This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
The opportunity cost—the shadow, if you will, that the cost of children casts on your future retirement savings—is enormous. It’s way larger than the nominal cost. Big ouch.
It ain't like just because the kid 7 you can leave them at home while both parents go to work.
Seems like you may be underestimating how much work kids, even at elementary age, can be.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
Six figures? False because poor people have been having children forever and continue too.
Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did. But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.
If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing? It goes up until some cannot afford to pay and demand balances supply.
Without a working age population, your retirement assets will be inflated away into worthlessness.
So far rich world governments and individuals haven't found an optimal incentive/cost share ...
The cost does not change. This situation that you describe is already present a many countries who have an acute nurse shortage. The gap as always is filled by immigrants from the global south.
1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.
2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.
Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.
But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.
There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.
I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.
0: https://www.cartoonshateher.com/p/how-to-have-grandchildren
More than low birth rates, I think that the problem is that people are postponing children until the last possible moment biology allows for it.
The reason is that people need to have their life in order before having children. I imagine it was easier in the past than nowadays.
You have Children and need to work? Daycare is extremely expensive. Want to buy a house? Well, Children weights against you when trying to get a mortgage. And I am not even getting into the actual costs of raising a child.
People say that low birthrates are a problem, but while raising children is a personal endeavor, nobody is willing to make a collective problem (it is fairly unpopular to direct taxpayer money to pay for it).