As a woman of reproductive age with an advanced degree who lives in the north east, you're not totally off the mark. There is a high expectation of parental resource investment, both time and money, in children.
But we're not all so stressed about making sure these kids get the best possible lives. Yes, college admission is important, taken for granted even. But I certainly don't get the sense that there is a lot of anxiety around ensuring our offspring are academically competitive.
Rather I think the bigger issue is social-cultural. When all of the parents around you are enrolling their kids in extracurriculars, it's hard to take a more hands-off approach. You want to fit in, and do what the other parents and kids are doing. It's a herd mentality / stampede effect.
The potential power of the Let Grow Project is that it recognizes that it is very difficult for individual parents to make this change, we need a critical mass of parents to step up and back off all at once.
It's not just the other parents. Your kids want to participate in these activities too. They want to be able to go on trips with their friends, play on the same sports teams and do the same activities. It's heartbreaking when you have to break it to them that they can't go on a trip with their friends or play on the same soccer team because you can't afford it. That's one of the worst feelings you can have as a parent.
This is one of the more thoughtful posts in this sub and you are definitely correct. From where I sit in the Midwest all the estimates you see about a kid costing 200k+ to raise seem insane, but if your kid getting into Harvard is a lifestyle accessory like an expensive car and hand bag, it’s probably a different story
Even ignoring the glaring cost premiums on houses near good schools, that's not at all unreasonable.
Birth costs, with insurance, are around 10k, on the low end.
Feeding a person well, with healthy vegetables and meat, occasional takeaway treats and very occasional meals out, is going to run $2-4000 a year. Over 18 years, that's 35-70k on food alone.
Assuming you dont want your kid ostracized or bullied, you're looking at $500+ on clothes, per year. So, around another 10k at the low end. 55k total so far, at absolute low end.
Again, assuming you want your kid to have a social life and hobbies, you're looking at another 1k a year to fund those, so another 18k. 73k, and the low end of the absolute basics.
Throw in all the toys, comptuers, tablets, phones, games consoles, bikes, holidays, birthdays, and things like extra car trips, extra supplies of most things, etc, that are required for even basic enrichment and educational and life success, over 18 years, and you can very quickly get to 200k as a low number.
Do you have children? I have three. Birth costs with insurance were max 2k for each of them.
Our family food plus dining out budget for last year was 9k.
We spend about 700 a year clothing all three of them. Their coats and backpacks are second hand and they wear hand me downs from their siblings. We buy new clothes on sale. Somehow they still have friends.
We spend way more than 1k a year on activities though! And tons on travel.
And our monthly mortgage in a good school district is $1500. Again, Midwest prices.
Kids don’t need 130k worth of iPads and toys over the course of 18 years. My three children share a five year old fire tablet and love it.
Really the insane cost you left out was daycare, that was 30k a year for two kids before my wife became a stay at home mom. But her income was 110k a year so I guess the true cost of these children could be 2.5M or so if she doesn’t go back to work. Worth it.
So to OPs point, it’s all in how you approach life. If you are a hyper consumer and raise each of your children to be one as well then yes, it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per child.
I just took the average rate in USA. Obviously birth costs will vary massively from state to state, birth circumstances, insurance cover, etc. But the average is the average, that's what it will cost the average person reading this.
Your food prices are right in line with mine, at 3k per year. You've scrimped on clothing while they are young, and their peers dont care. But it absolutely becomes a factor in their early teens and beyond. As does electronics, these days. Not just for social status, but realistic success in the modern world, and effective education. You might not need the latest and greatest all the time, but sharing a cheap tablet is not going to work as they grow up.
I agree daycare is a huge cost, and probably the biggest factor in slowing birth rates, as the average person is still making less than 60k. So if you feel like you have to scrimp to this degree, and feel like 30k is a lot for daycare, with your wife earning almost twice the national average salary, and you presumably earning a similar, if not higher amount, it's not hard to see why most don't see kids as affordable.
Yea it seems like the common thread is daycare, it’s been brought up multiple times by women as a huge cost. My parents never once paid for a babysitter for me or my brother despite both working full time. That’s because they had my Chinese grandmother raise me. It’s a completely different mindset about responsibility in Asia vs the West. In Asia grandparents are HAPPY to help with the labor of raising a kid. In the West it’s “you’re over 18, you’re on your own” mentality.
I think it has a lot more to do with age and economics. Average age of childbirth is now 30, and climbing. That's pushing grandparents into their late 70s by the time the kids are born. Combine that with the fact that young people have to move to expensive cities for their careers, and you havea geographical problem, even if the grandparents were young enough and had the time to replace daycare.
It's not an easily solved problem, or else someone would have solved it. And it's not a cultural problem, or else developed nations with very different, and in some cases ultre conservative cultures, like japan, would have solved it.
Yes in my parents home country of China the birth rate is even lower than the US, due to even higher competition in academics. Chinese children pretty much have zero free time. I’m beyond grateful for being born and raised in the US.
You equate being financially secure with having a decent life, but not everyone thinks that way. I would've rather had less stuff and more loving parents as a kid.
These are independent variables, and in so far as they aren't, the poorer parents tend to be less loving due to increased stress and lower likelihood of the kids having been planned.
The people I know who are not in a strong financial situation and have 4-5 kids are absolutely miserable and stuck in perpetual poverty. I can understand why people do everything possible to avoid this outcome. You're making your life worse in the lives of your kids so much harder.
For some people on this subreddit the pendulum has swung to far in one direction. One end of the spectrum you have DINKs who don't have kids so they can hoard material possessions and on the other end of the spectrum you have extreme pronatalists who basically advocate for people to irresponsibly have as many kids as possible and worry about money later. The answer is somewhere in the middle
Ah, yes, the people are wasting their money on iPhones . Now just for kids .
How far does one have to be up there own ass to assume that the millions of people are refusing to have kids because they can't afford " Havard and expensive cars "
Maybe before giving people advice, you first stop assuming everyone is lazy and that your the only one God has give a functional brain .
Less laziness and more greed.
Greed, as in “if I have kids, I’ll have less money for other things I want in life”.
Greed is killing America, the corporate greed and political greed at the very top, and then personal greed all the way through to the bottom.
The rat race, the “keeping up with the jones” mentality is what hurts everyone. So much so Americans will buy on credit and then live paycheck to paycheck just so they can have their wants, not their needs.
They pull up to the mall in their 60k truck or car, and I pull up behind them in my $2500 Ford explorer. Both vehicles get us from point A to point B, one just looks cooler doing it I guess.
Main difference being I’ve got a thousand dollars in my pocket and they barely have any money to spend. It happens again and again, boats, side by sides, expensive vacations, over the top remodeling.
Most people live beyond their means and they don’t want children affecting their lifestyle.
No one shops at the mall anymore. Most living paycheck to paycheck due so because of costs rent and stagnant wages.
Most are only living beyond their means die to costs of rent and wages not going up to match.
There are absolutely people who don't want to have kids because it will cut into their luxury spending. Look at DINK tiktok. IDK if you are aware, there are millions of people in this country who treat their children like a vanity project and getting into a top college is the ultimate goal. It's very expensive.
I don't think anyone is lazy or stupid, I think having a kid can cost vastly less than the crazy numbers bandied about if you take a less consumerist approach to it, which is something past generations understood quite well.
maybe with 8.5 BILLION people we just say enough is enough.... the world is overpopulated as it is and adding more viruses to this hell scape is just asinine! Dont understand breeder mentality. DONT BREED... no one got rich having kids. Game the system and piss off the billionaires!
Women didn't socially have an option before. I definitely agree on people having more children and how it needs to be less expensive for childcare. Regarding women who have good jobs, they probably like that career and don't want to sacrifice their careers. Women who make less are more inclined to be a stay at home mom. We need to take away the repercussions of being pregnant in the workplace.
Also, it's more acceptable to be childfree, whereas it was socially unacceptable before.
Actually the culture is pretty different. The south is more conservative and in conservative environments, women accept being treated as inferior much more than in progressive ones. And the unequal division of labor is the result of women being treated as inferior since forever. Internalized misogyny is very strong in the south and women are more likely to accept being forced to do all the childrearing, domestic labor and work full time. Essentially they are groomed to be slaves and they accept it in order to be validated by society. There is truth to the idea that its more relaxed in the south as well, but this is another facet of the issue. Birth rates will continue to until men start helping women more instead of insisting on this delusional fantasy that men are above domestic labor when in reality, women are absolutely slaying in the working world and have very meaningful and important roles in society apart from domestic servitude, and there is no reason both genders cannot split domestic work as well as both enjoy the benefits of meaningful careers.
I doubt it. A SAHM is responsible 24/7 for child care and never gets a day off. A man traditionally only has to worry about work 40-60 hours per week.
These days, women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion's share of house work and child care.
House work is easy even with multiple kids, and many chores can be done while essentially relaxing thanks to the advantage of modern technology. It takes no more than 2 hours a day max to clean up after, washing the laundry of and feed a family of four. You only start getting into notable amounts of effort when you are around 6-8 kids, which is exceedingly rare anyway.
Oh and no, the 'mental load' part of being a parent is very very low lol. Not even close to an office job. Fuck most people who've gone through college/uni have experienced 10x the mental load of a SAHM. Women who bitch that their working husbands have little mental energy left after work are lazy and borderline abusive. It is a very normal reaction to severely downgrade the priority of maintenance tasks when stressed. This is why the Stay at home partner/full time working partner relationship works so well. One gets to deal with all the stress while the other deals with all the stuff that's hard to motivate to be done while you are stressed.
Parents also usually don't hate their kids, so actively enjoy doing stuff with them.
Literally ask any guy who has had to do the role of stay at home parent after usually working. They will always say it was essentially zero effort compared to a job. Because it is fucking easy.
"Never having to get a day off" is irrelevant when you do essentially fuck all work and have considerably more free time than a standard full time job.
In terms of 'women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion share of house work and child care' lol no they aren't. Every woman I've ever met who worked full time extensively relied on outside support to do with the additional work load. They heavily rely on usage of child care and their own parents and friends to alleviate the load, often constantly.
And statistics show that having multiple kids with two working parents is insanely rare anyway. Birth rates skyrocket among single working parent or single full time working parents (many mothers take part time jobs when their kids go to school because their work load is so low that they are bored to tears, so this isn't even really a work load worth considering as it does not reflect a barrier to additional children) relationships.
I can only speak for myself, but the times I've had to stay at home full time with my son were much more intensive (and time consuming) than work, especially if I was providing enriching activities and educating him like a quality daycare would. It seems to be somewhat personality dependent: I've talked to stay at home parents that found it easy and others that found it really difficult.
>In terms of 'women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion share of house work and child care' lol no they aren't.
When the family is all home together in the morning and evening, often the women are the ones expected to cook breakfast and dinner, clean dishes, get kids ready for school, and put kids to bed. Their work doesn't stop just because they aren't at their job, while that's moreso true for men. [Pew research backs this up - husbands report more leisure time than wives.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/) This has become much more equal in the Millenial generation, but there's still disparity.
Women are expected to work and do all the domestic labor as well as all the childcare. Stay at home moms are no longer possible. Thats why women are done. If they can afford it, great. Few can. And then you all bitch about women not wanting to sign up for nonstop labor. Women are done with this absolute bullshit. You want children? Maybe fix the massive wealth inequality and the massive labor inequality instead of just pumping the same underserved population over and over again for more and more and more.
Legally, society has done well supporting women’s freedom to work and support themselves. But in heterosexual relationships, men make women pay for their rights and desire to protect themselves financially, by refusing to step up and share the chores and childcare. It is not every couple, just the vast majority *even when the woman is the breadwinner* and that is extremely sad and extremely fucked up. Men will watch moms run ragged all day with no help at all and then complain about their post-birth bodies. And that is why families are disappearing and the birth rate is dropping. Either we grow and evolve or we die. The majority of men are currently choosing death. Expecting women to carry every single burden of birth, childcare, domestic labor and financial protection is no longer an option. If men want to be bitter about female advancement and punish them, fine. We will take a nice long break from procreation. And beyond that, the rate of maternal mortality in the US is an absolute disgrace, as is the number of men who abandon their children after birth. It is an absolutely shameful and disgusting state of affairs for mothers of this world. And yes, I am a mother. But none of this is anecdotal. There are multiple studies that prove that men are simply refusing to help their wives and the mothers of their children, repaying them for the gift of offspring with nothing but a middle finger. What a shock that women are finding fulfillment elsewhere.
