4 ms·

It is a great pity that it's so fucking difficult to do so in this day and age. Elaborate.

pen2l 11y ago
Having children is reaaaaaally expensive. Much more than people would expect. Most 25 year old couples don't have this money, in this day and age. It would require out of them that they both work hardcore hours... but then when baby has come, who will take care of it? Babysitters? Daycare? They're expensive as hell. Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. all add up to something humongous. This is not to mention the mental toll of getting up each damn night at 3a.m. to calm crying babies. Daycare often times costs more than what one of the parents make, it's that expensive. For whatever reason Americans want to get away from their parents after getting married (unlike a lot of Asian countries), so if you can't rely on your parents to help out it's really difficult and it'll exhaust you out before you know it.
- ashark 11y ago
  > Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. The real killers are health care (should your kid need more than the norm in the first couple months—and many do) and childcare. Plus the less-obvious, very high cost of having to live in a decent school district or else pay for private school. Those areas are pretty much always more expensive. No more cheap rent/mortgage for you :-( Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist. You can recover a lot of that money when you're done with the things by selling them, at a small time cost.
  - pen2l 11y ago
    Yeah, you're absolutely right. > Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist. Or even better, from friends and family. :) They only need baby clothes, car seats for a few years, take it from them. And pass it on when you're done.
    - ohazi 11y ago
      Car seats and bike helmets -- don't get them used.
      - radicalbyte 11y ago
        Buy new, or get them from people you trust.
    - jtheory 11y ago
      Yeah, this as well! Cultivate relationships with friends/family who have good taste, and kids 2 years older than yours or so. ;) This is pretty easy, actually... people also actively want to get rid of clothes rather than store them; and young kids in particular fly through clothes much faster than they can wear them out. About other stuff -- my wife & I were stubborn about avoiding all of the "default" baby purchases unless we really felt we needed them. No value judgement intended on people who buy e.g., strollers! Sometimes a stroller would have been pretty handy... But we wanted to travel a lot with our kids, light, so we needed lightweight habits at home first. So: no upgrade from the 2-door hatchback (though we did spring for good carseats). No strollers; we learned a few good ways to tie a sling instead. No separate kids' rooms (and no furnishings and decorations of such rooms). No crib. No disposable diapers (we broke this rule for compostable diapers at night when each child was over 6 months or so... more pee to absorb... and much of the time when traveling). Potty-training quite early (from a few months old) with no deadlines or pressure, etc.; that worked out pretty well. No bottles, no sippy cups. (Yes to small cutlery, though). We did use cheap glasses when they graduated from nursing to drinking from glasses, and lost a 2-3 per child as expected. The girls learned not to let them fall. Toys: we bought very few and still ended up with a ton; family & friends give gifts, and they'd be sad if you told them to just stop. So we just tried to avoid electronic "made to be broken" stuff, generally. Books: we have tons of books. No intention of reining this one in!
- knughit 11y ago
  Having upper middle class children is expensive. For most of world and history, having children was cheap. We have thrown away the community structures that supported childrearing
- douche 11y ago
  Most educated 20-something couples will also have the equivalent of a hefty mortgage payment dedicated to servicing their educational loans. Take a considerable chunk off the top for that, and then it becomes harder to establish the savings necessary to make a down payment on a home, which locks our couple into renting, at rates that are commonly well above what the mortgage payment would be, without the benefit of building equity in the property. Moreover, to earn the kind of money to service those loan payments, our couple has to abandon their local social networks that might be able to assist with childcare, shared resources, etc, and move to a different area with more competitive wages, or possibly just an area where employment is possible, which results in yet higher costs of living. Throw in parents and family that have the attitude that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and so their children ought to be able to as well, ignoring the fact that when they got their education, it was possible to earn enough money working in a summer to cover their tuition and living expenses for the rest of the year. Or that it used to be possible to earn a middle-class income with no education beyond high school. It's kind of a vicious circle.
  - vram22 11y ago
    >when they got their education, it was possible to earn enough money working in a summer to cover their tuition and living expenses for the rest of the year. Or that it used to be possible to earn a middle-class income with no education beyond high school. Talking about the US or EU, I guess? Any idea why it was that way, back then (also, when was "then"?) and not so now?
    - douche 11y ago
      I was speaking on the US, and the difference between the experience of Millennials vs the Boomer parents. It seems like runaway costs, more than anything. Tuition and room and board have nearly quadrupled[1], while the amount of money that it is possible to earn in the kind of low-level, part-time work that a college student is capable of fitting in has sort of stagnated. I was able to earn $5-6k over the course of a summer working, which isn't a whole lot different than what my father, for instance, was able to earn in his summers in the 70s. That might pay my tuition for part of one term, whereas it paid his whole year. Meanwhile, housing costs have rocketed up as well, and the price of gas was $4/gallon, rather than $.50. [1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-and-fees-and-room-and-board-over-time-1975-76-2015-16-selected-years http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
- HillRat 11y ago
  This, too many times over. My wife and I are older parents, and despite our highly privileged income stratum I'm still shocked at the costs of parenthood (and we're still several years off having to pay $25-30K/year for private school). Meanwhile, some of my wife's youngest (early 20s) employees are starting to have kids while dealing with relatively low salaries, overwhelming student debt, and high levels of employment instability. I have no idea how they'll do it and, if we want to consider ourselves a decent society, we should have support mechanisms in place to help them do it.
obvithrow1910 11y ago
The other replier gives good reasons, but it's worth considering why things have gotten this way. If one parent wasn't working, all the money spent on daycare wouldn't be an issue -- the other parent just takes care of the child. Why do both parents have to work? Because you can't afford a house somewhere where you'd want to raise kids without. Why can't you afford a house without both parents working? Because dual-income households drove up this housing stock to absolute boundary of affordability. This is basically the thesis of Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap". See here [1] for a good synopsis. It's a shame that so many of the children of these educated mothers are going to be autistic because of advanced maternal age. Not so good for our future. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...
- pjc50 11y ago
  I upvoted you before I got to "going to be autistic because of advanced maternal age" - I'm going to have to ask for a citation there, as the etiology of autism is not well advanced and we're still recovering from the last guy who blamed it on vaccines.
- rayiner 11y ago
  Eh. It's also: what the heck do you do after the kids are older and don't need nor want full time care? Most people still have half their working lives left, but are permanently off the career track. There are lots of people who could easily afford to take off 5-6 years when their kids are little but don't because it's career suicide.

