The South Korean government has passed a new law that will replace the country’s old age-counting system with the global norm. The country’s people will now appear on official records as being either 1 or 2 years younger.
South Koreans are expected to get younger;
A baby is now considered a year old in South Korea when they are born. Not just that. They acquire a year every time a new year begins. As a result, a child born in December will soon be regarded to be two years old. In a different system, a person’s age is determined starting at zero at birth and one year is added on January 1 in order to determine eligibility for military service or the legal drinking and smoking age. The traditional method, however, has never applied to legal and medical documents. In these situations, the accepted practise was to start the calculation at zero at birth and add a year for each birthday.
South Korea is planning to follow the worldwide standard for determining age;
When the new regulations that mandate using just the worldwide way of counting ages come into force in June 2023, the bewildering assortment of methods will now vanish—at least on official papers. According to Yoo Sang-bum of the ruling People’s Power Party, ‘the change is intended to reduce needless socio-economic expenditures because legal and social conflicts as well as uncertainty continue as a result of the many approaches of measuring age’.
Local media state that since health officials utilised both the international age and the Korean age interchangeably while establishing recommendations and rules for the COVID-19 vaccination, there has been an increase in requests for standardising legal age counts. People who were not old enough to have their COVID-19 vaccinations were nonetheless needed to present proof of immunisation due to the three age-counting systems coexisting, which caused a mess in the administrative world.
Some parents have attempted to game the birth registration system throughout the years because they were concerned that their December kids would have challenges in school and as a result in later life. Attempts to develop a standardised technique for calculating ages have previously been made by South Korean government.
Similar bills were put forth by two legislators in 2019 and 2021, but they were not adopted by the Korean Assembly and were later defeated. However, the citizens’ situation is about to change, and it may result in a younger population. However, one thing is certain: even once the worldwide age is established, it will take time for people to adjust to this ‘new’ standard.
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