Being a parent is _punished_ in our society. It messes with your career growth in a dual income family, and for any metro with well paying jobs you're looking at ~3k/month daycare infant costs, down to 1.5k/month by age 5. And that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight.
So if you're looking at income, for 2 kids, your break-even for stay-at-home is north of 100k per year. That's absurdly high.
Combine that with infant kid rearing coinciding with the most expensive purchase of one's life (housing) and you see how impossiblly punishing it is for someone not making 200k+ in yearly income
This is the usual argument people make - that having children is harder and less affordable than before - but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries, where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West. And conversely, increasing standards of living and having more disposable income is the #1 predictor of dropping fertility rates. You see it in Europe, in Asia, in America.
The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices than their ancestors did. It's that they no longer want to make small ones. The price tag you mention is what you pay if you don't want to make any lifestyle changes. Not moving closer to one's parents, so that they could provide child care. Not cutting down discretionary spending, not giving up on career goals.
I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country where such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference. There may be other reasons to do it, but I guess the only tried and true way to fix fertility is famine and war...
In many non-western countries the social framework is completely different.
- People have kids as retirement plans.
- There's religious and instituional pressures to have more kids. Most people don't think about how they're brainwashed by instituions that have a political motive to expand their group size. The end result is that someone that doesn't have kids is heavily scrutinized. Made even worse in societies where your 'face' and reputation are everything since things like the legal system might not be as strong.
- The minimums for raising a kid in the west is much different. You simply can't just have 8 kids and send them off their chimney sweeping jobs when they turn 12. You can't just have the kids, and wander off to the bar all night while their 13 year old sibling watches them.
- Western countries also put a lot of emphasis on sex education and provide resources like contraceptives.
There’s more than just a bare price tag here though.
It’s also about risk. In developed societies, it’s still somewhat reasonable (though this is starting to wane) for a couple with dual incomes to be able to establish themselves well enough that the risk of being put out on the street is minimal. Once even a single kid enters the picture however, this changes; the required income level for both parents to both provide the desired quality of care for the child and achieve reasonable insurance against financial disaster is quite high and well above the earning potential of a huge percentage (probably the majority) of the population. How much the parents are willing to sacrifice has little bearing on this.
The impoverished aren’t as affected by this because they’re already living on knife’s edge, and having kids won’t change that much. A poorer population boosts birthrates but making people poorer is not how nations should go about fixing their population problems.
Aside from that, I feel that it’s a mischaracterization to pose giving up on who a person had been prior to becoming a parent (career goals, etc) as “small”. It’s anything but minor and among the biggest course changes a person can make, and in a well functioning society one shouldn’t need to choose between the two — one should be able to continue to pursue their goals mostly unencumbered and be a parent, and the only reason this isn’t possible now I believe comes down to the benefits of the vast productivity improvements of the past several decades only being reaped by a select few at the top.
> but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries.
The difference is that (in addition to birth control) in those situations having children does not really make a material difference (barring extreme food shortages). There's no career to heed, usually no mortgage or daycare to pay, there's no cars so no need to worry about getting that SUV, education is also not always a primary concern. The family just makes do with where they would have lived and pack in a few more kids. The main extra cost is feeding a few more mouths, which is usually manageable. But sometime down the line the children can help around the house or supplement family income.
> but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries
Lack of birth control.
> The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices to raise children.
The problem is that the standard that you’re expected to meet in raising a child is significantly higher. Is it biologically required that you have full time coverage of someone watching your toddler? No. Is it legally required? Yes. Do most grandparents want to be live in caretakers to young children? No, they have better things to do. Do you have to pay a fortune for the service? Yes.
Is it biologically required to meet a certain standard of living to raise a child, a standard that generally requires 2 parents salaries in the west? No. Is it legally required? No, but you might sets them up for failure later in life, and means they’ll struggle too when they get to be your age.
The whole thing is people who want to be parents have a drive to make sure their kids live at least as good a life as they did (or at least should).
If that seems financially hopeless in the west… we have effective birth control and can delay until it is possible.
Sometimes the point in time when you are financially stable enough to have children is also the point at which you are biologically unable to have them (everything is more difficult after ~35 or so). If there’s no promise of financial stability any time is as good as any other.
Fixing the “problem”is a complicated mix of social/psychological problems and financial problems related to wealth inequality. Blaming millennials or whoever for being selfish is a bad take.
> where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West
This part ain't correct, if you actually traveled properly in such places you would find much better community/family support for raising kids compared to typical western young couple situation. I ain't saying every single young family is better off like this, but on average the difference is often staggering.