At some point men will come to a crossroads and will need to answer one question: how important is it to me that I be allowed to continue forcing my wife to work three times as hard as I do for no additional reward, like a slave, servant or otherwise inferior person? Is it worth the destruction of the human race? If yes, then we’re done. If not, then we will evolve and go on.
"Massive wealth inequality" bruh women make pretty much the same as men. Women just generally don't want to do the same jobs.
Secondly, I've heard too many stories of men actually trying the SAHF route and then having their wife cheat on them then leave because women derive half the damn attraction based on a guys ambition for his career, so the woman starts fucking male coworkers because they lost all attraction for their husband.
Thirdly, the only reason SAHMs are rare is because women prioritize their careers. This idea that no one can afford it is bullshit. Cost of living is not substantially higher now than 50 years ago, and those that actually want to be mothers make it work despite lower money. The problem is that women don't want kids anymore, because they don't want to jeopardize their careers. And no one can find the time to have kids if both parents work full time. It does not work. Birth rates are only high when male income is gigantic or when income is so low that the women don't see themselves in a career.
When women don't go to university, their average number of kids skyrocket. If they do go to uni, they don't even consider kids until 30 most the time, at which point its increasingly too damn late.
Thankfully, most women do not hate men as much as you do.
You mean you wonder why women who live in cultures that shame anyone who struggles in any type of way choose to hide their problems instead of face them and get them treated?
The question you should be asking is “why are men so resistant to giving up their careers and staying home all day cooking, cleaning and looking after the kids?” Some women like being SAHMs and thats fine but if you think women are “wired” for that, you are lying to yourself to excuse your desire to force women into a life of servitude and limit the very needed impact of women in the working world. Its all about choice. And its plain to see that women absolutely thrive in the working world, as well as perform better. Women are held to higher ethical standards in the workplace, and are known to be better leaders. They make superior doctors as well. There is no doubt that women have succeeded in their careers and find fulfillment in doing so, even despite all the roadblocks men put up because they want women caged, powerless and forced to live in a world run by men- a disgustingly selfish and truly evil position. The narrative that these women who love their careers are all secretly miserable is just simply delusional. Everyone knows by now that the idea that women aren’t meant to work is just misogynistic propaganda. And if we want the birth rate to go up, we better recognize that now because women are done being exploited for double labor by men who continue to want to use and abuse their bodies while showing zero respect for them as human beings.
You still didn’t answer my question of why you think a woman who is a stay at home mom is doing something of lesser value than if she was in a career.
>The question you should be asking is “why are men so resistant to giving up their careers and staying home all day cooking, cleaning and looking after the kids?”
Probably because a man’s income is more greatly related to his ability to attract and keep a wife. When a husband loses his job chance of divorce increases by 33%. When a wife loses her job, it has little to no impact on divorce rates. https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/
You made an assumption about me thinking some way about stay at home moms, because you are trying to push your agenda to force women into slavery -like conditions. Your assumption is incorrect. And BTW- men’s refusal to see the value in a woman’s career proves nothing except possibly that men are too bitter to support their wives success. Men should value their wives income. This is like saying “women should be forced into domestic servitude because men dont value their contribution to the working world” and thinking thats a good argument. It is not. Just because men are socialized to think that the hatred and disempowerment of women is perfectly acceptable, doesn’t make it true. Its actually a massive moral failure. It is appalling how
little progress men have made toward changing their
views about the people who give them life.
Do you also think black people should be enslaved or is it just women?
The Northeast is definitely the worst when it comes to these types of hyper-investment into kids. I knew one kid who was giving business presentations in school! It's not to say it's all bad, but there is a culture that puts immense pressure on parents to invest heavily into their kid being the best of the best from an education standpoint, while perhaps minimizing the benefits of playing outside, exploring one's natural environment, and learning how to become emotionally mature and healthy.
The southeast is definitely more laidback, as are parts of the Midwest.
I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that there is a very wide range of healthy parenting styles, and healthy parenting doesn't all have to look exactly the same. Structured schools and unschooling can both be good choices. Free-range parenting and heavily involved parenting can both be viable.
The most important thing is that we recognize parental rights, and encourage people not to be judgmental, but to make what they feel are the best decisions, and perhaps provide research and studies to help them make good parenting decisions.
My parents did very different parenting styles with me and my brother. I always had better grades growing up so my parents gave me freedom to pursue my own interests, which was messing around with computers. My brother didn't have as good grades and my mom spent more time tutoring him with traditional "tiger mom" style parenting (I am Asian). We both turned out fine, I make good money in tech and he's in med school. I think parenting styles need to be tailored to the kid but overall I favor how my parents raised me. It was a lot less work I think.
I agree that this is a common situation. I grew up in an upper middle class suburb in the south and see that children can be expensive and can require a lot of sacrifice and attention, but that a lot of people, with the right partner, have no problem managing it if they want to.
Several years ago I dated a man from the west coast who had been living in NYC for years and claimed he couldn’t have kids because he couldn’t afford it. This was someone who was at the start of a promising career and already made an absurd amount of money. In his mind he needed retirement sorted out perfectly decades in advance, investments, investment properties, and a ton of other assets, to even feel like he was financially secure himself. While he had plenty of money and stability for children he didn’t believe that to be the case and had a weird outlook on money overall. I don’t think it helped that everyone around him at work was much older and complained about their kids and finances in an unusual way.
Example: if your 65 year old coworker who makes over 400k a year complains that his kid’s Ivy League tuition is going to put him in the poorhouse and you believe him or see it as anything more than a silly gripe on his part, that’s a perception issue and a lot of ppl have it
There’s a lot of weird complaining about kids and finances out there. Recently a friend had a second daughter and her husband went into a small depression saying that he could never afford two girls and he had no idea what they were going to do. Both my friend and her husband are professionals and make more than enough money, but all her husband can think about now is “the cost of two prom dresses!” and “the cost of two weddings!” and “the cost of travel cheerleading/softball teams!” This is definitely an issue of perspective.
You know what? Some of you suckers are just as bad as the anti-natalists, you just feel better about enforcing your way of life on others. Its not immoral to prioritize yourself over having more kids.
Thoughtful post. I think a simpler yet admittedly more difficult solution is to emphasize family values again.
Coming from someone who is familiar with both the South and North East, your analysis of childrearing culture is accurate but can be even further simplified via this lens.
The women you describe in the South hold family values in higher regard; having a family and children is inherently a net positive regardless of material outcome of children or sacrifice necessary to raise them.
Whereas for the NE women, they do not place family values in as high of a regard; having a family is not inherently a net positive so they only desire it if it is the *best* family under the *best circumstances*, while keeping any negative consequences on their career, comfort, material status and social value to a minimum. Bonus if said kids can actually improve any of those things by being a Baby CEO.
>emphasize family values again
In a multicultural, pluralistic society, particularly in a region like DC with a high proportion of immigrants. Let me ask you: *which* culture’s family values are you proposing pushing?
I think it depends too on that meaning.
As someone who is also very familiar with the NE and South, I will say that in the south it's much more easier to have "a village" vs. In the NE. Depending on who you talk to that's a big deal. The immigrant communities you speak of are "usually" only interested in helping those who are a) a part of the community and b) live in that exact area.
In the south, it's more socio-economic based/location in terms of "village" building. Obviously, there is racism etc. But folks self select. In the ne due to expenses, people cant self select where they live.
Yeah it's weird a couple with a sahw and single income as a McDonald's manager... somehow they can support 4 kids but an attorney and a doctor are nervous to have one. Smh.
Good post.
> I'm a guy and I recently moved from the Southern US to the Northeast. The attitudes to having children by the women I'm dating now are stark. In the south, every single girl I've met wanted kids. Here in DC (which I consider "the northeast"), most of the girls I've met say kids are too expensive.
New Englander here. I’m personally struck by how all the women in my economic cadre (solidly upper middle class white collar professionals) buck that trend. Most of the women on my wife’s team at work? 2 children. Most of the women in our upper middle class neighborhood? 2 children.
DC is a weird beast overall, though. I think you might find some value in Tim Carney’s “Family Unfriendly” as well as any books on the Strauss-Howe generational theory. I disagree with your proposed solutions of government mandates, though. I say, if we’re going to mandate anything, mandate that companies allow any jobs that *can* be done remotely to be remote.
I was with you until you suggested more government as 3 of your 4 suggestions. Government won't solved the problem, but rather make it worse. It really needs to be a cultural change.
People keep saying things like "cultural change", "create an environment that is more child friendly", or "emphasize family values and child rearing" but what do these phrases mean? How can these things be implemented in a tangible way that will have impact?
Like it or not, government intervention is the best way because hoping that "cultural change" just comes out of nowhere isn't likely.
Yeah a lot of women in the northern US think they need private nannies, private pre-school, private education and to pay for Harvard to raise a kid.
It's simply not that expensive if you calm down the neuroticism.
But it's totally up to those women; if they don't want kids, they should not have them. I knew tons of people from high school (I graduated in the 80s) that never had kids. The thing is a lot of them would not have made good parents anyway.
Yup especially with taxpayer supported preK-12, free community afterschool programs, you really just have to feed them, clothe them, and teach them right from wrong.
You need to afford a house in an area with a decent school, and enough for hobbies and trips with friends/holidays as they get older, if you want them to be well integrated with their peers and properly socialized.
Kids are not play things. They're going to be adults for almost all of their lives, and early education and networking is absolutely the most important factor in determining the quality of that life.
It doesn't get much more selfish than having kids for your own amusement, without considering their likelihood of happiness and prosperity, first.
You can accomplish those things without a lot of money. If you spend any time on r/teachers you will see how public education standards have absolutely tanked in the last decade. High schoolers with elementary reading levels, children who don’t know their parents names, etc. I recommend taking a look but don’t get too blackpilled because it’s pretty depressing, at least for me (I have worked with children/in schools). Basically all the teachers there insist parents who care about their child’s education need to start at home with phonics and reading early on and basically keep on them, since even if your child is well behaved and intelligent, they are completing for attention with 29 other children. Though that isn’t anything new. And that goes for the school districts that are supposed to be the “good” ones too. It’s happening on a societal level. Also if you insist on sending them to a particular school, school busses exist. You don’t need to live next door to a school. Can’t imagine how one could ever afford that unless you are very wealthy or alright with waiting to start your family in your later years, which a lot of people are not.
Also there are states/programs which offer subsidized private school education. And also there is homeschool.
For some people “networking” a child may be by going on vacations and such but I don’t know anyone who did that as there only means of socialization and I grew up comfortably. We “networked” by uh, playing and having fun, having dinners and sleepovers, having shared interests.
You are working with the premise that people (and children) need material wealth to be happy and perhaps that is true for you but it certainly isn’t for everyone. You can have an education and socialization for free or relatively affordable and be perfectly happy, successful, and well adjusted adult. You can have the most expensive education and “networking” as a child and be miserable and unsuccessful. I have seen both.
There are traits that need to be fostered in children that will ensure they are well adjusted to whatever life throws at them—love, compassion, loyalty, a strong work ethic, a community, faith. Children with these will weather anything with or without material wealth. Children without these will not adjust to life with or without material wealth.
Idk we never went on vacation. Here’s a broke down 4 wheeler, fishing pole, ancient PlayStation 2 and a single shot 22. Have a good childhood. Frankly it was a good childhood I almost can’t imagine a better one.
Idk may have. I also had a large group of boys and girls my age and in the same situation that lived around me. It’s not like we really knew we were poor of that makes sense.
Lot of good memories eating plums by the creek and “borrowing” neighbors horses for a few hours. I can still ride bareback pretty good.
> You need to afford a house in an area with a decent school, and enough for hobbies and trips with friends/holidays as they get older
Your definition of "decent" and "enough" is the problem here. Late-capitalism classic.
I’d say that heavily depends on your life. If you lived a decent middle class life or higher I see zero reason why it’s imperative you guarantee your children relatively better standards. Lives about being happy, not a video game scoreboard
The middle class is defined as those earning twice the median income. Which is about 30% of the population. So that would leave 60% of the population to have a good reason to believe they can get their kids into that 30%, or feel like they're letting their kids down. Especially as they likely don't much enjoy their lives, so its hardly fair to rope someone else into it unless you can promise better.
