To save the family

The danger posed by the family and by the tragic decline in our rate of population growth is greater than we think. Moreover, this is a decline that has been coming in plain sight for years. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has pointed to this danger since the earliest years of his premiership, and in his own way he encourages people to have more children against it. As we noted before, thanks to these campaigns of his, the neighbourhood pressure on couples with many children has, among broad segments at least, been largely lifted.

This is not a small thing; it is a much more valuable contribution than one might think. Because, though this will sound a bit Marxist, changing economic infrastructures bring with them the family cultures or ideologies that suit them. In traditional societies the child is a source of income for the family economy. Having many children is also a source of strength and prestige. Because more children means more labour, and therefore more income. The child is not a cause of expense or burden. That is why in these societies people can put forward the number of their children as an occasion for pride and boasting.

Yet as people urbanise and become civilised, and especially as this urbanisation advances toward a life interwoven with education and technology, individualisation also develops. People's need for one another as kin declines. Within a social division of labour based on distant relationships, everyone can obtain the services they need in this life. In this way of life the child turns into a great burden and expense.

People who have postponed marriage until the age of 35 can, for the child they have from then on, allocate perhaps ten times the material resources they could have allocated in the past. So much so that today those who refrain from having a second or third child because of material constraints can spend on the one child they have perhaps the money that on the old scales would be spent on ten children.

They perhaps do this in the name of a parental ideology that might be expressed under the heading "my child must not fall behind others." Ideology is like an idol that people feed and spoil as they compete with one another, and bring trouble upon themselves. For this reason they have no strength left to spend on a second child anyway. You can guess what the long-term effect of this will be, because it is the picture of the reality we see and live. A picture of the effect, one on the child being raised, the other on population habits in general:

First, the self-centredness, individualism, narcissism and so on that develop in children on whom so much has been spent, over whom parents tremble, and who draw alone all the attention withheld from other children; second, that the parents already have no strength left to have another child.

On top of this, the over-mixing of male and female roles, and its being sanctified in the name of so-called gender equality, is one of the most important factors affecting the family. When women, who are encouraged to the utmost toward education, are inevitably also encouraged toward working life and careers through an ever more peculiar approach such as "positive discrimination," that positive discrimination in fact turns back and strikes, first of all, with the most negative discrimination against the woman. The measures taken in the name of empowering women in legal legislation do not yield results in the woman's favour in the long run, as is supposed. The disproportionate advantages given to the woman with the marriage contract create, on the man's side, a serious hesitation as to whether he is stepping into a marriage or into a minefield.

Although she has been encouraged to the utmost with regard to career, the advantages provided to the woman such as lifelong alimony and her statement being taken as the basis in certain offices turn the family, in the long run, into a goal very hard to reach.

There are of course also the well-known deviant tendencies that threaten the establishment, development and sustainability of the family, but in the face of the urbanisation, modernisation and development of educational life that we are experiencing, their negative effect is not as great as supposed. The real major effect is that education and working life, together with their developing new lifestyles, have reduced the weight, importance and value of the family. Even if it has not reduced its value, it has pushed it toward a place where it can be constantly postponed in the face of other tasks considered important in life. There are certainly measures against this. With much different, cool-headed and rational measures, this process could of course have been run otherwise too.

Even at this stage there is much that can be done:

1. First of all, for this, education should be reorganised so as to encourage people to enter a profession at an early age. The 12-year compulsory education must be made flexible and made such as to encourage vocational training. When education being compulsory also makes failing a class impossible, concession on the quality of education is inevitably given. A strange generation emerges, who have completed their education in no field and who cannot do any work with their hands. There used to be pressure of a secularism debate over whether education should be 12 years. Thank God, since this pressure no longer exists today, it can be discussed quite comfortably and the solution to the problem can be reached by common effort.

2. In addition, homemaking and motherhood must certainly be adequately rewarded and appreciated. Women, or their husbands, should not think that they have brought a great task upon themselves when they have a child. In fact, both having a career and having children, doing both at a certain quality, is much harder than supposed. Mothers and fathers who suffer this hardship know it best, of course. Therefore those who prefer motherhood over career should be made to feel, both materially and spiritually, that motherhood too is a sufficiently valuable and advantageous career.

3. In the current situation, a woman without a career is also not preferred as a spouse in marriage, and unfortunately this is no exception even in conservative families. Many conservative, well-off people too look to whether the women their sons will marry are working. Rather than seeing a few grandchildren in the home their children will establish, calculations of livelihood and career are again more to the fore. This is perhaps not the problem of the state but of society, but the measure the state can take to reverse this is the aforementioned measure.

4. Measures can be taken that make founding a family and having children a prestigious mission, even a profession, especially for women. A salary, insurance and retirement right and so on tied to the woman according to the number of children can of course be considered.

I note this proposal of mine at the risk of playing with the nerves of our dear minister Mehmet Şimşek, who himself came to where he is today out of a family with many children.