How can families afford children?
marginalrevolution.com
marginalrevolution.com
This is not true. Depending on the wife for income prevents her from focusing on having a large family. Without the assistance of a grandparent or some expensive nanny, this tends to limit the number of children in the family to 2 or 3.
Also, women working has driven the price of houses up, so it's difficult to get by with one working parent now. Women have less of a choice to work now, and more of an obligation.
This doubling of eligible workers also drives down the salary of everyone, making men pull in less money, further forcing women to work whether they want to or not.
Not to mention how expensive large vans/suvs are to actually drive them around.
You claim to be disagreeing but I think you are agreeing with that comment. By referring to "opportunity cost", the author means precisely that when a woman works it is harder to have a large family. Not having a job is one opportunity cost of children.
Just driving is pretty expensive. Not owning a car saves loads. Unfortunately, it usually takes a lot of money to live somewhere that doesn't require one.
Also worth noting - my wife would be at home with the kid right now (I have a much higher income) except she has substantial student debt, so off to work she goes. This means paying for creche too.
We couldn't afford creche fees for two kids, and she can't afford not to work due to aforementioned debt.
Also we had a kid because we were approaching mid thirties and it was a now or never thing, but it would have been nice to get a home big enough for two kids (a 3 bed apartment, or a bigger 2 bedroom apartment, would suffice) but the numbers don't add up.
In America perhaps. Europeans seem to manage, generally on lower salaries than Americans...
I know a number of families who ran the numbers and found out that the second income didn’t offset the cost of childcare. Or if it did, the excess income was so low as to be negligible. Don’t forget that there are tax implications to having a second income.
The number of women who WANT to work is a lot lower than everyone wants to admit. And when they see the option to leave the working world, many of them take it. So much education that just gets wasted when they realize that having a career is not nearly as fulfilling as they have been led to believe.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, my first thought would be "sweet, we can afford a third kid!"
Some are fullfilled, some are not.
For instance, an 8-year-old can do laundry (except for carrying the basket), or vacuum, or prepare sandwiches for the entire family's lunches. A 12-year-old can change diapers, assist in the kitchen, or keep an eye on younger children of any age for an hour or two while Mom and Dad are a couple rooms away cooking or doing other chores. In some states, a 15-year-old can drive siblings to school; and in most a 17-year-old can drive them to other destinations.
One thing I've noticed is that the children in these families are much more mature, responsible, and independent than children of similar ages in 1-3 child families.
I thought I was refuting the point, but in fact, agreed with the point.
Whoops!
Previous generations just sent the kids off to play after school, without much attention; they expected kids to be 100% on their own after highschool (and even before); and on and on.
Today we expect far more parent involvement than ever before (at least in the US), this makes it comparatively more expensive to raise children now than in years past.
True also in the UK. As a kid, the normal after-school routine was to walk home, get changed and play out until it was dark. All achieved with minimal contact with parents.
Now kids seem to have very little independent time and this, in my opinion, is/will be very much to their detriment in later life.
1: I say trend, though it's probably much less than 1% of the population, but kids are seen by more than 100 adults in a week, and the nosier adults self-select for being more likely to be looking for kids doing something wrong.
I'm not sure it's so common but I wouldn't be surprised if it happens from time to time. I guess it depends what time of day and how far away from home they are?
We are looking at places for our older child right now, and one of the schools we are looking at has an official document that the parents must present in order to pickup your child. Otherwise they will not release the child.
I, as a childless adult, couldn't care less how my friend raises her kid, just as long as she isn't abusive. It's probably because I haven't spent any time learning the ins-and-outs about raising a child, so I don't have a strong opinion either way.
But if anything, my friend has felt internal pressure on decisions she makes with her child via the opinions of other parents. This is especially true to her with respects to the pressures to breastfeed.
In America at least the cost disease of education, housing, and healthcare all make it worse, but the first part is the primary culprit. And I'm not sure there's any fix for it besides long parental leaves and subsidized childcare.
Back in the day, everyone worked the fields. The men, the women, and the children. Especially in times of harvest, the more hands, the better
I happen to know a bunch of large families (7+ kids), and I think the common thread among them is:
* The choice to be open to more children into the family, whether by birth, adoption, or fostering, is not primarily because they perceived themselves to have extra free time or extra resources, but because they had more love to give. Which is not to say that families who have fewer are less loving, or that material circumstances don't factor into the decision. But it seems like the families I know recognized that they could parent more children, and give them all sufficient love and care, and that was the motivating factor.