What I mean - for us, both having high intensity jobs that required 17+ years of hard studies and moving across various parts of Europe, going from couple/married but without children into having 2 small kids a massive shock in every single aspect of life since we raise them largely on our own, families are very far. Families in such places face on average significantly less shock in such situation, mostly they continue in their lives as before (the guy) and women take care of kids for some time as is expected. Of course this is slowly changing into that western model as people get better white collar jobs in big cities.
> if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference
> where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West
Does it? I would argue that, in societies where a woman is not expected to work anyway (either due to cultural limitations or lack of jobs or both), the relative sacrifice required to raise a child is less than in the West.
Add to that that it's more common in those societies to have multi-generational households, with readily available (and also jobless) grandparents.
The expectations of what should be provided to a child are also much smaller, for better or for worse.
High rates in poor places are easily explained by lack of birth control.
The thing to compare is societies with birth control and higher rates of reproduction vs those with lower. Comparing with or without easily accessed birth control doesn’t tell us much.
Why, for example, is South Korea’s birth rate so much lower than France or the USA?
Very authoritarian cultures that forbid birth control are also less relevant.
In impoverished and conflict torn countries, there isn't much worse that the situation could get with kids and the mortality rate is higher, so there's less interest in family planning. On top of that, most such countries are ones where there is significant cultural pressure to have children early.
This also translates to other things, if people are having families in their early 20s, the third generation has relatively young grandparents. If they're having them in the late 20s, early 30s, the third generation has grandparents who are in their 60s and not as capable of chasing after toddlers all day.
Being expected to give up on career goals also comes down to the same issue, when you're primarily focused on staying afloat, your career goals are also just to not have things get worse.
Famine or war would not reverse this in the West, unless it was at apocalyptic levels such as to cause a total cultural reset back to a society where women are seen as child factories first.
> It's that they no longer want to make small ones.
Moralization of having kids (and birth control) also has a large impact on this—it's not uncommon to hear younger folks say they don't believe it's ethical to have kids.
It's funny that you describe fertility as something which needs to be fixed. I see it as a very fortunate thing that humanity is voluntarily choosing to stop expanding its population in a situation of global ecological overshoot.
My colleague went out on maternity leave and never came back, because it just didn't make financial sense to hire daycare when her husband could support the whole family without her income. She's also happier than she's ever been in her life and loves her baby far more than she ever cared about her job.
As someone without kids I typically see my coworkers who do have kids be granted special allowances and bond with upper management over the experience of being a parent, etc
This is the most frustrating part. I have so many team members who drag their feet on tons of projects and blame it on their parental obligations with seemingly endless levels of understanding from everyone, but if I were to say "I am really burnt out and want to take the day off to go skiing" once in a while, I become the team pariah.
I had a young coworker blow a fuse because of allowances given to parents not available to others. But I’m so old and have seen it so many times I just shrugged and told him to get used to it. It is what it is.
That's absolutely true - you become a member of a global club and can bond with people who will be walled away from you otherwise. Your own parents also make a reappearance in your life.
> that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight
Maybe you don't have a solution "in sight" because by eliminating tax analysis you're conspicuously skipping the Child Tax Credit[1], which is pretty clearly aimed right at this issue.
It doesn't make children into a revenue source or anything, but it's a real and tangible action taken by "our politicians" to address exactly the problem you claim they're ignoring.
[1] Also the Child and Dependent Care Credit, also any of the various state policies in the same realm, also the deductability of child care expenses, etc... Basically tax policy IS THE MECHANISM by which government tries to address this problem. And you totally missed it!
What is sad about the child care credit: it’s like half the cost of one kid, and doesn’t scale with the number of kids you have. So ya, it saves you ~$1k-1.5K year in taxes, it’s kind of useless.
And many employers offer Flex Savings Accounts for child/dependent care, which I believe are capped at $5,000 per year.
So the child tax care credit is $2,000 cash for each kid, then $5,000 of your child care costs are pre-tax. Criticize that all you want, but why lie about it? Or be ignorant and sanctimonious?
> And that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight.
It's not just post-tax for you, daycare providers also pay taxes so it's a double whammy. Most European countries give you a tax credit (which would help a lot more than tax deductions) and have special generous tax schemes for the providers themselves to ensure they get licensed & declare their revenues. Without these schemes, you end up with the current situation where upper-class folks hire nannies under the table and essentially stiff the government instead.
France had the same issue and fought it successfully in the 80s by making sure providers make more money by being declared and licensed. It would not that hard with enough federal government intervention. Which will likely not happen because white Americans still think more like German people ("why would you be a working mom") than French people ("why would you stay at home").
Financial issues aside, it brings a lot of uncertainties and responsibilities in your everyday routine. For good and bad, your mind is never truly alone for the rest of your life. The child gets sick and nothing else matters at that moment. You must be able to deal graciously with all kinds of mood emotional states ranging from stubbornness, through laziness, to exhilaration.
