Ten years after it ended its ‘one-child’ policy, China’s push for more babies isn’t winning its citizens over

Welkin Lei has been doing some paper-napkin calculations in his spare time.

As the 30-year-old from Beijing and his wife consider whether to have a second child, they face a question of resources. Caring for their three-year-old son requires hiring childcare while they’re at work, and the couple – both only children – are also looking ahead to when they’ll need to balance parenting with the cost and time of caring for their own aging parents.

While those considerations are not uncommon around the world, they’re also uniquely at the heart of one of the biggest long-term domestic challenges facing China’s leaders: spurring the country’s young people to have more children after decades of stringent, state-enforced birth control that skewed its demographics.

January 1 marks 10 years since China scrapped its notorious “one-child” policy, after the government realized that a falling birth rate threatened to derail the growth of the world’s second-largest economy.

But the landmark change – and a raft of other measures to encourage couples to have more kids – have failed to boost the population.