On Saturday, the Bush Dance Display Group (of which I'm a member) were performing at a retirement village. Some of us started talking during the halfway break about life, ageing, children, etc. Sometime during our chat, I realized that the childcare and retirement industries benefit when women as a whole delay childbearing.
When women marry young and bear children when they're young, their parents (let us call them "the grandparents" to avoid confusion) - who may be in their mid to late forties - can help with childrearing and childminding. Thus such families will be less likely to outsource childcare. In addition, the grandparents themselves are much less likely to need care themselves at that time. When the children are adolescents, they depend less on their parents, so the parents are more likely to be able to care for the grandparents.
On the other hand, when women marry late and bear children in their 30s, the grandparents who will likely be in their 60s are less likely to be able to help with childrearing and childminding. In fact, many grandparents will need substantial care themselves at that age. And most parents will neither have the time nor resources to look after 2 sets of dependents (children and grandparents). Thus, with the lack of grandparental help in childrearing, parents are forced to live on one income or outsource childcare to the childcare industry. In addition, parents may have to move the dependent grandparents into being looked after by the retirement industry (because they're too busy looking after their young children).
Pensions and social security wouldn't even be needed if people looked after their own parents. Instead, these social programs were trying to fix a problem that didn't exist in the first place. When people are offered "free healthcare" they stop looking after themselves ("why should I look after my health when I can get free healthcare?"). When welfare programs are started to help the needy, people stop being charitable ("the government is looking after the poor, so why should we?). When people are offered "free care for the elderly" they stop looking after their elderly ("they have pensions and social security, so they can look after themselves").
All this is very good for the childcare and retirement industries, but detrimental to society as a whole. Some might call these parasitic industries, but perhaps a better name for them is "cannibalistic industries", because they cannibalize the society (of which they're a part), destroying it and eventually themselves in the process. But this process once started cannot be stopped because short term gains are always more attractive than long-term gains.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1228768/The-state-cares-old-WE-care-them.html
ReplyDelete"So the Government is to spend £670million to offer free personal care for the most vulnerable elderly people in their own homes. Good, you may say. I'm not so sure. The more the state intervenes, the more we seem to treat the elderly with contempt."