Faced with low birthrates, Japan takes the first step towards a “child-centered society”

Japan on Monday launched a new government agency tasked with coordinating policies aimed at support the birth and raising children, given the accelerated demographic decline facing the country.

The organism, called Agency for Children and Familiesshould serve for “lead the creation of a society favorable to children and their care”, according to the Japanese Prime Minister, Fumio Kishidaby attending the opening ceremony this Monday.

The creation of this agency is one of the measures taken by the Government led by Kishida along with others such as the distribution of economic aid to families, with which the Executive aspires to create “a child-centered society” to solve the drop in birth rates, a problem that threatens the sustainability of the country in the medium term.

Last year the number of newborns in Japan fell by 5.1% to below 800,000, a record low, while the population aged 65 and over now accounts for 29% of the total, placing Japan as the Second country with the highest demographic aging in the world.

The agency will be in charge of supervising the regulations and policies that cover everything from pregnancy and postpartum to nurseries or the distribution of aid for raising children, and will also be in charge of coordinating measures against child abuse and bullying. .

The measures that affect public nurseries and compulsory education will continue to be within the competence of the Ministry of Education, although the new entity will have the capacity to make recommendations to this and other ministries.

The agency will also take into account the opinions of children, young people and parents, and for this it will regularly invite them to meetings of its council or consult them through social networks on specific topics.

The current Minister of Equality, Masanobu Ogura, will also be in charge of the Agency for Children and the Family, which will have a staff of more than 400 workers, as announced by the Executive.

In parallel to this new entity, Kishida has promised to double the budget aimed at supporting the birth rate and raising children, among other measures focused mainly on the economic section and which, according to some experts, are insufficient to address the serious and complex demographic problem of Japan.