7 ms·

How can families afford children?

45 points by jeffreyrogers 9y ago

purplezooey 9y ago
In the west, we need a lot more housing, roads, and trains. These could be doubled and it wouldn't be enough. We need a large government intervention on the scale of a Manhattan Project.
jawns 9y ago
It used to be that having a large number of children was more important to your family's survival. Childhood mortality was higher, and children often contributed to the family business. My dad was one of 11 born to a farming family, and the kids were expected to help operate the farm. I happen to know a bunch of large families (7+ kids), and I think the common thread among them is: * The choice to be open to more children into the family, whether by birth, adoption, or fostering, is not primarily because they perceived themselves to have extra free time or extra resources, but because they had more love to give. Which is not to say that families who have fewer are less loving, or that material circumstances don't factor into the decision. But it seems like the families I know recognized that they could parent more children, and give them all sufficient love and care, and that was the motivating factor. * They tend not to have highly scheduled, highly involved kids -- and the kids turn out just fine. * There are increased costs as the number of children increases. But having, say, six children does not cost twice as much as having three.
- cwbrandsma 9y ago
  I have 5 kids. As you say, there are a lot of things we don't do. There are not individual sports that we rush one kid to and then another for different kid. Often we pick full family activities, like swimming (or swim team) where 2-3 kids can all participate together, and the other kids can still have fun. We also don't live in a high cost-of-living area, so housing costs are [somewhat] low. Also child care, we made the decision early on that my wife would stay home with the kids. She couldn't earn enough for us to afford child care anyway. So this was the cheaper option. That also affords her more time to work on food prep as well, so we don't eat out much at all.
  - ppeetteerr 9y ago
    Curious why you wanted 5 kids. Seems like a large number these days.
    - aantix 9y ago
      I'm not the OP that you were asking, but I do want to chime in. My wife and I make a pretty good team. Even the most tense arguments eventually get resolved with a laugh. We have three boys, we're probably going to have a fourth. We feel we have a lot of love to give. And giving someone life is the ultimate pay-it-forward act of gratitude. My parents did it for me. If I can give a few children life and send them out into the world with a good grounding, my life is a win.
      - mustardo 9y ago
        > And giving someone life is the ultimate pay-it-forward act of gratitude Also likely the worst thing you can do for the environment
    - agensaequivocum 9y ago
      It's not really that many, it only seems so because of the negative attitude in popular culture towards large families. I know many families with 7-14 children. And so far, I have one but I foresee many more in the future and I'm really looking forward to them.
compiler-guy 9y ago
The standards we expect for childrearing are also dramatically higher today than ever before. Previous generations just sent the kids off to play after school, without much attention; they expected kids to be 100% on their own after highschool (and even before); and on and on. Today we expect far more parent involvement than ever before (at least in the US), this makes it comparatively more expensive to raise children now than in years past.
- dazc 9y ago
  'Today we expect far more parent involvement than ever before (at least in the US)...' True also in the UK. As a kid, the normal after-school routine was to walk home, get changed and play out until it was dark. All achieved with minimal contact with parents. Now kids seem to have very little independent time and this, in my opinion, is/will be very much to their detriment in later life.
  - coldacid 9y ago
    The transition from "free-range" kids to the helicopter parenting they experience now also informs a lot of the issues with college and university students being afraid of challenge and ideas they've not already come across. I look at how my brothers and I were raised (in the 80s) and I look at kids born and raised in the 90s, and there's a clear disconnect in attitudes and experiences that can be attributed to whether or not one was constantly supervised and pampered.
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    Is there a trend in the UK of nosy neighbors reporting unsupervised children to the authorities? This has been a disturbing trend[1] in the US that makes it harder to provide kids with independent time, particularly when the person responding to the complaint is guaranteed to be heavily armed. 1: I say trend, though it's probably much less than 1% of the population, but kids are seen by more than 100 adults in a week, and the nosier adults self-select for being more likely to be looking for kids doing something wrong.
    - 9y ago
craig1f 9y ago
"Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families" This is not true. Depending on the wife for income prevents her from focusing on having a large family. Without the assistance of a grandparent or some expensive nanny, this tends to limit the number of children in the family to 2 or 3. Also, women working has driven the price of houses up, so it's difficult to get by with one working parent now. Women have less of a choice to work now, and more of an obligation. This doubling of eligible workers also drives down the salary of everyone, making men pull in less money, further forcing women to work whether they want to or not. Not to mention how expensive large vans/suvs are to actually drive them around.
