If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.
This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self.
I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
Not having kids and having less kids is a universal trend that is not unique to America. It's affecting every country in the world, and the US is actually doing better than most at the same level of development.
Bangladesh’s decline in fertility rate is due to deliberate population control efforts over the last 70 years. (That was my dad’s career. We came to the US because he was working on a USAID population control program in Bangladesh.)
You can see this clearly by looking over at Pakistan, which has almost double the fertility rate despite being at a similar level of economic development. If it was dictated by economics rather than culture and policy, you wouldn’t see that.
It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world.
Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals.
Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
Or, again, make it easier to raise kids. Subsidize childcare, or even better, allow zoning that stimulates community development so people have free childcare in their neighbors or extended family living nearby.
Countries such as Portugal, South Korea, Iceland, and Latvia have more affordable childcare, more subsidies, and more parental leave than the US, yet even fewer cousins.
Like most human related things there is no single cause.
I can't comment on Iceland.
However, South Korea has one of the most crushing work cultures in the world, with insane work hours. Most people are not even in a relationship yet alone with kids.
In Portugal you have a huge problem of disposable income. Median salaries are insanely low and stagnant when adjusted to COL. To the point that by now most former 'Iron Curtain' EU members have surpassed Portugal in workers income both adjusted and absolute.
The fact is, when comparing across all countries in the world, that the harsher the conditions, the more kids there were. Do people really believe that their ancestors lived in better times for raising children than currently? It is precisely because they didn't that they had so many, as they needed labor for agriculture or to make sure at least a few survived since so many would die before the age of 5.
Now, I am not having children either, but I will not deny that even in the best of countries, when controlling for all of these factors, people still aren't having children simply because they have no want or need of having them. That's it, that's the reality. Now it is an uncomfortable truth for many, but many people nowadays, me included, just don't want them, for no particular reason at all.
Child subsidies are a great help for parents, but they don't seem that successful at getting people to have kids in the first place.
Apparently, married people are having kids at roughly the same rate as they did decades ago. However, fewer people are getting married and far fewer kids are being born outside of wedlock.
These are not necessarily negative developments, at least at the individual level, but they do point towards a significant change in human culture and society: increasingly, only people with a strong intrinsic drive to have kids will do so.
I don't think that we can predict the effect of this trend a few generations from now.
$2K/month for two kids in flyover country at what amounts to the only day-care in the area. That's just the day-care costs, not counting the additional missed work from every bowel-voiding illness they bring home! Have to pick them up by 16:30.
Our parents' parents were primarily not paying for day-care. It still seems quite odd to their generation to have mom work to pay for someone else to watch the kids.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
Fun fact, like 80% of the kids at that particular day-care are there on "scholarship." Not sure exactly what that means, being as how they're not likely to be there on intellectual merit at this age, but it looks like care is partially or completely subsidized by the government. I'm for affordable care, but it seems like the same perverse incentives that have caused the cost of college to go up like they have.
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Yeah I'm hoping mgmt can't claw WFH back, a lot of the folks I know still doing mostly programming or desk-job engineering work have seen a significant improvement in both their personal lives and the development of their children from WFH.
It would be politically impossible to implement, but I would like a daring economist to compute the exact amount that childless people should be paying as subsidies towards those with kids.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?
Considering current events, I consider this comment to be inappropriate. A different example, perhaps relating to children who aren't in a conflict zone would have been more constructive.
In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.
The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands?
It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case.
That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing.
It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
Well, you have insurance, facilities, logistics. Local area matters a lot. For each family there should be some point, a little below the lower earners salary probably, where they'd rather just stay home themselves than pay for care. That will vary by income but I imagine the average price is a little below average woman earnings (usually but not always the lower earner still I think). That is basically what you can charge unless there is enough competition to bring the price down a lot. It doesnt sound like there is based on the prices people are claiming?
$1k per week is very high even for the SF Bay Area or Manhattan.
I would need proof to believe it, and am interested in what kind of pampered existence these kids have at school considering TN’s average CoL, and even if such a daycare exists, it is surely not representative of 99% of daycares.
I mean, I'm not gonna give you the proof there as this is as anonymous an account as I can be.
One thing would be to try to look at the wait lists of various daycares. My buddies in TN are at ~3 years. We were at ~1.5 years. And yes, it's quite common in the US for the waitlist for a daycare to be longer than 40 weeks of human gestation.
Daycare in the US in general is really not very well tied to the local CoL. Many factors influence the cost and CoL is but one. Things like the quality of churches really affect things in ways that other services are not affected by normally.
