I understand that the more educated people are more aware of the responsibilities and risks of having children and they use protection more etc. but why is it ALWAYS that more literate and rich populations have lower birth rates? At one point, shouldn’t the literate and able people have children to contribute to the future of their countries?
In: Other
Having a high literacy basically means that area of society cares about making sure that it’s population is educated.
This has a lot of other implications/correlations. Usually areas that care enough about their population’s literacy will care about taking care of the population in general compared to places that don’t care about literacy, leading to a higher quality of life.
People who are educated are more likely to make informed decisions.
Aka having a kid becomes more than just someone telling you “it’s fun, I did it, you should do it” or a side effect of sex.
People who are educated know how babies are made and can actively choose to not do the thing that makes babies.
People who are educated usually come from higher income areas so they can afford birth control and abortions more often than lower income areas can.
People who are educated are more likely to know that having kids takes time and money and choose to wait it have less kids to ensure each child gets a certain amount of time/money. They also know that if they don’t want to have kids, they don’t have to have kids.
People who are educated most likely can take care of themselves and chances are they will not have to rely on their children on the future, another side of that is cultures where farming or labor is necessary, too much time is spent doing the labor so there is no point in going to school because you don’t have time. Some of those people will have more kids to have more workers.
Going back to the topic of an area caring about it’s population’s well being and quality of life, if you take good care of your kid and have good medical care and such your kid is pretty much guaranteed to make it to adulthood. In other, less fortunate places, infant/child mortality rate is insanely high, mostly due to diseases and lack of adequate medical care. People in these areas will have more kids just hoping a decent amount of them will actually make it to adulthood.
Tl;dr, people who are literate are most likely educated, which has a lot of implications, like access to birth control and family planning/education and low infant mortality rates means it’s more guaranteed your child will make it to adulthood so there is not really a need to have a bunch of kids to hope some make it. The higher rate of literacy, the higher level of medical care (usually).
Latest Answers