You must have reserves and be mobilised like a warrior in every aspect – financially, mentally, physically.
In the US child-to-teacher ratios have maximum limits usually set and enforced at the State or municipal level. This ratio also varies by age level with lower child to teacher ratios for infants than for toddlers.
In Georgia the ratio is 6:1 for infants. However there is a national daycare certification group NAEYC which has stricter ratios. The daycare where my kids went was NAEYC certified and the ratio was 4:1 for infants.
Procreation is a choice on an individual level but on a societal level it is not a choice at all, it is absolutely mandatory. So, someone's got to do it, and if you're not going to do it, then it's not unreasonable for you to contribute to others who are doing it.
Furthermore, if you benefit from future workers in any way in the future without having kids of your own, if you did not help pay for those kids then you're effectively benefiting from something you didn't do shit for: namely raising those kids who became workers who ended up paying for your pension, keeping the lights on, keeping your ETFs growing, paying for your healthcare, etc., etc... So you should pay, or you should have kids.
Your future living situation may be in part dependent on the economic strength of the nation you're living in, and thus there's collective onus on ensuring that future. It's reasonable to believe that one ingredient in a vibrant economy is people, sufficiently many doing sufficiently interesting and valuable things. At the end of the day, the only way to have future people is to have children now. Thus, collectively, we should be interested in supporting the work of building future generations to be sufficiently populous, vibrant, and motivated, even if we are motivated only by our own future wellbeing.
And I suppose you can magnify this argument to the degree that you feel collective responsibility toward our shared civilizations. And negate it to the degree that you believe we'll someday within your practical lifespan achieve miraculous technology like functional and practical immortality.
Because raising children is essential to the survival of human society.
If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.
If you're a 12 year old teenager who doesn't know anything about society and economics.
If you apply this logic to any resource that is being paid for collectively (like roads or maybe safety/rescue service), but not being used by everyone at all times, it becomes very evident why "others" pay for something that benefits the collective.
Because we really do live in a society. Believe it or not you were once someone's expensive and serious responsibility that others had to pay for. And in the future those expensive and serious responsibilities are going to be the tax base that's forced to pay for your care.
A basic function of societies is caring for the young (and old) and I believe socializing the costs of early rearing of children is beneficial to literally everyone. Right now you may not want to help, but when you're old and decrepit you'll want to be living in a functioning economy run by the children you contributed some money to help grow into contributing members of the economy.
I think having a healthy community where children can grow to be well-educated, good citizens benefit everyone in the long run. And it is not like zero-sum game, I think there might be very cheap solutions with good ROI. Solutions can be found if there is a will and concerted effort. I don't live in US, this is the model in my mind.
People raising children now are raising your future retirement financial future, in the form of nurses, paramedics, social safety nets, and governmental tax basis. They are raising people who will be lifting you and bathing you when you cannot yourself.
But there is no reason for the cost of childcare to go up and up. Literally just enable better pregnancy/parenthood laws and create an abundance of childcare centers so that costs can go lower.
If that's your opinion, then fine, but you don't get to complain about birth rates, immigration, "the great replacement", or the unsustainability of the social security fund at the same time.
If you have something to lose, you will be far more cautious about all aspects of life than someone with nothing. Sex is one of those primal drives that are easy to ignore when there are other things to pay attention to, and easy to indulge in without thinking much when everything has gone to shit. It's not exactly hard to understand that people with options will plan their lives much more intensively than those who don't know if they will be able to eat tomorrow.
Reproduction can be said to be incentivized in low-income groups as children can often participate in the tasks (typically manual labor) performed by the family. Meanwhile, in high-income groups, children take away resources that could be invested into the parents' career progression and wealth management.
Of course low-income groups also suffer from lack of access to contraception, so it's not as straightforward, but that is the birds' eye overview of how it typically works.
Back in the olden days when the majority of human labor was agricultural, having more children meant more hands to work the farm, so having more children actually improved your resource situation. Humans on some level have a biological drive to procreate as well, but if the incentives against having children become strong enough the humans will prioritize short term survival, or maintenance of their standard of living which can feel like survival if slipping for even one month means homelessness.
Free time might be a prime causal factor here. Both the wealthy and working poor may have too little leisure to achieve above-replacement birthrates. That would explain why there are places on Earth with high birthrates yet low GDP per capita.
I'm also suspicious that "wealthier" countries are subjected to more substances which disrupt fertility than poorer countries.
Anecdotally, I've noticed that it has a lot to do with women having the sense of security and freedom to say they don't want children. About half of the women in my friend group do not want children despite their husbands wanting them. It has life long physical side effects on women, pregnancy isn't very fun, giving birth can be traumatic and painful, and there are all too many societal expectations placed on the mom. Almost every parenting book I read seemed to be assuming only the mom would read the book. Networking with other parents seems to need to occur primarily through moms, breastfeeding is endlessly pushed and shifts a great deal of the work required early in the child's life onto the mother, possibly carrying over into habits that are maintained afterwards. People don't even talk about any of these things beforehand, but I'd honestly be surprised if most women would want children after learning about these things.
