I take it all back. I take back the irritated look I gave a mother whose toddler was throwing a fit at a grocery store. I take back the snide comments I made about mothers fretting about how to teach their 3-year-olds to babble away in English.
Unless you are in their shoes, you never, really, actually know. And I am guilty as charged -- all the judging I made in the past seemed to come back to haunt me once I became a mother myself.
Doctors, nannies and even caretakers at the postnatal houses make it their business to scorn mothers for not breast-feeding their babies enough. Strangers come up to you and point out that the shoes your baby is wearing seem too big, or that the way you are holding the child is wrong.
This could be a cultural thing in South Korea, where offering unsolicited advice is still considered a goodwill gesture.
But such encounters -- more common and frequent than one would think -- have more fundamental implications.
Mothers are primarily considered the protectors of their children. A “freewheeling” father, should he fulfill the obvious duties a mother naturally takes on, becomes a hero.
Hence, the decision not to have a child, or put off family planning, is also naturally blamed on women.
The declining desire to have babies has been universal since the 1970s.
Across the world, in developed and developing countries, the total fertility rate – the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime -- has been dipping. Once it drops below the 2.1 mark considered necessary for stability, it rarely rebounds.
South Korea, with a fertility rate of just 1.23, has been spewing out one measure after another, investing some 81 trillion won ($66.7 billion) since 2006, in desperate hopes of persuading the young to love more, marry earlier and procreate.
For centuries, debates have persisted over whether we are headed toward an apocalypse from overpopulation or low fertility and their correlation to economic growth and the environment.
Political economist Thomas Robert Malthus warned in his famous 1798 essay on population that population tended to increase faster than food supply, with disastrous results. He argued that the increase in population should be checked by moral restraints, or could be curbed by war, famine and disease.
While the controversial Malthusian theory has often been challenged, as it was with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, it introduced an epochal substitute to the norm that population growth is nothing but a benefit to the economy.
The global aim today appears to be the opposite: saving the world from declining birthrates, which lead to societal aging, increased social burdens, and a slowing of the scientific innovations normally driven by the younger generation as well as new industries.
The trend, however, is consistently debated by some, who argue that population growth would inevitably lead to increased pollution and resource depletion.
And to make the discussion even more complicated, there are also some who contend a smaller population doesn’t necessarily lead to environment protection, as argued by demographer Philip Longman in 2010, who said childless singles could result in higher per capita consumption, in turn increasing total carbon emissions.
Whatever may be more harmful to the stable existence of economy or the Earth, the governments today have been focused on discerning the factors behind declining birthrates and ways to end the decline.
One of the obvious reasons cited is the widening economic emancipation of women. As more women choose to work, they end up having fewer children. But the theory has also been consistently countered, by citing cases such as Iceland, where both the birthrate and the female employment rate are high.
Some argue that the social cost of helping working mothers to raise children may offset the benefits of a larger population. Some also say that the measures to motivate more couples to bear a child should coincide with or precede polices aimed at life before marriage. More men and women are marrying later, which leads to fewer children.
In this jumble of theories and arguments, it is difficult to say there is a hard-and-fast rule to maintain the ideal population level.
Indisputably, there are fewer people choosing to have babies, at least in their prime years. This may be due to the high economic and social cost of raising a child or the modernization and urbanization that offer more sources of joy than that given by children.
And personally, it is difficult to recommend to singles that having a child would definitely be the prime achievement and the biggest gift of life. Although I am one of the lucky few in South Korea who work with generous bosses and coworkers, when one thinks of the societal prejudice, judgement and guilt that are accompanied in raising a child as a working mother, it is difficult to shove my fellow women to go down the same road. The government’s jingoistic campaigns that depict women as part of a system with childbearing duty and coerced maternal instinct do not help either.
Although at a snail’s pace, more attention is being paid to the need to address unorthodox parents -- couples suffering from infertility, single parents or children out of wedlock.
There is also a growing sense of awareness that the conformist emphasis on the isolated sacrifice of a mother should be shared by others.
One chilly night last year, my 2-year-old son developed a sudden fever spiking at 40 degrees Celsius, his chest heaving heavily.
Frantic, I left my other child with the husband, carried him out and hailed a passing taxi to head to an emergency room.
The cab driver, an elderly man, took a glimpse at me and the boy and said, “Ah, the baby must not be feeling well.” My nervous response was followed by a few moments of silence, my mind visiting all the fearful scenarios.
Then the man took out a CD and inserted it in the stereo.
“Agaya (baby), feel better soon OK? Hopefully this may help,” he said, as soothing music started to play. He said it was a CD of prenatal music he bought for his pregnant daughter.
As my child’s head leaned defenselessly on my chest, I felt a swarm of warmth slowly calm my anxiety.
I felt like my child was truly loved -- so unexpectedly by a perfect stranger -- as if he is already a worthwhile member of this world, and that I, as a mother, was not really alone.
Lee Joo-hee is the national editor of The Korea Herald. She can be reached at
jhl@heraldcorp.com. — Ed.