The article makes me say "no duh". The economic tradeoff of kids versus no kids is crazy in most places in the US. If we hadn't been stuck in a cult earlier in life we probably would have waited to start having kids.
In order to keep up you basically have to have two income streams or a solid business.
We can afford it, but think of what this does to the income gap and GDP. If either of us made less than $100k/year, it'd make sense for one of us to stop working for a while to look after the kids. This means that already well off people have a big advantage of being able to have a double income, while that's denied to everyone else.
It feels like COVID makes this even worse - at least daycare is only a few years before public school takes its place. With that gone, kids need full time care for longer. Does this mean we'll see people dropping out of the workforce in big numbers? What does that mean for recovery?
How do other places and countries manage it?
In Spain, a good private nursery ("guarderia") cost tops €250-350 per month anywhere outside of Madrid and Barcelona. Children of low income households have free public daycare. From the age of 3y, children go to "school" and it's 100% free from that point on. You have the choice between public (secular education), consertado (semi-private with more emphasis on Christianity, science is not discriminated), or private (usually bi- or trilingual). The last option isn't free and can cost €400-1000 monthly. Books aren't free unless, again, low-income. Giving birth, check-ups and the like is free.
In hindsight, it's quite perfect -- but the economy is currently in a terrible state.
Say you need 9 hr care every day from 9-6. That adds up to 45hrs/week. Even pooling 4 kids together, you are looking at ~700$/week cost per teacher at minimum wage. Have 1.5-2x factor for more experienced or more skilled teachers. Add another 2-3x for rent, insurance, utilities, admin expenses, backup teacher expenses etc. And you are looking at 2K-4K per teacher (or 500-1K per kid) expense per week, or 2-4K per month per kid. Completely aligns with my experience in SV, across childcare centers of various qualities.
[1] https://www.cdss.ca.gov/Portals/9/Regs/1cccman.pdf?ver=2019-...
It also means that couples making more than that each end up with an even bigger advantage, since they can stay in the workforce and continue to grow their careers.
Why? You can always subsidize childcare via taxes. You can see that happening in the rich countries with dwindling populations. It won't happen in the US yet because the population is still growing thanks to immigration and also due to the ideological opposition to any public spending by a major party.
Here in CA Daycare costs 1800$/mo and 3000$/mo in SF. Out in Houston, where the standard of living is much higher, I hear it's only 600$/mo.
$700-800/mo is about what I'd call the middle of the road for childcare here. You can pay less and get a sketchy center that basically gets your kid a bare room and an oversized class for 8 hours, or pay more for really premium preschool with cooking classes and such, or montessori for closer to $1200-$1500.
Children to teacher ratios do seem to be lower in California, which is probably what is (partially) increasing those costs.
She:
- Elected for a home birth, so the NHS put an ambulance on stand-by outside her house once the midwife said things were coming to a head, in case things went south.
- Had regular home-visits by the nurse after the birth until she was happy without them, which focus was both the child and my sister's well-being. no question too foolish to ask, practical advice, that sort of thing, you know ... support.
- Got 6 months paid off work (state + company perks)
- Got free daycare when the kid was young.
- Gets child-support payments from the government every 2 (?) weeks. Not much, but every little counts.
- Gets free-at-the-point-of-need healthcare, of course.
- Gets excellent free schooling, all the schools are rated above average where she lives, in a Northern city not known for its largesse.
I:
- was kicked out of hospital in 3 days because that's what the insurance would pay for
- had the nurses give me stuff to handle the first few days (bottles, nappies, etc.) under the table because they weren't actually allowed to.
- Got no support after we left the building
- Got 2 weeks paid leave.
- Almost had a nervous breakdown because of what we didn't know, had parents fly out to help and finally got some sleep after 2 weeks (he's an "active child"...)
- Had to bump up the insurance costs significantly from X+Spouse to X+family, because there's no X+Spouse+1, so we're indirectly paying for those with X+spouse+4
- Paid a fortune for daycare in the valley when it became time.
- Realised that our designated local school was bloody awful (3/10) despite being in a "good school district". Didn't win the lottery. So we pay for private school, currently about $15k/year
I can afford it, but the difference between the "people before profits" approach the UK takes, with its much more diverse social safety net, and the "profits über alles" approach the US takes is stark. The only reason I'm still in this country is because my partner wants to stay, if I had my way, I'd be living on the beach in the UK, probably retired...
