1] - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w7621xypyo
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/world/africa/nigeria-scho...
Yes this is the classical correlation vs causation situation.
> Am I misunderstanding ...
NO. I've seen quite a few things, across many cultures, pointing out that girls being any combination of low-value, low-status, and unsupported leads to them ending up as "cheap bodies".
That includes several American women friends, whose life stories include getting married at age 17-ish - because, with the situations in their own families, that really looked like their least-bad option.
Cant you still marry a child in some american states? Isn't this a bit like the pot calling the kettle black?
Yes; it's currently legal in 34 US States. Here are the 16 that ban the practice: Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Rhode Island, New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, Connecticut, Michigan, Washington, Virginia, New Hampshire, Maine, Oregon, and Missouri.
In Nigeria, nearly 40% of all girls are wed by 18 between 2000 and 2019 (https://childmarriagedata.org/country-profiles/nigeria/#comp...), whereas there were a total of less than 300K American girls in child marriages between 2000 and 2018.
not if you also condemn the American states that allow that...
Pretty much "yes" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marriage_age_in_the_United_Sta...
I'd guess your pot/kettle comment is something nationalist/political? My prior comment was trying to say it's universal, not some "country X is good/bad" dig.
See garciasn's sibling comment to yours.
Degree matters. A lot. Saying "it's universal" because there is some frequency everywhere is misleading. There are many country Xs that absolutely deserve to be called out as bad, because they are relatively so much worse than the best countries, or even the average ones.
Are people just riffing off the headline, the subheading and the first sentence of this page, is the full paper open access, or has anyone read the more substantial policy brief associated with the study [0]?
That's not to say that there's nothing of value being discussed here without the last two resources, but a URL swap may be helpful. The brief has a list of freely available references for further consideration.
[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8
[0a] (PDF): https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-00720-8.pdf
There is also a lot of evidence that shows the availability of factory jobs in developing countries (not just Africa but also India and Pakistan) is very good for young women. A young woman who gets a job outside of her poor family is much less likely to be forced to marry young.
I'm glad they have the option, but some evidence is needed that slaving away in a 3rd world factory actually makes you better off than having a man provide for you in exchange for child bearing. I suppose maybe it's better to be the slave of some random boss (who maybe also uses sexual assault and other coercion) than the slave of some man you or your family has picked, but who knows.
------ re: throttling "children" -----------
The person I responded to said "young women" not "children."
Well I wouldn't prefer children are slaving in a finger or limb slicing factory nor bearing children, but here we are. I'm guessing in rural Nigeria a 15,16,17 year old is making adult decisions either due to circumstances, being forced, or economics. We can't facially say the factory is the best or better one vs marriage, although I'm sure there are instances where it is.
Childhood pregnancy is the leading cause of death in teenage girls.
We can say the factory is better.
I appreciate this perspective.
It's wild how much Western people in topics like this use a mindset of complete black-and-white thinking, and an assumption that everywhere should be exactly like us - to hear these people talk, in sub-Saharan Africa, the age of majority should be exactly 18 like us, marriage should be strictly an individual decision undertaken purely for romantic love like us, women should consider working outside the home as their most important activity in life like us, etc.
I don't understand where people get so much confidence that their own particular culture has correctly solved every question of how life should be lived, as though it's a math problem that can be checked.
Now, I'm not saying 10-year-olds should be sold to the highest bidder and never be allowed to leave the neighborhood. But describing a 16-year-old having an arranged marriage in a way that is traditional in her culture as a "child bride" with heavy doses of sneering judgment is being dishonest.
I agree that some arranged marriages are poor matches. Some certainly have a power imbalance which is a bad thing if it leads to abuse or domination. But:
1. Let's not pretend that young people, even in our culture that values their autonomy, don't make their own terrible decisions too. Look at the divorce rate and the rates of reported DV in the West.
2. The Western way ("love marriage" + "women must work or the family will be in poverty") has led to most Western countries being on a downward spiral to literal extinction, so arguably we can't claim we've solved anything. We've just made a different tradeoff: More perceived freedom for women ("You're free to work any job as long as it's outside the home, for money, so your family can afford the high rent") in exchange for population collapse and kids being mostly raised by strangers. I'm not even arguing whether that tradeoff is worth it... I'm sure some families are happier 'our way'. but I bet others are more miserable.
