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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

I think this is going to be common experience.

One thing I find interesting is that my wife and I explicitly discussed before marriage that we would not have kids until and if we had enough to ensure the kids would have a nice, stable home with decent healthcare and education.

Probably someone already told you this could be a trap. You might never arrive to the point when you feel everything is really perfect to have kids. In my case, I expressed is as the amount of cash I need to have in order to feel secure enough - a concrete amount is much more reachable as an aim.

I model our cash flow for the rest of our lives to determine when and if we have enough for our goals, and if we need to modify goals. I would say the house/mortgage payment is the big one, and then the roughly $15k to $20k per year per kid for daycare, and then a few thousand per year for doctors. And then a few years of expenses saved up in case we lost our incomes. I think it was in the $200k range (excluding house) or so.

Both my wife and I grew up children of poor immigrants. Neither of us had our own home, much less a room, and we moved around quite a bit, and we did not see a dentist until we both had gotten jobs in our 20s that afforded us dental benefits. I had been in 8 different schools in 7 states by the time I was in 9th grade, and I think we both agreed that financial insecurity was our biggest problem growing up. If we did not have that for our kids, then we were simply happy to go without kids.

So in essence the way you were raised convinced you you'd rather someone not exist rather than have that childhood?

Is that because of what it did to you and your life or because of the stress on your parents?

Yes, I would not want another person to have the childhood I did (although I understand that many, many people around the world have much worse childhoods, including my parents). It did put stress on my parents, of course, but my main motivation is in the interests of the child(ren). Which I guess is also to not have stressed out parents.

I also think I was lucky to have had the life trajectory I did, partly due to just being good at school. My parents never taught me English (and we still do not speak English to each other), but I somehow never had a problem being successful in US schools. I doubt that is the case for many other kids in similar positions.

I was also lucky that I had access to online forums and educated adults to advise me on what choices to make, since my parents were not able to help me. I do not think I would have had a fraction of the success were it not for the internet giving me the ability to communicate with educated people familiar with how things work in the US.

> So in essence the way you were raised convinced you you'd rather someone not exist rather than have that childhood?

Well, that is really a metaphysical question. If there was a way of knowing whether consciousness exists before conception and if so, what is its "quality of life", it would shed a new light on our perspective of not just when, but also whether to have kids and how many.

This is absolutely the best way. My partner and I set our goal at X% of our total annual expenses in savings exclusively, before we started trying for children

A nebulous 'when we're comfortable' will never be comfortable. Whereas a set, concrete goal based on income and expenses is measurable and provides a clear path to an outcome.

What's X, approximately? As a frame, I think 25 times annual expenses is a retirement goal.

Not X times, but X% of. For us, that was 90-100% of annual expenses. We wanted a one year cushion in case something went wrong.

And to be clear - that's cash money, not investments. That is simply a crash easy to access liquid asset in case of emergency. If we couldn't say, this cash is exclusively for this goal, we didn't count it.

It took 6 years to put together, with both of us working in education.

Yeah, I’m with you and we’re also doing this.

Reality though (imo) is this is extraordinarily rare and most people pick mates based on attractiveness at a young age and then have kids similarly randomly either then or a couple of years later at best.

Any kind of planning around this (or anything really) seems to be uncommon.

Based on the stats of increasing age at first marriage, increasing age at first child's birth, and overall decreasing birth and marriage rates, I assume more and more people are doing the same calculations and concluding that if they cannot have a certain minimum lifestyle, then they are willing to forego the marriage/child parts of life.

Most people dont have kids randomly.

Because of the housing cost crisis, I'd guess the majority of people currently of child-bearing age will simply miss the chance to have children at all if they put it off until they have a nice, stable home with decent healthcare and education.

They will not get that until their 40s or later, if ever, by which point the wife will have reached the end of their viable child-bearing years, probably with some panic and grief if they waited.

Did your wife and you discuss before marriage whether you would skip having kids entirely if you didn't achieve your financial ambitions in time, or were you able to assume you would?

Yes, we made it clear to each other that we were both not interested in having kids if we could not provide them with the minimum quality of life/opportunities we wanted for the kids.

