Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!?
Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.
/s
I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals.
Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
It's also affecting Bangladesh.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/BGD/bangladesh/fertili....
You can see this clearly by looking over at Pakistan, which has almost double the fertility rate despite being at a similar level of economic development. If it was dictated by economics rather than culture and policy, you wouldn’t see that.
But stay at home parent isn’t a thing nowadays.
If you look at the numbers, around 1/3 of families have one stay at home parent.
If you just look at families with kids too young to stay at home by themselves after school, it’s even higher.
The number of stay at home parents of both genders has been growing since the late 90s.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
This is what you get for living in a car-bound society. In a walkable society, the kids can just walk home if they're 6 years old or so.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?
[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/07/01/which-co... [2] https://www.euronews.com/next/2023/03/06/childcare-puzzle-wh...
I can't comment on Iceland.
However, South Korea has one of the most crushing work cultures in the world, with insane work hours. Most people are not even in a relationship yet alone with kids.
In Portugal you have a huge problem of disposable income. Median salaries are insanely low and stagnant when adjusted to COL. To the point that by now most former 'Iron Curtain' EU members have surpassed Portugal in workers income both adjusted and absolute.
Now, I am not having children either, but I will not deny that even in the best of countries, when controlling for all of these factors, people still aren't having children simply because they have no want or need of having them. That's it, that's the reality. Now it is an uncomfortable truth for many, but many people nowadays, me included, just don't want them, for no particular reason at all.
Apparently, married people are having kids at roughly the same rate as they did decades ago. However, fewer people are getting married and far fewer kids are being born outside of wedlock.
These are not necessarily negative developments, at least at the individual level, but they do point towards a significant change in human culture and society: increasingly, only people with a strong intrinsic drive to have kids will do so.
I don't think that we can predict the effect of this trend a few generations from now.
If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.
There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard.
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
[0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
But yes, thanks for the correction.
It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case.
That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing.
It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
I would need proof to believe it, and am interested in what kind of pampered existence these kids have at school considering TN’s average CoL, and even if such a daycare exists, it is surely not representative of 99% of daycares.
One thing would be to try to look at the wait lists of various daycares. My buddies in TN are at ~3 years. We were at ~1.5 years. And yes, it's quite common in the US for the waitlist for a daycare to be longer than 40 weeks of human gestation.
Daycare in the US in general is really not very well tied to the local CoL. Many factors influence the cost and CoL is but one. Things like the quality of churches really affect things in ways that other services are not affected by normally.
In general, if there is a waitlist, then capitalism has failed. You'd just raise prices until there is no more waitlist. But with daycare, you can't really do that without knocking out a large percentage of the workforce. Hence waitlists.
NPR has a good PlanetMoney episode from a while back on the issues with daycare in the US. It's worth checking out.
At least in the US and UK school starts at 5.
No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)?
When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care!
And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
Yes, this is ideal for children.
>...just, without the gender imbalance.
But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
Assuming you want a more peaceful existence, and for women to have a choice in the matter, society needs to get hands-on to force a gender balance.
I don't think anyone suggested forcing a gender balance.
In the past in the US single-worker households were the standard. The expectation was that except for a few jobs, for example school teacher or nurse, women only worked until they got married.
There was no law that said women doing other kinds of jobs had to leave the workforce when they got married, but many employers strongly favored hiring men. Similar when they wanted to promote someone they would favor men. They didn't particularly have anything against women per say, but felt that a man with a stay at home wife needed the work more than a married woman with a working husband.
When someone wrote:
>> Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance
I think they had in mind how the single-worker household norm used to work, and by "without the gender imbalance" meant dropping the assumption that in single-worker male/female households the worker should be the man.
I also very much think there would not tend to be an imbalance in a modern advanced economy; we’ll tend to be equal, and that most gender imbalances are just transient effects from history. This is just a prediction, though, I have no data to back it up.
I don’t think there can be data on this, we do not have a statistically robust number of globalized information economies, we have just the one.
I have no particular desire to return to old fashion gender roles, and lots of people who want single income households might, so I want to be very explicit about the fact that I don’t care to defend that position. Which I think is a losing position.
I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...
Does that really count as coming from a right wing think tank?
The article there just cites a paper, "Gender Asymmetry in Educational and Assortative Marriage", that was in the Journal of Marriage and Family, and has a short interview with one of the paper's authors.
That journal is from the National Council on Family Relations. I can't find anything that suggests they are conservative. If anything what I'm finding in Google tends to have them more on the liberal side of things. E.g., their board's statement against anti-trans legislation [1].
> I'll see you and raise you "single women are happier"'
I don't think you are using "I'll see you and raise you" correctly. It's suppose to be followed by something that contradicts what you are replying to. What your link and his talk about are orthogonal.
https://www.ncfr.org/news/ncfr-board-directors-statement-res...
