More religious yes, but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer” (at least not if the goal is a sustainable TFR). France and the US had birth rates around 2 as recently as the early aughts.
Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.
I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge.
So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.
Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.
Huh? Where did you get this idea? Daycare, clothing, food, medicine, and education are not free in Japan. They're mostly not as horrifically expensive as in America, but definitely not free.
If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.
The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.
Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.
Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.
Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/
Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.