Reasons Why Young People Hesitate to Marry... Ministry of Health and Welfare's Emergency Meeting with 2030 Generation

Reasons for Significant Difficulties in Asset and Housing Acquisition
Need for Improvement in Wedding Culture and Perceptions of Out-of-Wedlock Births

The Ministry of Health and Welfare held a meeting to discuss marriage, pregnancy, and childbirth with young people. This was in response to the increasingly serious low birthrate issue.

On the afternoon of the 4th, the Ministry held an 'Emergency Meeting on Low Birthrate Response with 2030 Youth' at the Korea Health and Welfare Human Resources Development Institute Seoul Education Center, together with 15 members of the Ministry's 2030 Youth Advisory Group.

At the closed-door meeting, unmarried young people in their 20s and 30s mostly cited income issues as the main reason for not getting married. Due to difficulties in asset formation, loans, and securing stable housing, marriage is realistically not easy.

This was also revealed in a paper published in the quarterly journal of the Social Welfare Research Association at the end of last year. In the paper, the research team conducted an in-depth analysis of responses from 281 unmarried men and women aged 20 to 34, based on a survey of 1,040 adults conducted in November 2021.

As a result, it was found that people with a monthly income of over 2 million won were more than eight times as likely to believe that 'marriage and childbirth are absolutely necessary' compared to those earning less than 1 million won per month.

Lee Gi-il, Vice Minister of Health and Welfare, is presiding over a meeting with young people in their 20s and 30s on the 4th at the Seoul Education Center of the Korea Human Resource Development Institute for Health and Welfare in Jung-gu, Seoul.
[Photo by Yonhap News]

Additionally, opinions were expressed at the meeting that the culture of marriage, which strongly involves recovering wedding costs and congratulatory money given by parents, is burdensome, and the pressure that marriage must lead directly to childbirth discourages marriage.

The attending youth shared views such as "there needs to be a change in perception regarding not only wedding culture but also cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbirth," and also suggested that "infertility support, which is currently focused only on women in marital relationships, should be expanded to unmarried women and men as well." Furthermore, there were opinions that "cash support to reduce childcare costs should be expanded, and more time and leisure to spend with family are needed."

Lee Gi-il, the First Vice Minister of the Ministry of Health and Welfare who presided over the meeting, stated, "The government is preparing with a strong sense of crisis regarding the current situation," and added, "We will thoroughly review the proposals made today to develop policies that better meet the needs of young people."

According to Statistics Korea, last year Korea's total fertility rate (0.78) ranked the lowest among OECD member countries. The total fertility rate is the average number of children a woman aged 15 to 49 is expected to have in her lifetime, and it must be at least 2.1 to maintain the population.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.