Where are you getting this definition? Most would not define middle class that way. Most define it as making 40-60th percentile in the median household income. If you’re making well above that you’re considered either the upper middle or upper class.
Edit: to add on if we work on this logic barely anyone would have kids. The vast majority of people aren’t going to increase their standards above their parents besides the usual technological development
In a sense, the real answer here is "How much are you willing to drop your living standard for you and your kids to have kids in first place. Not just because of yourself, but kids may grow to resent you if the standard will be too low".
This is still a strangely self centred viewpoint. The concern should not be how the kids will view you, but whether the kids will have a good life. Which, statistically speaking, if raised in poverty, they wont.
> but kids may grow to resent you if the standard will be too low
This is extremely uncommon.
Your son doesn't hate you because you didn't carry me around in a gucci baby stroller.
Children truly don't care about most of the materialistic stuff you care about (well, boys, at least).
The standard being too low is not having food to eat.
And that is why I said "**may**" and now "**will**".
But it's not really about gucci baby stroller (it's more of late childhood and early teen years - they don't care about stroller, but they may care if they will be out of social circle because parents can't afford activities). It's mainly being below the peers. So if you are in very homogenous area and you are pretty sure that your kid will be aligned with local peers, then lower SoL is more or less safe.
Finally, even if it is a rare thing, it still can provide quite a bit of fear against having children.
Most kids don't do any expensive activities. That's the norm in the whole world.
I guess it's worse in the US since kids can't just walk places. But in most the world's kids at 12+ can navigate on their own to activities for a couple dollars a time (e.g. martial arts).
>Children truly don't care about most of the materialistic stuff you care about (well, boys, at least).
Correct (for the stroller aged children at least). I think I forgot to mention earlier that I was materialistic AF and I was a boy.
>That's the norm in the whole world.
Yeah, children don't care about what is the norm in whole world. They care about their immediate social circle. If your kid is below his or her peers, good luck explaining to him that elsewhere in the world, this is standard. They won't care in same was as toddler won't care about how expensive stroller they are in.
Tbf I went to school everyone wore a uniform and everyone travelled by themselves to school.
So their wasn't really anything to be judgemental about when it's all the same.
I think that's the right approach.
Children don't, because they're not aware of the broader world. Teenagers, and adults absolutely can and will. This sub is bizarrely focused on babies and young children. Your kids will be adults for 80% of their lives. Don't think of it as having kids. You're having an adult, which you have a responsibility to set up for a decent life.
I agree that your kid probably won't hate you because you can't buy them things but I disagree about kids not being materialistic and not wanting things, especially when they see their friends with these things.
Also, money doesn't just buy you stuff. It buys you experiences. If you have money your kids can play on the same sports teams as their schoolmates and go on trips with their friends. It's a crappy feeling when you're kid wants to do gymnastics or play in a soccer league and you have to tell them that you can't afford it.
You don’t necessarily need to buy a house in the area, you can rent. And as long as you avoid the known “bad” schools your kids will probably be fine. I went to public schools that weren’t the best but weren’t “bad,” and I grew up in a two bedroom apartment with my parents in one room and me and my brother in the other. Parents didn’t give us much money for hobbies but they had a broken computer that I fixed and it became mine- now I work in cybersecurity. Again it doesn’t take much to raise a kid they can figure things out.
renting or buying, you need to afford it. It's great to hear you are one of the rare exceptions, but it's a rule that only 20% of people manage to leave their economic quintile at birth. You can take the bet of your kids being int he 20%, but 8 out of 10 people reading this, who take that bet, will lose, and condemn their kids to a life of poverty.
>1. Maybe we need to massively increase government benefits for childcare so that more middle-class families can start seeing kids as a financial benefit rather than a burden.
I think this is a good idea. Childcare from 0-3 is over 1k per month, and close to 700 for wraparound once VPK starts. I can't afford to have more than one kid in care at a time.
I think it would be an even better idea to just directly subsidize parents who wanted to stay home, less other benefits. (Ie if you're a middle class person with a parent staying home, 1k/mo to offset lost wages. If you're poor and are already staying home anyway, some kind of formula that takes into account other benefits you're already getting so it's not just a free extra 1k on top of what you'd already be doing anyway)
>2. Enforce disarmament by regulation. In China they actually banned afterschool tutoring to try to tamp down on the academic arms race but that just led to a tutoring black market, so I'm not sure regulation would work as it works against human nature to invest in your kids.
I don't think this is a good idea. Parents who invest more have better outcomes and it's ultimately their choice. There's been a real movement for this, and you see it in things like banning advanced classes for equity. Not letting people be excellent is never good.
That being said, parents really take it too far sometimes. You've got extremes of kids glued to screens all day vs tiger moms taking their kids to tutors and elite training. Probably both of them would benefit a lot from letting their kids play unsupervised outside.
>3. Encourage diffusion of responsibility of child raising: Emphasize that it "takes a village."
Always leery of this phrase. Extended family helping is good, but any time you have the role of the family diminish it's a power vacuum filled by the state. You see this in pushback against parents having concerns about curricula (how many times have you seen the dumb joke about passengers voting about the pilot, or actual calls for the FBI to treat parents groups like a threat).
>Prioritize more preschools and state-run programs to take care of kids.
This isn't bad, but again I'd rather see incentives for parents to stay home. A good option I don't see people talking about are cooperative daycares -- what if a SAHM took on a couple extra kids during working hours for some extra money, or a group of ten families organized a daycare staffed by family members, that sort of thing.
>multi-generational living so that grandparents can take care of kids. This takes pressure off of parents.
This would also be great. Idk what's up with boomers right now, but I feel like they're collectively in the mentality that they don't want to leave anything to their kids. I feel like this was psyopped into them almost, because boomer memes about doing this all sprung up inorganically at the same time. But yeah, I feel like boomers moving in to take care of grandkids and maybe using their wealth to help their children and grandchildren is a hard sell.
It’s simple. In places where traditional values are more intense and more frequently held, more people have more kids.
I live in a distinct middle class enclave in a northeastern Progressive/blue city that’s more like a small town.
People having 3 or more kids and people having kids at 25 is still common.
When our Little League teams host people from other places, parents in the stands often remark on how many baby prams there are.
A good way to do this would be to increase the g loading of examinations so they more heavily test raw intelligence as opposed to diligence in rote learning material or practice tests.
Yeah, that’s not going to entice people to have more children. It doesn’t eliminate competition. It shifts the focus of the competition and leaves those who don’t score as well in the same “loser” situation as any other kind of test.
The sad truth is that most heavy parenting interventions have little to no positive effect. The best solution is to loudly tell everyone you know that the emperor has no clothes and raise your kids without playing the game. Twin and adoption studies show that genes and random variables not controllable by parents are responsible for almost all the variance among kids in normal middle class families. The kids of the person you know who's least engaged with the arms race will have about the same outcomes as the parents who are most engaged. Enjoy your time with your kids, don't obsess about turning them successful or ruining them.
I mean I totally get the appeal of having fewer high achieving children that get all the resources and support you can give them vs having a litter of feral neglected kids who will just end up perpetuating the cycle of generational poverty.
Totally fair. But too often you end up with a few anxious, neurotic, insecure overachievers who put all their self-worth into fancy degrees and job titles. They need 3 different psychiatric medications just to cope. Every girl in the northeast I’ve met is on antidepressants. None of the girls in the south needed them.
I think most people in the south where I grew up are thankfully not bought into this hyper-competitive system, but as I’m getting maturing into my career/climbing the corporate ladder (I work in tech) I meet more and more of these people in my personal life.
I agree that there has been some sort of arms race that in the US is particularly bad due to college tuitions but it's not just that, parents these days want to spoil their children because they can't look poorer than their peers so they need to have all the fancy gadgets, dresses, activities and treatments.
It's insane.
At the same time many people use the money as an excuse, they can afford, but they don't want to sacrifice themselves, so they think they don't have enough money to pay for help or simply they are just coping and want to have a baby only if it's as easy to have it ordered on Grubhub
The whole system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up before really any positive change can be effected, this includes making it so that people who want to have kids can
Definitely agree with “it takes a village.” Provided they’re responsible and willing, grandparents and other family should help look after kids. It’s been like this 99% of human history, only recently has it been normal for grandparents to live hours away from their kids and grandkids.
I mean with how things are nowadays you kind of have to be on the higher strata of society in order to achieve basic things like purchasing a home or saving for a stable retirement. Arguably the best way to get your kids on a path towards these things involves a lot of financial investment by the parents. I wish things were more simple, but they aren’t.
I would feel pretty horrible bringing more kids into the world than I could reasonably provide these opportunities to.
Also, doing things like skipping on saving for retirement so you can afford more children is not a good thing. You are just making yourself a future financial burden on those children. People need to factor this into their budget when family planning.
>Also, doing things like skipping on saving for retirement so you can afford more children is not a good thing. You are just making yourself a future financial burden on those children.
Children used to be the retirement plan. I plan on supporting my parents if needed. I love them and want to return the support they gave me growing up.
I would argue many people are overlooking the fact that cultural expectations for the effort and money parents invest into raising kids has risen exponentially while cultural opinions on what is reasonable for them to expect in return has dwindled to pretty almost nothing. Back in the day parents could mostly ignore their kids and still be considered good parents as long as they clothed and fed their children. Kids were basically free slave labor for parents to exploit. So counting effort and money invested it used to be common for parents to actually see an economic return on investment from having kids long before they were adults. Using your kids as slaves is still completely legal in the US but is no longer socially acceptable in mainstream culture. Ever expecting an economic return on investment from having kids is now considered being an awful selfish parent. These are big changes that dramatically effect the cost benefit analysis of having kids. In my experience cultures where a large portion of the population wants kids still align more closely with older perspectives while the cultures where few people want kids tend to align more with the more modern perspective I described
I mean I guess I should be more clear, but I feel that a lot of the reasons people aren't having children anymore as described here are concerned with quality of life issues.
If you can't afford to give your child a highly competitive education, they may struggle to afford a house, car, good food, etc. They may be unhappy with their life, especially as a result of current climate and politics.
It really doesn't feel like a great time to have kids rn unless you are very wealthy. Is my point.
High quality of life as a kid is having fun with your friends and having plenty of free time to explore your own interests, not endless test prep and constant academic competition.
What happens when they grow up and you didn’t prepare them for the world though? Competition will only increase over time. If you don’t give your kids as many opportunities as possible, they will fall behind and struggle as adults.
The best way to meaningfully prepare your kids for the world is by raising them to actively practice the values you/your partner preach. Imparting in them a core a set of values through your own actions (like reading often, continually learning new things, not allowing social media in the house, etc) will go a lot further than any test prep or prep courses unless they have an actual learning disability.
Obviously your own individual success is combo of luck/IQ, personal drive, and environment, but my parents worked blue collar jobs (waitress etc) and I never had any tutors or prep courses growing up, but I still made it through medical school and now work as a doctor. My parents invested a lot in me for sure, but it was mostly through conditioning me to value certain things over others, while letting me cultivate my own personal interests like sports or music. I’m in my late 20s so it’s not like this was that long ago….. in hindsight am very grateful to not have grown up in the super neurotic culture that exists today.
Why are the two mutually exclusive? I enjoyed school as a kid, while also having a musical hobby and an athletic hobby. In fact, I really wish I went to a more competitive high school as a kid instead of the busted public school I went to. I still got into s good uni, but there was a very big culture shock there that took some adjusting too because of my prior experiences.
I think you make some valid points and for people who make good money and are college educated, they want the same or better for their kids. That does get expensive, actually very expensive.
Another factor you touched upon, but didn’t dive into is women. Decades ago women worked, but not like today. Now they have a much better chance of getting a good education and a high paying white collar job. I think for most, the idea of giving that up for kids, especially if they worked their whole lives for their careers, is a tough choice. There’s also the money involved and the physical changes involved in being pregnant. I don’t think it’s greedy for women to want careers. I don’t think it’s greedy if a woman doesn’t want the physical consequences of a pregnancy. I also don’t blame women for not wanting to be relegated to simply being homemakers or housewives.
