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Comment by oldpersonintx | Hacker News Reader

In the US, having kids is for the top 1% who can afford it or the bottom 5% who have always been poor.

Want to fix this in the US? Offer stable child-rearing families FREE housing, and I mean in decent neighborhoods. I don't mean a stipend or low-interest loan, I mean FREE including utilities, maintenance and property tax. You will see strollers everywhere within two years.

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I'd suggest that the main issue might not be housing, but rather childcare. The cost of childcare is incredibly high, more than many (most?) mortgages or rent payments. Unlike previous generations who settled in the suburbs close to family support, many of us are now gravitating back to city centers away from relatives who could help with childcare.

Raising children requires a substantial commitment of time – they're undoubtedly rewarding for many who choose to have them, but it's completely reasonable why some people would be hesitant or even opposed to the idea.

What about Finland or Sweden? 2.1 children per woman is the steady "not declining" rate... and Scandinavia tends to have people pointing there and saying "this is how you do support for new families..."

Sweden is at 1.66 children per woman and Finland is at 1.37.

United States is at 1.64 and Canada is at 1.40.

No one thing will be sufficient, but eliminating obstacles to child rearing is the only solution governments have short of nonsensical interventions (or just accepting the situation).

As Clinton famously said: "It's the economy, stupid." (I'm not calling you stupid.)

Housing, healthcare, education, and transportation are all generally unaffordable, and those are precisely the costs most associated with having children. Add in the tradeoff of one partner staying home vs making money but paying it to childcare for several years, and it's much easier to say "maybe next year".

But what is the outcome? Children in families where people are getting everything for free from the government. They will not be an active working class, because why should you work if government is giving everything for free?

But more affordable child care and more tax brakes for families with kids is a key.

These days having a kid is like going to prison: woman destroys career and burns savings.

As others have pointed out you should really do some research, in the United States birth rates are inversely correlated with income. [1] If anything, if we wanted to dramatically raise birth rates we would want a poorer population, not a wealthier one.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

That trend is reversing. https://medium.com/impact-economics/rich-families-are-having...

You must be joking, we don't get free healthcare, let alone free tape at the post office.

Healthcare is just one piece of the puzzle. Birth rates are collapsing in countries with socialized healthcare as well.

> Offer stable child-rearing families FREE housing, and I mean in decent neighborhoods.

This has been done, often abused, and the neighborhoods don't always remain decent.

How about just a UBI instead?

Solve declining populations with this one simple trick!

Population declines in rich countries and increases in poor. Make world poor again and that will resolve the issue! /s

I’m an old dad (by my standards, 41 with two toddlers), and this is the reason. It took me most of my young adult life to even get to a stable configuration where kids felt remotely possible. No regrets over here, but I have less energy than I did when I was 30!

Birth rate decreases as income increases. The highest income earners have the lowest birth rates.

How do you offer free housing in "decent neighborhoods"? "Decent" is not an immutable quality of a place, its a property that emerges largely from the people that live there. Decent people are decent neighborhoods.

Discovering the unintended consequences of this policy is left as an exercise for the reader.

socialism is youth tax so what are you accomplishing taxing the youth to pay the youth (minus bureaucrats hefty cut)? we really need to stop taking money from kids to give to boomers, and take money from boomers to give to kids, unpopular political suicide changes like delete medicare

lol

There is also something seriously wrong with what we’re consuming or being exposed to. I’m a millennial and it seems like more of my friends have had trouble conceiving than the opposite. Just in my small friend group a couple of people are unable and the ones that have had them tried for quite a long time. I’m currently at a year of trying at 31 years old (partner is 30.). We are all otherwise healthy.

Everyone used to be able to afford it until states and corporations worked together to convince everyone that a mother's time is better spent in a corporation generating tax revenue & profits for shareholders so that she can take some of that money she earns to afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working so that she can afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working so that she can afford childcare & home services because she doesn't have the time to care for her children or maintain her home because she's working

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