- euphoria 9y ago
  You and the author are both suggesting that improvements in jobs for women raise the opportunity cost of having large families, yet you are framing it as a refutation.
  - craig1f 9y ago
    Yeah, I read that wrong. Whoops
- lacker 9y ago
  "Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families" This is not true. Depending on the wife for income prevents her from focusing on having a large family. You claim to be disagreeing but I think you are agreeing with that comment. By referring to "opportunity cost", the author means precisely that when a woman works it is harder to have a large family. Not having a job is one opportunity cost of children.
  - aidenn0 9y ago
    I believe that craig1f is claiming that if most women did not work, wages would be higher for those women that do work (due to reduced labor supply), so increased labor participation for women has lowered the opportunity cost compared to a hypothetical world in which women work.
ppeetteerr 9y ago
Maybe the Norwegian model/Canadian model is a good example (not that it's increasing fertility, but it's improving affordability). We have: - Subsidized daycare - Subsidized education - 1.5 year maternity leave - Subsidies for families with children under a certain income bracket It's affordable, but couples in western countries don't really want more children (just under 2 is the average)
- pvelagal 9y ago
  I wonder if the Canadian model of 1.5 years of maternity leave is a must for humanity's survival in the long term. IMHO (without much research) i see many women who have no choice but to feed formula milk to their babies (at daycares) as they are not around to breastfeed. Now i read somewhere that without breastfeeding the baby enough the women's body generates lesser and lesser breastmilk. But, Doctors always recommend breastfeeding as it gives maximum immunity to the baby. In the absence of a proper/sufficient maternal leave (like the Canadian one), i wonder if the next generations of humans become less and less immune to diseases.
- colmvp 9y ago
  > It's affordable, but couples in western countries don't really want more children (just under 2 is the average) I was looking at how many contraceptions and items my friends bought for their newborn ranging from things related to feeding/sleeping/playing. And that's not including the highest expenses, namely shelter/transportation/food. I thought to myself, my goodness how did we ever raise children in previous millennia? Anecdotally it feels like it's becoming more and more expensive to have children. I'm fairly well-off myself, and I would probably be fine with just one child, if any.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > I was looking at how many contraceptions and items my friends bought for their newborn “Contraceptions” for a newborn seems a bit...premature.
    - votepaunchy 9y ago
andy_adams 9y ago
The article focuses on very utilitarian ways of thinking of a family, which is a sad way to look at kids. I know lots of large families - many who are extremely poor - who are the happiest people I know. The difference being that they've made their family their source of joy, and don't look somewhere else to find fulfillment. I'm writing this in case someone reads this article and thinks "well, the math doesn't support having children, so I won't". There's a _lot_ more to kids than financial calculation.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  The author is not as utilitarian as he appears, but you have to be familiar with him and his prior writing to realize this, so I can see why you'd think that.
- ppeetteerr 9y ago
  I can only imagine that those couples with a lot of children find happiness in having many. It's not that large families make people the happiest. Just want to clarify in case some depressed person thinks they will cure their depression with many, many kids.
- henrikschroder 9y ago
  > "well, the math doesn't support having children, so I won't" The thing is that that's not how it works. It's not the case that everyone first does the math, and then the rational decision. But what does happen is that a lot of families, all over the place, make the individual choice of "we'd love to, but we can't afford another kid". And in aggregate, that leads to lower birth rates across society. And if society makes it cheaper to have kids, the birth rate goes up.
sudhirj 9y ago
This is re. India, but might also apply to other developing countries - public school is not an option. Because the public school system is so abysmal, it is used mostly by the very poor who have no other choice. Sending your kids to private schools is a fundamental aspiration, one that is realized even with single mothers who work as maids / domestic help. This point along puts a huge cost on having children, even for people below or just around the poverty line. When sex was the only recreation option available with no known birth control methods, lots of kids was the norm. That has changed now, though. People at all levels of society know that raising a child with an semblance of upward mobility is expensive, and logarithmically so - the good private schools are 10X more expensive than the regular ones, with the international schools going to 100X. Breaking the norms is difficult, but it looks like the country is already tending towards a voluntary one child policy, at least for any parents that hope their children will live better than they did.
bmcusick 9y ago