* They tend not to have highly scheduled, highly involved kids -- and the kids turn out just fine.
* There are increased costs as the number of children increases. But having, say, six children does not cost twice as much as having three.
My wife and I make a pretty good team. Even the most tense arguments eventually get resolved with a laugh.
We have three boys, we're probably going to have a fourth. We feel we have a lot of love to give. And giving someone life is the ultimate pay-it-forward act of gratitude. My parents did it for me. If I can give a few children life and send them out into the world with a good grounding, my life is a win.
Also likely the worst thing you can do for the environment
New humans are still the most important inputs to human society. As societies become more specialized and productive, the powers and burdens of new humans go up. Thus, richer societies need fewer people, but each person needs to be more specialized and capable. And inversely, a society that is not producing new humans who are more specialized and capable, is a society that will have trouble advancing.
Evaluating public policy from this perspective produces some different conclusions than the more traditional family-oriented perspective which is often used to look at policies related to children.
Policies that empower women professionally and reproductively mean that only women who affirmatively choose to have children will have them--increasing the chance that they will have the means and will to invest heavily in each child.
And policies that give each child the chance to maximize their potential can be seen as long-term investments, not handouts.
Conversely, policies that permit or force children to develop sub-optimally are wastes that should be eliminated. Today many societies promote policies that encourage procreation (no access to sex education or contraception, incentives for more kids), but don't invest in children (no early childhood education, bad primary and secondary education, poor health care, poor food programs, etc.).
If someone bought a car but refused to pay for gas and oil changes, you would probably say they are making some damn bad decisions. Either maintain the car, or if you can't afford to do that, don't get one until you can.
Traditionally, the analogous kid blame game has fallen on the parents themselves. But parents are part of a larger society, and ultimately, given an ~80 year life span, will only manage about 25% of a new human life. Society will manage the other 75%, but in a lot of ways, our thinking about policy has not caught up to that reality.
What I mean in more words is the process by which we create the logistics we need to thrive (food, clothing, shelter, power, comms, currency, etc), combined with the incentives to produce the society we want to live in (physical safety, freedom of expression, opportunity for work and love, etc.).
It's hard to talk about this without judgmental overtones. But essentially what I mean is, picture your best life--how do we make that possible for each and every person? It won't happen by accident. And it's to everyone's benefit it we can make it more likely.
And when that doesn't happen--when people don't have the skills to find work, when they commit crime, when they fall to addiction, when they're mentally or physically ill, etc... at that point we do sort of "take them under management." They go on unemployment or disability, they go under medical and mental care, they go into prison. Those are direct costs we all pay, and probably even greater is the opportunity cost of that human life. (And not just from a strictly economic perspective, but also art, emotion, love, etc.)
But people become part of society when they're born. And a lot of what makes each person who they are, is set during childhood. Letting a person go without investment for 20 years, then paying direct costs to manage them if it doesn't work out, doesn't seem smart to me.
If you take any life and trace it back to the beginning, early management is in the family. But there is a lot that society can do to help that process be more successful. And I would argue it's in all of our benefits.
And again, to make it clear, I'm not talking about authoritarianism. In modern democracies, in an ideal sense, we should be managing ourselves. To some extent we're discovering the society we want as we go along, so our management system need to be adaptable, and that's what democracy should give us. I'm advocating for certain policy choices we can make democratically--give women more power of their lives and reproduction. Invest fully in the health and education of all children. Provide support to families so that they can do a better job of raising their kids. Etc.
This point along puts a huge cost on having children, even for people below or just around the poverty line. When sex was the only recreation option available with no known birth control methods, lots of kids was the norm. That has changed now, though. People at all levels of society know that raising a child with an semblance of upward mobility is expensive, and logarithmically so - the good private schools are 10X more expensive than the regular ones, with the international schools going to 100X.
Breaking the norms is difficult, but it looks like the country is already tending towards a voluntary one child policy, at least for any parents that hope their children will live better than they did.
I know lots of large families - many who are extremely poor - who are the happiest people I know. The difference being that they've made their family their source of joy, and don't look somewhere else to find fulfillment.
I'm writing this in case someone reads this article and thinks "well, the math doesn't support having children, so I won't". There's a _lot_ more to kids than financial calculation.