I am also cognizant that maybe those discussions were all just talk, and biological urges from one or both of us would have won out if push came to shove and we were mid 30s and had not reached our minimum viability stage yet.

I think that the point was, your rules are not good population level rules.

Also, on population level and looking at history, a lot of marginalized subgroups would cease to exists entirely if they followed those rules. Including formerly marginalized subgroups that do better now.

I am certainly no authority on what rules other people should have. But I also think history would have been very different if women had had the financial independence they do now, plus access to the birth control methods available these days.

But that's the point. Society has made raising kids extremely expensive. Society needs to fix itself if it wants to continue growing.

And it's really not even that hard. We know what the issues are. It's entirely a political problem. (talking mostly about the Anglo world here).

Keeping the population levels up is so far down in my list of priorities that it will never come up. Is this really a concern of other people?

I think you've misunderstood the comment you're replying to, as I don't believe that comment is talking about keeping up the population.

I think they are talking about what kind of decision making about kids is rational for most people across the majority of the population, as well as what kind of decision making is useful for sustaining the cultures we have.

It would be a pretty big deal if most people decided to apply the "wait until we have a nice, stable home with decent healthcare and education" rule for having kids. In much of the developed world, it would be tantamount to deciding that only well-off people shall have kids, and the effect of that on human culture would be profound.

This exact question is why I am not a married man today. I promised myself that I wouldn't have children if I couldn't give them all the opportunities my parents gave me, she wanted to "just have faith" that we would be a happy family.

As Mike Tyson said so eloquently, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.

That reflects my experience in planning for vs actually creating a family.

In retrospect, I should've had kids when I was in grad school. I wasnt ricb then, but had more time and more energy. Then they'd be mostly out of the house once I get settled. But that's a Canadian/German perspective, where there's access to health insurance and affordable day care, so kids aren't so expensive.

Ppl worry too much about kids. They mostly ride along with whatever, and are probably more flexible than u are.

> Canadian perspective ... affordable day care

Is $1000+ a month per child for daycare in large cities considered affordable?

No. Its also not what u pay in Montreal.

Sadly, that's a Quebec perspective. The rest of Canada has yet to get its shit together with respect to childcare.

In retrospect, I should have worked my ass off so that I'd be retired now. Or learned a bunch of languages. Or spend a lot of time practicing guitar and piano.

In other words, it's easy to imagine what you should've done when you also imagine the entire cost being in the past but all the benefits still being enjoyed in the present. You might, of course, be right - but you also might not be, and it's hard to tell when fantasising about all the benefits and not actively living through paying the cost.

Which is also the reason why we shouldn't put much stock in what people on their death beds say they wish they've done differently.

Nobody even remembers being 0-6 years old. I have decided this is in part a sort of grace period for you, the parent, to get your shit together. For example, if you have a kid at 25, you’ve got at least until 30 to secure a stable environment for them. (You are also way more motivated to do this when the kid is there)

Certainly on the other hand, it makes some things easier if you don’t have to sweat the cost of a doctor visit, but it’s hardly prerequisite.

>Nobody even remembers being 0-6 years old.

Maybe you don't have conscious memory of much of that time, but it absolutely shapes the person you will become. If you haven't, please check out the following books:

The Body Keeps Score

Behave

What Happened to You

Having said that, your psychological stability matters SO MUCH MORE than your financial stability. A parent who is kind, patient, caring, and struggling financially is going to have a much better outcome than a cold, distant parent that cannot control their anger, but can otherwise afford to provide their toddler's every whim.

I agree in principle. But some claims stretch the truth. E.g. 'suppressed memories' from early childhood are often false?

Memory isn't reliable for any of us, but this is especially true with childhood. I certainly would not have a 4 year old testify in a trial.

My point was that events absolutely do emotionally imprint from basically birth onward. There was a very unethical but interesting experiment that a pair of psychologists did on their toddler. They showed him a pet rabbit and made a loud noise to startle him. As an adult, the man was terrified of rabbits but had no idea why. Children exposed to violent parents as a child go on to have a host of issues even if they're removed from that environment. It's flat out wrong to suggest that parents get a pass from birth to 6 because 'children don't remember'.