In general, if there is a waitlist, then capitalism has failed. You'd just raise prices until there is no more waitlist. But with daycare, you can't really do that without knocking out a large percentage of the workforce. Hence waitlists.
NPR has a good PlanetMoney episode from a while back on the issues with daycare in the US. It's worth checking out.
Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo.
This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury.
No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)?
When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way.
What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care!
And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
> Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids.
The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
Either one, doesn't really matter, and it is up to the parents. Although, not sure if you know this, but fathers can't breastfeed, no matter what you read on Twitter. It affects your options for the early years.
Hahaha. As a parent and regular human, I'm fully aware of who can breastfeed. I assume my point was clear though. We need to stop putting all of this on women. Yes there are certain biology issues that require women to take some outsized roles in child development but those aren't permanent and telling women that they should stay home with the kids is usually not aligned with "until they're off the breast and then the father can stay home instead."
Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods.
On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people.
If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
Not sure if you know this, but it's possible to pump and refrigerate breast milk. And even freeze it.
Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
You're not American, are you? Maternity leave is not a year here. There's a 12 but it's "weeks" and never months. That's the law I'm the very liberal states.
It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
Unfortunately most women, even the most feminist and empowered ones, would refuse to marry a man that makes less than her. That being the case, if it comes time for one to quit their job, it usually makes sense for it to be the lower earner. Not sure if there’s a way to really square that circle without restructuring male/female psychology.
I strongly disagree with your framing that this is "women refusing to marry."
Here's a few excerpts from the article you linked:
> On one hand, women’s advantage in education may enable them to be more economically independent and thus put less emphasis on economic traits when evaluating potential spouses (Press, 2004). On the other hand, evidence suggests that men may still feel uncomfortable forming relationships in which they have lower status than their female partners (Bertrand, Kamenica, & Pan, 2015; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson, 2006).
> From men’s perspective, although men have placed more importance on the financial prospects of a potential spouse over time (Buss et al., 2001), they may value women’s high status only up to the point when women’s status exceeds their own status (Bertrand et al., 2015; England, 2011; Graf & Schwartz, 2011). For example, a speed dating study found that men did not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeded their own (Fisman et al., 2006). Psychology experiments showed that men’s self-esteem was lower when their partners succeeded than when their partners failed, whereas women’s self-esteem was not affected by their partners’ performance (Ratliff & Oishi, 2013). Although these studies did not directly test men’s reaction to their partners’ education or income, they suggest that men may avoid a potential spouse who has both higher education and higher income than themselves.
> Given a shortage of more-educated men, women may seek to maximize gains from marriage by evaluating potential spouses more on the basis of income. Because mate selection is a two-sided process, it is equally possible that men hesitate to form marital relationships with women who have both more education and higher incomes than they do.
Sure, it takes two to tango, and some of the effect may be on the man's side as well. But if you're at all tuned into popular culture, it's pretty clear that from a dating/marriage perspective, a lower earning man is at a huge disadvantage. Whereas this isn't really the case for a woman. Setting studies aside, just look at what people say in the real world: https://www.reddit.com/r/dating/comments/154w09d/do_women_fi...
This doesn’t fit what I’ve personally seen, it is basically random among my friends. But we’re unusually progressive people in an already progressive state. That said, the Overton window only goes so far, so I think it will be widespread next generation.
I disagree TBH, haha. Regardless of historical trends, I think, but mostly hope, that we’re heading toward equality. I don’t need a citation to see that we’ve still got work to do—I believe it!
Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank?
The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors.
That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1].
> I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal.
It does because the site is a right wing think tank but I will give that my link is more about "women are happier when they get to be people first" and it doesn't contradict the "women often marry up in income." The problem with starting with a place like a right wing think tank's evaluation of a study is that the goal is to sell a narrative that aligns with their existing bias. See the use of the word "prefer" which is only used once in the interview and it's from a leading question that asserts the preference to be true. It's easy for women to marry up economically: find a man doing your same job, marry him and he'll likely get paid more.
Additionally, it's easy for better educated women to do that same. Find qualified women in various industries and review the educational qualifications of their male peers who are making more than them and... same outcome.
So yes, I find the source to be problematic. I have not read the cited study itself but I did see that fun Q&A.
I think even my generation, and I’m not that young, has the expectation that at least an approximate balance would be expected as an outcome, absent any enforcement.
