A quiet, easy-to-miss moment tells you everything you need to know about how South Koreans feel about childhood. On a Tuesday night in Seoul around 11 p.m., middle schoolers are leaving hagwon, the private after-school programs that have become as normal in Korean families as breakfast. Some of these kids are 12 years old. Some of them look younger. It’s not toys they’re carrying, it’s books.
The birth rate in South Korea was 0.74 in 2023, which was the lowest rate ever recorded for any country in modern times. In 2024, the number barely went up to 0.75, which was the first rise in almost a decade. The government quickly framed this as progress. It’s possible that they are right to feel better about it. You might be right to celebrate 0.75 as a turning point, but you might also be wrong to do so when someone is still on life support and opens their eyes.
Every time this subject comes up, the same old explanations are used again. How much homes cost in Seoul. The 4B feminist movement has women all over the country actively rejecting marriage and having children. Stable wages. A harsh way of working. All of these are real. There is one thing, though, that doesn’t get as much attention when policy is being made. This might be because education is so important to South Korea.
Around age five, kids in South Korea start going to a separate school system that is based on competition. Hagwon work in the evenings and sometimes past midnight, even though local laws are supposed to limit their hours. Every year, 500,000 students take the suneung, which is the test to get into college, in conditions that feel more like a national emergency than a test day. Planes are on the ground. The building stops. Police walk students who are late to testing sites. Years of planning, a lot of money spent by the family, and a child’s sense of self-worth are all squished into eight hours.
This system is so expensive that it’s hard to believe. About $19.7 billion was spent by South Korean families on private schools in 2022 alone, which is more than 10% more than the previous year. Almost 80% of elementary and middle school students have some kind of private tutoring or hagwon. To keep up, the average family spends more than $400 a month on each child. And, culturally speaking, keeping up is not a choice. To stay alive.
It costs 7.79 times South Korea’s per capita GDP to raise a child, which is the most of any country in the world. China comes in second with 6.9 times. The number drops sharply after that. This doesn’t just mean that South Korea is pricey; it also means that the way of childhood that the culture values is especially pricey. A poll done in 2020 found that the main reasons South Koreans didn’t have kids were the unstable economy and the high cost of raising a child. The phrase “the cost of raising a child” does a lot of work without being said. It’s not the cost of daycare and diapers. It’s what it costs to raise a child who is competitive.
It was 33.5 years old for most South Korean mothers when they had their first child in 2022. That number was 28.3 for developed countries in 2019. That difference is important because later starts usually mean fewer kids, and fewer kids add up to a demographic problem that gets worse over time. At the rate things are going, the number of economically active people (15–64 years old) will drop by more than half by 2065. In the shadow of that number are things like pension plans, tax revenues, and even the readiness of the military.
The Korean government hasn’t done nothing. Policies like paid parental leave, birth incentives, and housing help for young families already exist and have grown over the past few years. But there is a sense that they are being aimed at the wrong target. Giving families free or cheap daycare when they secretly think they’ll have to spend thousands of dollars on hagwon doesn’t change the calculation behind it. It just puts it off.
The cultural structure that makes the suneung so important is harder to deal with, and the government has mostly avoided directly facing it. The chaebols, which are the big conglomerates, hire mostly from three universities. Everything below that bottleneck is affected by it, including what parents spend their money on, what their kids do, and, in the end, whether young couples decide to have kids at all.
It’s hard not to notice that countries where birth rates are a little more stable tend to be places where more than one definition of professional success are real. There is honor in vocational education. There are real career paths at mid-sized companies. One important test is not the pendulum that hangs your whole life. Even though South Korea has a very strong economy, it hasn’t built that kind of system, and it’s costing the country more right now than any housing subsidy can make up for.
The math behind demographics is harsh. Some structural change has to happen for reform to work. This could mean lowering the suneung’s influence on admissions, adding more vocational tracks, or changing how smaller businesses compete for talent. South Korea hasn’t fully thought through where this path is leading them yet: to a country that worked so hard to make sure every child would succeed that it stopped making children.