Additionally, it's easy for better educated women to do that same. Find qualified women in various industries and review the educational qualifications of their male peers who are making more than them and... same outcome.
So yes, I find the source to be problematic. I have not read the cited study itself but I did see that fun Q&A.
Here's a few excerpts from the article you linked:
> On one hand, women’s advantage in education may enable them to be more economically independent and thus put less emphasis on economic traits when evaluating potential spouses (Press, 2004). On the other hand, evidence suggests that men may still feel uncomfortable forming relationships in which they have lower status than their female partners (Bertrand, Kamenica, & Pan, 2015; Fisman, Iyengar, Kamenica, & Simonson, 2006).
> From men’s perspective, although men have placed more importance on the financial prospects of a potential spouse over time (Buss et al., 2001), they may value women’s high status only up to the point when women’s status exceeds their own status (Bertrand et al., 2015; England, 2011; Graf & Schwartz, 2011). For example, a speed dating study found that men did not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeded their own (Fisman et al., 2006). Psychology experiments showed that men’s self-esteem was lower when their partners succeeded than when their partners failed, whereas women’s self-esteem was not affected by their partners’ performance (Ratliff & Oishi, 2013). Although these studies did not directly test men’s reaction to their partners’ education or income, they suggest that men may avoid a potential spouse who has both higher education and higher income than themselves.
> Given a shortage of more-educated men, women may seek to maximize gains from marriage by evaluating potential spouses more on the basis of income. Because mate selection is a two-sided process, it is equally possible that men hesitate to form marital relationships with women who have both more education and higher incomes than they do.
{{citation needed}}
There are only a few years of their lives where they need constant care but the costs of all their education will be enormous later in their lives and so a couple that has two earners will be able to out compete a single earner household for all the expensive late-childhood/early-adulthood expenses that will come up.
Education—there’s the cost of providing it, and then there’s the zero-sum competitive component. As far as I can tell we seem to be re-investing all that extra money into deans, administrative staff, and fancy facilities, so I think we should just not play that game.
I don't think there's any way out of that particular game other than not having children; they're going to need to go onto careers, and as much as the education system might suck, it's less grim than the careers they'd face without a degree. My cousin's (I don't have a lot of cousins but we've actually been close our whole lives; we've lived in the same city and I actually consider them my college friends because we also went to the same school) daughter's 3rd birthday is coming up. His ask - no presents, just college contributions please.
I myself opted out of the game early on, and upon a lot of reflection of late, I think this is a significant reason I did although I would have had a hard time articulating it when I was younger.
I feel that I've voted my entire life for more collective solutions to problems (what else is government for?) though imperfect the purveyors of such solutions may be (let's be real, as fashionable as it is to say that both sides are bad, the Democratic party are the only ones trying to actually improve things). But it seems that enough voters go the other direction that we have decided against such solutions. I am truly sorry for the state of things and that children today will inherit these problems.
Seriously though I don't know anyone who has kids as status symbols. That seems quite weird.
Also I suppose living in a desirable neighborhood indicates status to outsiders maybe? I'm not sure what, if any, benefits that perception confers on me.
I may be a little broken in that I don't see the value of status signalling. If I'm nice to people, they're nice to me. That system has suited me increasingly well for decades. I dress for practical comfort, don't have high-ranking frequent flyer membership tier, and routinely get upgrades at the airport because I am sympathetic to the agents' pressures. People recommend me for jobs because I didn't make them feel shitty at work and make a point of boosting other people's contributions.
Between that, and trying to signal something with expensive sneakers or a sports car, I much prefer the approach that makes me feel happy inside, and builds people up rather than trying to make them jealous.
It's tragedy of the commons, race to the bottom, etc.
If everyone else has one income and I have 2, I am suddenly way ahead in the social dominance hierarchy. I liiike.
Before you know it, everyone has followed suit and now nobody's happy.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Thankfully modern science has invented and improved the breast pump and the bottle warmer and after recovery, women don't actually need to stay home for kids to get breast milk. So there's really no need to be gender specific about which parent should stay home, past reasonable maternity/paternity leave periods.
On the other hand, being single income is a luxury that not everyone can afford anyway. Our living costs have skyrocketed since 2020 and both parents working is necessity for lower and middle income families, in many cases. Even if the second income covers little more than child care, that "little more" is meaningful to people.
If we want better families, we should provide ways for lowering the burden and not force women (her it's women because nothing grows in or comes out of men) to have kids they can't care for and/or don't want and find ways to make childcare more affordable.
Most developed countries have at least 3 months of maternity leave, and most children start weaning after a year or so. Which means 25% of that time is covered by mom anyway.
Everything, including housing, healthcare, and education is so expensive now, we couldn't afford for one of us to stay home anymore.
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
Not that it necessarily matters to someone looking for a modest first home today.
https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...
>[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one.
I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population.
