About Rx Kids
rxkids.org
rxkids.org
Some might decide to buy more expensive car or larger house and that's cool choice as well. But in the end will bring you just a temporary happiness and maybe some social status boost.
Screw consumerism, just have a child.
Unions and Fight for your rights, that's what we need
In case of special needs you are correct. But you need to hope that's not the case.
You also entirely skipped the most expensive ones. Feeding them, an expense that's been ever growing in the last decade, much faster than inflation. Education and child care, which the cynic in me, having read you say the problems started when women joined the workforce, thinks this is probably cause you think women should stay home for these - I hope I'm wrong.
I'd be extremely surprised if your budget didn't radically change before and after having kids, even staying frugal and living within your means.
Breast milk substitutes are expensive though, I admit.
I'm not saying your budget doesn't change after having a child. I'm just saying for a price of a special color on car, vacation and couple nights out, you can afford to have a child for a year.
It's not cheap, but most of us are blowing money on useless stuff anyway. Some are donating thousands a year to online creator, game microtransactions, drinks in a bar, designer bags, funko pop collections and such.
The lifestyle inflation is real. And thanks to shifting priorities, you might even get yourself into better financial position after a few years, then before having a child.
one person's actions can start to move the tide
Love your own life, refuse to have children for free!
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11150-026-09861-1
https://www.economicsobservatory.com/baby-bust
Estimates are that in France and Poland pro-natalist policies have cost around from $1m-2m per extra birth. This is completely unsustainable.
None of which means we shouldn't support families having children, of course we should for all sorts of reasons. It improves health and education outcomes for children, reduces child poverty, and gives women greater autonomy in their choice between work and home life, and overall seems to increase their participation rate in employment.
I think realizing this and taking it into account in family support policies can help us achieve actually achievable outcomes, while avoiding sinking money into unachievable ones.
There are more parents out there that would disagree with that than you might think.
It's a factor, it's not the only factor.
Decrease in teenage pregnancies, decrease in alcohol consumption, contraception and day after pills, higher levels of education, less socialized culture, less generational housing etc.
Having a child is more than often a deliberate, calculated decision that is made by adults whereas in the old world pregnancies happened left and right with little to say about it. Support systems existed because the problem was pervasive. Now the problem is generally gone, and the support systems thereafter.
No country has managed to reverse the trend of declining birth rates. The better quality of life people have, the fewer children people tend to have.
It's not just about who does and who doesn't have children, it's also how many children per family. 1-2 children is the new normal. My grandpa was #7.
Perhaps we can learn from the past? Birthrates between the world wars were below replacement level in much of the western world. Then the trend reversed for a while.
And just look at the interwar years themselves: lots and lots of people died in World War I, but that didn't trigger a babyboom. Just the opposite.
It might simply be the economy. The vibes are bad and have been bad since the late 70s because wealth distribution is lopsided and income growth is stagnant.
Seems unlikely: the decrease in fertility rates is pretty universal, but what your are giving as reasons here seem pretty US specific.
May I point you to the State of Israel? Its TFR sits at 3.
And if we really want to be nitpicky, and concentrating on the "reverse"-part of your statement, then even Balkan countries shine, as they literally managed to reverse the trend.
That same bump is now reversing and the general trend of depopulation continues to accelerate. IIRC Bosnia has the lowest birth rates in all of Europe.
I appreciate the push back; I was overly confident in that statement. I do think however that it's correct to state that the slow trend across all developed countries could be summarized as "aggressively downwards".
Israel is literally the one exception.
In South Korea the reports are they this is very different. Kids are not tolerated in many places, many couples have few kids, society makes it quite hard on moms as well.
0 - https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/isr/isr...
Yes.
> Support systems existed because the problem was pervasive. Now the problem is generally gone, and the support systems thereafter.
Meh, support for single moms or pregnant teenagers was not all that great. To large extend, they were punished and suffered, they were blamed. Their kids were oftentimes blamed.
You are better off being pregnant teenager is a single mom today then in 1950 or 1925 or whatever.
Besides European countries you have many of the Soviet countries who had a rebound, Kazakhstan is the greatest example, going from 1.8 to 3. Israel was mentioned by others.
I also don't think the better life => less kids holds true at this point. Plenty of countries in deep troubles (e.g. Tunisia) have birthrates far below the US or some other western countries. Having a phone is enough to keep people distracted.
Those who do well financially (at least relatively in their own country) get more kids, I've heard about people working for TSMC getting twice as many kids vs their non TSMC peers.
If somehow everyone was able to have a stable job, could afford good housing, wasn't obsessed about the rat race you'd see birthrates close to replacement (like you see them in regions of the US where these conditions are mostly met). Sadly this isn't going to happen.
I've got two young kids. I wouldn't say day to day expenses are particularly huge.
