People with moderate incomes can barely afford to house and feed themselves, even with a partner. Introduce a dependent child into the mix and the subsequent ~30% increase in fixed expenses and it is easy to see why fewer and fewer people are having children.
Personally I wouldn’t want children because of the increasingly bleak outlook for humanity. Climate change is looking increasingly dire, and fascism is seeing a frightening upswing.
But the actual cost of having a child is food off your plate, second hand clothes, and a stay at home parent.
The problem is that is probably not the lifestyle upper middle class people want.
That's the big issue. Middle class households today need both parents working to afford a decent home, 2 cars, and health insurance.
Of course many could downsize to a smaller home, 1 car, fewer vacations, etc. But those are the financial trade offs that increasingly fewer couples seem to want to make.
Something tells me not.
And why is this is a question we should answer. Inability to afford birth control? Sex as the one redeeming "happy" thing after slaving away for a guy who wears a suit 5 days per week? Religion also plays a part -- lots of mainstream religions eschew birth control such as condoms and lots of poor people are religious. Are they poor because they have so many kids?
The guy is doing okay -- his income is somewhere over $200k/year -- but this expense is a _big_ fraction of his total income. For him, childcare costs are basically the difference between leasing a new Ferrari and living in a mansion, and buying clothes from Ross and begging his parents for money. (Which, I've learned, he does.)
There are two factors in play. First, he lives in a large and diverse American city, and wants to insulate his children from bad influences. Second, he's under a great deal of, essentially, peer pressure to "Keep up with the Joneses" -- in other words, to keep up appearances relative to other members of his social group.
It's insanity, of course.
But, in his position, it would be difficult to raise a child cheaply. The outcomes might be quite poor. So, either way, there's difficulty and worry.
There are also the opportunity costs of parenting, which are considerable, but that's a different matter.
For elementary school we rented an apartment for 6 months to get an address in a decent school, it wasn't a guaranteed ticket but a risk we took because it was cheaper than private school. We were able to get in and worked closely with the school and our kids to make sure they were learning what they needed to get to the next school. They both got to a magnet middle school thankfully which was goal #2 but I mean even the magnet school is still like a zoo (sex in bathrooms, drugs, etc). Again, we work closely with the school and our boys, teaching them a lot of the skills they're not getting at school (it's very time consuming and basically a second job for me and my wife). My oldest is now in 8th grade and tested recently for the top magnet STEM HS in DFW. He feels pretty confident about it but we find out March 1 if he got it, that's goal number #3.
Looking back, my wife and I both strongly agree just moving 45 miles north to suburbs with actual functioning public schools would have been so much better. Yeah sure, we live in a hot neighborhood (north oak cliff), downtown, uptown, and deep ellum are < 3 miles away but we never go down there anymore anyway. Suburbs with good schools and other amenities geared toward families are where it's at.
What was your biggest concern about school? That they would become involved in bad behavior? Or that they wouldn’t be educated?
My experience from public school is that it’s basically worthless. Could you treat it as social time and make up for the school in your own?
school performance and education which correlates to behavior. Obviously, when you drop your kids off at school you want to be confident they're going to be ok so behavior is important. My wife and I have found that low teacher rollover is also a good indicator of a school's quality. The top magnet schools in the district have the lowest teach rollover which is another vote for that metric.
We do a lot of educating at home but it's a tough row to hoe. You're basically homeschooling and the last thing my kids want to do when they get home from school all day is more work.
"Keeping up with the joneses" doesn't come into play at all.
Here’s an interesting recent interview on the topic with a leading Finnish demographer: (Financial Times, paywall)
https://www.ft.com/content/500c0fb7-a04a-4f87-9b93-bf65045b9...
Twenty years ago, Finland appeared to have it all. The birth rate was rising and the proportion of women in the labour force was high. Policymakers from around the world, including the UK and east Asia, came to learn about the Nordic model behind it: world class maternity care; generous parental leave; a right to pre-school childcare.
But maybe they got it wrong. Despite all the support offered to parents, Finland’s fertility rate has fallen nearly a third since 2010. It is now below the UK’s, where the social safety net is more limited, and only slightly above Italy’s, where traditional gender roles persevere.
“The strange thing with fertility is nobody really knows what’s going on. The policy responses are untried because it’s a new situation. It’s not primarily driven by economics or family policies. It’s something cultural, psychological, biological, cognitive.”
At the Family Federation, Rotkirch oversees a unique series of surveys, which ask young people not just how many children they are planning to have, but how many they would ideally like to have.
Her findings suggest that children do not fit into many millennials’ life plans. Once it was a sacrifice not to have children; now starting a family means sacrificing independence. “In most societies, having children was a cornerstone of adulthood. Now it’s something you have if you already have everything else. It becomes the capstone.”
I'm sorry, but which part of Europe would that be? People cannot afford a house and rents are going up like crazy, energy is expensive, taxes are high..?
But the overall trend of shrinking fertility is unmistakable over a substantially longer period than just the past few years. There isn’t a direct link to the economy, as the Finnish demographic researcher explains in the interview I linked.
Beg your pardon? Have you seen the price of real estate/child care/energy/... in Europe?
The cost of having and raising a child in Finland is minimal compared to the U.S.
2. That's cool for Finland, but Finland is not necessarily representative of Europe as a whole;
3. And even though, ‶better than the US for a someone who's socially high enough to be able to work in NY″ is probably not representative of the average Finn, and still does not make it ‶great″.
I dont know about for whole EU, but I have friends in Germany / Spain and even people who are both working on some middle IT positions can hardly afford 2 bedroom appartment and a car after taxes. Situation is much worse in poorer countries like Poland or expensive one like Switzerland.
Also I lived in UK and have family there. It's not quite EU, but rich country nontheless. And a lot people struggle there just to pay their mortage because with high interest rates their repayments also spiked almost 2x.
Friends of mine are on high IT salaries that when average Joe with non-IT offline job making 30% less money. And job market is brutal there too - if you lose your job it's possible to find new one, but you'll land on lower salary.
I think I read an article about Korea that attributed the precipitous drop in birthrate to an advertising campaign that equated children to being a burden in order to lower what was at the time a very high birthrate.
To my mind, the most likely reason is that for most people having kids is not a priority. Need more money, worried about climate change/terrorism/fear-in-vogue, etc.
I have two kids, they were born when I was in my 30's. I wish that I could have had them earlier...you are able to recover more when you are younger.