I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
This seems to be a huge shift from the previous generation. My father and most of his peers worked long hours and contributed little to childrearing.
I'd guess men don't volunteer to be primary child rearers because stay-at-home jobs have been relatively rare, prior to the past 4 years, men tend overwhelmingly to want to support a spouse than to be supported (which is probably why gay couples have greater household incomes and lower divorce rates than all other categories), and women tend to be hypergamous in mate selection. It's not that there's no incentive to stay home (if you like your children, at least, which I hope is true), it's that there's a strong incentive to go to work.
In my particular situation, tax and childcare would eat most of my wife's income, so she'd be spending 40+ hrs/wk working with other people's children in exchange for less time with hers. She'd rather work with our children and be able to take an afternoon nap.
Would we both prefer to be independently wealthy and not have to work, sure! Might one or both of us work anyway? I probably would. She probably wouldn't.
The remainder of your message appears to be uninformed condescension. My wife is not a chattel slave. Her primary focus is child rearing and home making, but it's not her sole occupation nor solely her responsibility.
There are parts of being single we miss, and parts of being childless we miss. That doesn't change the fact that we've worked very hard for the life we have, find it very rewarding, and wouldn't give it up easily.
If men are handing 60-75% of their money over to their wives/partners to spend, I'd assert that those women are getting paid better than men are.
Setting that aside, once you have a family, nobody is going to have much discretionary money and they’ll have even less with just one income earner.
Because everywhere I've lived and every community I've been a part of, "we" absolutely do give motherhood profound levels of respect. So much so, that being a mother is an almost sacrosanct role and puts the holder of the title above reproach in many situations.
Also "we" do pay them for it? If you feel better thinking about it that way, their income-earning spouse can be seen as paying them (by having the single income pay for all household spending). Also society at large pays them, by virtue of the myriad subsidies, deductions, services, and programs for children and parents.
The biggest challenge I've witnessed to praising motherhood as a full-time profession, is that mothers who work corporate jobs feel attacked or disparaged if they hear any comment which suggests they are doing any less mothering than the full-time mothers. So we end up in a tricky position culturally, where you can call someone a full-time mother, but a phrase like part-time mother is seen as offensive or inappropriate.
It's very challenging to balance giving respect and recognition to full-time mothers in a way that won't offend mothers who work for companies.
Would be nice.
To be honest, I'm not even sure who you expect respect from and why that'd be of terrible importance.
Some people, believe it or not, find their jobs fulfilling. They go to school to learn something so they can do it for the rest of their lives. Having a child jeopardizes the role you planned for yourself for the future. The goals you wanted to accomplish often never get accomplished because having a child takes up an insane amount of your time.
Yes, being a parent is a very important job in society, but often it means that your personal horizons become a lot more narrow. Rather than aspiring to climb to the top of your field, create art, invent something, discover new things, or whatever else you'd hoped to do when you were a teenager, your focus becomes almost entirely on keeping a single human being alive and then raising them.
It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.
People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.
> Why do they need to go to different schools?
Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.
It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.
That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.
Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children.
Median income in my area is ~$40k per year.
There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual.
Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue.
Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think.
But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow.
Like, you know the 80/20 rule?
Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance.
(Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment)
Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have.
From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same.
That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
2) I think we paid about $10k per birth, total. That’s not nothing.
3) Health insurance goes up. Kids are cheap but it’s still a couple thousands more per year. Plus hundreds to low-thousands per year in other healthcare spending per year (averaged—we’ve had $5k years and $1k years)
4) … Except having kids is a reverse lottery ticket for each one, and the healthcare & related costs could end up being “most of your money, forever”, if you’re unlucky.
5) Childcare costs are either $500-$thousands per kid per month (unless you’ve got relatives who are cool doing that all the time) or the entirety of one parent’s foregone compensation for the same span (five to six figures a year for most folks)
6) Housing. Unless you can’t afford it, you’re gonna find it very hard to settle for cheap housing in a bad school district. The premium in our area for a good vs. mediocre (not even the awful, horribly dangerous ones!) district is about 35-40% for a similar house. That’s… a fuckton of money, and the difference is likely to be 100% financed for folks around having-kids ages.
Everything else is basically negligible compared to healthcare, daycare, and housing, or can be made very cheap with minimal sacrifice.
Child related expenses were often over 50% of everything leaving our bank account, for months on end, when our kids were younger.
It will soak up the the full take home pay of one parent on an average wage or around that.
There are government funded childcare hours (that are increasing finally) which help, but it's still a tough choice unless both parents have earnings well above average.
Families get spread out because children are priced out of where their parents live, and can only afford a small home. So the grandparent support is often hard to make work too.
I find it curious that the type of people that moan about low birth rates and the loss of "family values" are also the ones voting for politicians that block house building and impose spending cuts on government services like childcare.
Not having children in the current political climate is a rational choice.