I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.
Also families are much more unstable nowadays, with divorces being common. Children growing up in stable families do better in several parameters, therefore instability has a ripple effect on society.
Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids?
The value of stability in marriage is not just stability for kids, so yes.
That being said, the import of people having kids before getting married when is hard to assess without data on both the single vs. cohabiting parenting split (which the source has some reference to) and on the stability among unmarried cohabiting parental couples.
It might be worth checking out the countries that have implemented child bonuses to check the hypothesis that costs are the reason. https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate... (Not to mention what others nearby have called out: look at birthrates tallied by socioeconomic status. If birthrates go down with increasing income, maybe costs aren't a major factor in birthrate declines, perhaps increasing income is the reason?)
What this kind of thing doesn’t tell us is anything about the alternative choice that is much more difficult to model: what is the cost of not having children. There are cities in the US and countries in the world whose economies are collapsing due to population loss. And I’ve watched people in my life go through breakdowns due to angst over not having kids. I’ve lost at least one very close friend in part because I chose to have kids and he chose not to.
The costs also don’t really help evaluate the goals or the choice to have kids or not. The reason to have them usually isn’t primarily financial, and for most people the reason not to have them also isn’t primarily financial, even if there’s a secondary influence like costs.
Even having a baby is very expensive in the USA, in terms of costs for the delivery, and the very very short maternity leave available to the majority of women. By contrast we had almost a year of paid leave, and paid something like €250 for a birth - which was mostly based around the cost of the room we had for a week after the delivery.
Got shipped because IMO this is just a bit too much money to spend.