Oh, and she's an air-hostess for BA, her partner works for telecoms companies doing their wiring at the top of poles. THey're not particularly well off (I have a lot more disposable income as a FANNG s/w engineer) but their actual life is a lot easier.
2. You mention that you are in the valley and a FAANG engineer. Between my partner and me, we have experiences of 4 out of those 5. All of them had far more generous parental leave policies than "2 weeks paid leave" like you claim. Can you please name your company? Because it honestly doesn't jive with our experience as an engineer in the valley.
2. I am in the valley. I work for Apple, and 9 years ago when the kid was born, Apple's policy on paternal leave was in fact 2 weeks paid leave, you could opt to use your vacation (which I did) after those 2 weeks, and you could cash in a week's accrued sick leave as well as a bonus if you had it, but that was it. It's better now, but that doesn't make my experience any different.
2(a) My wife worked for Chevron at the time, and their policy (who knows what it is now) was similarly 2 weeks of paid leave, then you can take accrued vacation, then you're back at work. She quit.
Reading back my original post, I can see it's confusing where I'm saying "I" and talking about being in hospital - I was trying to continue the "My sister":"Me" but it was of course my wife giving birth, not me.
Thanks for clarifying. I interpreted your original comment as the current state of affairs. From my first-hand experience, Apple's parental leave policies are far more generous now than just 2 weeks of paid leave.
Now my salary is higher in the US than it was in the UK (despite the fact I owned the company in the UK, and I work as a software engineer over here) but that just makes things comparatively worse for the US. I used to get a larger percentage of my wages tax-free than I do here.
The lower cost of living in the UK helps out here - just comparing the dollar:pound ratio using currency exchange metrics doesn't make sense when I sold my (owned) house in the UK and used that to get a 15% down-payment on a house out here in the valley. Fifteen years later and I've finally (this week actually :) paid off the mortgage on my home here. That's 15 years of mortgage payments that I wouldn't have had to make, and my house in the UK was (almost) twice the size of the one I now own here.
In the US if you're someone that works for a living you pay a lot of taxes once you add all the various ones up. In return the government provides you nothing at all. Where in places like the UK you pay a lot of taxes and you get public benefits in return. Like healthcare, decent schools, maternity leave, things like that.
One year in SF as a single man I calculated my total tax rate was about 45%. Add Federal taxes, withholding, state income tax, and 8% sales tax. Then add $800/mo health insurance.
I'm assuming that's because of your salary bracket. For a similar level compensation in the UK would most likely be at least 60%-65% if not more.
I talk to friends that have families that have lived in Europe and the US. And it's much easier in Europe. All the smoke and mirrors doesn't change that.
Basically yes if you have a lot of passive income then the US is much better. If you have middle class amounts of earned income it's worse to terrible.
To be fair, you can also get a nanny for about that (going rate is $20/hr or so) which works out with two kids.
Still though, my point is that high costs of child care in the city are a wedge that furthers the gap between rich and everyone else.
Is this true? When I was a kid my daycare was like 30 kids per teacher. It was called "Mother's Day Out". I can't remember the cost but judging by the amount of time I spent there it was basically free.
Fundamentally, it is a business that does not scale, as you need a set number of providers per n children, and low values for n are probably going to be associated as better value. There's really no way to get efficiencies or scale, as the personal interaction and attention is what parents are really paying for.
So it come down to a question of local real estate prices and prevailing wages for the area, so I'm assuming mindvirus lives in a city with a very high cost of living and real estate costs.
Comparing just dollar value of services is not of much use across countries.
It's like saying, interest rate in India is 6% while in US it's 1% why Americans are not putting their money in India. The info you are missing is inflation.
5k is not a lot in mega US cities and these guys will not move to some cheap city because they'll not find a job that pays that well and gives them ability to support such a high quality of life in smaller/cheaper cities.
Unsurprising, because only king would be earning this kind of income per month.
If you had an adult who watched just 6 kids they'd make 180k a year which seems like an insane amount of money to make sure a kid doesn't stick his/her finger in a socket.
If instead they made closer to the median salary then childcare would be closer to $500/month per kid which seems much more reasonable.
To me, the thing that strangles young families financially is child care. We've been able to sidestep that by having my wife stay home. The current response to single income households is "think how oppressed the homemaker is!", so they aren't really in vogue right now.
Yea, my wife doesn't have a career. The truth is she wasn't on track to have one anyway. She was managing a coffee shop before we had our first. That's not a "climb the corporate ladder" situation.