This isn't to mention the fact that having children completely upends your time. Hobbies and free time are seldom available after children. This affects both parents, and it feels like people really don't want to give these things up these days. Really, short of parents constantly pushing you to have kids, there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation to have kids.
I wonder why the same set of people would be happy for years of unpaid and costly education, to get a job with overtime expectations and have significant motivation for career growth.
At least children will be yours. Whatever you do on your job will belong to somebody else. Somebody else is going to reap all that career growth of yours. You will get an insignificant amount of money for the effort, that you will be forced to spend on way overpriced things.
People aren't choosing to work for free rather than having children. They're choosing to work more now to either have more stuff now or work less later.
Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.
You must either be right at the tail end of Gen X, or you had kids REALLY late. I'm in the middle of Gen X, didn't have a kid until I was 35, and my kid is about to turn 18.
Yes I waited pretty late and mine is 9, not quite a toddler. However when she was a toddler I expected all the other parents to be much younger than me given how late I was. But they weren’t.
How is having kids necessarily going to change the world? Is there something totally unique about the way you're raising them, like training them from birth to be ninja assassins and infiltrating government institutions with them? Or are you just trying to change the world by doing the same thing as everybody else by raising them to be healthy and happy and educated and letting them grow up and make their own decisions, like sitting around all day playing video games and doom scrolling and social networking on their mobile phones?
“The world” is defined by experiences of individuals. By shaping and being an integral part of the world as a single human being experiences it changes the world - as experienced by someone - dramatically more than building an online dry cleaning service. You shape the nuanced perceptions of everything in that life, you become a primal force that defines every moment of their life, to their last breath. There’s no greater impact to be had on “the world.”
The broader sense of the world is an intellectual exercise. The world is a spinning ball of uncaring rock covered in a crust of self replicating carbon structures. You might slightly perturb the movements of that crust in some remote way, they might even shape some rocks to look like your long gone carbon structure, but you don’t change anything at that scale.
At a certain point your local experience and the present matter more. Particularly the stronger influence you’ve had on the world at large the more empty it feels in the end, because you are still you, you still only live 24 hours a day, there is no score, no game over you won screen, and the impact that matters most to you is the way your children look at you as you take your last breath.
I'm 38 and have had the opposite experience. Of all the friends I remember saying they wouldn't have kids, I don't think any of them changed their tune. I do have friends who used to say they wanted kids, but probably never will.
In those 11 years fertility has fallen near universally. Speaking as a millennial, I never saw my career as a means towards changing the world or some life mission driven by passion; I just wanted to find stable employment to hopefully find some financial security and keep my ass in health insurance (I foolishly contracted a childhood condition that left me somewhat disabled). Graduating into the great recession and trying to stay on the treadmill of employment as I flee one layoff or another hasn't left much space in life for a lot else.
I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.
Except the correlate isn’t as people propose here poverty but wealth, as wealth increased fertility has decreased. I would note that having kids doesn’t mean having a brood like people did in the past. One or two children is by far the norm in my cohort and I have one. Growing up families were not uncommon with 4-6 kids, now it’s unheard of.
I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.
The increasingly toxic politics (arguably by design) emerging around school board elections is very recent addition to disincentives. I live in a Midwest city where suburban school districts that previously wooed young professionals away from urban core now frequently feature nasty culture war fights, book banning, etc. It's notable for impacting generally wealthier households that could bear the expense of relocating to suburban municipalities with higher cost of living/taxes to access better schools.
I wonder why all of troublemakers are not ejected from the system? You would think any "komsomol" types would be flushed by democratic system whereas they would be retained in assignments based system. Are there parents who genuinely want culture wars / book banning types deciding how their children study?
Increasingly, the troublemakers are gaining overwhelming support from the electorate. We used to rely on the fact that the belligerent, crazy, culture wars / book burning folks were a tiny minority, kept powerless by the democratic system. As their numbers grow, the democratic system starts to work for them. Many places (at least in the USA) have crossed the rubicon demographic wise, and the inmates are now running the asylum.
An underlying motivation to this new power-mongering in school district politics is that education is typically the 2nd largest budget item in most US states. The "troublemakers" despite their theatrics also as a category tend to overwhelmingly support schemes that divert education funds to private entities, e.g. vouchers, tax-credit scholarships.
I was born in the early '60s and I have no children.
Economical concerns are surely part of the equation but I also suspect that in Western Culture adults tend to have a more individualistic stance and this could also be a factor.