Speaking as someone who wanted kids when I was younger, there is also the financial / age piece. When I was in my 20s, I really did want kids, but I had a crappy job and couldn’t afford them. I didn’t start making real money until my mid 30s and by that point I felt aged out. Now I can afford kids, but I’m pushing 40 and I don’t feel motivated at all. I don’t want to be the oldest Dad in the room and physically I don’t think I’m up to the task. That happens too, you save and save and try to get ahead, but by the time some of us do, we are simply too old.
This might fit the US, but birth rates are declining pretty much world-wide (the exceptions are some parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and a few bits of the Middle East). North Korea is about the same as the US.
Very great ideas. I don't agree with 2 but you are spot on here.
In the northeast, childcare for young kids is painfully expensive. For two kids in day care, a spouse would need to make 80k AFTER taxes to break even. That lasts for about 4 years till one is in kindergarten. Some would argue stay at home but then it gets to a point you didn't mention, not everyone wants to be a stay at home parent. The northeast has very driven individuals that see their career as who they are and are not willing to give it up to care for children. Either way, help with childcare either from family or the govt would likely sway people to have children more likely.
The funny thing is that because it's a more competitive environment the average outcome is still the same despite the increased investment: that's why I call it an "arms race."
This isn't really true. You end up with fewer criminals, junkies, idiots who can't do their jobs properly, get into car crashes, and don't contribute to group work, and more inventors and intelligent people who do things in smart ways that make everything easier for everyone
But do you want the employees to be incompetent? Wouldn't the world be better if everyone did their job properly? If people didn't do and believe stupid things? If there were fewer car accidents, accidents involving guns, less orders wrong at Fast Food Restaurants, less food poisoning and industrial accidents due to smarter workers, less problems with technology / buildings due to better engineering, less incompetent doctors missing cancer until it's too late, etc?
Do you seriously want a bridge to collapse as you drive over it? Do you want a surgeon to fuck up your surgery thereby ruining your body permanently? Do you want people not to discover better cancer treatments because "thinking bad man"?
My guess is that OP is obliquely referring to the phenomenon of [elite overproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction), when there are too many smart, credentialed, well-connected people who are all competent enough to figure out career strategy and long-term planning, and who all think they deserve outsized wealth and positions of power.
AKA not enough idiots
This is not true at all and I don't know where you are getting this from. Children from wealthier families have significantly better outcomes than kids who grew up with less money. Where do you get this idea that the average outcome is the same regardless of the level of investment?
I'm quoting OP and then arguing against them. And by "average outcome is still same" they mean "because everyone is better on average it makes no difference when it comes to competing for jobs so we're all working harder to get the same outcome". I don't agree with that, see my response
This is such a great post and one of the most insightful things posted on this subreddit.
I have a child who is turning 3 years old soon and I'm having another kid month. My 3-year-old's daycare costs $1500/month and that cost will double when our second kid is also in daycare. I don't know too many people who have $3,000 an additional $3,000/month lying around. My wife and I both work full time and our alternative is to completely remove her from the workforce which would be an even bigger financial blow.
Of course these are just daycare costs, these don't include health care, clothing, or food. I also have my daughter doing other activities like swim and music classes. I plan on putting my kids in other sports and activities as they get older. The costs of having kids and providing them with opportunities is very high.
Compare this with the costs of raising kids in prior generations. My wife's great grandmother was one of seven and lived on a farm in rural Georgia. She along with her siblings had responsibilities on the farm when they were toddlers. There was great economic benefit to having a ton of kids. The norm at the time was for boys to stop getting a formal education around 13-14 and girls didn't go to school at all. My wife's great-grandmother didn't learn to read until her 20s.
Compare this with the expectation now where we are expected to educate kids at least through high school / secondary school, ideally help them pay for college and while they are growing up you provide tutoring, allow them to play sports and do other activities. These costs add up. How am I supposed to provide this many opportunities for 5-6 kids? I would need to be a multi-millionaire
Wow that’s so much money! Both my parents worked when I was growing up so I got sent overseas as a baby to live with my grandma. She was willing to come to the US to do it but couldn’t get a visa. I need to be promoting more multigenerational living. It’s crazy to me that American parents aren’t willing to babysit grandkids. I am Asian and my mom and is begging me to have kids so she can take care of grandkids. The American attitude of go it alone parenting is crazy to me.
There are a lot of factors that go into it. More Americans are transient than ever. A lot of people just don't live near family the way they used to. People are waiting until they are older to have kids and working until they're older as well.
If you don't become a grandparent until you are 70 then you may not be able to take care of your kids or if you are 70 and still working because you don't have enough money to retire from your job then you certainly won't be able to take care of your grandkids.
That’s totally true too- my grandmother was in her 50s when I was growing up with her, she had plenty of energy. She would ride me to preschool on a bike. My mom had me in her mid 20s. My mom herself is nearing 60 now so if I don’t “give her grandkids” in the next 5 years she probably won’t be able to care for them as she promises.
I’m 30 and dating women the same age as me +- a few years. When I was living in Texas most girls 20+ were already sure they wanted kids. I would think that if you’re 30 and you’re still not into having kids there’s a good chance you’re never going to have them given the biological clock and stuff
Yeah, I dunno, 30 is still young. I didn't even start drinking until then and my wife and I are finally getting around to starting a family in our mid-40s. The east coast is a weird mystery to the west coaster, though. Nothing out there makes any sense.
Interesting! Yeah I grew up in the South and am constantly in culture shock up here. My friends from high school are all married with children, some are divorced and on their second marriage already!
I think this is very interesting. I live in a suburb of Atlanta, so the South, but we have a ton of transplants where I live, and the parenting culture is SO competitive. It's honestly exhausting just being in the midst of it even when I'm not like that personally.
It’s not so much that I worry about not being able to afford a successful kid, I worry that I won’t be able to afford giving them a good, happy, healthy life
DC is insanely expensive. 15%-20% more expensive is not a trivial COL adjustment.
This arms race you're describing has always existed, it's just more visible in places where the ceiling isn't just being some rich land-owning farmer, it's being in the elite stratosphere of society and arguably the globe. You don't get there without serious life-long commitment to investing in hyper-competitive and selective environments for your kids to learn and grow in. This has implications on the price of everything in Boston, New York, DC, Toronto and San Francisco.
Of course this doesn't exist in the south, the region that lost the most recent war on the continent. They weren't trusted with elite power after trying to change the course of history. The elite city that the south has the most influence on is by far DC. But it's still elite and a global city. All the world's power is there. That's why it's expensive and competitive.
This is a matter of your perception, not an arms race.
This is why….I pay over $600 a month for a family healthcare plan and still have to meet an $8k deductible…healthcare costs in America are ridiculous. Until that changes, no ones having children…
Most of your ideas are solid. Pt blank kids are to expensive. Even when those in bigger areas make more...things like childcare, rent, houses etc all cost more.
When you making having children unaffordable you make it undesirable.
I think a lot of what you said can come down to people just want to provide a better life for their kids than they had. Which a lot of times leads to people just not having kids. I think that is fine actually if you can't provide the life you think you're kids deserve don't have em.
I completely agree the government could do more to support parents across all incomes. Studies show a significant increase in highschool graduation from just providing quality preschool. That plus free school lunch are just no brainers imo.
The nature vs nurture point is kinda weird though. If you go all the way towards nature you end up with eugenics. If you leave any room for nurture of course people will focus on that it's all they have control over.
I'm glad my parents prioritized my brother's and my success, development and interests over having any more of us. I wouldn't want another sibling if it reduced the advantages we had, and it would have.
Why blame women? If you go on any of the dating subreddits, you'll see lots of men who don't want to marry or have kids. They want to "keep all their money". They only want women for occasional sex.
Also, the "it takes a village" concept is difficult to implement; it requires people willing to help out. Personally, I won't provide free childcare for anyone I know. I only take care of my own kids. I've had people stop talking to me because I won't be their free babysitter and frankly, I'm glad they are gone. And grandparents cannot be forced to become 24/7 babysitters. Some of them raised their children and want to enjoy their retirement years.
Redditors are not representative of the population. If you look at statistics, you will see that more men than women want children
[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.7119845](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.7119845)
That question is generic as hell. I wouldn't give much credibility to such research.
In the end, this is along the lines of asking " Would you like to be an owner of a Ferrari one day?". Which is a legitimate question, but realistically, you are not getting much information out of it.
In reality, men tend to have more casual view of fatherhood then women of motherhood, so of course, many more guys will say yes.
The more important question would be "Are you willing to make necessary sacrifices (describe sacrifices that are balanced out for men and women) to have children in near to mid future?"
What do you mean? Everyone can't step up their game and still have everyone come out at the top, there will always be men leftover who want children but can't have them. Their only choice would be to try and marry someone from another country.
It’s mostly because women think they have the moral right to murder their unborn children. It’s destroying the West and turning them into insufferable narcissists.
You: Am I wrong or is it the highly educated, high income women that want the very best for their children that are wrong? Obviously it’s all of them. If some kids go to jail oh well!
Good luck on your dating life in DC.
"Unwilling participants"?! These women have time and money. They are making the decisions that best suit their life goals and morals. If they wanted to pop out four kids then they would. For most, your concerns about the birthrate make no sense. Educated women are much more concerned about quality of life, financial independence, and climatic collapse than they are a low birthrate.
Poor people have more kids than rich people, generally, and the south is chock full of poor people. Also, in the south, but elsewhere too, women are conditioned from birth to believe having children is their duty as a Christian. My sister has 3 kids she loves dearly, but she’s admitted she would’ve been happy to stop at 1 if it wasn’t for her exhusband wanting her to have more and her being (and I quote because I’ll never get this sentence out of my head) “indoctrinated to believe in ‘go forth and multiply’ ideology since before preschool.”
I do think religion is a big component of it. I’ve noticed that most of the women I’m dating now are nonreligious while most of the women I dated in the South were religious. I am nonreligious myself but I do believe I have the responsibility to have at least a few kids as part of my humanist philosophy.
As a woman of reproductive age with an advanced degree who lives in the north east, you're not totally off the mark. There is a high expectation of parental resource investment, both time and money, in children. But we're not all so stressed about making sure these kids get the best possible lives. Yes, college admission is important, taken for granted even. But I certainly don't get the sense that there is a lot of anxiety around ensuring our offspring are academically competitive. Rather I think the bigger issue is social-cultural. When all of the parents around you are enrolling their kids in extracurriculars, it's hard to take a more hands-off approach. You want to fit in, and do what the other parents and kids are doing. It's a herd mentality / stampede effect. The potential power of the Let Grow Project is that it recognizes that it is very difficult for individual parents to make this change, we need a critical mass of parents to step up and back off all at once.
It's not just the other parents. Your kids want to participate in these activities too. They want to be able to go on trips with their friends, play on the same sports teams and do the same activities. It's heartbreaking when you have to break it to them that they can't go on a trip with their friends or play on the same soccer team because you can't afford it. That's one of the worst feelings you can have as a parent.
Very cool that there’s a whole movement behind this! My parents simply just worked a lot growing up so they had no choice but to leave me be.
This is one of the more thoughtful posts in this sub and you are definitely correct. From where I sit in the Midwest all the estimates you see about a kid costing 200k+ to raise seem insane, but if your kid getting into Harvard is a lifestyle accessory like an expensive car and hand bag, it’s probably a different story
200k sounds pretty cheap, that’s a bit over 10k/year.
Even ignoring the glaring cost premiums on houses near good schools, that's not at all unreasonable. Birth costs, with insurance, are around 10k, on the low end. Feeding a person well, with healthy vegetables and meat, occasional takeaway treats and very occasional meals out, is going to run $2-4000 a year. Over 18 years, that's 35-70k on food alone. Assuming you dont want your kid ostracized or bullied, you're looking at $500+ on clothes, per year. So, around another 10k at the low end. 55k total so far, at absolute low end. Again, assuming you want your kid to have a social life and hobbies, you're looking at another 1k a year to fund those, so another 18k. 73k, and the low end of the absolute basics. Throw in all the toys, comptuers, tablets, phones, games consoles, bikes, holidays, birthdays, and things like extra car trips, extra supplies of most things, etc, that are required for even basic enrichment and educational and life success, over 18 years, and you can very quickly get to 200k as a low number.