The thing is that that's not how it works. It's not the case that everyone first does the math, and then the rational decision. But what does happen is that a lot of families, all over the place, make the individual choice of "we'd love to, but we can't afford another kid". And in aggregate, that leads to lower birth rates across society.
And if society makes it cheaper to have kids, the birth rate goes up.
- Subsidized daycare
- Subsidized education
- 1.5 year maternity leave
- Subsidies for families with children under a certain income bracket
It's affordable, but couples in western countries don't really want more children (just under 2 is the average)
I was looking at how many contraceptions and items my friends bought for their newborn ranging from things related to feeding/sleeping/playing. And that's not including the highest expenses, namely shelter/transportation/food. I thought to myself, my goodness how did we ever raise children in previous millennia? Anecdotally it feels like it's becoming more and more expensive to have children. I'm fairly well-off myself, and I would probably be fine with just one child, if any.
“Contraceptions” for a newborn seems a bit...premature.
With greater distribution of capital (not income, that's just more wage slavery), we could likely not only afford kids more, but also support social relations that make rearing kids easier. Society wouldn't be fighting you.
Mondragon and the cooperatives in Emilia-Romagna might be work looking at.
And don't say that saving up money now will get rid of the need to depend on future generations in retirement. You can't eat a 401k. Retirement is inherently dependent on the productivity of subsequent generations no matter how you move money around.
I think "affording" children has never been the primary goal of folks having children. Most folks aren't all that good at predicting what it will cost to raise a child or three. Some costs aren't as much with multiple children (used clothing, for example, or sharing rooms makes housing more affordable). Others are higher, such as child care and food costs. Some things are improved if one parent stays home. I think the main thing that drives folks to have smaller or larger families is desire to do so rather than costs themselves. Oddly enough, education can help as well, if you are in a country that thinks it needs more or less children in total.
I find it appalling that it is socially unacceptable in many places for the man to stay home while the woman works. If my immigration status didn't depend on my husband working and we were at all keen on having children at all, I'd work while he stayed home with children.
I'm not sure jobs are any more satisfying, as it is a difficult thing to compare. Many parts of the world simply didn't allow women the same sort of opportunities as men 100 or 150 years ago. Some didn't 40-50 years ago. I got turned down for a job 20 years ago because "females just couldn't do the work required".
We also don't actually need large families any longer, not like we did in the past. Between better infant mortality rates, better survival of giving birth, and birth control, and the financial reasons given earlier, it really isn't as necessary. It's OK to do, but it should be a choice. I think society should have laws allowing maternity and paternity leave and time to tend to the children. This should include a parent staying home... at least until the child is in school and/or mature enough to spend some time alone. In so many places, this is missing.
There are opportunity costs if someone has multiple children, though. What chances does a woman have to be CEO if she also wants 5 children in a 10-year time frame? If she takes the proper time off for both her pregnancy and infant care, it becomes difficult. This can be worked around with strong paternal leave policies: After all, once a woman is healed enough to do her job, she doesn't need to be the one staying at home. It also puts the opportunity costs on both sexes.
And I have no problem with people getting divorced. Divorce rates are a ridiculous standard to rely on because it is based on moral principles. We make it really easy for people to get married, with little to no education about what a healthy relationship might include. I'd rather folks get divorced while they can be on friendly terms, actually, and I'd happily require them to go through some counseling to learn how to do so afterwards (so long as there is no abuse involved).
Women do physically produce the child and most can breastfeed or pump milk. Ideally, strong fraternal leave policies means she can get some support while doing this stuff. Even if the father doesn't live with the mother, he can still help out. After that, there isn't anything the woman does that a man can't do, especially while they are young. It just might take some education. Men do it all the time when the woman dies during childbirth, after all. And honestly, a woman should be up to date with education as well since her information could easily be out of date with current medical standards.
I'm not sure. A large part of it could definitely be that men don't know how to act in such a situation since it's not a family format that society has had to deal with before.
The changes you're advocating for are all pretty radical (I don't mean this is a bad way necessarily) and I'd be worried that they may have unintended or unplanned for consequences. I don't think it's a given that men can raise children as well as women can.
With regards to divorce. I think it's pretty clear that divorce is harmful when children are involved. The best thing for kids is to have two parents in a healthy marriage. Obviously this isn't always possible, but I think it should be the goal.
