South Korea is in the midst of a childbearing catastrophe. Birthrates are dropping below replacement level all over the world, including in the United States, and South Korea has the world’s lowest fertility rate, with only 0.75 children born for every woman of childbearing age. (Replacement level is considered 2.1 births per woman.) As a result, if the trend continues, South Korea’s population is expected to decline by half by the end of this century.
Why are South Koreans so reluctant to have children? There are the usual explanations: a high cost of living, young people delaying marriage and the stubbornly patriarchal nature of South Korean society — a problem so persistent that it sparked the feminist 4B movement, which contends that women should forgo four activities: dating men, having sex with men, marrying men and having kids. (The Korean prefix that denotes negation is pronounced “bee.”)
If you want to understand how these factors play out in the experience of South Korean women, look to the plots of the most popular K-dramas on TV. The K-drama business is one of the few industries in South Korea where women dominate; according to a 2018 estimate, 90 percent of K-drama writers are women. The popularity of these shows, in part because of their global distribution on Netflix, has given South Korean women a potent venue to tell their stories, and many of these stories can rightly be heard as a cry for help.
On paper, the rights afforded new and expecting mothers in South Korea can sound positively Scandinavian in their generosity — including up to three years of combined paid parental leave and generous government baby bonuses. And the country, which fully shed authoritarian rule only in 1987, is enjoying a period of prosperity and cultural influence. South Korea has the world’s most popular boy and girl bands, the world’s second-biggest cosmetics export industry and a thriving cultural sector that has produced an Academy Award for best picture (“Parasite”) and one of Netflix’s most popular shows (“Squid Game”).
But women’s advancement has been sporadic and unequal, and in practice, few of the benefits ensconced in the law have shifted the country’s deeply held beliefs about the pressures and demands of parenthood. Many South Koreans believe parental leave is for wimps. The Korea Herald reported that mothers still have a hard time re-entering the work force and that “many of the women residing in Seoul whose careers have been interrupted by family-related issues tend to sustain a job for less than two years after returning to work.”
Population collapse is largely a first-world problem. But as the most popular Korean dramas are desperately trying to tell us, you can’t fix a first-world problem when crucial areas of your society are still stuck in an outdated mentality about gender roles.
When I was growing up in Seoul, having moved there from the United States in the mid-1980s, I watched classic ’80s Korean dramas like “One Roof, Three Families” and “Country Diaries.” These shows were about happy and abundant families and reveled in themes like “It takes a village” and “Parents know best.” At the time, this seemed like a fairly accurate reflection of life in South Korea. The birthrate was double its current level, and the government hung banners along freeways exhorting South Koreans to “have no more than two children” in order to keep up the population.
Today’s most popular K-dramas center on competition, not abundance, and children are, at best, a chore or, at worst, a burden. The hit show “SKY Castle” is a nighttime soap about the lengths to which parents will go in order to get their kids into one of the country’s leading universities. The SKY of the title is an acronym for the country’s top schools: Seoul National University, Korea University and Yonsei University. In one scene, a teacher asks his middle school students, “What happens if you don’t get into SKY?” The kids respond in unison: “We are worth less than nothing.” A central character is Coach Kim, a top tutor with a 100 percent placement rate who charges tens of thousands of dollars per month and wields the social influence of a Guggenheim or a Kennedy. The children in the show are miserable. In one episode, the pressure causes a mother to succumb to suicide.
The aspects of “SKY Castle” that Western viewers might assume are most hyperbolic are the ones most firmly based in reality. According to 2023 data from Statistics Korea, many South Korean families spend more on tutoring than on food. According to The Korea Times, nearly 80 percent of South Korean schoolchildren go straight from the classroom to private cram schools called hagwons, where instructors prepare them for the all-important university entrance exams. Hagwons start children as young as 2 years old, and kids often stay until 10 p.m. — which is the cutoff time mandated by law, though some hagwons secretly stay open later. Top coaches have personal chauffeurs and stylists. And guess who must oversee their kids’ university prep as a nearly full-time job? Mothers, which is, in part, why “SKY Castle” has proved such a hit.
This pressure cooker atmosphere is reflected in another K-drama hit that mirrors South Korean reality: “Birthcare Center,” a soapy drama in which wealthy new mothers recuperate in a luxury postpartum spa. Nurses take care of the babies as women get pampered and fed iron-rich foods. This may sound great, except that for these women, the purpose of the spa is to compete to return to a prenatal physical state: a perfect body, zero fatigue and the ability to promptly return to work. It sounds like dystopian fiction, but centers like the one depicted on the show are very real and very popular in South Korea. The message is clear: Childhood is miserable, and motherhood is a marathon quest to pursue elusive perfection.
K-Dramas tell a story that the laws and the news do not: The old, hierarchical views haven’t evolved alongside socioeconomic progress, and this has left women and children miserable. Culturally, South Korea has achieved the paradoxical status of unassailable cool with absolutely no chill.
On TV we see a parallel trend in American programming. A generation ago, shows such as “Home Improvement,” “Family Ties” and “Growing Pains” centered on characters with lots of kids and a message that family life can anchor a fulfilling existence. (To quote the “Growing Pains” theme song, “As long as we’ve got each other.”) The arrival of “Seinfeld,” “Friends” and “Sex and the City” ushered in an era of carefree urban singletons — and fewer happy families to be found on U.S. television. Current pop culture is dominated by shows like “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “Severance,” in which women are reduced to their wombs or technology means everyone can have an “innie” slave. We can no longer imagine a lovable, kid-friendly future, even in our wildest shared dreams. The bleak Darwinism of “Squid Game” resonated for a reason.
South Korean and American programming have one other interesting element in common: nostalgia for a bygone era. In South Korea if you want a realistic show that prominently features family life, there are a number of popular teen dramas that are set in the ’80s and ’90s, including the hit series of “Reply” shows. In the United States, recent kid-centric American shows include throwbacks like “Stranger Things” and “Young Sheldon,” set in the Reagan and Clinton eras.
None of the recent shows I mentioned, either American or South Korean, are explicitly anti-natalist. They don’t offer solutions for escaping this treadmill of misery. But when so many stories are addressing the same anxieties about having children, it’s worth listening to the alarm. In both countries, the most popular programs suggest that increased wealth hasn’t liberated parents or made their lives easier. Instead, the implicit message before every commercial break is: Why would anyone want to choose this?
Euny Hong is a cultural critic.
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