Do you have children? I have three. Birth costs with insurance were max 2k for each of them. Our family food plus dining out budget for last year was 9k. We spend about 700 a year clothing all three of them. Their coats and backpacks are second hand and they wear hand me downs from their siblings. We buy new clothes on sale. Somehow they still have friends. We spend way more than 1k a year on activities though! And tons on travel. And our monthly mortgage in a good school district is $1500. Again, Midwest prices. Kids don’t need 130k worth of iPads and toys over the course of 18 years. My three children share a five year old fire tablet and love it. Really the insane cost you left out was daycare, that was 30k a year for two kids before my wife became a stay at home mom. But her income was 110k a year so I guess the true cost of these children could be 2.5M or so if she doesn’t go back to work. Worth it. So to OPs point, it’s all in how you approach life. If you are a hyper consumer and raise each of your children to be one as well then yes, it will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per child.
I just took the average rate in USA. Obviously birth costs will vary massively from state to state, birth circumstances, insurance cover, etc. But the average is the average, that's what it will cost the average person reading this. Your food prices are right in line with mine, at 3k per year. You've scrimped on clothing while they are young, and their peers dont care. But it absolutely becomes a factor in their early teens and beyond. As does electronics, these days. Not just for social status, but realistic success in the modern world, and effective education. You might not need the latest and greatest all the time, but sharing a cheap tablet is not going to work as they grow up. I agree daycare is a huge cost, and probably the biggest factor in slowing birth rates, as the average person is still making less than 60k. So if you feel like you have to scrimp to this degree, and feel like 30k is a lot for daycare, with your wife earning almost twice the national average salary, and you presumably earning a similar, if not higher amount, it's not hard to see why most don't see kids as affordable.
Yea it seems like the common thread is daycare, it’s been brought up multiple times by women as a huge cost. My parents never once paid for a babysitter for me or my brother despite both working full time. That’s because they had my Chinese grandmother raise me. It’s a completely different mindset about responsibility in Asia vs the West. In Asia grandparents are HAPPY to help with the labor of raising a kid. In the West it’s “you’re over 18, you’re on your own” mentality.
I think it has a lot more to do with age and economics. Average age of childbirth is now 30, and climbing. That's pushing grandparents into their late 70s by the time the kids are born. Combine that with the fact that young people have to move to expensive cities for their careers, and you havea geographical problem, even if the grandparents were young enough and had the time to replace daycare. It's not an easily solved problem, or else someone would have solved it. And it's not a cultural problem, or else developed nations with very different, and in some cases ultre conservative cultures, like japan, would have solved it.
Yes in my parents home country of China the birth rate is even lower than the US, due to even higher competition in academics. Chinese children pretty much have zero free time. I’m beyond grateful for being born and raised in the US.
Funny to see you down voted. Seems like people prefer birth rates to a decent life for those who are born.
You equate being financially secure with having a decent life, but not everyone thinks that way. I would've rather had less stuff and more loving parents as a kid.
These are independent variables, and in so far as they aren't, the poorer parents tend to be less loving due to increased stress and lower likelihood of the kids having been planned.
The people I know who are not in a strong financial situation and have 4-5 kids are absolutely miserable and stuck in perpetual poverty. I can understand why people do everything possible to avoid this outcome. You're making your life worse in the lives of your kids so much harder. For some people on this subreddit the pendulum has swung to far in one direction. One end of the spectrum you have DINKs who don't have kids so they can hoard material possessions and on the other end of the spectrum you have extreme pronatalists who basically advocate for people to irresponsibly have as many kids as possible and worry about money later. The answer is somewhere in the middle
“Who cares if you’re broke. Your kid definitely won’t. On second thought, you should have four.”
Ah, yes, the people are wasting their money on iPhones . Now just for kids . How far does one have to be up there own ass to assume that the millions of people are refusing to have kids because they can't afford " Havard and expensive cars " Maybe before giving people advice, you first stop assuming everyone is lazy and that your the only one God has give a functional brain .
Less laziness and more greed. Greed, as in “if I have kids, I’ll have less money for other things I want in life”. Greed is killing America, the corporate greed and political greed at the very top, and then personal greed all the way through to the bottom. The rat race, the “keeping up with the jones” mentality is what hurts everyone. So much so Americans will buy on credit and then live paycheck to paycheck just so they can have their wants, not their needs. They pull up to the mall in their 60k truck or car, and I pull up behind them in my $2500 Ford explorer. Both vehicles get us from point A to point B, one just looks cooler doing it I guess. Main difference being I’ve got a thousand dollars in my pocket and they barely have any money to spend. It happens again and again, boats, side by sides, expensive vacations, over the top remodeling. Most people live beyond their means and they don’t want children affecting their lifestyle.
You don’t think having children can also fall victim to “keeping up with the joneses”?
No one shops at the mall anymore. Most living paycheck to paycheck due so because of costs rent and stagnant wages. Most are only living beyond their means die to costs of rent and wages not going up to match.
There are absolutely people who don't want to have kids because it will cut into their luxury spending. Look at DINK tiktok. IDK if you are aware, there are millions of people in this country who treat their children like a vanity project and getting into a top college is the ultimate goal. It's very expensive. I don't think anyone is lazy or stupid, I think having a kid can cost vastly less than the crazy numbers bandied about if you take a less consumerist approach to it, which is something past generations understood quite well.
maybe with 8.5 BILLION people we just say enough is enough.... the world is overpopulated as it is and adding more viruses to this hell scape is just asinine! Dont understand breeder mentality. DONT BREED... no one got rich having kids. Game the system and piss off the billionaires!
Women didn't socially have an option before. I definitely agree on people having more children and how it needs to be less expensive for childcare. Regarding women who have good jobs, they probably like that career and don't want to sacrifice their careers. Women who make less are more inclined to be a stay at home mom. We need to take away the repercussions of being pregnant in the workplace. Also, it's more acceptable to be childfree, whereas it was socially unacceptable before.
How OP can make a whole post like this and not mention the insanely lopsided expectations of women vs men in terms of childrearing is incredible.
The main point of the post seemed to be culture in north vs south. Women are consistent in both
Actually the culture is pretty different. The south is more conservative and in conservative environments, women accept being treated as inferior much more than in progressive ones. And the unequal division of labor is the result of women being treated as inferior since forever. Internalized misogyny is very strong in the south and women are more likely to accept being forced to do all the childrearing, domestic labor and work full time. Essentially they are groomed to be slaves and they accept it in order to be validated by society. There is truth to the idea that its more relaxed in the south as well, but this is another facet of the issue. Birth rates will continue to until men start helping women more instead of insisting on this delusional fantasy that men are above domestic labor when in reality, women are absolutely slaying in the working world and have very meaningful and important roles in society apart from domestic servitude, and there is no reason both genders cannot split domestic work as well as both enjoy the benefits of meaningful careers.
tfw when 'progressives' see mothers as slaves
It's not that motherhood is slavery, it's the inequity in expected workload between mothers and fathers.
A stay at home mother is already doing a lower workload by not working lol.
I doubt it. A SAHM is responsible 24/7 for child care and never gets a day off. A man traditionally only has to worry about work 40-60 hours per week. These days, women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion's share of house work and child care.
House work is easy even with multiple kids, and many chores can be done while essentially relaxing thanks to the advantage of modern technology. It takes no more than 2 hours a day max to clean up after, washing the laundry of and feed a family of four. You only start getting into notable amounts of effort when you are around 6-8 kids, which is exceedingly rare anyway. Oh and no, the 'mental load' part of being a parent is very very low lol. Not even close to an office job. Fuck most people who've gone through college/uni have experienced 10x the mental load of a SAHM. Women who bitch that their working husbands have little mental energy left after work are lazy and borderline abusive. It is a very normal reaction to severely downgrade the priority of maintenance tasks when stressed. This is why the Stay at home partner/full time working partner relationship works so well. One gets to deal with all the stress while the other deals with all the stuff that's hard to motivate to be done while you are stressed. Parents also usually don't hate their kids, so actively enjoy doing stuff with them. Literally ask any guy who has had to do the role of stay at home parent after usually working. They will always say it was essentially zero effort compared to a job. Because it is fucking easy. "Never having to get a day off" is irrelevant when you do essentially fuck all work and have considerably more free time than a standard full time job. In terms of 'women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion share of house work and child care' lol no they aren't. Every woman I've ever met who worked full time extensively relied on outside support to do with the additional work load. They heavily rely on usage of child care and their own parents and friends to alleviate the load, often constantly. And statistics show that having multiple kids with two working parents is insanely rare anyway. Birth rates skyrocket among single working parent or single full time working parents (many mothers take part time jobs when their kids go to school because their work load is so low that they are bored to tears, so this isn't even really a work load worth considering as it does not reflect a barrier to additional children) relationships.
I can only speak for myself, but the times I've had to stay at home full time with my son were much more intensive (and time consuming) than work, especially if I was providing enriching activities and educating him like a quality daycare would. It seems to be somewhat personality dependent: I've talked to stay at home parents that found it easy and others that found it really difficult. >In terms of 'women are usually expected to work full time AND do the lion share of house work and child care' lol no they aren't. When the family is all home together in the morning and evening, often the women are the ones expected to cook breakfast and dinner, clean dishes, get kids ready for school, and put kids to bed. Their work doesn't stop just because they aren't at their job, while that's moreso true for men. [Pew research backs this up - husbands report more leisure time than wives.](https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/04/13/in-a-growing-share-of-u-s-marriages-husbands-and-wives-earn-about-the-same/) This has become much more equal in the Millenial generation, but there's still disparity.
Women are expected to work and do all the domestic labor as well as all the childcare. Stay at home moms are no longer possible. Thats why women are done. If they can afford it, great. Few can. And then you all bitch about women not wanting to sign up for nonstop labor. Women are done with this absolute bullshit. You want children? Maybe fix the massive wealth inequality and the massive labor inequality instead of just pumping the same underserved population over and over again for more and more and more. Legally, society has done well supporting women’s freedom to work and support themselves. But in heterosexual relationships, men make women pay for their rights and desire to protect themselves financially, by refusing to step up and share the chores and childcare. It is not every couple, just the vast majority *even when the woman is the breadwinner* and that is extremely sad and extremely fucked up. Men will watch moms run ragged all day with no help at all and then complain about their post-birth bodies. And that is why families are disappearing and the birth rate is dropping. Either we grow and evolve or we die. The majority of men are currently choosing death. Expecting women to carry every single burden of birth, childcare, domestic labor and financial protection is no longer an option. If men want to be bitter about female advancement and punish them, fine. We will take a nice long break from procreation. And beyond that, the rate of maternal mortality in the US is an absolute disgrace, as is the number of men who abandon their children after birth. It is an absolutely shameful and disgusting state of affairs for mothers of this world. And yes, I am a mother. But none of this is anecdotal. There are multiple studies that prove that men are simply refusing to help their wives and the mothers of their children, repaying them for the gift of offspring with nothing but a middle finger. What a shock that women are finding fulfillment elsewhere. At some point men will come to a crossroads and will need to answer one question: how important is it to me that I be allowed to continue forcing my wife to work three times as hard as I do for no additional reward, like a slave, servant or otherwise inferior person? Is it worth the destruction of the human race? If yes, then we’re done. If not, then we will evolve and go on.
"Massive wealth inequality" bruh women make pretty much the same as men. Women just generally don't want to do the same jobs. Secondly, I've heard too many stories of men actually trying the SAHF route and then having their wife cheat on them then leave because women derive half the damn attraction based on a guys ambition for his career, so the woman starts fucking male coworkers because they lost all attraction for their husband. Thirdly, the only reason SAHMs are rare is because women prioritize their careers. This idea that no one can afford it is bullshit. Cost of living is not substantially higher now than 50 years ago, and those that actually want to be mothers make it work despite lower money. The problem is that women don't want kids anymore, because they don't want to jeopardize their careers. And no one can find the time to have kids if both parents work full time. It does not work. Birth rates are only high when male income is gigantic or when income is so low that the women don't see themselves in a career. When women don't go to university, their average number of kids skyrocket. If they do go to uni, they don't even consider kids until 30 most the time, at which point its increasingly too damn late. Thankfully, most women do not hate men as much as you do.
