[MZ Column] A Society Where Parenting Is Impossible Without Miracles

Our society is one where raising children without miracles is impossible. I am also raising a young child, and the reason it is possible is thanks to miracles. Without much help from either side of the family and without hiring anyone, my spouse and I, both working, manage childcare?it is a miracle. That miracle lies in the fact that I have a relatively late commute while my wife has an early one. So in the morning, I take our child to daycare, and in the evening, my wife picks them up?this perfect timing barely allows us to manage childcare. Also, thanks to a workplace that permits taking personal leave in urgent situations, we can somewhat cope when our child is sick.

When waiting for the car to take the child in the morning, all the other parents waiting appear to be stay-at-home moms except for me. When my child was younger and I took them to the cultural center, nine out of ten were mothers or grandparents. Although times have changed a lot, there are still many women who quit their jobs because of their children.

In some large organizations like big corporations or government agencies, employees may have relatively more flexibility regarding parental leave or vacations. However, in small and medium-sized enterprises, which make up most of Korea’s employment, staffing is usually very tight. When taking time off for childcare, one inevitably worries about the company’s CEO as well as the eyes of coworkers. If there are companies and colleagues who allow maternity leave, parental leave, or family care leave without issue even though they are not huge anonymous organizations like big corporations, then those people have essentially encountered a miracle as well.

The problem of career interruption begins again when the child enters elementary school. Children finish classes at noon, and this period, when they transition from the realm of “care” to “education” and struggle to adapt, can be called a “massacre period” for women. Many quit their jobs en masse to focus on childcare, and career breaks start. Unless one side of the grandparents lives nearby, or there is an environment where relentless academy “round trips” are possible, or there is the economic power and luck to hire a trustworthy person, this is the point where the “miracle of dual-income” reaches its limit. Having a second child is an irreversible “fatal blow.”

In reality, our society’s entire system feels like it says, “Are you really going to raise children like this? Fine, let’s see if you can.” By shifting all childcare responsibilities onto individual families, grandparents are mobilized even in their old age just so that one child can barely be raised. They even say that housing costs and private education expenses for children are the grandparents’ responsibility, so in effect, society does nothing.

It is questionable whether a society that can only raise children by relying on miracles is a proper society. Even if the entire society supported and helped with care, it would still be insufficient. In this total survival-of-the-fittest situation, one must become a superman or superwoman and develop one-person-show abilities or rely on miracles. I find it quite natural that such a society is becoming a low-birthrate country heading toward extinction, unprecedented worldwide. A society that cannot live without miracles sounds like a fitting description for endangered animals.

Jung Ji-woo, Cultural Critic

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