We're talking about children.
Don't be obtuse. You can quit a boss and never see them again.
As a child factory slave?
No one seriously wants to compare the relative merits of child factory slavery and traditional child bride type situations. Like literally no one here is saying "its better to enslave children in factories compared to having them exchange their womb for protection from a local man."
Being forced to do anything is bad. Having an evaluation of your options is good. I don't think a facial argument can be made you're better off in the factory, although it might be true. I can think of many scenarios where I'd rather be in the factory, but also many where perhaps I'd prefer to have some selection of pastoral herding families to marry into over being funneled into "the one factory" where the god-billionaire has even more power than a vindictive husband.
I'm certainly not going to look at a piece of paper that says "factory move into town and women (or chidlren) took the jobs" and then just declare the women are better off. What happened before that factory was there? Did they buy off the agricultural or herding land and turn it into a waste dump? Are the power dynamics against women even worse now, where before it was a decentralized network of husbands but now one centralized hierarchal company with bosses that are even more above the law than the husband was? I don't know.
I'd be interested to know what happened when this transition took place in Europe and the UK, because we'd have the advantage of hundreds of years of history to inform the outcomes. It's easy to forget that our great grandparents and grandparents experienced roughly the same dichotomy between living on a farm raising kids and going to work for a capitalist owner of a factory for a meager wage. The romanticization of that period paints a picture of choice that I don't really buy. It seems like your desire to find nuance is validated by what I do already know.
This is appalling. Delete it.
is this saying like "we were happier with some nuts and occasional games, discovering fire was a mistake"
This kind of data was shown by late Hans Rosling and his foundation Gapminder¹. He gave a Ted talk² about similar subjects as well, and I find him an excellent lecturer.
¹ https://www.gapminder.org/
² https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w
I think that birth rates also drop when girls and women are educated. I would like to see such education AND lotsa child support programs and credits. I.e. I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
This subthread has people using "improve" to mean "increase" and "improve" to mean "decrease". Maybe you guys should stop talking past each other and converge on replacement rate?
Up until very recently, and especially in Africa, huge amounts of effort went into reducing birth rate to avoid locally-Malthusian situations with high child death rates and occasional famines.
I’m very passionate about birth rates and I think they’re worth improving. Unfortunately, child support programs don’t move the needle, it’s thoroughly researched. Nordic countries have tried them in various ways, and the birth rate is still extremely low. Ultimately, the benefits of female education AND lowered child mortality AND access to contraception feel inextricably linked to lower birth rates.
I wish I had a solution. As an educated woman, why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career? Most research indicates that child support programs tend to just support people that already planned to have children. As someone about to be a first time parent, I would love more support in the US. But it’s hard to imagine a world where you take on a lifelong responsibility for, say, an extra $2k (or even $20k) being handed to you by the government.
> why should I spend time developing an employable skill just to raise >2.3 children and not thrive in my career?
This contains the answer: we aren’t paying enough.
Kids used to confer private, excludable benefit through their labour. Without child labour, their economic value is no longer exclusive to their parents. This transforms children, economically, from a private good to a common resource. Our low birth rates are a tragedy of a commons. A known problem with a known solution.
If we want a higher birth rate, we should have a massive child tax credit. One that can rival the rising cost and opportunity cost of childrearing.
I would go further and say that the annual payment amount should be set by a feedback loop, so the incentive rises every year that the birth rate remains below whatever target (eg. replacement), and stabilizes as it reaches that target.
At some point, would-be parents at the margin decide they don't need a job to attain economic security.
This is basically a way of doing price discovery on the "market rate" of parenthood. Currently we're under-paying and getting the predictable outcome, and we're all out of ideas.
(In fact, I think this should basically be the solution to all labor shortages, of which parenting is just one example. The wage should increase until the market rate is found, even if that wage is much higher than people say it "should be").
A better, cleaner solution is to remove old age benefits (Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid). A tax credit sufficient to incentivize attaining TFR would probably blow up the budget, and it would be hard to pin down the exact number, subject to tons of politics.