I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
Your failure to draw meaning from the simplified problem disappoints. If you can’t grapple with this toy model I’m afraid you won’t make inroads in any real scenario.
If you’d started the conversation with a good-faith attempt to be understandable I think we could have had a more interesting conversation, or maybe not, but at least it would have been shorter.
Your premise is flawed, anyway. That which "dominates" the other is strictly through force, historically speaking, and thus you are unfortunately succumbing to argumentum ad antiquitatem. Even if it were not fallacious, it also seems that you exhibit this as natural, unfortunately additionally succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy.
What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
Nobody is forcing anyone, it’s just the natural choice for the lower earning parent to step away from their job. If women to a high degree only marry higher earning spouses, then this is frequently going to be the woman.
That's not the natural choice. The natural choice is to find the bottom of the barrel outside care and have a second income because we've made it financially impossible to do anything else.
Sorry, it's true that the common choice is often for both parents to work. I meant the natural choice given that a couple has decided for one of the two parents to stay at home while their children are too young for school.
Because in a given couple, women typically match with men that earn more than them. Whether that is the “fault” of the woman or man is for anyone to decide.
With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things.
I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
> I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance.
In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married.
There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband.
When someone wrote:
>> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance
I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
That is mostly what I meant, just dropping the assumption that there ought to be an imbalance.
I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up.
I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see males constantly fight each other to lead the pack and mate with multiple women, with women having little choice in the matter.
Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
And anyway, what hands are we talking about? Human nature is whatever humans do I guess, and that includes things like inventing feminism and equality.
The extra income, post childcare. went into housing, as families had a higher income they had more to spend on the house, but the same houses existed. So it meant prices went up. The only winners were those who owned houses before the change.
I suppose it depends on what the purpose of children is. I’ll be a bit provocative and say that I think that they are largely status symbols - they need to go to good schools and onto high status careers in order to bring as much prestige to the family as possible.
There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
I don’t disagree that some people treat kids as status symbols, but that’s basically a pathology in our society IMO. The point of having kids should be to raise some happy, well-adjusted people. Education is important but for their enrichment, not as some silly high-score focused game.
Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please.
I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
I think it's the opposite actually; only individuals can really opt out. As a long time observer of the US (having lived in it my entire life), I'd say it's a highly anti-collectivist country. Socialized education is under attack as unfree and lacking choice. I find it instructive to think about if libraries did not exist and someone proposed creating them today - can you imagine the screams of "socialism!" and the attacks on such an idea as collective ownership of books? And we're the only developed country that lacks a universal healthcare system.
I feel that I've voted my entire life for more collective solutions to problems (what else is government for?) though imperfect the purveyors of such solutions may be (let's be real, as fashionable as it is to say that both sides are bad, the Democratic party are the only ones trying to actually improve things). But it seems that enough voters go the other direction that we have decided against such solutions. I am truly sorry for the state of things and that children today will inherit these problems.
Private and subscription libraries were a thing even in the Gilded Age - and the working class used them too (hence the Pratt "Free" Library to contrast it)
The education costs are high, but not THAT high. We're on a forum for tech workers and their corresponding suits: that kind of salary can comfortably send 2 kids to any university they fancy on a single income. We're talking about saving up about three quarter million by the time the second kid hits college. Faaaarr from impossible on a 1500-200k salary.
My lazy kids are terrible status symbols but they are excellently suited for their actual purposes which are to laugh at my dad jokes and keep me honest about snacking.
Seriously though I don't know anyone who has kids as status symbols. That seems quite weird.
If they remain pleasant, carry their weight around the house, and don't mind that we are going to be moving somewhere much warmer the day they both finish high school, then sure! I like them.
It does sound like you have a few qualifications there at least, not that I can blame you. I wonder - what do you feel does give you status within your community if not your children?
I think most of my local status, such as it is, comes from being generally amiable and having helped out at least half the people on the street with repair/lifting/moving tasks at some point.
Also I suppose living in a desirable neighborhood indicates status to outsiders maybe? I'm not sure what, if any, benefits that perception confers on me.
I may be a little broken in that I don't see the value of status signalling. If I'm nice to people, they're nice to me. That system has suited me increasingly well for decades. I dress for practical comfort, don't have high-ranking frequent flyer membership tier, and routinely get upgrades at the airport because I am sympathetic to the agents' pressures. People recommend me for jobs because I didn't make them feel shitty at work and make a point of boosting other people's contributions.
Between that, and trying to signal something with expensive sneakers or a sports car, I much prefer the approach that makes me feel happy inside, and builds people up rather than trying to make them jealous.
