As the 30-year-old from Beijing and his wife consider whether to have a second child, they face a question of resources. Caring for their three-year-old son requires hiring childcare while they’re at work, and the couple – both only children – are also looking ahead to when they’ll need to balance parenting with the cost and time of caring for their own aging parents.
While those considerations are not uncommon around the world, they’re also uniquely at the heart of one of the biggest long-term domestic challenges facing China’s leaders: spurring the country’s young people to have more children after decades of stringent, state-enforced birth control that skewed its demographics.