It's not better, because by the time people reach old age and understand the dangers of old age destitution and how dire is the lack of support from close family, they can't act on it anymore. Things need to be structured in a way people act while they still have opportunity.
One thing that makes me suspect the population crash will be much harder to fix than the previous population explosion, it's that there's no immediate fix. It takes ~20-30 years to raise a human being into a fully functional member of modern society, after the decision to conceive them was made. It's a long term investment. Back when people panicked on population explosion, some of the proposed "fixes" were brutal, like forced sterilization in India[1], of Forced abortions in China[2], but they could be implemented or stopped quickly.
There's fundamental asymmetry. Time to terminate an unborn child is measured in hours to days (counting the recover time for the mother). Time to fully _raise_ a child is measured in decades. By the time people panic over it, it may be too late to avert the crisis.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2025/6/25/india-forcibly-...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil...
A better, cleaner, solution that literally no civilization on earth would ever vote for or want to deal with. "Support families to raise kids" sells way better than "let old people die if they don't have kids to support them."
Isn’t that the global problem with democracy? What sells well isn’t what is effective, and often times is just current generations selling out future generations.
People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years.
> People are going to die regardless of having supportive kids. The question is who pays for their quality of life while in the final years
Social Security and Medicare are equally about quality of life and survival. And even if you're okay with impoverished seniors, burdening their children of child-rearing age with a new financial obligation doesn't raise birth rates.
I agree with everything you've written.
But since you mention the Nordic countries, it's worth driving home just how high the amounts are:
In Norway it's 100% of pay for up to 49 weeks or 61 weeks at 80% of pay, capped at ~$111k (based on a your salary, capped to "6G" - 6x the national insurance base rate)[1].
So not even up to $111k is enough to convince enough women to have more children to maintain replacement rates (and I don't blame them).
And this is in addition to e.g. legally mandated right to full-time nursery places with the fee cap dropped to a maximum of ~$130/month as of last year.
When people think money will be enough, they need to realise just how much money some countries have tried throwing at parents without getting back above replacement...
[1] in Norwegian: https://www.nav.no/foreldrepenger
People think money is enough because they look at their lives and think 'how could I afford kids? Clearly I need money to do that.' and they don't think 'if I had extra money, would I spend it on someone else or on myself?' and the majority of people choose spending it on themselves instead of that potential child someone else.
Those people often don't even consider the time cost either. Which makes sense, if reason A is sufficient to say 'no' then why continue dwelling on other reasons? But even if there was more money and they were willing to not spend it on themselves, they now need to accept giving up roughly 90% of their non sleep/work time to someone else as well. That's not giving away something new you didn't have, that's giving up something you've been using and are accustomed to having.
Most of the people in the pro-natalism space have moved over to the idea that you're not going to be able to convince folks to have a first kid. Instead, you might be able to convince folks to have a third kid. That seems to be where the space is moving towards.
It only takes a few percent of women to decide they don't want kids for career reasons for the replacement rate to drop below parity.
When you add those who don't want kids or can't have them for other reasons - not straight, asexual, emotional trauma, physically unable, others - getting to parity is even harder.
It's not stress. For a lot of history life was far more challenging, uncertain, and dangerous than life today.
Humans kept reproducing, aggressively enough to compensate for infant mortality, wars, and pandemics.
The big change is that the primary role of women doesn't have to be motherhood, where for most of recent-ish history it was.
I'm not saying a return to that is desirable. But I am pointing out that the causes of low birth rates aren't mysterious.
Women who do choose motherhood are more likely to have kids younger.
But if given a choice, a significant proportion of women will either not choose motherhood at all, or will delay it significantly, which lowers fertility and raises infant mortality.
It doesn't need to be a majority of women. A fairly small percentage is enough to shift the numbers.
I'm not sure. I think there's a lot of people out there who want to be parents, but who put it off in favor of employment because they feel like they need money, and end up having fewer children than they wanted to have. I don't think they're all delaying motherhood because they prefer delayed motherhood.
So basically they probably don't lose their wage for the duration of their absence but it's likely still a net negative to them (financially aside from the physical and time burdens) and in line with societal expectations created over decades?