Associating homemaking and raising children with oppression is probably part of the reason why modern society is not reproducing.
You may receive a comment soon regarding the opportunity cost of your wife staying home. As if she is an object of economic activity who is unfashionably compelled to pause her value generation in order to raise kids.
When the relationship goes bad, being homemaker is massive disadvantage. It is not just money lost by staying at home, it is making it super hard to find any job after being at home for long (and plus having kids dependent on you). Even when they stay together in mutually resentful relationship, it quickly becomes his money that she is wasting rather then our money.
Plus, men die. And if he dies and she did not had a job for years, it gets pretty bad.
The domestic violence rates go up with female earning power and down with female unemployment. It is opposite for males relative earnings. Partly it shifts power in the family and partly it simply allows her to leave.
That is not even speaking about male resentment from having to work while she is chilling at home. Because not every male is winning in a job that he loves, plenty of them are working jobs they dislike for sociopaths bosses.
The single income arrangement does not have to turn badly. But when it turns badly, it is very bad. And the guys who are intentionally looking to make someone dependent on them so that they can have upper hand are favoring this arrangement - making it more vulnerable situation then it would if only honest guys would be interested in that.
The bad outcomes are potentially very bad, so society disincentivises single income households to the detriment of the large swath of people that may actually benefit from it.
Like, not everyone was happy at lockdown and it seemed to me easier situation then being stay at home. (Due to working with others remotely, many people having same shared experience. )
And the bottom here did not used to be small nor rare. The really bad stuff about abuse still happens, through less often. And then, divorces happen more often. With single income, they would be more rare, but that marriage will be more of a trap.
If she's a homemaker, you have the ability, if not the desire, to hold all of the purse strings and possibly, in effect, monopolize all of the power to make decisions for the family - where to live, what to buy, where and when to travel....
If she works, even only earning $12k, her position in the family (when you're a controlling husband) is greatly strengthened.
To be clear, I'm sure YOUR actual relationship with your specific wife is much more egalitarian, so being a homemaker probably works well for her.
Not to mention that it's much better to have the mom take care of the children instead of a stranger.
What does "In order to keep up" mean, exactly?
Even making low six figures doesn't seem like enough in my low to mid CoL area. It's incredibly taxing to invest yourself into the lives of two small humans while still maintaining your own life.
So yeah, people could live like pilgrims and have kids, but why? That's not the main obstacle in 2020. Societal, cultural, and economic uncertainty is far and away more of an obstacle than budgeting.
That’s why most married people with kids take a mortgage. Mortgage payments stay flat, but the actual expense goes down over time, because you pay less and less of interest and more of principal.
Plus, being stay at home with three small kids is more isolating then corona lockdown, so there is significant "dealing with frustration and routine without loosing your mind" challenge too.
1. I want to study
2. Get a job
3. Date between the education/career
4. Travel the world (she will not say travel with her boyfriend or partner)
5. Marry and have kid (most will not talk about kid or marriage at all) but a few will.
But realistically it takes a 20 year old girl atleast 15 years to achieve all that she listed. Most of the times it's not even possible for many of them.
That gives you age of 35 when they start thinking about marriage or kids. From there fertility doesn't cooperate with you and sometimes it even gets hard to find a commited partner.
But marriage and kid is the last thing on their list and the things that come before it are not easy, not feasible for everyone to travel world.
So it is study, get a job and then work while living.
Also, dating is something you do while doing school and work, it is not like people needed to take two years off to date.
Our society tricks women to think that working for some corporation is "empowering" while staying home and raising kids is "oppressive". It's no wonder everyone is depressed and not getting married anymore.
Also -- and this is never a popular suggestion, but it's a great suggestion -- you can travel the world with a steady paycheck and have your room and board paid for by joining the military. Many Western militaries have personnel stationed on bases (or ships) all over the place, and some offer programs for members to travel at a discount or for free. Even if you never travel anywhere at all in the military, you could save a lot of your pay and pick up a few useful life skills and experiences while you're at it. Perhaps even gain an appreciation for the many various modern-day miracles that most people take for granted (useful for traveling the world in the alpine style, btw).
1st - It doesn't fit with what the majority here believe.
2nd - It dangerous to spread the idea that people aren't victims and they're just experiencing the effects of their own choice to live in an expensive city.
Mobility is much more elusive than HN, or the middle and upper classes, would have you believe. Also, that doesn't account for the fact people do not choose where they are born.