What I mean is: as soon as we start getting some sort of economic independence we tend to focus on our own hobbies, travels, interests. Those of us who are lucky enough in being in a long lasting relationship would hopefully do this together... but we are always aware that the moment a child enters our life, we can forget most of it, at least for a decade.
I feel like this is a common misconception about having kids, that your life somehow ends, and you have to give up everything you care about in favor of them. We’ve been traveling with our kids since the first was 4 months old, and it’s been great fun introducing them to our hobbies, and doing them with them. Seeing them pick this stuff up and in some ways surpass us is incredibly gratifying.
It's not a misconception if you choose your family style to be "prioritize time with kids and follow their interests". To implement that in our family meant adjusting our budget to allow one parent to stay at home. Adjusting our budget like that had consequences on our previous hobbies of travels, etc.
yes, but I do not think this is something that people really discusses rationally, either.
I.e. I doubt that couples who decide to go childless sit down and say "listen, if we have children our current life is over, just look at Jack and Laura - they disappeared from the Lindy classes and had to cancel their spa subscription".
It is probably both a subconscious thing that - along with other factors - will make you postpone the decision until it is either too late, or your spouse somehow puts you in front of an ultimatum.
As I said in another message I have living proof that things can work out fine among relatives and friends both, so I am sure that it could be done.
Neither me nor my MSO (Most Significant Other) were really into the idea of having children though, so we passed.
i'm not a parent, but from observing the parents i know, i think you're incredibly lucky to be able to travel with your child and have it not be a burden. the norm seems to be "add an hour and hundreds of dollars for every activity you do with kids, and add unbounded levels of stress if you're the mom"
We’re child free (and intend to remain as such) and in our 30s, to be honest we do wonder what it’ll be like in 30 years.
I’ve never wanted children (vehemently so) but my SO needed some convincing and it’s something I struggle with, I’m not sure if it’s really what she wants or my desires are just too strong. We’ve had this conversation between us of course and she’s not really sure either, she thinks she’ll be fine though.
I’d love to hear your perspective.
Do you feel like you’ve accomplished more than your peers? Led a more fulfilling and liberating life that allowed you to focus on yourselves? Or did that get old past age 40?
"Do you feel like you’ve accomplished more than your peers? Led a more fulfilling and liberating life that allowed you to focus on yourselves? Or did that get old past age 40?"
I often feel that I did not manage to accomplish enough, personally. But:
- I know people who are immensely more affluent than me (high school fellows) who did not have any child, either, and did not need to work.
For me they accomplished even less than me.
- On the other hand, both my sister (who is 3 years older and has a son) and another friend of mine (former colleague) I would say made good use of their time and resources, because they lived what to me looks like a full life, managed to pursuit their interests, cultivate hobbies etc... and also raised a decent human adult on top, which is quite an achievement in itself.
What I am trying to say is "if I had won scientific or sport prizes or written a successful book... maybe I could say this would have been impossible if I had to take care of one (or more probably more than one) child".
And I cannot even say that I decided to not have children because I was focused on winning a Nobel (or developing my startup, or become a renowned martial artist...) and yet EVEN WITHOUT THE CHILD I failed for some other reason.
I have a normal life, some stuff I did may seem huge to others (assuming they share some of my interests) but while I can dream of having the money of my former schoolmate and say "boy, what I could have done if I were in his place" I am pretty sure that nobody is thinking "wow, if I had lived a childen-free adulthood like Pamar...".
I am not regretting it (maybe I'll soon do when it is time to retire, will keep you posted) but I would never say to anyone "if you want to live your life to the fullest, like me, forget having children", either.
The usual suspects: high cost of living, corp jobs sucking people dry, fear of uncertain future, all seem reasonably valid.
But no one seems willing to suggest that maybe people today are just so self centered, that they don't want such a distraction from minecraft/halo/call of doodoo.
If people can't manage to look out of the windshield of the car they're driving for more than 11 seconds at a stretch, because it's distracting from their cell phone usage, when their life is literally endangered, why would they choose to take on a lifelong commitment to another child besides themselves?
As a parent of 3 in Switzerland, I always laugh (sadly) at these threads. Cost of daycare? Make a sliding scale. Cost of housing? Accept smaller living space, but count on your community to give you other safe, comfortable and fun public spaces. Pay parents to have kids? Yup (1500 at birth, 200 a month until school is done, even up to bachelor degree). Cost of education? Free public universities.
If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
Not necessarily wrong but why some countries have higher birth rates. Subsidize current citizens costs for more natural born citizens. More people/workers - immigration.
In many Asian countries the kids live with their parents and if they move out after marriage it’s to a house on the property with the parents or very closely nearby for support.
