Motherhood, on the social podium

In all Western countries, the fertility rate is well below the replacement rate and continues its steeply declining trend. If this trend continues, many of them will disappear in a few decades.

South Korea is the country with the lowest rate of natality in the world. Given their government's great concern about the problem, they have spent $200 billion on trying to increase their birth rate. Hungary spends 5% of its GDP annually on the same. Both countries and many others are failing.

However, Georgia or Mongolia increased their birth rate a lot without spending practically nothing. How? They understood that fertility is not a question of money, but also of status. Before explaining the importance of status, let's quickly note that the most common explanations for why fertility is collapsing (cost of living, etc) cannot be the whole story.

What does the increase in birth rate depend on?

As the above-mentioned countries and the Nordic countries show, giving people more and more economic benefits to have children does not practically change the situation. We are faced with an apparent paradox: a sustained trend toward lower fertility rates throughout the West, in country after country, generation after generation, with no obvious causal logic. How can this be explained?

There is an underappreciated root cause of this trend, which manifests itself in the form of different causes, real and imagined, and in different geographies. This root cause is status. Social "status" denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors.

What is status

Status describes the perceived position of the individual within the group. It denotes his or her social value and place within the formal and informal hierarchies that make up a society. Status has its expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect and honor (or their opposites: rejection, ostracism, humiliation, etc.).

Status is obtained and maintained through socially approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, group defense) or through the possession of recognized "symbols" (titles, wealth, physical attractiveness).

Today's social values are materialistic and are heavily influenced by the woke culture and the like. These imply that the status outcome of having one more child is lower than that of other competing factors. Status has existential importance for many individuals. People commit suicide because of the loss of status.

Georgia

In the mid-2000s, Georgia skyrocketed its birth rate, which increased by 28% and remained high for many years. How did it achieve this? A leading patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia IIannounced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children thereafter. The births of third children increased so much that, in fact, they eclipsed the decreases in the number of first and second children. This has been widely understood as an exclusively religious phenomenon, but it is better understood if we incorporate the status factor.

Mongolia is another great example. For nearly 70 years, Mongolian leaders have awarded the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers of several children. This has elevated the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pro-birth culture.

Fertility in Mongolia has been consistently 2 and 3 times higher than that of neighboring countries in recent years and has been gradually increasing for the past 20 years, while its neighbors have seen falling birth rates.

True recognition

In Mongolia, the president himself gives an award to every mother who has at least four children. Mongolian mothers of four children receive the Order of Glorious Motherhood. Mothers of six children receive the Order of Glorious Motherhood of Honor. The mothers receive this distinction from the hand of the president himself in a ceremony that is celebrated in style. The women descend the steps of the State Palace in Ulaanbaatar on a red and gold carpet, with the statue of Genghis Khan right behind them.

Several ceremonies are held in each district in order to provide personalized attention to all award recipients. There is also a cash prize, but it is minimal: only US$60 for mothers of six children. Clearly, the motivation for women to have children is not economic, but status in Mongolian society.

This award is so important that even Mongolian consulates are obliged to give it to Mongolian mothers abroad. Status around motherhood is a crucial and underappreciated factor in birth rates. Status is incredibly important to most human beings, and perhaps we seek it more than anything else.

Transcendent sense

Status helps explain the paradox that as societies become wealthier and society loses the transcendent meaning of life, the fertility rate declines. Although absolute well-being has increased, having children in a wealthy, materialistic society offers no increase in relative status.

Education and career compete directly with family life. In cultural groups where parenthood is elevated to a high status, such as in religious groups like traditional Catholics or Modern Orthodox Jews (not to be confused with the ultra-Orthodox), the fertility rate is usually higher.

This may also explain the remarkable fertility in England and Wales during the Victorian era. Queen Victoria passed on a culture that conferred a high status on motherhood, raising nine children herself.

South Korea

Conversely, can status reduce birth rates? Yes, it can. South Korea is the perfect example. Thanks to formalized Korean systems of etiquette, language and titles, social hierarchies there are very clear and explicit. Individuals are incentivized to take whatever measures necessary, however extreme, to ensure that their status within the system is maximized or at least maintained.

This process finds particular expression in the structure of the Korean economy, in which the only high-status employers are the small number of industrial mega-conglomerates such as Samsung (the so-called "chaebols").

The chaebols

In Korea you are not a person of equal status with others if you do not work in one of these chaebols. Chaebols are extremely important for social status in Korea. People devote much of their lives to trying to get a perfect score on the entrance exam to the chaebol of their choice.

Competition is fierce and depends on the performance of each individual in the national exam that determines university places. This exam is so important that even air and road traffic slows to a crawl on the one day of the year when it is held.

All children must receive exceptional training to perform on this exam. This means that parents must pay for private teachers or very expensive academies. This means that most couples do not have large families.

Personal esteem

We all have a psychological need for status. But now that the standard introductory question is "What do you do?", unfortunately "I'm a mother" is not a good answer, because it conveys little status within today's materialistic culture.

Is there then any hope for future generations? Yes, non-materialistic religious faith and culture. Modern Orthodox Jewish and traditional Catholic communities have higher fertility rates even though they live in Western countries and their women are university educated or professionally trained, and many of them have prestigious professional careers.

In addition to the definite influence of faith in the transcendence of life and in the divine value of the human, within these groups presenting oneself as a mother of several children enhances their social status.

The message is that we have to find a way to honor motherhood as if our civilization depends on it. Because it certainly does depend on it.