pen2l 11y ago

Having children is reaaaaaally expensive. Much more than people would expect. Most 25 year old couples don't have this money, in this day and age. It would require out of them that they both work hardcore hours... but then when baby has come, who will take care of it? Babysitters? Daycare? They're expensive as hell. Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. all add up to something humongous. This is not to mention the mental toll of getting up each damn night at 3a.m. to calm crying babies. Daycare often times costs more than what one of the parents make, it's that expensive. For whatever reason Americans want to get away from their parents after getting married (unlike a lot of Asian countries), so if you can't rely on your parents to help out it's really difficult and it'll exhaust you out before you know it.

ashark 11y ago
> Clothes, food stuff, toys, childcare services, carseats, strollers, etc. The real killers are health care (should your kid need more than the norm in the first couple months—and many do) and childcare. Plus the less-obvious, very high cost of having to live in a decent school district or else pay for private school. Those areas are pretty much always more expensive. No more cheap rent/mortgage for you :-( Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist. You can recover a lot of that money when you're done with the things by selling them, at a small time cost.
- pen2l 11y ago
  Yeah, you're absolutely right. > Toys/clothes/accessories/food barely even register compared with those things. Thrift stores, craigslist. Or even better, from friends and family. :) They only need baby clothes, car seats for a few years, take it from them. And pass it on when you're done.
  - ohazi 11y ago
    Car seats and bike helmets -- don't get them used.
    - radicalbyte 11y ago
      Buy new, or get them from people you trust.
  - jtheory 11y ago
    Yeah, this as well! Cultivate relationships with friends/family who have good taste, and kids 2 years older than yours or so. ;) This is pretty easy, actually... people also actively want to get rid of clothes rather than store them; and young kids in particular fly through clothes much faster than they can wear them out. About other stuff -- my wife & I were stubborn about avoiding all of the "default" baby purchases unless we really felt we needed them. No value judgement intended on people who buy e.g., strollers! Sometimes a stroller would have been pretty handy... But we wanted to travel a lot with our kids, light, so we needed lightweight habits at home first. So: no upgrade from the 2-door hatchback (though we did spring for good carseats). No strollers; we learned a few good ways to tie a sling instead. No separate kids' rooms (and no furnishings and decorations of such rooms). No crib. No disposable diapers (we broke this rule for compostable diapers at night when each child was over 6 months or so... more pee to absorb... and much of the time when traveling). Potty-training quite early (from a few months old) with no deadlines or pressure, etc.; that worked out pretty well. No bottles, no sippy cups. (Yes to small cutlery, though). We did use cheap glasses when they graduated from nursing to drinking from glasses, and lost a 2-3 per child as expected. The girls learned not to let them fall. Toys: we bought very few and still ended up with a ton; family & friends give gifts, and they'd be sad if you told them to just stop. So we just tried to avoid electronic "made to be broken" stuff, generally. Books: we have tons of books. No intention of reining this one in!
knughit 11y ago
Having upper middle class children is expensive. For most of world and history, having children was cheap. We have thrown away the community structures that supported childrearing
douche 11y ago
