Having a kid in the US is retirement-suicide at best, if you're not rich. As in, it'll all but completely kill any hope of a decent retirement. And if you get unlucky (as far as the kid's health) it's like winning a reverse-lottery ticket that condemns you to lifelong poverty. Except the odds of that happening are way better than hitting a lotto jackpot.

I get that birth rates are also low in Europe so a good social safety net can't be all of the solution, but I know an awful lot of people in the US who'd like to have kids, or who'd like to have more of them, but it's such a bonkers-bad financial decision that they can't bring themselves to do it. That is, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of desire in the US to have more kids, but you're punished so badly for it that people avoid it anyway. I think fixing our healthcare system and improving our public pension scheme to something better than "if you have to rely on it, you're probably fucked" would help a ton.