(12-10) 04:00 PST Seoul -- Faced with a tumbling birthrate and women souring on the idea of marriage and family, the South Korean government is reaching out to a small group of people believed to have the power to avert a demographic catastrophe: writers of prime-time dramas.
Last month, the Planned Population Federation of Korea organized a two-day seminar for writers of TV soaps and dramas and urged them to create more situations that show happy mothers with their children. The aim is to counter an anti-baby mood that is leading South Korea down the path to being, well, less populous.
"For many years we have been pondering what influences people the most, and we concluded it was TV dramas and other news and documentary programs," said Shin Sun Chol of the family planning group. "We are just asking the writers to be more considerate because some programs now depict career women as being very egoistical, thinking only of themselves."
The idea of leaning on TV writers for social engineering followed the release of a government study of 50 Korean dramas that shows a television landscape in which single life is portrayed as cool, children as a burden, and love as something that does not always have to lead to marriage and a family.
And that's important in a country where the audience of potential mothers -- women in their 20s and 30s -- is known to be heavily influenced by TV dramas. Not only do the shows generate big audiences, but their subject matter also is spun off to heavily trafficked Internet chat rooms where plot lines are discussed with great intensity.
"Koreans are very emotional, and they don't watch TV dramas as drama -- they think it is something close to their own lives," said Go Bong Hwan, a female TV writer. "They tend to see the TV character's problem as their problem, to the point that some Korean husbands worry that their wife might have an extramarital affair just because her favorite character in a drama is having an affair."
That degree of immersion may sound extreme, but there is nothing exaggerated about the extent of the demographic challenge facing this country of 48.5 million.
Statistics released last month show that the birthrate of South Korean women between the ages of 15 and 49 fell to a record low of 1.08 in 2005. The government now predicts that the country's population will start decreasing by 2018, two years earlier than previously expected.
And with Koreans' life expectancy increasing, projections suggest that by 2050, those older than 65 will account for 37 percent of the population, which would give South Korea the social and economic burdens of being the world's most aged society.
Government policies have had little success in persuading women to have more babies. Reasons for this lack of enthusiasm range from worries about the cost of education to job uncertainty. Moreover, South Korea trails most Western countries in providing child care options for mothers who want to work.
There are also strong signals that Korean women are far less likely than men to see marriage as desirable. A poll for the Ministry of Health and Welfare in October showed that whereas 71 percent of unmarried men described marriage as "necessary," the same percentage of unmarried women preferred a good job to marriage.
Earlier government surveys showed a dramatic drop since the late 1990s in the number of women with a positive attitude toward having children.
So the government has set out to improve the public image of marriage and family. Prime-time dramas have a track record of altering attitudes, Shin said, noting that when the government was trying to reduce South Korea's then-high birthrate in the 1960s, the Planned Population Federation petitioned TV writers to show households with fewer children.
The government still must persuade today's writers to get on board. Go, who is married with children, said she did feel an urge to write about husbands who help out more around the home.
"But that's about it," she said. "It's very easy to write about happy families, but what excites us is to write about characters who need more love. It's more challenging to write about families with problems."
The 10 male and 22 female writers who heard the government's appeal were a mixed group: about half married with families, and half single, with the women expressing how difficult it is to have a family and a television career. And they had some practical objections to the government's appeal to put more children on prime time.
"Some of the writers said it was too much work because they'd have to give each kid a line," Shin said. "But they said they'd try."