The challenge: procreate or perish

There are at least two obstacles to bigger families: the financial cost, and people simply running out of time.

With people marrying later, that is going to be a huge challenge. If you want to tackle the declining fertility rate, you have to make it more attractive for people to marry in their 20s.

How do we create the conditions under which people will marry earlier while still allowing them to meet all their other aspirations?

In relation to the financial costs, Hakim takes up the idea of paying parents a home-care allowance for the mother, or father, who stays at home full-time to care for children.

She says the money can be regarded as a wage for childcare at home, as a partial replacement for savings forgone, or it can be used as a subsidy for purchased childcare services that enable the parent to return to work, either part-time or full-time.

As Hakim states, few welfare states offer a home-care allowance to parents, but the idea is popular. She mentions a successful scheme in Finland introduced in the 1980s that allows parents to choose between publicly provided child-care services and a cash benefit for child care at home.

A similarly generous French scheme, introduced in 1986, is also popular, Hakim states, because it fits the preferences of adaptive women as well as home-centred women, rather than being targeted at a single group.

Hakim states that even modest home-care payments to mothers attract an immediate, positive response because they provide public recognition for the parenting role, and renew its social value by providing the mother with a minimum "salary" for their work.

Hakim argues it is possible to design policies to offer advantages to women and men generally, rather than to narrowly defined subgroups. "The challenge for politicians and policy makers in the 21st century is to design policies that are neutral between the three preference groups."

Whatever choice Australia takes, it will only be a start. To do nothing is to walk away from our responsibilities to the future.