Globally, the main thing is that married families have transitioned from small farm cooperatives (where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house) to market-based work for both of them. The problem with market based work is that it's usually incompatible with keeping one eye on small children, unlike the household chores of a farm. Also, kids are pure burdens until they can join the market themselves, whereas farm kids could help collect eggs and feed chickens starting pretty young. In America at least the cost disease of education, housing, and healthcare all make it worse, but the first part is the primary culprit. And I'm not sure there's any fix for it besides long parental leaves and subsidized childcare.
- TremendousJudge 9y ago
  >where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house Back in the day, everyone worked the fields. The men, the women, and the children. Especially in times of harvest, the more hands, the better
- xyzzyz 9y ago
  Back in the day, in the farming days, people still had only 2 children on average survive to the adulthood — the population growth only really took off after industrial revolution. The biggest problem back then was that having more than 2 children impoverished them in the long run — it ensured that each kid had less land to farm than their parents. If you kept having above replacement fertility rate for a while, after a few generations the descendants had no land to farm, and with few alternatives afforded by technology-less society, this meant absolute poverty and starvation.
- bryanlarsen 9y ago
  As somebody who collected eggs and fed pigs at a very young age, it would have been much faster and more efficient for Dad to do it himself. :)
  - bmcusick 9y ago
    Buddy, may I introduce you to the concept of comparative advantage? :-)
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
This article claims a lot of things and assumes many more. I think "affording" children has never been the primary goal of folks having children. Most folks aren't all that good at predicting what it will cost to raise a child or three. Some costs aren't as much with multiple children (used clothing, for example, or sharing rooms makes housing more affordable). Others are higher, such as child care and food costs. Some things are improved if one parent stays home. I think the main thing that drives folks to have smaller or larger families is desire to do so rather than costs themselves. Oddly enough, education can help as well, if you are in a country that thinks it needs more or less children in total. I find it appalling that it is socially unacceptable in many places for the man to stay home while the woman works. If my immigration status didn't depend on my husband working and we were at all keen on having children at all, I'd work while he stayed home with children. I'm not sure jobs are any more satisfying, as it is a difficult thing to compare. Many parts of the world simply didn't allow women the same sort of opportunities as men 100 or 150 years ago. Some didn't 40-50 years ago. I got turned down for a job 20 years ago because "females just couldn't do the work required". We also don't actually need large families any longer, not like we did in the past. Between better infant mortality rates, better survival of giving birth, and birth control, and the financial reasons given earlier, it really isn't as necessary. It's OK to do, but it should be a choice. I think society should have laws allowing maternity and paternity leave and time to tend to the children. This should include a parent staying home... at least until the child is in school and/or mature enough to spend some time alone. In so many places, this is missing. There are opportunity costs if someone has multiple children, though. What chances does a woman have to be CEO if she also wants 5 children in a 10-year time frame? If she takes the proper time off for both her pregnancy and infant care, it becomes difficult. This can be worked around with strong paternal leave policies: After all, once a woman is healed enough to do her job, she doesn't need to be the one staying at home. It also puts the opportunity costs on both sexes.
- jeffreyrogers 9y ago
  There's some evidence that when women start to out-earn their husbands they divorce at higher rates. Whether biological or social (and probably a bit of both), there is an expectation that men contribute more financially than women do, which explains a lot of why men work more after having children than women do. Plus, women obviously invest more in having children than men do.
snowwrestler 9y ago
There is another way to look at children, which is from the societal level. New humans are still the most important inputs to human society. As societies become more specialized and productive, the powers and burdens of new humans go up. Thus, richer societies need fewer people, but each person needs to be more specialized and capable. And inversely, a society that is not producing new humans who are more specialized and capable, is a society that will have trouble advancing. Evaluating public policy from this perspective produces some different conclusions than the more traditional family-oriented perspective which is often used to look at policies related to children. Policies that empower women professionally and reproductively mean that only women who affirmatively choose to have children will have them--increasing the chance that they will have the means and will to invest heavily in each child. And policies that give each child the chance to maximize their potential can be seen as long-term investments, not handouts. Conversely, policies that permit or force children to develop sub-optimally are wastes that should be eliminated. Today many societies promote policies that encourage procreation (no access to sex education or contraception, incentives for more kids), but don't invest in children (no early childhood education, bad primary and secondary education, poor health care, poor food programs, etc.). If someone bought a car but refused to pay for gas and oil changes, you would probably say they are making some damn bad decisions. Either maintain the car, or if you can't afford to do that, don't get one until you can. Traditionally, the analogous kid blame game has fallen on the parents themselves. But parents are part of a larger society, and ultimately, given an ~80 year life span, will only manage about 25% of a new human life. Society will manage the other 75%, but in a lot of ways, our thinking about policy has not caught up to that reality.