Getting together regularly with family or friends is usually very healthy. I suggest people watch the documentary “Happy” 2012 by Roko Belic. It was introduced in a class to help with stress among many other supportive topics.
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So if you're looking at income, for 2 kids, your break-even for stay-at-home is north of 100k per year. That's absurdly high.
Combine that with infant kid rearing coinciding with the most expensive purchase of one's life (housing) and you see how impossiblly punishing it is for someone not making 200k+ in yearly income
The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices than their ancestors did. It's that they no longer want to make small ones. The price tag you mention is what you pay if you don't want to make any lifestyle changes. Not moving closer to one's parents, so that they could provide child care. Not cutting down discretionary spending, not giving up on career goals.
I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country where such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference. There may be other reasons to do it, but I guess the only tried and true way to fix fertility is famine and war...
- People have kids as retirement plans.
- There's religious and instituional pressures to have more kids. Most people don't think about how they're brainwashed by instituions that have a political motive to expand their group size. The end result is that someone that doesn't have kids is heavily scrutinized. Made even worse in societies where your 'face' and reputation are everything since things like the legal system might not be as strong.
- The minimums for raising a kid in the west is much different. You simply can't just have 8 kids and send them off their chimney sweeping jobs when they turn 12. You can't just have the kids, and wander off to the bar all night while their 13 year old sibling watches them.
- Western countries also put a lot of emphasis on sex education and provide resources like contraceptives.
It’s also about risk. In developed societies, it’s still somewhat reasonable (though this is starting to wane) for a couple with dual incomes to be able to establish themselves well enough that the risk of being put out on the street is minimal. Once even a single kid enters the picture however, this changes; the required income level for both parents to both provide the desired quality of care for the child and achieve reasonable insurance against financial disaster is quite high and well above the earning potential of a huge percentage (probably the majority) of the population. How much the parents are willing to sacrifice has little bearing on this.
The impoverished aren’t as affected by this because they’re already living on knife’s edge, and having kids won’t change that much. A poorer population boosts birthrates but making people poorer is not how nations should go about fixing their population problems.
Aside from that, I feel that it’s a mischaracterization to pose giving up on who a person had been prior to becoming a parent (career goals, etc) as “small”. It’s anything but minor and among the biggest course changes a person can make, and in a well functioning society one shouldn’t need to choose between the two — one should be able to continue to pursue their goals mostly unencumbered and be a parent, and the only reason this isn’t possible now I believe comes down to the benefits of the vast productivity improvements of the past several decades only being reaped by a select few at the top.
The difference is that (in addition to birth control) in those situations having children does not really make a material difference (barring extreme food shortages). There's no career to heed, usually no mortgage or daycare to pay, there's no cars so no need to worry about getting that SUV, education is also not always a primary concern. The family just makes do with where they would have lived and pack in a few more kids. The main extra cost is feeding a few more mouths, which is usually manageable. But sometime down the line the children can help around the house or supplement family income.
Lack of birth control.
> The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices to raise children.
The problem is that the standard that you’re expected to meet in raising a child is significantly higher. Is it biologically required that you have full time coverage of someone watching your toddler? No. Is it legally required? Yes. Do most grandparents want to be live in caretakers to young children? No, they have better things to do. Do you have to pay a fortune for the service? Yes.
Is it biologically required to meet a certain standard of living to raise a child, a standard that generally requires 2 parents salaries in the west? No. Is it legally required? No, but you might sets them up for failure later in life, and means they’ll struggle too when they get to be your age.
The whole thing is people who want to be parents have a drive to make sure their kids live at least as good a life as they did (or at least should).
If that seems financially hopeless in the west… we have effective birth control and can delay until it is possible.
Sometimes the point in time when you are financially stable enough to have children is also the point at which you are biologically unable to have them (everything is more difficult after ~35 or so). If there’s no promise of financial stability any time is as good as any other.
Fixing the “problem”is a complicated mix of social/psychological problems and financial problems related to wealth inequality. Blaming millennials or whoever for being selfish is a bad take.
This part ain't correct, if you actually traveled properly in such places you would find much better community/family support for raising kids compared to typical western young couple situation. I ain't saying every single young family is better off like this, but on average the difference is often staggering.
What I mean - for us, both having high intensity jobs that required 17+ years of hard studies and moving across various parts of Europe, going from couple/married but without children into having 2 small kids a massive shock in every single aspect of life since we raise them largely on our own, families are very far. Families in such places face on average significantly less shock in such situation, mostly they continue in their lives as before (the guy) and women take care of kids for some time as is expected. Of course this is slowly changing into that western model as people get better white collar jobs in big cities.
Exactly, countries like Sweden have implemented a lot of policies to help parents. The current fertility rate is 1.8 (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SWE/sweden/fertility-r...).