I say crank up the numbers then. Give them a bigger tax credit too. Hold it long enough for societal expectations to slowly adjust.
Why does low birth rates need solution? Low birth rates are already the solution to countless issue like ressources depletion, climate changes and real estate high cost.
A constant stream of young workers is required for a sustainable economy.
In order to pay for pensions, the government borrows money from young, working adults. This is effectively what happens in pay-as-you-go public pension systems (which is most of them, to my knowledge, apart from the US, I'm not 100% sure how pensions work in the US). The money you put in actually goes to pay for another person, with the government guaranteeing that they will do the same for you.
If the percentage of retired people increases, the percentage of working adults naturally decreases. Eventually, you'll hit a turning point where the government can no longer borrow from working adults. The government is now in a debt crisis and has to loan money from banks or foreign investors at a significantly higher interest rate, which becomes even more unsustainable if the percentage of retired people increases even more.
This is what is happening in e.g. South Korea and Japan. There are too many old people, and too few working adults. This is caused ny low birth rates over a long period of time.
It's going to be painful, but at some point the bandaid has to be ripped off. This idea of sustaining our economic system infinitely through simply breeding more bodies is going to naturally fall apart in a world with non-infinite resources.
They don't need the population to increase, just stay the same or not decrease too fast.
What's the point of sustainable resources, stable climate and affordable real estate in a society that fades away? What difference does it make whatsoever?
What if the sustainable population is half of what we have now? A lower than replacement (global) birth rate would move things in that direction in a more palletable way than stochastic murder.
But, Logan's Run could solve population control and balance the Social Security budget. I always wanted to live in an underground city that was a Texas mall. The original mall is gone, but the Houston Galleria has an ice rink, so maybe we can setup there.
You're assuming fertility rates wont rebound once there is less population pressure.
I thought there was a broad consensus among social scientists that sub-replacement birthrates in the West are linked to the expense of new household formation, especially wrt. real estate prices. Child support programs can help quite a bit at the margin, but not enough to make a dent in that particular issue. It makes no sense to conflate this situation with Nigeria's, they're polar opposites in many ways.
Everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East have sub-replacement birthrates at this point. Including India and China. China has started seeing contraction, India will start seeing contradiction in ~20-30 years since the measures lag.
It is by no means an issue just in the West.
You're right the situation is different with respect to Nigeria, but the birth rates are also falling in all of the remaining countries. Nigeria's is still high but also falling.
Birth rates would also improve when boys and men are educated. Both genders need education and child support programs. Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
Governments around the world would benefit their society by investing in family planning, family support (esp. child care) to enable parents to work and provide for their family.
An educated and healthy populace (from infant to old age) benefits everyone.
This is almost the opposite of what happens.
The more educated/developed a nation, the lesser their birth rate is going to be.
I understand the "shoulds" but that's not what the data suggests.
In essence, we can't have the pie and at the same time eat it.
The most useful thing education does for children is reduce child-mortality rate.[1]
Sources: https://raphael-godefroy.github.io/pdfs/mali_final.pdf
[1] https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED503923
This is misleading. Education is not the panacea. I am saying it's a "whole of family" approach. Governments need to also provide more support to families. This is clear to any parent.
> They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body.
I thought they were built for that. For tens of thousands of years women had on average 7 children or more, it looks like the process is very reliable. These days birth-giving mortality is very close to zero, also post-birth care is quite good, so we are in a better place than ever and still concerned?
"Men/Boys need to understand what responsibilities they have, if they choose to have a child. They also need to understand the effects that having a child has on a woman's body."
This will only reduce birth rates. I have two kids and it's hard. I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be (especially during winter, when everyone is sick).
There are also many men that just don't care if they have a child, what it does to a woman's body. This won't change with more education.
So, the solution is to... not provide education? The logic doesn't make sense. You say this yourself: "I would still have them if I knew just how hard it would be"
If it reduces birth rates, that's not due to education alone. That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families.
You should know this with two kids. Any help is better than no help. Women want to work. Women want to go to school. That's what this topic is about.