- fredmorcos 9y ago
  This is gold! Thank you! :D
- jl6 9y ago
  I’m not going to disagree with your overall thesis, but there is something I find oppressive about the idea that society manages 75% of your life, rather than managing your own life during adulthood.
bobthechef 9y ago
Actually, I recall reading or hearing somewhere that the negative correlation between income and number of kids mostly applies to consumerist societies, which is what much of the West has become. I can't find the source ATM, so if you know, please post.
achou 9y ago
Demographic decline seems almost inevitable given our economic system, sans immigration. I'm a parent in SF. The cost of housing and availability of quality care (day care, nanny), and schools are definitely factors among the parent community here in deciding not to have more children. Many of the parents I know are doing well financially (they must be to be raising kids in SF), so I get to see the non-financial reasons for smaller families. One that's pretty important: quality of life. The opportunity cost of having children is about much more than money. The options for doing things you enjoy are hugely greater today than in the past. Fancy restaurants, sports events, cruises, gaming, live music, Netflix, social media. World travel. Rewarding work. You name it. The world has become much better and better at providing things that people enjoy spending their time and money on. Having children not only reduces the money you have to enjoy these things, it puts a huge damper on your time, and freedom to do so. Sure, you could go to that cool new restaurant with your young children. But it's a completely different experience than going without them -- so much so that it veers into negative utility. For some people enjoying family life and kids is more valuable than all of the other stuff combined. But as the world gets better and better at giving people alternatives to spend their time/money/freedom on that they enjoy, having more children will become less and less attractive for more and more people. Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates That's not paradoxical; strong social support networks have been known for a long time to produce reduced birthrates; the usual explanation for which is that it is because a significant reason people have children is as a form of do-it-yourself social insurance, especially for old-age support. Overall, “its too expensive to have kids” isn't the reason the US birthrate is lower than the past; if it was, birthrates would be higher in the upper income segments and lower among the poor, but it's exactly the opposite.
kevinmqaz 9y ago
Affording kids is all about choices. My wife and I have 4 kids under 7, and she does not work. We lived in Seattle last year and moved to Dublin Ireland in August. We have zero debt, own a house in the states and rent in Ireland. We don’t own cars in Ireland as they don’t honor the US license and I don’t want to do drivers ed again. Since moving here in August we went from zero in checking to an average daily balance of 10k last month; based only on my income here in Ireland of about 90k a year taxed at 42%. In that time we’ve paid for flights and trips for 6 to London ( we all got sick and had to ball none refundable lame), Barcelona ( 4 nights), Berlin ( 4 nights), London again ( booked 4 nights in May money already out of the account) and the big one back to the states this month @ 3k in tickets. We don’t eat out much, we don’t owe anyone / pay interest, we don’t spend money on things we don’t need that don’t a provide a good ROI. We’d rather walk around and explore a city then take a tour and pay to stand in line some where, we cut our own hair, shop at thrift stores or sales, Read we are frugal. Even in the states wife did not work. In the states our cars were paid for in cash, we had no credit card debit, and we built our own house with our own bare hands out of cash; it took 3+ years and we lived in a fifth wheel with 2-3 kids for part of it, but it was all paid for. We made the choices to have kids, and we worked out how to afford our choice and how to be happy. Why four kids — We watched the intro to idiocracy a few too man times and decided we needed to have more vs fewer kids to combat Clevon. We’d have more kids but we hit 40 this year and that was our stop having kids cut off. Spend 700$ a month on car payment, 500$ on month on eating out, 500$ a month on amazon, 2000$ on a house payment, buy alcohol and other vices for hundreds a month, ETC and shit adds up fast and you wonder how you can even afford yourself. Don’t have a car payment, or house payment, eat out less, don’t drink and smoke and the numbers are completely different. We have a huge rent payment in Ireland that was the biggest hit moving here. Going from paying property taxes to 2800 a month in rent hurt. But we rented a huge house and rent a room out for 600 a month; which helps off set costs. The house is walking distance to work, grocery, train, and kids school – the higher rent facilities the no care life style. We could live further out and pay half the rent but we would need 2 cars. We chose higher rent over cars.

