"People really need to feel confident about the future… having kids is sort of an irreversible decision and it's a long-term one"

Don't discount this reason, it's pretty powerful.

South Korea has the lowest birth rate. Japan has an older population and higher death rate, so a faster shirking population currently.

Well I imagine the people who call themselves “conservatives” probably want to switch back to the old thing, not try another new thing.

Are you thinking of a certain study? Meta analysis is mixed on your proposals. There have been some countries where more leave and financial assistance increases births, but causality is unknown. And those births were in some countries among older parents more financially established, not the young couples who would benefit the most. In other countries there’s been no found correlation. The infamous Spanish study found more paternity leave to decrease fertility. :)

State-provided benefits not driving fertility makes some intuitive sense. The countries with high birth rates are not the wealthy and comfortable ones.

Not so sure that is enough… 5 days of work then 2 days of taking care of kids and cleaning and laundry? It takes months between me and my wife getting a couple of hours for ourselves.

Only thing I think could help is going back to the traditional housewife/houseman with grandparents. Then it would work to get 3+ kids. But right now with increasing cost and rising pension age that seems like a dream.

A productive country will wrangle out the time from its productive members and let the non productive members have kids… which might not be the best approach in the long run.

I live in Czechia where basically everything you demand is law of the land, no one except rare uninsured foreigners faces any medical bills at all, we don't even have tuition etc., but our birth rate still isn't stellar. It moves the needle only by a few tenths of a kid, compared to our European peers, and our absolute birth rate is comparable to the US one.

I don't believe it is about the money anymore. People love sex, but they don't necessarily want to have children, and once efficient contraception and sex education is available to everyone, the subset of "unwanted kids", which might have been more than half of all kids born 100 years ago, mostly disappears. What remains are the "wanted kids", and the harsh truth is that quite a lot of people want 0 or 1 kid at most.

People also aren't even having that much sex lately. The epidemics of loneliness is real. Tell me how you are going to have kids if you never have a BF/GF. That is not something money can cure, this is a deep societal dysfunction mediated by smartphones.

Agreed, but the societal effects of such a dramatic shrinking of the population would be devastating.