It’d be funny if it weren’t so tragic. Korea has the lowest fertility rate in the world and it has many reasons, 4th quater last year was 0.6 children per woman. Here is one of the reasons:
I’m a stay at home dad and I’ll need to go back to work in 4 months. We’re both foreigners so our son is foreigner too even if he was born in Korea. We called the nursery which is close to us here and they said there a 30 babies in line but that doesn’t even matter, because as foreigners we are not allowed to be in that line anyway.
So I have two options, either hire a nanny which will consume most of what I’m making probably, or don’t go to work, which is probably what I’ll have to do, which is problematic for more than just the money reason. If this continues, I guess moving back to Europe will become a necessity more than just a wish from my side.
So we applied to be in the line and didn’t get any answers via email, so went to that Kindergarden and they said they couldn’t really promisse us that there will be space for our baby when I need to go back to work. There seems to be a point system and we only have 300 points, while many other people have over 700 points so they would get in first. This was one of those national Kindergartens where they appearently have kindergarten teachers with a higher education, it was also a very new building, etc.
Anyway, we started looking for a different Kindergarten which would still be close to us. We found one which is not run by the state/city or how ever it works here in Korea. We went there and it was older and a bit run down, but they said that they have space there. They have space for 6 small babies like him and only 2 are using it. They blamed the lack of children on the fact that during Covid people stopped having children, which yeah, having seen the line to the other Kindergarten obviously is just their dellusion. So it looks like it depends on the Kindergarten if they have space for your child or not.
In the second one we also asked how much it would cost, because we as foreigners have to pay for it ourselves. They said it’s around one million KRW. Damn, I didn’t expect it to be that expensive. I mean we both pay taxes like everyone else, but we can’t use the infrastructure for our children like everyone else, that’s a bummer. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still happy that they even allow us to live here, but yeah.