45 points by jeffreyrogers 9y ago

In the west, we need a lot more housing, roads, and trains. These could be doubled and it wouldn't be enough. We need a large government intervention on the scale of a Manhattan Project.

jawns 9y ago

It used to be that having a large number of children was more important to your family's survival. Childhood mortality was higher, and children often contributed to the family business. My dad was one of 11 born to a farming family, and the kids were expected to help operate the farm. I happen to know a bunch of large families (7+ kids), and I think the common thread among them is: * The choice to be open to more children into the family, whether by birth, adoption, or fostering, is not primarily because they perceived themselves to have extra free time or extra resources, but because they had more love to give. Which is not to say that families who have fewer are less loving, or that material circumstances don't factor into the decision. But it seems like the families I know recognized that they could parent more children, and give them all sufficient love and care, and that was the motivating factor. * They tend not to have highly scheduled, highly involved kids -- and the kids turn out just fine. * There are increased costs as the number of children increases. But having, say, six children does not cost twice as much as having three.

cwbrandsma 9y ago
I have 5 kids. As you say, there are a lot of things we don't do. There are not individual sports that we rush one kid to and then another for different kid. Often we pick full family activities, like swimming (or swim team) where 2-3 kids can all participate together, and the other kids can still have fun. We also don't live in a high cost-of-living area, so housing costs are [somewhat] low. Also child care, we made the decision early on that my wife would stay home with the kids. She couldn't earn enough for us to afford child care anyway. So this was the cheaper option. That also affords her more time to work on food prep as well, so we don't eat out much at all.
- ppeetteerr 9y ago
  Curious why you wanted 5 kids. Seems like a large number these days.
  - aantix 9y ago
    I'm not the OP that you were asking, but I do want to chime in. My wife and I make a pretty good team. Even the most tense arguments eventually get resolved with a laugh. We have three boys, we're probably going to have a fourth. We feel we have a lot of love to give. And giving someone life is the ultimate pay-it-forward act of gratitude. My parents did it for me. If I can give a few children life and send them out into the world with a good grounding, my life is a win.
    - mustardo 9y ago
      > And giving someone life is the ultimate pay-it-forward act of gratitude Also likely the worst thing you can do for the environment
  - agensaequivocum 9y ago
    It's not really that many, it only seems so because of the negative attitude in popular culture towards large families. I know many families with 7-14 children. And so far, I have one but I foresee many more in the future and I'm really looking forward to them.

compiler-guy 9y ago

The standards we expect for childrearing are also dramatically higher today than ever before. Previous generations just sent the kids off to play after school, without much attention; they expected kids to be 100% on their own after highschool (and even before); and on and on. Today we expect far more parent involvement than ever before (at least in the US), this makes it comparatively more expensive to raise children now than in years past.

dazc 9y ago
'Today we expect far more parent involvement than ever before (at least in the US)...' True also in the UK. As a kid, the normal after-school routine was to walk home, get changed and play out until it was dark. All achieved with minimal contact with parents. Now kids seem to have very little independent time and this, in my opinion, is/will be very much to their detriment in later life.
- coldacid 9y ago
  The transition from "free-range" kids to the helicopter parenting they experience now also informs a lot of the issues with college and university students being afraid of challenge and ideas they've not already come across. I look at how my brothers and I were raised (in the 80s) and I look at kids born and raised in the 90s, and there's a clear disconnect in attitudes and experiences that can be attributed to whether or not one was constantly supervised and pampered.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  Is there a trend in the UK of nosy neighbors reporting unsupervised children to the authorities? This has been a disturbing trend[1] in the US that makes it harder to provide kids with independent time, particularly when the person responding to the complaint is guaranteed to be heavily armed. 1: I say trend, though it's probably much less than 1% of the population, but kids are seen by more than 100 adults in a week, and the nosier adults self-select for being more likely to be looking for kids doing something wrong.
  - 9y ago