Most educated 20-something couples will also have the equivalent of a hefty mortgage payment dedicated to servicing their educational loans. Take a considerable chunk off the top for that, and then it becomes harder to establish the savings necessary to make a down payment on a home, which locks our couple into renting, at rates that are commonly well above what the mortgage payment would be, without the benefit of building equity in the property. Moreover, to earn the kind of money to service those loan payments, our couple has to abandon their local social networks that might be able to assist with childcare, shared resources, etc, and move to a different area with more competitive wages, or possibly just an area where employment is possible, which results in yet higher costs of living. Throw in parents and family that have the attitude that they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and so their children ought to be able to as well, ignoring the fact that when they got their education, it was possible to earn enough money working in a summer to cover their tuition and living expenses for the rest of the year. Or that it used to be possible to earn a middle-class income with no education beyond high school. It's kind of a vicious circle.
- vram22 11y ago
  >when they got their education, it was possible to earn enough money working in a summer to cover their tuition and living expenses for the rest of the year. Or that it used to be possible to earn a middle-class income with no education beyond high school. Talking about the US or EU, I guess? Any idea why it was that way, back then (also, when was "then"?) and not so now?
  - douche 11y ago
    I was speaking on the US, and the difference between the experience of Millennials vs the Boomer parents. It seems like runaway costs, more than anything. Tuition and room and board have nearly quadrupled[1], while the amount of money that it is possible to earn in the kind of low-level, part-time work that a college student is capable of fitting in has sort of stagnated. I was able to earn $5-6k over the course of a summer working, which isn't a whole lot different than what my father, for instance, was able to earn in his summers in the 70s. That might pay my tuition for part of one term, whereas it paid his whole year. Meanwhile, housing costs have rocketed up as well, and the price of gas was $4/gallon, rather than $.50. [1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-and-fees-and-room-and-board-over-time-1975-76-2015-16-selected-years http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-table...
HillRat 11y ago
This, too many times over. My wife and I are older parents, and despite our highly privileged income stratum I'm still shocked at the costs of parenthood (and we're still several years off having to pay $25-30K/year for private school). Meanwhile, some of my wife's youngest (early 20s) employees are starting to have kids while dealing with relatively low salaries, overwhelming student debt, and high levels of employment instability. I have no idea how they'll do it and, if we want to consider ourselves a decent society, we should have support mechanisms in place to help them do it.

obvithrow1910 11y ago

The other replier gives good reasons, but it's worth considering why things have gotten this way. If one parent wasn't working, all the money spent on daycare wouldn't be an issue -- the other parent just takes care of the child. Why do both parents have to work? Because you can't afford a house somewhere where you'd want to raise kids without. Why can't you afford a house without both parents working? Because dual-income households drove up this housing stock to absolute boundary of affordability. This is basically the thesis of Elizabeth Warren's "The Two-Income Trap". See here [1] for a good synopsis. It's a shame that so many of the children of these educated mothers are going to be autistic because of advanced maternal age. Not so good for our future. [1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-income-trap/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/28/book-review-the-two-inc...

pjc50 11y ago
I upvoted you before I got to "going to be autistic because of advanced maternal age" - I'm going to have to ask for a citation there, as the etiology of autism is not well advanced and we're still recovering from the last guy who blamed it on vaccines.
rayiner 11y ago
Eh. It's also: what the heck do you do after the kids are older and don't need nor want full time care? Most people still have half their working lives left, but are permanently off the career track. There are lots of people who could easily afford to take off 5-6 years when their kids are little but don't because it's career suicide.