Korea Pays Couples to Have Babies, and Your High Schoolers Have Strong Opinions
South Korea's national and local governments offer cash payments, housing points, and extended parental leave to encourage childbirth because the country's fertility rate has fallen to roughly 0.7 births per woman, the lowest ever recorded in a major country.
Park English2026-09-062 min read
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South Korea's fertility rate hit 0.72 in 2023, and even with a small bump in 2024 it's still under one birth per woman. That number gets thrown around so often in Korean media that most of your students have heard it on the news at dinner. What they haven't necessarily done is argue about whether the government's response actually works.
This is one of the rare "boring policy" topics that Korean teenagers have real skin in. Their own parents may have received a childbirth grant. Their city might advertise a payment on a banner outside city hall. And a fair number of them will, at some point, be the ones deciding whether to have kids in this system. That makes it a genuinely live argument, not a textbook one about zoos or uniforms.
Background for the teacher, in plain terms
Cities and provinces run their own cash incentive schemes on top of national child benefits, and the amounts vary a lot by region and change year to year — some counties have offered lump sums in the tens of millions of won for a second or third child, especially in areas losing population fast. National parental leave pay has also been extended in recent years. Don't quote a specific won figure to students as fixed; tell them to check this year's number for their own city, because it genuinely moves.
Running the lesson (45 minutes)
- Warm-up (5 min): Ask "How many people in this room, if any, want to have children?" Get a show of hands, no discussion yet.
- Vocabulary check (5 min): use the handout list before opening the floor.
- Pair discussion (10 min): students discuss the handout questions in pairs.
- Pro/con debate (15 min): split the class into two sides regardless of personal opinion. One side argues cash incentives work, the other argues they don't.
- Whole class share-out (10 min): each pair gives one sentence they'd say to a policymaker.
| For cash incentives | Against cash incentives |
|---|---|
| Direct relief for the real cost of hospital bills and baby gear | Doesn't fix the actual reasons people avoid having kids — housing cost, work hours, education pressure |
| Rural counties have seen short-term upticks after big lump-sum offers | Money runs out; some counties have quietly scaled back payments after a few years |
| Signals the government sees this as a national emergency | Feels like a bribe rather than a structural fix, students often say this themselves |
| Extended parental leave lets both parents actually take time off | Many workplaces still make it hard to use leave without career damage |
We've watched this debate go sideways in a good way — a few students always bring up that they don't want kids at all, incentive or not, and that's worth letting run. It's the most honest five minutes of the class.