TL;DR: people in higher income societies have more children if they have good access to childcare and education?
I have two very young kids.
It looks like I'll have to decline the invitation, as it turns out that nursery childcare in Cambride costs well over $1000 per child per month. (e.g., https://www.montessoricambridge.co.uk/admissions/fees-and-se... --- and these guys, at ~$1600/month/child, are far from the most expensive.)
In the developed world, in an upper middle class home, having children has become something akin to an extravagance: Very expensive, and quite uncommon. I'm the only one in my peer group with children, and I have two siblings and six cousins who are all childless in their thirties.
Unfortunately, my visa would have a "no recourse to public funds" note -- so I wouldn't be able to avail myself of any reimbursement scheme.
Besides, "3+" is also a problem, as one of mine is much younger than that. (The difficulty of raising children is naturally front-loaded; it starts out very hard, and gets easier and easier as they grow. What's interesting is that the UK assistance plan only kicks in as things get much easier. The difference between a two year old and a three year old is vast.)
The University's childcare scheme is certainly not free -- it's a whopping $1840/child/month. https://www.childcare.admin.cam.ac.uk/nursery-fees
If you're an employee, they take it out of your salary. It's not even discounted. But they charge for it "before income tax, and that's where your savings come in." I'm not joking.
Imagine spending $3700/month just on daycare.
Parallel reply asks where do you live now with cheap childcare, giving number like $1600/kid. Here in Kraków, Poland, it's more like 1400 PLN (~$325), and most private facilities are enrolled in a program that makes the city cover half of that. At kindergarten level, there's enough good, public facilities available, that you only have to pay if you want some usual/experimental facility.
Of course, there's a cost-of-living difference between Poland and UK/US, but it's not that big - relatively speaking, daycare here seems 2-4x cheaper anyway. It's one of increasingly many things that make me think Poland is the goldilocks zone of Europe - all the benefits of first-world development, with little to no drawbacks.
I spend quite a lot of time in Croatia, and it's just as inexpensive over there.
Central Europe is indeed a good place to be right now.
Which would be fine if I could tune for intrinsic reward vs extrinsic in my current situation. Part time, startups, taking a chance at consulting, etc.
No dice with this child care cost.
You mean the western world. The UAE has one of the highest GDPs per capita globally and yet for $1000/month you could hire a full-time live-in nanny. The difference is western countries generally have much stricter restrictions on immigration from poorer countries, and high minimum wages.
Leaving their own children to raise someone else’s while being treated like a middle ages servant is absolutely not what we should be encouraging.
I work with a non profit that helps those women escape those places once their passport is stolen.
Not all ‘masters and ma’ams’ are abusive but a large percentage are.
Not nearly as terrible as what I hear about places like Dubai today, but the workers in HK still preferred to be employed by visiting westerners since it meant better treatment.
From the conclusion:
"Past fertility research largely focused on understanding fertility decline over time and the negative cross-country relationship between income and fertility. The most important mechanism in explaining these patterns was the quantity-quality tradeoff. However, much has changed over the last few decades. In particular, fertility is no longer negatively related to income across high-income countries. Instead, family policy, cooperative fathers, favorable social norms, and flexible labor markets have become key determinants of fertility choice. Thus, a new era of fertility research has begun."
Conclusion: childcare cost is not causative.
1. Austria and Switzerland both have TFR of 1.5 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
2. "Switzerland has one of the most expensive childcare systems in the developed world and also gets bad marks on parental leave, according to a report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF)." https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/society/switzerland-among-worst...
Prerequisite to having kids is removing choice and meaning in life.
Unless I am grossly misunderstanding you, this is exactly backwards. Having kids was the most important choice and the most meaningful one I've ever made.
The fact that being highly educated and well-off has made this a somewhat less "obvious" choice is the sad part.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-israel-former-ultra-orthodo...