The rejection of children and the declining birth rate: a transversal debate in Spain and South Korea

This August an interesting debate was generated regarding an article by Ana Iris Simón in El País about Adults only hotels. A euphemism, he said, so as not to call them hotels that prohibit the entry of children, which is a much uglier thing. Yours reminded me of another one in The New Yorker that had the consistent title The end of children. There was a compendium of the global phenomenon of the birth rate collapse, but the most interesting was the part of the report in South Korea, the country with the lowest birth rate in the world. The author reported that in his conversations with young Koreans it was evident that the rejection of children is widespread. The result is a country in which a large part of the population censors any space where there are children, there are signs in cafes and restaurants specifying that their entry is prohibited and terms such as mom-chung are widespread in local slang, which is a literal way of calling women with noisy children bugs.

Korea sounds far away from us, but in the debate in Spain it has been proven that the rejection of children and families is widespread, is quite transversal and includes all topics, from the supposed right not to be bothered by anyone in a restaurant or a train, to the recurring parents of today not educating children, nonsense like any other. Parents educate their children, perhaps with greater concern and dedication than ever, and what lies ahead is a society that is becoming choralized at the same rate at which it stops having offspring. In the oldest but at the same time most infantilized population in history, the natural tendency is to want to be 25 years old all the time and raising children complicates life too much: they consume your energy, your resources and your time, and they make you uglier and uglier. But there are still people who still have them and locking families in neighborhoods for children, restaurants for children, parks for children, hotels for children and train cars for children says much more about a twilight society than about incompetent parents.

Today, millions of families will leave our children at school with the feeling that of all the problems that are never solved, education is the main one. It has disappeared from public debate, despite the teachers' strikes and the obvious problems that we will see tomorrow in the PISA Report. It seems a logical consequence. If many people do not want to see children in their hotel in the summer, we can imagine how much they care about the quality of mathematics teaching.