Marriage childbirth evoke fear not joy among young South Koreans study finds

SEOUL - Amid South Korea’s birth rate crisis, new support plans are unveiled, including ‘fast-track’ airport entry for large families, and affordable housing.

This comes as marriage and parenthood are increasingly associated with fear and anxiety among South Korea’s younger generation, according to an analysis released on March 11.

The analysis of posts on Blind, an online community for young workers, find that two-thirds of marriage-related posts carried emotions of “sadness”, “fear” or “abomination”.

Of these, 32.3 per cent displayed feelings of “sadness” while 24.6 per cent exhibited “fear” and 10.2 per cent were categorised under “abomination”.

On the other hand, only 9.3 per cent of the posts expressed happiness.

A similar trend could be observed for childbirth and child-rearing. According to the institute, over 60 per cent of childbirth-related posts carried negative emotions, with “abomination” leading at 23.8 per cent, followed by “fear” (21.3 per cent) and “sadness” (15.3 per cent). Nearly 70 per cent of posts about child-rearing exhibited such emotions.

The analysis was conducted by not-for-profit private-sector think tank Korean Peninsula Population Institute for Future. It was based on some 50,000 blind posts combined from December 2017 to November 2024 about marriage, childbirth or child-rearing.

Despite government efforts to reverse the country’s declining birth rate through a range of policies, the study indicated negative perceptions towards family life persist, reflecting deep-rooted societal and economic concerns.

The same analysis also showed that the word “money” appeared in nearly 30 per cent of all posts related to marriage and in 13.2 per cent of posts about childbirth.

Moreover, nearly 60 per cent of the marriage-related posts centred around the “preparations and conditions for marriage”, while almost 20 per cent of childbirth-related posts talked about “financial support related to childbirth”.

This came as South Korea showed signs of a rebound