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Comment by neverminder | Hacker News Reader

I think there are several factors that are causing this:

* Gender equality. Because more women are now financially independent, they don't have to marry and/or have children and choose career instead.

* Hypergamy. There are millions of high achieving single women in their 30s who struggle to find a partner while at the same time their fertility is falling.

* Divorce statistics. Divorce rate is high, most divorces are initiated by women and most men end up losing a lot, which causes more men to abstain from marriage and/or kids.

* Ever rising cost of life and standards. In UK for instance real estate prices are growing way out of proportion compared to income.

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This seems like a culture-war projection, rebuttable from the difference in fertility rates between places like the US (high divorce, expensive divorce, minimal social safety net, higher fertility) and places like Japan or low-fertility European countries.

The UK tax system is also hostile to families. No joint tax burden in a family makes it really tough. Lots of policies would have to change to encourage people to have children. Cost of going from a 1 bedroom apartment to 2-3 bedroom flat/house is also a large jump.

* Culture telling women that if they desire to be a full-time mother they're inferior to career women.

"Inferior" in the sense of less highly paid - well, yeah. I don't think this is a gendered thing, simply the fact that people pay you to do work but not to have kids. Nobody can afford to have kids on a single parent's income anymore.

That isn't the reality in the USA. I know lots of people who have done this. Many of them have ordinary jobs. One with a pair of kids has the man earning about $60,000 today, with a career that switches back and forth between making concrete block walls and making picture frames. Another person is a handyman with, last I heard, 9 kids. Another person is a shift manager at a care facility for the mentally unwell, with 7 kids.

People with better-paying jobs have more of course. I know a person with 11 kids, doing technical training I believe. I have 12 kids, supported on a career involving low-level software.

> Nobody can afford to have kids on a single parent's income anymore.

What? My wife hasn't worked in 15 years and we have 7 children at home. I'm not rich, we just budget.

Not rich? What percentile do you think your net worth is? That home of yours, that's big enough to house 7 kids - you own it?

Buddy - you're rich. You don't seem to realize how utterly out of reach your lifestyle is to the vast majority of people.

I don't think this is fair. I've known lots of big families at median income or lower and like the GP says, it's about budgeting and priorities. There's a big difference in the cost per kid of having two in daycare, then each with their own room, their own new clothes, etc, vs 7 kids cared for by a parent, wearing hand me downs, eating home cooked meals, etc.

Dude my house is less than 2,000 square feet. I think you're making a lot of assumptions.

Wow, you sure seem to know a lot about this person you've never met before!

Hell hath no fury like someone who thinks some other person has too much on the internet.

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