I'd like to think it's so easy to disregard all this, but I can say that as someone who also eschews the whole status thing (maybe I'm overly sensitive to it), people seem to disregard me mostly, which I suppose is fine. I think I'd rather be left alone to mostly just fart around and play, but I have some rather serious medical needs and so I have to try and stay employed through one company's layoffs or other. It seems I can never really escape the employment status games at a minimum.
Yes but interest rates were higher and you generally needed 20% down to get a mortgage. The years of near zero interest and zero-equity financing inflated housing prices. Also with dual-income buyers, people could afford bigger and more highly-speced houses, and builders built these instead of "starter homes" because their costs were about the same so why would they not build what was more profitable for them (this is still the reason we don't have enough "affordable" housing being built, because there is still not enough supply of higher-end housing).
Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"
Don’t worry, AI will end most SWE jobs within 10 years. Significant amounts of the population will learn about morvecs paradox which is that it’s really hard to automate away physical labor intensive tasks but shockingly easy to automate brainy tasks. Hope you like construction!
>[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
So then I expect you'll have a child and give up several years of your career to do so? Or perhaps multiple children and drop out of the workforce altogether?
Some people, believe it or not, find their jobs fulfilling. They go to school to learn something so they can do it for the rest of their lives. Having a child jeopardizes the role you planned for yourself for the future. The goals you wanted to accomplish often never get accomplished because having a child takes up an insane amount of your time.
Yes, being a parent is a very important job in society, but often it means that your personal horizons become a lot more narrow. Rather than aspiring to climb to the top of your field, create art, invent something, discover new things, or whatever else you'd hoped to do when you were a teenager, your focus becomes almost entirely on keeping a single human being alive and then raising them.
My children are more important than my personal ambitions. I will find a wife who feels the same. I don't live to work, I work to live and to support my children.
Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it?
Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature.
Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one.
I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population.
I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
Men can stay home and that's the point: we don't see men volunteering to be the stay-at-home parent because there's no incentive for them. We assume being mom is the pinnacle of female existence because we ignore the reality that all humans have goals and independent needs. Maybe your wife is special and thinks she needs nothing else and get cup is filled only by pouring herself out into the cups of others until she's empty. Maybe your local community days the same thing out loud. But I bet if you asked your wife if she ever felt like she'd like to do have something for herself, something that let her feel like individual she once was, she'd probably have some comments and ideas. Perhaps explore that a bit.
Without exception, my male friends with kids have significantly reduced their time and energy spent on their jobs to focus more on their small children. They all say that their kids are the most rewarding part of their lives. Most have highly-paid professional jobs. I expect to do the same, at least for the early years, when I eventually have children.
This seems to be a huge shift from the previous generation. My father and most of his peers worked long hours and contributed little to childrearing.
I think you're still in the minority but it's a good thing. I'm devoted to my spouse and my kid. I'll drop anything for them. Some of the fathers I know feel the same but some smell like mine and he was a piece of crap. I fully support parenting being a team sport and in my opinion, that's how we're going to fix the modern family, by making it better than pretend version of The Good Old Days.
I don't know about your good old days, but I am just emulating my very religious, very conservative father, who, like me, made similar career choices to spend more time with his kids, as well as that of my grandfather's. Their good old days were pretty darn nice and I fully intend to recreate it for my children.
Reduced but not abandoned, that's the difference. My wife works part time hours since since the birth of our son, but she would never quit her job entirely and that dynamic will change substantially once he's old enough to start school.
Referring back to your previous post, I asked my wife if she felt she should be paid. She says she is paid, in that my money (which I make for the family) is her money and supports the entire household.
I'd guess men don't volunteer to be primary child rearers because stay-at-home jobs have been relatively rare, prior to the past 4 years, men tend overwhelmingly to want to support a spouse than to be supported (which is probably why gay couples have greater household incomes and lower divorce rates than all other categories), and women tend to be hypergamous in mate selection. It's not that there's no incentive to stay home (if you like your children, at least, which I hope is true), it's that there's a strong incentive to go to work.
In my particular situation, tax and childcare would eat most of my wife's income, so she'd be spending 40+ hrs/wk working with other people's children in exchange for less time with hers. She'd rather work with our children and be able to take an afternoon nap.
Would we both prefer to be independently wealthy and not have to work, sure! Might one or both of us work anyway? I probably would. She probably wouldn't.