Does it? I would argue that, in societies where a woman is not expected to work anyway (either due to cultural limitations or lack of jobs or both), the relative sacrifice required to raise a child is less than in the West.
Add to that that it's more common in those societies to have multi-generational households, with readily available (and also jobless) grandparents.
The expectations of what should be provided to a child are also much smaller, for better or for worse.
The thing to compare is societies with birth control and higher rates of reproduction vs those with lower. Comparing with or without easily accessed birth control doesn’t tell us much.
Why, for example, is South Korea’s birth rate so much lower than France or the USA?
Very authoritarian cultures that forbid birth control are also less relevant.
This also translates to other things, if people are having families in their early 20s, the third generation has relatively young grandparents. If they're having them in the late 20s, early 30s, the third generation has grandparents who are in their 60s and not as capable of chasing after toddlers all day.
Being expected to give up on career goals also comes down to the same issue, when you're primarily focused on staying afloat, your career goals are also just to not have things get worse.
Famine or war would not reverse this in the West, unless it was at apocalyptic levels such as to cause a total cultural reset back to a society where women are seen as child factories first.
Moralization of having kids (and birth control) also has a large impact on this—it's not uncommon to hear younger folks say they don't believe it's ethical to have kids.
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It's funny that you describe fertility as something which needs to be fixed. I see it as a very fortunate thing that humanity is voluntarily choosing to stop expanding its population in a situation of global ecological overshoot.
In the middle is a group who would actually lose a lot by having children, so they don't.
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Maybe you don't have a solution "in sight" because by eliminating tax analysis you're conspicuously skipping the Child Tax Credit[1], which is pretty clearly aimed right at this issue.
It doesn't make children into a revenue source or anything, but it's a real and tangible action taken by "our politicians" to address exactly the problem you claim they're ignoring.
[1] Also the Child and Dependent Care Credit, also any of the various state policies in the same realm, also the deductability of child care expenses, etc... Basically tax policy IS THE MECHANISM by which government tries to address this problem. And you totally missed it!
So the child tax care credit is $2,000 cash for each kid, then $5,000 of your child care costs are pre-tax. Criticize that all you want, but why lie about it? Or be ignorant and sanctimonious?
It's not just post-tax for you, daycare providers also pay taxes so it's a double whammy. Most European countries give you a tax credit (which would help a lot more than tax deductions) and have special generous tax schemes for the providers themselves to ensure they get licensed & declare their revenues. Without these schemes, you end up with the current situation where upper-class folks hire nannies under the table and essentially stiff the government instead.
France had the same issue and fought it successfully in the 80s by making sure providers make more money by being declared and licensed. It would not that hard with enough federal government intervention. Which will likely not happen because white Americans still think more like German people ("why would you be a working mom") than French people ("why would you stay at home").
You must have reserves and be mobilised like a warrior in every aspect – financially, mentally, physically.
In Georgia the ratio is 6:1 for infants. However there is a national daycare certification group NAEYC which has stricter ratios. The daycare where my kids went was NAEYC certified and the ratio was 4:1 for infants.
Procreation is a choice on an individual level but on a societal level it is not a choice at all, it is absolutely mandatory. So, someone's got to do it, and if you're not going to do it, then it's not unreasonable for you to contribute to others who are doing it.
Furthermore, if you benefit from future workers in any way in the future without having kids of your own, if you did not help pay for those kids then you're effectively benefiting from something you didn't do shit for: namely raising those kids who became workers who ended up paying for your pension, keeping the lights on, keeping your ETFs growing, paying for your healthcare, etc., etc... So you should pay, or you should have kids.
Your future living situation may be in part dependent on the economic strength of the nation you're living in, and thus there's collective onus on ensuring that future. It's reasonable to believe that one ingredient in a vibrant economy is people, sufficiently many doing sufficiently interesting and valuable things. At the end of the day, the only way to have future people is to have children now. Thus, collectively, we should be interested in supporting the work of building future generations to be sufficiently populous, vibrant, and motivated, even if we are motivated only by our own future wellbeing.
And I suppose you can magnify this argument to the degree that you feel collective responsibility toward our shared civilizations. And negate it to the degree that you believe we'll someday within your practical lifespan achieve miraculous technology like functional and practical immortality.
If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.
If you're a 12 year old teenager who doesn't know anything about society and economics.
If you apply this logic to any resource that is being paid for collectively (like roads or maybe safety/rescue service), but not being used by everyone at all times, it becomes very evident why "others" pay for something that benefits the collective.
But there is no reason for the cost of childcare to go up and up. Literally just enable better pregnancy/parenthood laws and create an abundance of childcare centers so that costs can go lower.
People often consider their desires to be prime movers, when there they are perfectly aligned with the systems of incentives they inhabit.