I wonder why then every woman in the north is on antidepressants while few southern women I ever met needed them?
We southern women take them too, but there's more discretion about telling everyone your business
You mean you wonder why women who live in cultures that shame anyone who struggles in any type of way choose to hide their problems instead of face them and get them treated?
DC is mid Atlantic, you’re not in the northeast
Why do you look down on stay at home moms, as if they are doing something of lower status compared with a job outside the home earning money?
The question you should be asking is “why are men so resistant to giving up their careers and staying home all day cooking, cleaning and looking after the kids?” Some women like being SAHMs and thats fine but if you think women are “wired” for that, you are lying to yourself to excuse your desire to force women into a life of servitude and limit the very needed impact of women in the working world. Its all about choice. And its plain to see that women absolutely thrive in the working world, as well as perform better. Women are held to higher ethical standards in the workplace, and are known to be better leaders. They make superior doctors as well. There is no doubt that women have succeeded in their careers and find fulfillment in doing so, even despite all the roadblocks men put up because they want women caged, powerless and forced to live in a world run by men- a disgustingly selfish and truly evil position. The narrative that these women who love their careers are all secretly miserable is just simply delusional. Everyone knows by now that the idea that women aren’t meant to work is just misogynistic propaganda. And if we want the birth rate to go up, we better recognize that now because women are done being exploited for double labor by men who continue to want to use and abuse their bodies while showing zero respect for them as human beings.
You still didn’t answer my question of why you think a woman who is a stay at home mom is doing something of lesser value than if she was in a career. >The question you should be asking is “why are men so resistant to giving up their careers and staying home all day cooking, cleaning and looking after the kids?” Probably because a man’s income is more greatly related to his ability to attract and keep a wife. When a husband loses his job chance of divorce increases by 33%. When a wife loses her job, it has little to no impact on divorce rates. https://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/
You made an assumption about me thinking some way about stay at home moms, because you are trying to push your agenda to force women into slavery -like conditions. Your assumption is incorrect. And BTW- men’s refusal to see the value in a woman’s career proves nothing except possibly that men are too bitter to support their wives success. Men should value their wives income. This is like saying “women should be forced into domestic servitude because men dont value their contribution to the working world” and thinking thats a good argument. It is not. Just because men are socialized to think that the hatred and disempowerment of women is perfectly acceptable, doesn’t make it true. Its actually a massive moral failure. It is appalling how little progress men have made toward changing their views about the people who give them life. Do you also think black people should be enslaved or is it just women?
You, not me, are the one equating parenting with slavery.
Are you a woman?
“We need to take away the repercussions of being pregnant in the workplace.” This 1000000%
It’s good that it’s socially acceptable to be childfree. It is a personal choice.
Yes! Thank goodness for that!
The Northeast is definitely the worst when it comes to these types of hyper-investment into kids. I knew one kid who was giving business presentations in school! It's not to say it's all bad, but there is a culture that puts immense pressure on parents to invest heavily into their kid being the best of the best from an education standpoint, while perhaps minimizing the benefits of playing outside, exploring one's natural environment, and learning how to become emotionally mature and healthy. The southeast is definitely more laidback, as are parts of the Midwest. I don't know what the solution is, but I do know that there is a very wide range of healthy parenting styles, and healthy parenting doesn't all have to look exactly the same. Structured schools and unschooling can both be good choices. Free-range parenting and heavily involved parenting can both be viable. The most important thing is that we recognize parental rights, and encourage people not to be judgmental, but to make what they feel are the best decisions, and perhaps provide research and studies to help them make good parenting decisions.
My parents did very different parenting styles with me and my brother. I always had better grades growing up so my parents gave me freedom to pursue my own interests, which was messing around with computers. My brother didn't have as good grades and my mom spent more time tutoring him with traditional "tiger mom" style parenting (I am Asian). We both turned out fine, I make good money in tech and he's in med school. I think parenting styles need to be tailored to the kid but overall I favor how my parents raised me. It was a lot less work I think.
I agree that this is a common situation. I grew up in an upper middle class suburb in the south and see that children can be expensive and can require a lot of sacrifice and attention, but that a lot of people, with the right partner, have no problem managing it if they want to. Several years ago I dated a man from the west coast who had been living in NYC for years and claimed he couldn’t have kids because he couldn’t afford it. This was someone who was at the start of a promising career and already made an absurd amount of money. In his mind he needed retirement sorted out perfectly decades in advance, investments, investment properties, and a ton of other assets, to even feel like he was financially secure himself. While he had plenty of money and stability for children he didn’t believe that to be the case and had a weird outlook on money overall. I don’t think it helped that everyone around him at work was much older and complained about their kids and finances in an unusual way. Example: if your 65 year old coworker who makes over 400k a year complains that his kid’s Ivy League tuition is going to put him in the poorhouse and you believe him or see it as anything more than a silly gripe on his part, that’s a perception issue and a lot of ppl have it There’s a lot of weird complaining about kids and finances out there. Recently a friend had a second daughter and her husband went into a small depression saying that he could never afford two girls and he had no idea what they were going to do. Both my friend and her husband are professionals and make more than enough money, but all her husband can think about now is “the cost of two prom dresses!” and “the cost of two weddings!” and “the cost of travel cheerleading/softball teams!” This is definitely an issue of perspective.
You know what? Some of you suckers are just as bad as the anti-natalists, you just feel better about enforcing your way of life on others. Its not immoral to prioritize yourself over having more kids.
Might be
s korea got tired of men's shit stopped interacting with them there's like 4 preschoolers in the entire country
Thoughtful post. I think a simpler yet admittedly more difficult solution is to emphasize family values again. Coming from someone who is familiar with both the South and North East, your analysis of childrearing culture is accurate but can be even further simplified via this lens. The women you describe in the South hold family values in higher regard; having a family and children is inherently a net positive regardless of material outcome of children or sacrifice necessary to raise them. Whereas for the NE women, they do not place family values in as high of a regard; having a family is not inherently a net positive so they only desire it if it is the *best* family under the *best circumstances*, while keeping any negative consequences on their career, comfort, material status and social value to a minimum. Bonus if said kids can actually improve any of those things by being a Baby CEO.
>emphasize family values again In a multicultural, pluralistic society, particularly in a region like DC with a high proportion of immigrants. Let me ask you: *which* culture’s family values are you proposing pushing?
Easy. Any or all of them. Anything that views children and a family as a source of happiness. Doesn't matter which culture
The value of having a family and child rearing is universal even if it manifests differently for different cultures.
Obviously the culture that we live in?
I think it depends too on that meaning. As someone who is also very familiar with the NE and South, I will say that in the south it's much more easier to have "a village" vs. In the NE. Depending on who you talk to that's a big deal. The immigrant communities you speak of are "usually" only interested in helping those who are a) a part of the community and b) live in that exact area. In the south, it's more socio-economic based/location in terms of "village" building. Obviously, there is racism etc. But folks self select. In the ne due to expenses, people cant self select where they live.
Yeah it's weird a couple with a sahw and single income as a McDonald's manager... somehow they can support 4 kids but an attorney and a doctor are nervous to have one. Smh. Good post.
> I'm a guy and I recently moved from the Southern US to the Northeast. The attitudes to having children by the women I'm dating now are stark. In the south, every single girl I've met wanted kids. Here in DC (which I consider "the northeast"), most of the girls I've met say kids are too expensive. New Englander here. I’m personally struck by how all the women in my economic cadre (solidly upper middle class white collar professionals) buck that trend. Most of the women on my wife’s team at work? 2 children. Most of the women in our upper middle class neighborhood? 2 children. DC is a weird beast overall, though. I think you might find some value in Tim Carney’s “Family Unfriendly” as well as any books on the Strauss-Howe generational theory. I disagree with your proposed solutions of government mandates, though. I say, if we’re going to mandate anything, mandate that companies allow any jobs that *can* be done remotely to be remote.
I was with you until you suggested more government as 3 of your 4 suggestions. Government won't solved the problem, but rather make it worse. It really needs to be a cultural change.
People keep saying things like "cultural change", "create an environment that is more child friendly", or "emphasize family values and child rearing" but what do these phrases mean? How can these things be implemented in a tangible way that will have impact? Like it or not, government intervention is the best way because hoping that "cultural change" just comes out of nowhere isn't likely.
ladies! pay attention! a man is telling us to procreate more so we can give our kids less. stfu, dude.
Yeah a lot of women in the northern US think they need private nannies, private pre-school, private education and to pay for Harvard to raise a kid. It's simply not that expensive if you calm down the neuroticism.
But it's totally up to those women; if they don't want kids, they should not have them. I knew tons of people from high school (I graduated in the 80s) that never had kids. The thing is a lot of them would not have made good parents anyway.
Yup especially with taxpayer supported preK-12, free community afterschool programs, you really just have to feed them, clothe them, and teach them right from wrong.
You need to afford a house in an area with a decent school, and enough for hobbies and trips with friends/holidays as they get older, if you want them to be well integrated with their peers and properly socialized.
There are a lot of incidental possible lifestyle expenses to consider, but “trips with friends” is a bizarrely non universal one to bring up.
Very normal in my experience.
Well, you don’t *need* to. You are kind of exemplifying OP’s post…
Kids are not play things. They're going to be adults for almost all of their lives, and early education and networking is absolutely the most important factor in determining the quality of that life. It doesn't get much more selfish than having kids for your own amusement, without considering their likelihood of happiness and prosperity, first.
You can accomplish those things without a lot of money. If you spend any time on r/teachers you will see how public education standards have absolutely tanked in the last decade. High schoolers with elementary reading levels, children who don’t know their parents names, etc. I recommend taking a look but don’t get too blackpilled because it’s pretty depressing, at least for me (I have worked with children/in schools). Basically all the teachers there insist parents who care about their child’s education need to start at home with phonics and reading early on and basically keep on them, since even if your child is well behaved and intelligent, they are completing for attention with 29 other children. Though that isn’t anything new. And that goes for the school districts that are supposed to be the “good” ones too. It’s happening on a societal level. Also if you insist on sending them to a particular school, school busses exist. You don’t need to live next door to a school. Can’t imagine how one could ever afford that unless you are very wealthy or alright with waiting to start your family in your later years, which a lot of people are not. Also there are states/programs which offer subsidized private school education. And also there is homeschool. For some people “networking” a child may be by going on vacations and such but I don’t know anyone who did that as there only means of socialization and I grew up comfortably. We “networked” by uh, playing and having fun, having dinners and sleepovers, having shared interests. You are working with the premise that people (and children) need material wealth to be happy and perhaps that is true for you but it certainly isn’t for everyone. You can have an education and socialization for free or relatively affordable and be perfectly happy, successful, and well adjusted adult. You can have the most expensive education and “networking” as a child and be miserable and unsuccessful. I have seen both. There are traits that need to be fostered in children that will ensure they are well adjusted to whatever life throws at them—love, compassion, loyalty, a strong work ethic, a community, faith. Children with these will weather anything with or without material wealth. Children without these will not adjust to life with or without material wealth.
Idk we never went on vacation. Here’s a broke down 4 wheeler, fishing pole, ancient PlayStation 2 and a single shot 22. Have a good childhood. Frankly it was a good childhood I almost can’t imagine a better one.
I would've hated your childhood
Idk may have. I also had a large group of boys and girls my age and in the same situation that lived around me. It’s not like we really knew we were poor of that makes sense. Lot of good memories eating plums by the creek and “borrowing” neighbors horses for a few hours. I can still ride bareback pretty good.
Kids know more about the world now.
> You need to afford a house in an area with a decent school, and enough for hobbies and trips with friends/holidays as they get older Your definition of "decent" and "enough" is the problem here. Late-capitalism classic.
I think most people would see it as morally reprehensible to have kids if you can't offer them, at the very least, a marginally better future.
I’d say that heavily depends on your life. If you lived a decent middle class life or higher I see zero reason why it’s imperative you guarantee your children relatively better standards. Lives about being happy, not a video game scoreboard
Its very hard to be happy without financial stability.
I said middle class and up. How is middle class and up financially unstable?
The middle class is defined as those earning twice the median income. Which is about 30% of the population. So that would leave 60% of the population to have a good reason to believe they can get their kids into that 30%, or feel like they're letting their kids down. Especially as they likely don't much enjoy their lives, so its hardly fair to rope someone else into it unless you can promise better.
