Discussion#9:How to increase the birth rate

On Dec. 3rd, we discussed about birth rate. Recently, birth rate is raising little by little, but it is still low. Nobi (Masami) is a single mother and she has a seven-year-old girl who goes elementary school. Goda (kota) is a single father. His son (?) is 5th grade of elementary school. Actually, I did not think that these two people were related to this topic because they had already their children. Minamoto (Mai) had just married and she had no children. She is working so that she was worried about raising children up in the future. Now, they can have child care leave for 1 year and it is not enough for them. She wants to have child care leave for 2 years. Honekawa (Kasumi) has studied in France. France has the highest birth rate in EU. She thinks that this is because people in France can take child care leave longer than other countries, and after they get back to their work, their working time is shorter and have more time to take care of their children. Also, it is admitted to give birth without marriage and many old women give birth. In other words, the environment for giving birth and raising up children is better than Japan.
Finally, they found 4 things which will help this problem: increase child care leave allowance, discount system for familly who has children (costs such as transportation, zoo, museum) , child care service in the working place, the right to decide how long they work.

In the class, we were confused because it was unclear if they are talking about the birth rate in the future, or the past. Of course, they wanted to find the problems and why the birth rate is low, and by considering these problems, they will solve the problem. However, I think they should set the theme clearer to make the discussion easy.
Also, I thought that we need to learn a lot of systems in the society.