Some retain memories from that age range, but it isn't the norm, sure. I definitely had strong memories from age 5 or 6 that lasted well into my teen years, which surely had an effect (they were mostly bad ones—I used to do some terrible ruminating at night).

Agree with he overall point that poorer material circumstances in the 0-5 age range likely has little effect, provided it's not to the point that basic things like good nutrition become a problem.

> Certainly on the other hand, it makes some things easier if you don’t have to sweat the cost of a doctor visit, but it’s hardly prerequisite.

Child care and healthcare costs in the US pretty much ensure that anyone with young kids who doesn't have a household income well over $100,000 is gonna feel like they're struggling. There's so-poor-you're-getting-quite-a-bit-of-assistance, which obviously feels like struggling (because it is), and then there's a big window of diminishing assistance in which those two things (especially) tend to eat all your extra income, before you finally hit a point at which it feels possible to keep your head above water without cutting expenses to the bone. It's easy to spend north of $30,000 on those two things per year, if you've got a couple kids and don't have absolute top-tier employer-provided health benefits (very few have that, and they tend to have huge salaries on top of it), and that's without splurging for, say, some super-fancy day care/school. And that's if no-one in your household has any health problems that year! And without costs for diapers, or clothes (very cheap, mostly, just buy used and in bulk), or food, or anything else. The only way to significantly diminish those costs is to have family that can take over most or all of what would otherwise be paid childcare, or to have one parent stay home, which usually only makes (financial) sense if you have lots of kids and the parent staying home had fairly low earning potential.

Is that really true? I have memories from the age of about 3-3.5 onwards.

As do I. I credit my dad with this. From a very young age he would frequently ask me what my earliest memories were, and ask me to recount them in as much detail as I could remember.

That really cemented in my memory a few key moments in my life from about age 2.5 onward (the birth of my younger sister, meeting some of my childhood best friends, etc)

Usually only the most intense memories last from that age. This is why usually childhood trauma affects a person for life, but it is not usual to retain many memories from that age range.

No. This is utterly and dangerously wrong. It's the complete opposite. The first 1-2 years have the biggest impact on the child's psychological health as an adult. It's also when their personality is formed. There's a reason child abuse is such a serious crime. It destroys people. But even common behaviors like showing frustration and anger can be harmful. So is suppressing them. Infants read emotions well because its essential to their survival. If you are inconsistently caring or fake caring, it can cause them to be unable to have a secure relationship themselves as an adult, and they'll have no idea why. They'll probably just blame their partner and not even realize they're broken. You need to have your shit together before birth.

Conscious memory of events has nothing to do with it.

> The first 1-2 years have the biggest impact on the child's psychological health as an adult

Do you have any sources?

You need to have your shit together before birth.

Certainly I don’t mean to suggest child abuse is fine when they are little. But you can’t be a perfect parent from day zero; there’s a lot of learning by doing, you can’t know how your life priorities will change, and kids don’t need material wealth when they are small outside healthcare, healthy food, etc.

In other words, you don’t need to have a successful career, perfect house, etc as a prerequisite to kids. They don’t even go to public school until they are five, yet many aspiring parents want to get into the right school district before having a kid.

Which is very sad, because those two things should just be a given in a prosperous society.

(I'm guessing you are in the USA.)

Yes, I am in the US.

Young kids are not expensive, and they don't care much about having a lavish home. IMO you want to have kids by no later than your mid 30s. You don't want to be 60 and dealing with teenagers.

I actually think that when they are young is the most expensive period - unless you have family nearby to help, either one of you gives up work or you pay a large amount of money on childcare, or some combination thereof if you work part-time. Although we haven't reached the teenage years yet so I am prepared to change my mind!

It depends if you want them to go to daycare or not and what kind of quality of life tradeoffs you are willing to make.

If you do, then they are going to bring back sicknesses every other week for a couple years, which means lost work time / $150 to $250 for the ones that require doctor visits.

Pregnancy and birth alone will prob take most families to the out of pocket maximum, anywhere from $3k if your employer is generous to $17k per year (legal maximum) if it is the cheapest insurance.

I assume licensed, inspected daycare in even the cheapest COL areas is $10k per year. But this is where grandparents who are willing to serve as backup or guardians while you work can make a world of difference.

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