Sure you can go wild and buy them designer clothes/shoes they grow out of in 6 months, or you can fill every waking moment with white-knuckle entertainment and excitement and that all costs money. But you don't need to do that, the kids don't care what they wear so long as it's got a robot/unicorn/etc on it, and they're often very happy playing with a cardboard box, a small amount of generic Lego, and their imagination.
Food cost is almost a rounding error. Barely anything for an extra loaf of bread, an extra packet of cereal, some more chicken etc. peanuts.
The main cost - beyond needing to live in a larger house which I probably would have got anyway even without kids - is the opportunity cost of having kids: I've probably missed a promotion or two because I've had to say no to work travel, projects, late meetings with the US office etc to go kid related things. That and UK nursery costs are bigger than the mortgage, but again that is "optional" and only for the first few years.
Good luck
Though my kids are amazing and absolutely worth it, no questions asked, I did feel like i was playing catchup in my career starting in my mid-30s.
I'm probably 8-10 years behind where I thought I would be in terms of promotions though (and the chunky pay rises that come with it) - I've basically been treading water since my wife was pregnant with the first kid because I had to say no to things at work so I could focus on family. I'm fortunate to have a very chill employer, but there have been many, many, many times where before children I'd simply have stayed late at the office to get something done or done a bit of work at the weekend or jumped on a plane somewhere with less than 24 hours notice or whatever. Instead things just have to wait to the morning or Monday, or I don't respond to messages any time of the day/weekend, or I am not there for that critical meeting with the stakeholders because its in Dallas or at 9pm UK or whatever.
I am only just starting to emerge tentatively from the other side of that now about 7 years later, and even then very very tentatively as I am basically 24/7 on-call for family emergencies that trump anything else.
Your wife and family won't believe you if you say it's impacted your career as the man or that it's hard to context switch - they'll laugh and dismiss your feelings as the narrative is that it is typically the mother who makes the sacrifices etc, but even if the mother is the stay at home parent there is still a major impact on the husband's career and work (or it has been for me anyway) but don't ever dare say that to a mother because they have a monopoly on that position.
If this received no taxpayer funding I wouldn't care, but when public funding is involved there need to be some checks to ensure no abuse, which Rx Kids doesn't have.
All of the checks you listed would just serve to make it harder for this money to reach the mothers that need it.
In the same way seatbelts just serve to make it harder for drivers to get to where they need to go quickly. It would not be difficult to restrict this to people below a certain tax bracket.
It all comes down to how much public money (that could have been used to help people who need it) you're willing to accept the possibility of being defrauded for one person to get support a couple days sooner.
?
Means testing often leaves out those on the lower end who straddle the line or get excluded by stupid technicalities. You simply can’t account for every scenario. Excluding any mother means you will exclude someone who needs it.
I would honestly love a national program that gives money to every mother automatically no questions asked.
I mean, where I live there's food banks, and the only requirement to utilize the food bank is that you bring in a piece of mail with your address on it so they can know you're at the correct food bank. I know, I'm poor and I've had to use the foodbank, recently even. Besides that, you could be the richest guy in town and go and pick up a nice big haul of food every 5 weeks if you choose to. But for whatever reason, this system isn't rife with abuse, even though I'm not drug tested (I would pass) or background checked (no criminal record) or made sure I work (I do). I'm aware of a few bad eggs who don't "need" the food bank who access it anyway, but by and large the people who do need it are getting it and that's what matters.
I guess my point is, you always hear about "what if this is abused" when it comes to systems that are in place to help the less-than-fortunate, but from what I can see it's always just a veiled attempt to make it harder for people who need assistance to actually get it, for little to no actual return because the "rampant abuse" we're told to worry about doesn't seem to be such a big issue in reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I've already discussed this in a separate reply.
I wasn't claiming there needs to be all of those in the first place - I was using it to illustrate how little protections are in place. Nor was tax brackets my proposed solution, just one of many protections that could help. You don't need (or shouldn't be required to) to come up with a perfect solution to alert people to a problem.
> are replying to most comments to be sure your perspective always has the last word
It's odd to complain about people engaging in discussion on a discussion bulletin board. It's the most recent discussion in my comment history, so when I check my comment history once in a while I see it's updated (often with some type of accusation of cruelty, bad-faith, et cetera).
> which happens far more from the wealthy than from those in poverty,
We're not really talking about the very wealthy here and it'd be strange to go on an off-topic rant about fraud committed by them.
> and now are resorting to telling people they are breaking the rules when they disagree with you.
I've only mentioned the Guidelines to someone uncharitably accusing me of "look[ing] for a reason not to help [those who need it]", who then at least attempted to engage further up the thread. It's not against the guidelines to disagree with me, but my interpretation is that it is to automatically assume bad faith if somebody disagrees with you and attack things they didn't say, which numerous people have.