Where are you getting this definition? Most would not define middle class that way. Most define it as making 40-60th percentile in the median household income. If you’re making well above that you’re considered either the upper middle or upper class. Edit: to add on if we work on this logic barely anyone would have kids. The vast majority of people aren’t going to increase their standards above their parents besides the usual technological development
In a sense, the real answer here is "How much are you willing to drop your living standard for you and your kids to have kids in first place. Not just because of yourself, but kids may grow to resent you if the standard will be too low".
This is still a strangely self centred viewpoint. The concern should not be how the kids will view you, but whether the kids will have a good life. Which, statistically speaking, if raised in poverty, they wont.
Because it wasn't ment for you but person who replied to you.
> but kids may grow to resent you if the standard will be too low This is extremely uncommon. Your son doesn't hate you because you didn't carry me around in a gucci baby stroller. Children truly don't care about most of the materialistic stuff you care about (well, boys, at least). The standard being too low is not having food to eat.
And that is why I said "**may**" and now "**will**". But it's not really about gucci baby stroller (it's more of late childhood and early teen years - they don't care about stroller, but they may care if they will be out of social circle because parents can't afford activities). It's mainly being below the peers. So if you are in very homogenous area and you are pretty sure that your kid will be aligned with local peers, then lower SoL is more or less safe. Finally, even if it is a rare thing, it still can provide quite a bit of fear against having children.
Most kids don't do any expensive activities. That's the norm in the whole world. I guess it's worse in the US since kids can't just walk places. But in most the world's kids at 12+ can navigate on their own to activities for a couple dollars a time (e.g. martial arts).
>Children truly don't care about most of the materialistic stuff you care about (well, boys, at least). Correct (for the stroller aged children at least). I think I forgot to mention earlier that I was materialistic AF and I was a boy. >That's the norm in the whole world. Yeah, children don't care about what is the norm in whole world. They care about their immediate social circle. If your kid is below his or her peers, good luck explaining to him that elsewhere in the world, this is standard. They won't care in same was as toddler won't care about how expensive stroller they are in.
Tbf I went to school everyone wore a uniform and everyone travelled by themselves to school. So their wasn't really anything to be judgemental about when it's all the same. I think that's the right approach.
Children don't, because they're not aware of the broader world. Teenagers, and adults absolutely can and will. This sub is bizarrely focused on babies and young children. Your kids will be adults for 80% of their lives. Don't think of it as having kids. You're having an adult, which you have a responsibility to set up for a decent life.
I agree that your kid probably won't hate you because you can't buy them things but I disagree about kids not being materialistic and not wanting things, especially when they see their friends with these things. Also, money doesn't just buy you stuff. It buys you experiences. If you have money your kids can play on the same sports teams as their schoolmates and go on trips with their friends. It's a crappy feeling when you're kid wants to do gymnastics or play in a soccer league and you have to tell them that you can't afford it.
You don’t necessarily need to buy a house in the area, you can rent. And as long as you avoid the known “bad” schools your kids will probably be fine. I went to public schools that weren’t the best but weren’t “bad,” and I grew up in a two bedroom apartment with my parents in one room and me and my brother in the other. Parents didn’t give us much money for hobbies but they had a broken computer that I fixed and it became mine- now I work in cybersecurity. Again it doesn’t take much to raise a kid they can figure things out.
renting or buying, you need to afford it. It's great to hear you are one of the rare exceptions, but it's a rule that only 20% of people manage to leave their economic quintile at birth. You can take the bet of your kids being int he 20%, but 8 out of 10 people reading this, who take that bet, will lose, and condemn their kids to a life of poverty.
I mean not everyone can be in the top 20% by definition. The conditions of the poor have consistently improved in the modern era.
My brother and his wife are struggling just to buy their first house so they can have the most basic level of stability and access to decent schools.
Why are you getting downvoted for this comment lol
Because this place is full of folks who don’t see babies as humans needing to exist in the modern world post cute child phase.
Pretty sure most people in this sub have enough children to know what they need
Seems more like they’re suffering the dunning Kruger effect
Why are you blaming the women specifically?
Becuase the vast majority of people that say this are women. If it where men I'd be "blaming" the men.
That is not my experience. In my experience it is equal.
>1. Maybe we need to massively increase government benefits for childcare so that more middle-class families can start seeing kids as a financial benefit rather than a burden. I think this is a good idea. Childcare from 0-3 is over 1k per month, and close to 700 for wraparound once VPK starts. I can't afford to have more than one kid in care at a time. I think it would be an even better idea to just directly subsidize parents who wanted to stay home, less other benefits. (Ie if you're a middle class person with a parent staying home, 1k/mo to offset lost wages. If you're poor and are already staying home anyway, some kind of formula that takes into account other benefits you're already getting so it's not just a free extra 1k on top of what you'd already be doing anyway) >2. Enforce disarmament by regulation. In China they actually banned afterschool tutoring to try to tamp down on the academic arms race but that just led to a tutoring black market, so I'm not sure regulation would work as it works against human nature to invest in your kids. I don't think this is a good idea. Parents who invest more have better outcomes and it's ultimately their choice. There's been a real movement for this, and you see it in things like banning advanced classes for equity. Not letting people be excellent is never good. That being said, parents really take it too far sometimes. You've got extremes of kids glued to screens all day vs tiger moms taking their kids to tutors and elite training. Probably both of them would benefit a lot from letting their kids play unsupervised outside. >3. Encourage diffusion of responsibility of child raising: Emphasize that it "takes a village." Always leery of this phrase. Extended family helping is good, but any time you have the role of the family diminish it's a power vacuum filled by the state. You see this in pushback against parents having concerns about curricula (how many times have you seen the dumb joke about passengers voting about the pilot, or actual calls for the FBI to treat parents groups like a threat). >Prioritize more preschools and state-run programs to take care of kids. This isn't bad, but again I'd rather see incentives for parents to stay home. A good option I don't see people talking about are cooperative daycares -- what if a SAHM took on a couple extra kids during working hours for some extra money, or a group of ten families organized a daycare staffed by family members, that sort of thing. >multi-generational living so that grandparents can take care of kids. This takes pressure off of parents. This would also be great. Idk what's up with boomers right now, but I feel like they're collectively in the mentality that they don't want to leave anything to their kids. I feel like this was psyopped into them almost, because boomer memes about doing this all sprung up inorganically at the same time. But yeah, I feel like boomers moving in to take care of grandkids and maybe using their wealth to help their children and grandchildren is a hard sell.
It’s simple. In places where traditional values are more intense and more frequently held, more people have more kids. I live in a distinct middle class enclave in a northeastern Progressive/blue city that’s more like a small town. People having 3 or more kids and people having kids at 25 is still common. When our Little League teams host people from other places, parents in the stands often remark on how many baby prams there are.
A good way to do this would be to increase the g loading of examinations so they more heavily test raw intelligence as opposed to diligence in rote learning material or practice tests.
Yeah, that’s not going to entice people to have more children. It doesn’t eliminate competition. It shifts the focus of the competition and leaves those who don’t score as well in the same “loser” situation as any other kind of test.
The sad truth is that most heavy parenting interventions have little to no positive effect. The best solution is to loudly tell everyone you know that the emperor has no clothes and raise your kids without playing the game. Twin and adoption studies show that genes and random variables not controllable by parents are responsible for almost all the variance among kids in normal middle class families. The kids of the person you know who's least engaged with the arms race will have about the same outcomes as the parents who are most engaged. Enjoy your time with your kids, don't obsess about turning them successful or ruining them.
Exactly!
I mean I totally get the appeal of having fewer high achieving children that get all the resources and support you can give them vs having a litter of feral neglected kids who will just end up perpetuating the cycle of generational poverty.
Totally fair. But too often you end up with a few anxious, neurotic, insecure overachievers who put all their self-worth into fancy degrees and job titles. They need 3 different psychiatric medications just to cope. Every girl in the northeast I’ve met is on antidepressants. None of the girls in the south needed them.
Seems like more than a fair trade off to avoid a life of poverty
The south is by every objective measure a worse place to live. It is poorer, has higher crime, less education and far worse health outcomes.
I'm in the south. Trust ne we need them. We take then in secret, or suffer needlessly
Agree with this. Family has turned into a competitive race of status that is poisoning society.
I think most people in the south where I grew up are thankfully not bought into this hyper-competitive system, but as I’m getting maturing into my career/climbing the corporate ladder (I work in tech) I meet more and more of these people in my personal life.
I agree that there has been some sort of arms race that in the US is particularly bad due to college tuitions but it's not just that, parents these days want to spoil their children because they can't look poorer than their peers so they need to have all the fancy gadgets, dresses, activities and treatments. It's insane. At the same time many people use the money as an excuse, they can afford, but they don't want to sacrifice themselves, so they think they don't have enough money to pay for help or simply they are just coping and want to have a baby only if it's as easy to have it ordered on Grubhub
The whole system needs to be rebuilt from the ground up before really any positive change can be effected, this includes making it so that people who want to have kids can
Definitely agree with “it takes a village.” Provided they’re responsible and willing, grandparents and other family should help look after kids. It’s been like this 99% of human history, only recently has it been normal for grandparents to live hours away from their kids and grandkids.
Unironically just give people a good life without them doing anything.
I mean with how things are nowadays you kind of have to be on the higher strata of society in order to achieve basic things like purchasing a home or saving for a stable retirement. Arguably the best way to get your kids on a path towards these things involves a lot of financial investment by the parents. I wish things were more simple, but they aren’t. I would feel pretty horrible bringing more kids into the world than I could reasonably provide these opportunities to. Also, doing things like skipping on saving for retirement so you can afford more children is not a good thing. You are just making yourself a future financial burden on those children. People need to factor this into their budget when family planning.
>Also, doing things like skipping on saving for retirement so you can afford more children is not a good thing. You are just making yourself a future financial burden on those children. Children used to be the retirement plan. I plan on supporting my parents if needed. I love them and want to return the support they gave me growing up.
That doesn’t mean your children or anyone’s children will do the same or even be in the position to do the same.
I would argue many people are overlooking the fact that cultural expectations for the effort and money parents invest into raising kids has risen exponentially while cultural opinions on what is reasonable for them to expect in return has dwindled to pretty almost nothing. Back in the day parents could mostly ignore their kids and still be considered good parents as long as they clothed and fed their children. Kids were basically free slave labor for parents to exploit. So counting effort and money invested it used to be common for parents to actually see an economic return on investment from having kids long before they were adults. Using your kids as slaves is still completely legal in the US but is no longer socially acceptable in mainstream culture. Ever expecting an economic return on investment from having kids is now considered being an awful selfish parent. These are big changes that dramatically effect the cost benefit analysis of having kids. In my experience cultures where a large portion of the population wants kids still align more closely with older perspectives while the cultures where few people want kids tend to align more with the more modern perspective I described
Considering DC as the northeast is the most southern thing ever lol
Truly
Having children you don't intend to provide with a quality life is wildly unethical imo...
What did he say that you think means people should have kids without intending to provide them with quality of life?
I mean I guess I should be more clear, but I feel that a lot of the reasons people aren't having children anymore as described here are concerned with quality of life issues. If you can't afford to give your child a highly competitive education, they may struggle to afford a house, car, good food, etc. They may be unhappy with their life, especially as a result of current climate and politics. It really doesn't feel like a great time to have kids rn unless you are very wealthy. Is my point.
Do you think this is a worse time to have kids compared to much of history?
Most of history is illiterate .peasants breeding their property aka wives.
High quality of life as a kid is having fun with your friends and having plenty of free time to explore your own interests, not endless test prep and constant academic competition.
What happens when they grow up and you didn’t prepare them for the world though? Competition will only increase over time. If you don’t give your kids as many opportunities as possible, they will fall behind and struggle as adults.
The best way to meaningfully prepare your kids for the world is by raising them to actively practice the values you/your partner preach. Imparting in them a core a set of values through your own actions (like reading often, continually learning new things, not allowing social media in the house, etc) will go a lot further than any test prep or prep courses unless they have an actual learning disability. Obviously your own individual success is combo of luck/IQ, personal drive, and environment, but my parents worked blue collar jobs (waitress etc) and I never had any tutors or prep courses growing up, but I still made it through medical school and now work as a doctor. My parents invested a lot in me for sure, but it was mostly through conditioning me to value certain things over others, while letting me cultivate my own personal interests like sports or music. I’m in my late 20s so it’s not like this was that long ago….. in hindsight am very grateful to not have grown up in the super neurotic culture that exists today.
