2 ms·

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children b

You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. Anecdotally, my other half would love to have children but I want to delay it right now because of finances. We live in the south-east of England so this is how things look:- We have a nice 2 bedroom terrace that costs £500,000. I earn a good living but we're hardly living in luxury. The bank of mum and dad aren't rich, thus I struggle to pay that down. This could perhaps be attributed to woman joining the workforce, a lack of building, and a political lanscape that setup property as invesments. She wants children to go to private school that may cost £9000-£30000 per year, with an oppertunity cost of upto £2,000,000 per child. This can probably be attributed to the nigh on impossibility to get your kids into a good performing state school and grammer schools being given the shaft after our parents had their turn. She wants them to have a dad, but Men are afraid of commitment due to the litigious nature of break-ups which screw them over. I'm not saying Dads shouldn't pay for their kids, just they shouldn't be paying £4,000,000 for an ex-wife to keep the advantages of marriage whilst the man no longer gets anything in return There's probably many more problems because the birthrate is fairly low right around Europe but these are some pretty big negatives for middle class men to commit to having children, at least not until they have their lot in life, which means there's less time to have more than 1-2.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago
> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket. And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district. It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children. NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.) And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences. Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.

AnthonyMouse 11y ago

> You can pretty trivially expand the question as to why woman are choosing their careers over children. The problem is that it's not just one problem. Almost everything is set up to economically discourage two-income families from having more children. After everything you've mentioned, the second income financially disqualifies you from many childcare and other benefits available to single-income families while progressive taxation, sold as targeting the wealthy, instead swallows the money a middle income family could have used to pay for those things out of pocket. And after the government has laid claim to most of the second income, what's left becomes the baseline for the cost of living. More families now have two incomes so it takes two incomes to afford a home in a good school district. It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children?

dragonwriter 11y ago
> It seems what is needed but not present is a strong lobby for middle class families. Everyone pays lip service because they're a large voting block, but where is the equivalent of the AARP or NRA for families with children. NRA is a narrow, single-issue lobby, not a general lobby for interests of a broad demographic (which even "middle-class families with children" is.) And, really, everyone pays sort of vague lip service because its a large demographic, but no more than that because its not a large voting bloc. Particularly, its not a group that has a common set of policy preferences and consistently votes predominantly based on that shared set of preferences. Its not like there aren't lobbying organizations that promote themselves as promoting the interests of "families with children"; but none of them really represents the majority of that demographic, because there is no clear voting bloc to represent.