Of course low-income groups also suffer from lack of access to contraception, so it's not as straightforward, but that is the birds' eye overview of how it typically works.
I'm also suspicious that "wealthier" countries are subjected to more substances which disrupt fertility than poorer countries.
This is the true lesson of malthus' principle of population, not the narrow take that humans exhaust the planet and therefore doomed to extinction.
This isn't to mention the fact that having children completely upends your time. Hobbies and free time are seldom available after children. This affects both parents, and it feels like people really don't want to give these things up these days. Really, short of parents constantly pushing you to have kids, there doesn't seem to be a lot of motivation to have kids.
At least children will be yours. Whatever you do on your job will belong to somebody else. Somebody else is going to reap all that career growth of yours. You will get an insignificant amount of money for the effort, that you will be forced to spend on way overpriced things.
Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.
You must either be right at the tail end of Gen X, or you had kids REALLY late. I'm in the middle of Gen X, didn't have a kid until I was 35, and my kid is about to turn 18.
The broader sense of the world is an intellectual exercise. The world is a spinning ball of uncaring rock covered in a crust of self replicating carbon structures. You might slightly perturb the movements of that crust in some remote way, they might even shape some rocks to look like your long gone carbon structure, but you don’t change anything at that scale.
At a certain point your local experience and the present matter more. Particularly the stronger influence you’ve had on the world at large the more empty it feels in the end, because you are still you, you still only live 24 hours a day, there is no score, no game over you won screen, and the impact that matters most to you is the way your children look at you as you take your last breath.
I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.
I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.
Economical concerns are surely part of the equation but I also suspect that in Western Culture adults tend to have a more individualistic stance and this could also be a factor.
What I mean is: as soon as we start getting some sort of economic independence we tend to focus on our own hobbies, travels, interests. Those of us who are lucky enough in being in a long lasting relationship would hopefully do this together... but we are always aware that the moment a child enters our life, we can forget most of it, at least for a decade.
C'est la vie, and la vie est belle.
It is probably both a subconscious thing that - along with other factors - will make you postpone the decision until it is either too late, or your spouse somehow puts you in front of an ultimatum.
As I said in another message I have living proof that things can work out fine among relatives and friends both, so I am sure that it could be done. Neither me nor my MSO (Most Significant Other) were really into the idea of having children though, so we passed.
I’ve never wanted children (vehemently so) but my SO needed some convincing and it’s something I struggle with, I’m not sure if it’s really what she wants or my desires are just too strong. We’ve had this conversation between us of course and she’s not really sure either, she thinks she’ll be fine though.
I’d love to hear your perspective.
Do you feel like you’ve accomplished more than your peers? Led a more fulfilling and liberating life that allowed you to focus on yourselves? Or did that get old past age 40?
I often feel that I did not manage to accomplish enough, personally. But:
- I know people who are immensely more affluent than me (high school fellows) who did not have any child, either, and did not need to work. For me they accomplished even less than me.
- On the other hand, both my sister (who is 3 years older and has a son) and another friend of mine (former colleague) I would say made good use of their time and resources, because they lived what to me looks like a full life, managed to pursuit their interests, cultivate hobbies etc... and also raised a decent human adult on top, which is quite an achievement in itself.
What I am trying to say is "if I had won scientific or sport prizes or written a successful book... maybe I could say this would have been impossible if I had to take care of one (or more probably more than one) child". And I cannot even say that I decided to not have children because I was focused on winning a Nobel (or developing my startup, or become a renowned martial artist...) and yet EVEN WITHOUT THE CHILD I failed for some other reason.
I have a normal life, some stuff I did may seem huge to others (assuming they share some of my interests) but while I can dream of having the money of my former schoolmate and say "boy, what I could have done if I were in his place" I am pretty sure that nobody is thinking "wow, if I had lived a childen-free adulthood like Pamar...".
I am not regretting it (maybe I'll soon do when it is time to retire, will keep you posted) but I would never say to anyone "if you want to live your life to the fullest, like me, forget having children", either.
But no one seems willing to suggest that maybe people today are just so self centered, that they don't want such a distraction from minecraft/halo/call of doodoo.
If people can't manage to look out of the windshield of the car they're driving for more than 11 seconds at a stretch, because it's distracting from their cell phone usage, when their life is literally endangered, why would they choose to take on a lifelong commitment to another child besides themselves?
If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
> If a society wants healthy familles it can choose to have them.
So what is Switzerland doing wrong that it needs to fix so it can do better than the USA at least?
Immigration.
Not necessarily wrong but why some countries have higher birth rates. Subsidize current citizens costs for more natural born citizens. More people/workers - immigration.
Getting together regularly with family or friends is usually very healthy. I suggest people watch the documentary “Happy” 2012 by Roko Belic. It was introduced in a class to help with stress among many other supportive topics.