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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.