It is easy to have a child, but it is difficult to raise a child, and young people in rural areas are deeply touched by this now. This is not only reflected in today's young parents in rural areas, who generally attach more importance to their children, but also in the real money spent.
According to the latest statistics, the average cost of raising children (0 to 18 years old) in the country has reached 485,000, second only to South Korea. From the book data, the cost of having children in rural areas in China is relatively small, but in terms of group reaction, the burden of raising children in rural areas is even greater.
In this regard, many rural post-80s and post-90s who have been promoted to parents can only helplessly ridicule that parents always urge them to have more children, and said that it was easy for them to raise three or four children that year, and it was difficult to understand their current situation. Although on the surface, this is only the gap in concept between the old and new generations, but in fact it reflects the basis of rural life and has undergone great changes.
Why is it that when it comes to having children, left-behind women are the marginalized people who are ignored?
Unlike working women in the cities, in the old rural concept, the greatest responsibility that rural women need to bear is to take care of their families and raise children. Although these old ideas have been diluted with the progress of society, it will take some time to "eradicate". If they have a child, they can also go out to work with their husbands, but if they have a second or third child, they can only become left-behind women and take on the heavy responsibility of taking care of their children. In this case, they tend to miss the optimal age for career development, and when the child is less in need of care, they are mostly flexible employment.
At the same time, the amount of money has become an important criterion for family members to pay for the family. Because in rural families, men can intuitively reflect their contribution to the family with the amount of salary, while rural women's efforts in cleaning up housework and childcare are difficult to reflect through a realistic standard, and this will affect the harmony of family relations. In addition, we will always sympathize with the hardships of the left-behind elderly and the pity of left-behind children, but the loneliness and helplessness of left-behind women, especially the feeling of powerlessness when children are sick, are often ignored.
In general, it is precisely because rural women, if they have a second or third child, often miss the best period of career development by becoming left-behind women. At the same time, the efforts of rural left-behind women in cleaning up the housework and taking care of children have almost no intuitive standard similar to "how much money" is used, which makes their efforts easy to be ignored, and what is even more overlooked is the loneliness and helplessness when they take care of their children alone at home. Therefore, when it comes to having children, left-behind women are the marginalized people who are ignored, and their needs should be seen even more.
How to crack the "fertility pain" of rural women? The state struck.
At present, in response to the call of the state, many regions have launched birth subsidies for children aged 0 to 3 years old, and some regions have even launched birth loans that test IQ. Although such measures can indeed alleviate the economic pressure on rural children to a certain extent. However, the "big cost" of raising children is mainly concentrated after the age of three, and if the corresponding funding program can be launched in the later stage, it will be able to solve the "fertility pain" of rural women and greatly alleviate the problem of low fertility.
In addition, in the recently released "Central Document No. 1" in 2022, the state clearly stated that it will promote the transformation of basic public service supply from focusing on institutional administrative area coverage to focusing on the coverage of permanent population services. It can be seen from this measure that the pilot project of "rent-purchase equal rights" previously implemented by the state is likely to be greatly expanded in the experimental process and the scope of the experiment. In the future, rural children, along with their parents, will have greater hope of renting in the cities to achieve nearby schooling, and a large number of rural women will no longer have to stay behind.
What should farmers pay attention to when it comes to having children?
Farmers should pay attention to two issues, one is the number of children, it is recommended to comprehensively consider the strength of the parents' willingness to bring their babies, whether the local implementation of "rent-purchase rights", their income level and whether it is stable. The other is to suggest that young couples in rural areas try to choose nearby employment, or use the current good policies to return to their hometowns to start a business and spend more time with their families.