I do agree that divorce isn't the best situation for most children. But I also believe some of that can be minimized. I've met an entire range of folks - I had cousins happy their parents divorced. My parents would still be together if my father was alive. And somewhere in between. Parents getting along and the ability to see and talk to both parents at nearly any time seems to help. Of course, that sort of thing also limits what sort of life someone can lead after the divorce (live within driving distance to each other, for instance).
I'm also more in line to making sure folks can have birth control and teaching the importance of being in a stable relationship before having children (marriage or not, as the daily routine doesn't make a difference). Again, though, education.
Paternity leave isn't that radical in some areas when they concentrate on making sure the sexes are equal. I know here (Norway) they used to require some of it, and it is still an option for part of the time. Some friends of mine were both working about half their normal hours because of it actually. But yes, I'm pretty radical about it all, more so in some areas.
I'm pretty sure men can do just as much as women once the physical part is changed. The biggest thing I notice is that women are trained to do some of this stuff from the time they are young, whereas men aren't. Women are more likely to take child development classes and such things, for example. Again, this is really just education and little things like showing men doing a good job at this stuff on TV and things like that. You know, unless there are efforts to get more men into teaching and childcare like there are efforts to get more women into STEM fields. Until then, self education.
Alternatively, women who aren't financially dependent on men don't put up with as much in terms of negative situations within marriage. If that's the reason, there's no pressure unless your intent is to keep a wife through material dependence.
I'm a parent in SF. The cost of housing and availability of quality care (day care, nanny), and schools are definitely factors among the parent community here in deciding not to have more children. Many of the parents I know are doing well financially (they must be to be raising kids in SF), so I get to see the non-financial reasons for smaller families. One that's pretty important: quality of life. The opportunity cost of having children is about much more than money.
The options for doing things you enjoy are hugely greater today than in the past. Fancy restaurants, sports events, cruises, gaming, live music, Netflix, social media. World travel. Rewarding work. You name it. The world has become much better and better at providing things that people enjoy spending their time and money on.
Having children not only reduces the money you have to enjoy these things, it puts a huge damper on your time, and freedom to do so. Sure, you could go to that cool new restaurant with your young children. But it's a completely different experience than going without them -- so much so that it veers into negative utility.
For some people enjoying family life and kids is more valuable than all of the other stuff combined. But as the world gets better and better at giving people alternatives to spend their time/money/freedom on that they enjoy, having more children will become less and less attractive for more and more people.
Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe.
That's not paradoxical; strong social support networks have been known for a long time to produce reduced birthrates; the usual explanation for which is that it is because a significant reason people have children is as a form of do-it-yourself social insurance, especially for old-age support.
Overall, “its too expensive to have kids” isn't the reason the US birthrate is lower than the past; if it was, birthrates would be higher in the upper income segments and lower among the poor, but it's exactly the opposite.
We don’t eat out much, we don’t owe anyone / pay interest, we don’t spend money on things we don’t need that don’t a provide a good ROI. We’d rather walk around and explore a city then take a tour and pay to stand in line some where, we cut our own hair, shop at thrift stores or sales, Read we are frugal. Even in the states wife did not work. In the states our cars were paid for in cash, we had no credit card debit, and we built our own house with our own bare hands out of cash; it took 3+ years and we lived in a fifth wheel with 2-3 kids for part of it, but it was all paid for. We made the choices to have kids, and we worked out how to afford our choice and how to be happy.
Why four kids — We watched the intro to idiocracy a few too man times and decided we needed to have more vs fewer kids to combat Clevon. We’d have more kids but we hit 40 this year and that was our stop having kids cut off.
Spend 700$ a month on car payment, 500$ on month on eating out, 500$ a month on amazon, 2000$ on a house payment, buy alcohol and other vices for hundreds a month, ETC and shit adds up fast and you wonder how you can even afford yourself. Don’t have a car payment, or house payment, eat out less, don’t drink and smoke and the numbers are completely different. We have a huge rent payment in Ireland that was the biggest hit moving here. Going from paying property taxes to 2800 a month in rent hurt. But we rented a huge house and rent a room out for 600 a month; which helps off set costs. The house is walking distance to work, grocery, train, and kids school – the higher rent facilities the no care life style. We could live further out and pay half the rent but we would need 2 cars. We chose higher rent over cars.