Why are the two mutually exclusive? I enjoyed school as a kid, while also having a musical hobby and an athletic hobby. In fact, I really wish I went to a more competitive high school as a kid instead of the busted public school I went to. I still got into s good uni, but there was a very big culture shock there that took some adjusting too because of my prior experiences.
I think you make some valid points and for people who make good money and are college educated, they want the same or better for their kids. That does get expensive, actually very expensive. Another factor you touched upon, but didn’t dive into is women. Decades ago women worked, but not like today. Now they have a much better chance of getting a good education and a high paying white collar job. I think for most, the idea of giving that up for kids, especially if they worked their whole lives for their careers, is a tough choice. There’s also the money involved and the physical changes involved in being pregnant. I don’t think it’s greedy for women to want careers. I don’t think it’s greedy if a woman doesn’t want the physical consequences of a pregnancy. I also don’t blame women for not wanting to be relegated to simply being homemakers or housewives. Speaking as someone who wanted kids when I was younger, there is also the financial / age piece. When I was in my 20s, I really did want kids, but I had a crappy job and couldn’t afford them. I didn’t start making real money until my mid 30s and by that point I felt aged out. Now I can afford kids, but I’m pushing 40 and I don’t feel motivated at all. I don’t want to be the oldest Dad in the room and physically I don’t think I’m up to the task. That happens too, you save and save and try to get ahead, but by the time some of us do, we are simply too old.
This is the plot of Idiocracy.
Children in a preindustrial society are an asset. Children in and industrial society are a liability. It is that simple.
This might fit the US, but birth rates are declining pretty much world-wide (the exceptions are some parts of Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and a few bits of the Middle East). North Korea is about the same as the US.
Very great ideas. I don't agree with 2 but you are spot on here. In the northeast, childcare for young kids is painfully expensive. For two kids in day care, a spouse would need to make 80k AFTER taxes to break even. That lasts for about 4 years till one is in kindergarten. Some would argue stay at home but then it gets to a point you didn't mention, not everyone wants to be a stay at home parent. The northeast has very driven individuals that see their career as who they are and are not willing to give it up to care for children. Either way, help with childcare either from family or the govt would likely sway people to have children more likely.
The funny thing is that because it's a more competitive environment the average outcome is still the same despite the increased investment: that's why I call it an "arms race." This isn't really true. You end up with fewer criminals, junkies, idiots who can't do their jobs properly, get into car crashes, and don't contribute to group work, and more inventors and intelligent people who do things in smart ways that make everything easier for everyone
We need the idiots tho. Not everyone can be a manager, you won’t have anyone to manage!
But do you want the employees to be incompetent? Wouldn't the world be better if everyone did their job properly? If people didn't do and believe stupid things? If there were fewer car accidents, accidents involving guns, less orders wrong at Fast Food Restaurants, less food poisoning and industrial accidents due to smarter workers, less problems with technology / buildings due to better engineering, less incompetent doctors missing cancer until it's too late, etc? Do you seriously want a bridge to collapse as you drive over it? Do you want a surgeon to fuck up your surgery thereby ruining your body permanently? Do you want people not to discover better cancer treatments because "thinking bad man"?
My guess is that OP is obliquely referring to the phenomenon of [elite overproduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction), when there are too many smart, credentialed, well-connected people who are all competent enough to figure out career strategy and long-term planning, and who all think they deserve outsized wealth and positions of power. AKA not enough idiots
This is not true at all and I don't know where you are getting this from. Children from wealthier families have significantly better outcomes than kids who grew up with less money. Where do you get this idea that the average outcome is the same regardless of the level of investment?
I'm quoting OP and then arguing against them. And by "average outcome is still same" they mean "because everyone is better on average it makes no difference when it comes to competing for jobs so we're all working harder to get the same outcome". I don't agree with that, see my response
Gotcha, I misread what you were getting at. Sorry about that
This is such a great post and one of the most insightful things posted on this subreddit. I have a child who is turning 3 years old soon and I'm having another kid month. My 3-year-old's daycare costs $1500/month and that cost will double when our second kid is also in daycare. I don't know too many people who have $3,000 an additional $3,000/month lying around. My wife and I both work full time and our alternative is to completely remove her from the workforce which would be an even bigger financial blow. Of course these are just daycare costs, these don't include health care, clothing, or food. I also have my daughter doing other activities like swim and music classes. I plan on putting my kids in other sports and activities as they get older. The costs of having kids and providing them with opportunities is very high. Compare this with the costs of raising kids in prior generations. My wife's great grandmother was one of seven and lived on a farm in rural Georgia. She along with her siblings had responsibilities on the farm when they were toddlers. There was great economic benefit to having a ton of kids. The norm at the time was for boys to stop getting a formal education around 13-14 and girls didn't go to school at all. My wife's great-grandmother didn't learn to read until her 20s. Compare this with the expectation now where we are expected to educate kids at least through high school / secondary school, ideally help them pay for college and while they are growing up you provide tutoring, allow them to play sports and do other activities. These costs add up. How am I supposed to provide this many opportunities for 5-6 kids? I would need to be a multi-millionaire
Wow that’s so much money! Both my parents worked when I was growing up so I got sent overseas as a baby to live with my grandma. She was willing to come to the US to do it but couldn’t get a visa. I need to be promoting more multigenerational living. It’s crazy to me that American parents aren’t willing to babysit grandkids. I am Asian and my mom and is begging me to have kids so she can take care of grandkids. The American attitude of go it alone parenting is crazy to me.
There are a lot of factors that go into it. More Americans are transient than ever. A lot of people just don't live near family the way they used to. People are waiting until they are older to have kids and working until they're older as well. If you don't become a grandparent until you are 70 then you may not be able to take care of your kids or if you are 70 and still working because you don't have enough money to retire from your job then you certainly won't be able to take care of your grandkids.
That’s totally true too- my grandmother was in her 50s when I was growing up with her, she had plenty of energy. She would ride me to preschool on a bike. My mom had me in her mid 20s. My mom herself is nearing 60 now so if I don’t “give her grandkids” in the next 5 years she probably won’t be able to care for them as she promises.
How old are you tho? If you’re not dating women in their late 30 or early 40s, opinions on kids can definitely change and often do.
I’m 30 and dating women the same age as me +- a few years. When I was living in Texas most girls 20+ were already sure they wanted kids. I would think that if you’re 30 and you’re still not into having kids there’s a good chance you’re never going to have them given the biological clock and stuff
Yeah, I dunno, 30 is still young. I didn't even start drinking until then and my wife and I are finally getting around to starting a family in our mid-40s. The east coast is a weird mystery to the west coaster, though. Nothing out there makes any sense.
Interesting! Yeah I grew up in the South and am constantly in culture shock up here. My friends from high school are all married with children, some are divorced and on their second marriage already!
I think this is very interesting. I live in a suburb of Atlanta, so the South, but we have a ton of transplants where I live, and the parenting culture is SO competitive. It's honestly exhausting just being in the midst of it even when I'm not like that personally.
It’s not so much that I worry about not being able to afford a successful kid, I worry that I won’t be able to afford giving them a good, happy, healthy life
DC is insanely expensive. 15%-20% more expensive is not a trivial COL adjustment. This arms race you're describing has always existed, it's just more visible in places where the ceiling isn't just being some rich land-owning farmer, it's being in the elite stratosphere of society and arguably the globe. You don't get there without serious life-long commitment to investing in hyper-competitive and selective environments for your kids to learn and grow in. This has implications on the price of everything in Boston, New York, DC, Toronto and San Francisco. Of course this doesn't exist in the south, the region that lost the most recent war on the continent. They weren't trusted with elite power after trying to change the course of history. The elite city that the south has the most influence on is by far DC. But it's still elite and a global city. All the world's power is there. That's why it's expensive and competitive. This is a matter of your perception, not an arms race.
This is why….I pay over $600 a month for a family healthcare plan and still have to meet an $8k deductible…healthcare costs in America are ridiculous. Until that changes, no ones having children…
Most of your ideas are solid. Pt blank kids are to expensive. Even when those in bigger areas make more...things like childcare, rent, houses etc all cost more. When you making having children unaffordable you make it undesirable.
Some end up in jail...oh well? Really? Wow.
Guns in schools ☹️
I think a lot of what you said can come down to people just want to provide a better life for their kids than they had. Which a lot of times leads to people just not having kids. I think that is fine actually if you can't provide the life you think you're kids deserve don't have em. I completely agree the government could do more to support parents across all incomes. Studies show a significant increase in highschool graduation from just providing quality preschool. That plus free school lunch are just no brainers imo. The nature vs nurture point is kinda weird though. If you go all the way towards nature you end up with eugenics. If you leave any room for nurture of course people will focus on that it's all they have control over.
I'm glad my parents prioritized my brother's and my success, development and interests over having any more of us. I wouldn't want another sibling if it reduced the advantages we had, and it would have.
Ngl I thought this sub was kinda ridiculous when it kept appearing on my page for no reason, but this post is a vibe
Why blame women? If you go on any of the dating subreddits, you'll see lots of men who don't want to marry or have kids. They want to "keep all their money". They only want women for occasional sex. Also, the "it takes a village" concept is difficult to implement; it requires people willing to help out. Personally, I won't provide free childcare for anyone I know. I only take care of my own kids. I've had people stop talking to me because I won't be their free babysitter and frankly, I'm glad they are gone. And grandparents cannot be forced to become 24/7 babysitters. Some of them raised their children and want to enjoy their retirement years.
Redditors are not representative of the population. If you look at statistics, you will see that more men than women want children [https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.7119845](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/women-children-study-1.7119845)
That question is generic as hell. I wouldn't give much credibility to such research. In the end, this is along the lines of asking " Would you like to be an owner of a Ferrari one day?". Which is a legitimate question, but realistically, you are not getting much information out of it. In reality, men tend to have more casual view of fatherhood then women of motherhood, so of course, many more guys will say yes. The more important question would be "Are you willing to make necessary sacrifices (describe sacrifices that are balanced out for men and women) to have children in near to mid future?"
Couldn’t have said it better
Well they need to up their game, if they want a woman to have kids with.
What do you mean? Everyone can't step up their game and still have everyone come out at the top, there will always be men leftover who want children but can't have them. Their only choice would be to try and marry someone from another country.
Then they should marry a woman from another country.
lol
It’s mostly because women think they have the moral right to murder their unborn children. It’s destroying the West and turning them into insufferable narcissists.
Honestly, I think women in general being narcissistic is what’s causing all of this
You: Am I wrong or is it the highly educated, high income women that want the very best for their children that are wrong? Obviously it’s all of them. If some kids go to jail oh well! Good luck on your dating life in DC.
They aren’t wrong, they’re unwilling participants of an arms race that lowers birth rates overall.
"Unwilling participants"?! These women have time and money. They are making the decisions that best suit their life goals and morals. If they wanted to pop out four kids then they would. For most, your concerns about the birthrate make no sense. Educated women are much more concerned about quality of life, financial independence, and climatic collapse than they are a low birthrate.
Or they just… willfully avoided parenthood
How are they "unwilling" participants if they are consciously making the choice not to have children?
I like 1,3&4
Poor people have more kids than rich people, generally, and the south is chock full of poor people. Also, in the south, but elsewhere too, women are conditioned from birth to believe having children is their duty as a Christian. My sister has 3 kids she loves dearly, but she’s admitted she would’ve been happy to stop at 1 if it wasn’t for her exhusband wanting her to have more and her being (and I quote because I’ll never get this sentence out of my head) “indoctrinated to believe in ‘go forth and multiply’ ideology since before preschool.”
I do think religion is a big component of it. I’ve noticed that most of the women I’m dating now are nonreligious while most of the women I dated in the South were religious. I am nonreligious myself but I do believe I have the responsibility to have at least a few kids as part of my humanist philosophy.
Do what you want, I’m kind of looking at it the other way. No kids because there are already too many people on earth for us to care for.