"That's due to a lack of investment by governments to support those families."
Please show the evidence for this being true. Birthrates are low even in countries that provide a lot of support.
No country provides a lot of support. Some countries provide more but inevitably if you poll people they’ll mention that they mention significant financial deterrents, not to mention things like climate change, all of which are valid. People only need one of them to be true to decide to have fewer children, while society needs to help address all of them.
For example, if your government provides housing and childcare support—and say that’s the unicorn where those are consistently available, high quality, and cover the full cost—but still culturally tends to mommy-track careers into dead ends, despite doing those other things well you are going to have a lot of women decide not to risk multiple decades of lifetime earnings.
They've tried this in several countries, and it's never resulted in birth rate near replacement. And it'd be even lower if they didn't have immigrants from more family-oriented countries.
Can you point to any examples of this:
>I think a stable fertility rate AND educated girls are simultaneously possible all around the world
i.e countries with a very high education attainment rate or high ranking in the human development index coupled with a high fertility rate? There was HackerNews discussion a while back that alluded to the fact the more developed a country becomes the lower the fertility rate.
Because its suggested that solutions like affordable housing, more free time, child care may help in a few situations but largely don't bump the fertility rates.
Developed countries are currently getting by on their immigration rates but as the rest of the world becomes more developed this isn't a lasting solution.
What if you're wrong? What if, all else being as it is but with "lotsa child support programs and credits" and education, on average people who could give birth decide they're not keen and we do not hit replacement reproduction rates?
Because humans are so numerous even if we hit 1.0 rates (ie population halves each generation) we've got a long time before that's a pressing issue.
If the population halves each generation the biggest problem is total societal collapse. The children and the elder cannot be sustained by a small number of people of working age and the infrastructure cannot be maintained by a dramatically dropping population: even with AI and robots, roads don't fix themselves and train tracks don't get fixed by robots. We will not even have enough doctors and nurses to care for the seniors and no economy to make retirement possible (money will be worth their value in paper as there will be no people to provide services and goods for it).
If someone things the population on the planet is too big, then plan for a reduction that is manageable and change the pay-as-you-go pension system that exists in most of the world, that is based on working age people paying the pension for retirees. Even at replacement rate the pension systems will collapse, they were built in a time when the average number of children per woman was around 7 and the age of retirement was higher than average life expectation.
Yeah but in poor/developing countries raising birth rates are not something they're looking for but the opposite, (the most important thing is reducing teenage pregnancy). I lived in Colombia and they had programs where they have free antibcoceptives, free antibcoceptives implants that last a few years, like a lot of effort is spent in preventing birth rates, since a lot of people without the resources have a lot of kids. I don't think the problem of birth rates is related to financial reasons when in poor countries you see people with multiple kids without being able to afford It. I know personally people that have 10kids.
Birthrates at or below replacement rate are ultimately a good thing as we improve automation and AI. Infinite population growth is not a realistic model. We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
> We can't even prove the current population level is sustainable.
Everyday we prove it slightly more. To exhaust the nutrients in all the mud in the world would take a lot more farming, but we thought that ip4 addresses would never run out either, so maybe it will happen.
If anything every day we prove the current setup is NOT sustainable
Educated women = death of civilization?
This shouldn't be a surprise, lots of evidence in other countries to support this
Meanwhile in America [1][2][3][4][5][6].
Roger Freeman, then advisor to presidential candidate Ronald Reagan in 1970, said "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat" [7], leading to Reagan unwinding the free college of the UC system and this was a progenitor to the current student debt crisis.
But beyond college education, there's also an attack on education at K-12 levels. Homeschooling and a lack of sex education contribute to perpetuating abuse and trapping children (primarily girls) in this cycle.
[1]: https://calmatters.org/politics/2023/06/child-marriage-calif...
[2]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/married-young-the...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jul/09/chil...
[4]: https://www.freedomunited.org/u-s-child-mariage-laws-individ...
[5]: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/united-states-child-marriage...
[6]: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interactive/child-marriag...
[7]: https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/analysis/threat-of-educate...
Sounds like a net positive. Go team!
Do you love black people?
They should ban home schools in the US to achieve the same.