Blythe Terrell

You know, and the Trump administration is supposedly considering some of these ideas.

So there are a few things policy-wise that might move the needle here.

One of them is making childcare more available and also cheaper.

Duh.

Okay.

Yes.

And there's this big review that came out recently, and one study that was in this review came out of Belgium, and it found that if you increase childcare slots for young kids by just one percentage point, the odds of somebody having their first baby goes up more than 10%.

Mm-hmm.

So it bumps it.

Mm-hmm.

Another big thing seems to be giving people parental leave.

Yeah.

Duh.

Welcome to the Rose Tells Me Duh portion of the episode.

In Austria, they increased parental leave from one year to two years and saw that it led to about 12 additional kids per 100 women.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it's not nothing.

But I do have to kind of caveat some of these a bit, Rose, because although these things can make a difference, I think we have pretty good evidence that they do, and they can be good for people who want to have kids.