The remainder of your message appears to be uninformed condescension. My wife is not a chattel slave. Her primary focus is child rearing and home making, but it's not her sole occupation nor solely her responsibility.
There are parts of being single we miss, and parts of being childless we miss. That doesn't change the fact that we've worked very hard for the life we have, find it very rewarding, and wouldn't give it up easily.
I'm not sure who the "we" is in this comment, and I can't think of any group I know in real life that it aligns to.
Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.
Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.
The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.
It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.
Yeah I don't get this. My wife and I have both traveled alone with kids. She says that when she's in an airport with the kids, people help her and approach her and tell her what good jobs she's doing. I've never experienced that. At most I get a 'cute kids' comment. No one ever helps or even offers or even acknowledges. She says people give up their seats for her, help her with luggage, etc...
Women are responsible for 80% of the consumer spending. If we assume men and women have equal pay, then 3/5 of men's income is spent by women. If women make 20-30% less overall, then women are actually spending more than 3/4 of all the money men make.
If men are handing 60-75% of their money over to their wives/partners to spend, I'd assert that those women are getting paid better than men are.
This is the dumbest take I’ve seen in a while. Perhaps “buying stuff for the household” is just another chore that a non-working partner has more time for? It’s not like the average young family’s consumer spending is mostly discretionary purchases the wife makes to amuse herself.
Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places.
It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities?
Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
> Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.
> Why do they need to go to different schools?
Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.
It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.
Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
Ok so now it's even more ludicrous. So a couple in their early thirties is gonna sit down to discuss having kids and the deal breaker will be "well in 16 years Alice will be in high school and Bob will be finishing elementary school, so for 2 years we will need to drive them 15min from each other. You know what? Let's just not have kids, I don't think I can deal with this."
Some absolutely see how full their schedules are gonna be with one, give some consideration to what that’ll look like with two, older and at different ages, and stop at fewer than they might have if they hadn’t thought about that.
Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds.
Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken.
I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.
Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
Right, but if you're already partially paying (through your taxes) for childcare, the change in costs between not having children and having children is dramatically lower. And the financial costs of raising the next generation are shared more evenly across the population, instead of being concentrated on the people that are also doing the majority of the actual work.
Not enough. Here in Finland full time childcare is capped at 300 euros per child by law, the rest of the cost passing on to the taxpayer, but we haven't seen a resurgence in birthrates due to that. But you could get that down to 150 if you doubled the ratio, or 100 if you tripled it, and maybe then people would start again.
The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.
1) The costs are heavily front-loaded. This makes the opportunity cost enormous.
2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing.
3) Health insurance goes up. Kids are cheap but it’s still a couple thousands more per year. Plus hundreds to low-thousands per year in other healthcare spending per year (averaged—we’ve had $5k years and $1k years)
4) … Except having kids is a reverse lottery ticket for each one, and the healthcare & related costs could end up being “most of your money, forever”, if you’re unlucky.
5) Childcare costs are either $500-$thousands per kid per month (unless you’ve got relatives who are cool doing that all the time) or the entirety of one parent’s foregone compensation for the same span (five to six figures a year for most folks)
6) Housing. Unless you can’t afford it, you’re gonna find it very hard to settle for cheap housing in a bad school district. The premium in our area for a good vs. mediocre (not even the awful, horribly dangerous ones!) district is about 35-40% for a similar house. That’s… a fuckton of money, and the difference is likely to be 100% financed for folks around having-kids ages.
Everything else is basically negligible compared to healthcare, daycare, and housing, or can be made very cheap with minimal sacrifice.
Child related expenses were often over 50% of everything leaving our bank account, for months on end, when our kids were younger.
Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children.
Median income in my area is ~$40k per year.
There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual.
Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue.
Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think.
But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow.
Like, you know the 80/20 rule?
Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future.
The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance.
(Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment)
Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have.
From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same.
That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
Because it is very likely to be the biggest expense you will have apart from rent/mortgage payments. In the UK it is easily 50% of the take home pay of one parent if they are on a "good" above average wage.
It will soak up the the full take home pay of one parent on an average wage or around that.
There are government funded childcare hours (that are increasing finally) which help, but it's still a tough choice unless both parents have earnings well above average.
Families get spread out because children are priced out of where their parents live, and can only afford a small home. So the grandparent support is often hard to make work too.
I find it curious that the type of people that moan about low birth rates and the loss of "family values" are also the ones voting for politicians that block house building and impose spending cuts on government services like childcare.
Not having children in the current political climate is a rational choice.
Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!?
Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.