For every corporate executive position there are thousands of low level jobs. These low level jobs are practically everywhere.
Internet is free at the free library. Go there, Google cheep places to live, pick one, look for a job, rent a moving van, rent an apartment. It's not rocket science.
While your posts here arguable lack a little tact, I think this discussion would be improved if people who strongly disagree would respond with substantive, logical argument.
I don't think you're really wrong here, but some things are worth noting:
- People are generally not rational beings who examine their lives and try to live them better. So it's not reasonable to expect a large majority of people to take the kind of initiative you're describing
- There are only so many jobs in Billings, MT. So it's not like all the struggling families in San Fransisco can move there and all expect to do better. They need to all move to 10000 different parts of the country.
- Most kinds of working class jobs do not typically interview candidates from around the whole country so it gets tricky to first find a job and then relocate. And uprooting your family and moving 1000 miles to then look for a job seems risky.
Have you ever moved a family across the country? Do you have parents or family that offer a safety net? Do you have children?
A few things - you often need to pay to break a lease. Say your lease ends naturally, most new tenants are required to pay at least one month up front, sometimes the last, and maybe a deposit, too. You have to pay for some kind of moving truck or storage. Utilities require a deposit. You probably don't know what neighborhoods or schools suit your needs. There's an emotional cost to losing your support and friend network, not to mention those of your family members.
Those are a few things off the top of my head. I don't think anyone is claiming it's as complicated as rocket science. But the idea that it is cheap or free to uproot your life and family with little to no savings or support (low level workers don't get relocation packages) is not correct.
I guess we have different measures for hardship. I read what you say and think "and?"
The reason my friend is not having kid has nothing to do with economics of having kid.
He has plenty of money to support 10 or even 15kids based on the numbers some people posted on this thread.
Reasons why he does not want to have kids:
1. He dated like 5 different women, most of them confessed their love to him. But they were always busy at education/career, he lost interest in them and decided to shift focus to his career. After years, he found himself to be alone but successful.
2. After having achieved success, he didn't want to take deals where he could lose half of my income like alimony. It took a decade to build this much wealth, why risk losing it with marriage.
3. He needed love/support/care the most when he was younger. Now that he is much older, what's the purpose of all of that even if it comes to him now?
4. He told me that all the women who rejected him when he was young are now confessing that they always were interested in him. He told me that what people are attracted to do doesn't change, later in life they start supressing what they are truly attracted to for things that they logically want from others.
Not sure how many people can relate to it.
As young, he also wanted the kind of support he was not and is not willing to provide.
So, like, yeah. Him being single is good outcome. From all the choices, he wants the good selfish stuff and don't want the tradeoff.
Nothing to do with marriage per se, but more about how it's implemented in the US.
Distance learning is manageable for my kids as they're a little older and I can work from home. But families with younger kids where both parents have to go out to work and can't possibly afford childcare are getting hammered.
As always, the poor get the worse of the effects, and children are really compounding that right now.
It's crazy dependent on the provider, the hyper-specifics of the mother, and the peculiarities of the MD/RN. It's as if they all got together to make it so that no single person could ever be billed the same (to paraphrase Voltaire's quip on Ancien Régime France).
The bills, months and years after, are insane. I would not be surprised if the children had children of their own, and yet still you'd get bills for pre-natal care.
Then you throw in the near pervasive distrust in the medical community of women's pain and knowledge of their own bodies. Like, you're an OB-GYN, you deal with women all day, how are you thicker than concrete about this. GAH!
You weren't stuck in a cult. Consensus figurehead reality (CFR) was vying for your attention and you were looking for an escape. Judging by the fact that it helped you defy CFR on the most important life decision (reproduction), you chose wisely.
Also the ruling class discourages reproduction due to the tactic of Parasitic Castration. Raising kids takes money--money that could have been diverted to the ruling class.
Literally or figuratively?
Later, they gained some perspective and realized it was not in their interest to stay.
Had we not been well off, I would’ve gotten snipped before the first kid. $500 versus hundreds of thousands of dollars per kid is a no brainer (sidenote: cryopreserve some tissue before you do this, it’s only $1500-$2000 and gives you options in the future).
America is designed for extraction, not nurturing the future. We’re bouncing to Oceania (AUS and Taz specifically) in the future (universal healthcare).
TLDR Don’t have kids unless you’re rich or you can live somewhere that values you having them, or just values people in general.