craig1f 9y ago

"Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families" This is not true. Depending on the wife for income prevents her from focusing on having a large family. Without the assistance of a grandparent or some expensive nanny, this tends to limit the number of children in the family to 2 or 3. Also, women working has driven the price of houses up, so it's difficult to get by with one working parent now. Women have less of a choice to work now, and more of an obligation. This doubling of eligible workers also drives down the salary of everyone, making men pull in less money, further forcing women to work whether they want to or not. Not to mention how expensive large vans/suvs are to actually drive them around.

euphoria 9y ago
You and the author are both suggesting that improvements in jobs for women raise the opportunity cost of having large families, yet you are framing it as a refutation.
- craig1f 9y ago
  Yeah, I read that wrong. Whoops
lacker 9y ago
"Jobs for women are higher-paying and more satisfying than ever before, and that raises the opportunity cost of having large families" This is not true. Depending on the wife for income prevents her from focusing on having a large family. You claim to be disagreeing but I think you are agreeing with that comment. By referring to "opportunity cost", the author means precisely that when a woman works it is harder to have a large family. Not having a job is one opportunity cost of children.
- aidenn0 9y ago
  I believe that craig1f is claiming that if most women did not work, wages would be higher for those women that do work (due to reduced labor supply), so increased labor participation for women has lowered the opportunity cost compared to a hypothetical world in which women work.

ppeetteerr 9y ago

Maybe the Norwegian model/Canadian model is a good example (not that it's increasing fertility, but it's improving affordability). We have: - Subsidized daycare - Subsidized education - 1.5 year maternity leave - Subsidies for families with children under a certain income bracket It's affordable, but couples in western countries don't really want more children (just under 2 is the average)

pvelagal 9y ago
I wonder if the Canadian model of 1.5 years of maternity leave is a must for humanity's survival in the long term. IMHO (without much research) i see many women who have no choice but to feed formula milk to their babies (at daycares) as they are not around to breastfeed. Now i read somewhere that without breastfeeding the baby enough the women's body generates lesser and lesser breastmilk. But, Doctors always recommend breastfeeding as it gives maximum immunity to the baby. In the absence of a proper/sufficient maternal leave (like the Canadian one), i wonder if the next generations of humans become less and less immune to diseases.
colmvp 9y ago
> It's affordable, but couples in western countries don't really want more children (just under 2 is the average) I was looking at how many contraceptions and items my friends bought for their newborn ranging from things related to feeding/sleeping/playing. And that's not including the highest expenses, namely shelter/transportation/food. I thought to myself, my goodness how did we ever raise children in previous millennia? Anecdotally it feels like it's becoming more and more expensive to have children. I'm fairly well-off myself, and I would probably be fine with just one child, if any.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I was looking at how many contraceptions and items my friends bought for their newborn “Contraceptions” for a newborn seems a bit...premature.
  - votepaunchy 9y ago

andy_adams 9y ago

The article focuses on very utilitarian ways of thinking of a family, which is a sad way to look at kids. I know lots of large families - many who are extremely poor - who are the happiest people I know. The difference being that they've made their family their source of joy, and don't look somewhere else to find fulfillment. I'm writing this in case someone reads this article and thinks "well, the math doesn't support having children, so I won't". There's a _lot_ more to kids than financial calculation.

jeffreyrogers 9y ago
The author is not as utilitarian as he appears, but you have to be familiar with him and his prior writing to realize this, so I can see why you'd think that.
ppeetteerr 9y ago
I can only imagine that those couples with a lot of children find happiness in having many. It's not that large families make people the happiest. Just want to clarify in case some depressed person thinks they will cure their depression with many, many kids.
henrikschroder 9y ago
> "well, the math doesn't support having children, so I won't" The thing is that that's not how it works. It's not the case that everyone first does the math, and then the rational decision. But what does happen is that a lot of families, all over the place, make the individual choice of "we'd love to, but we can't afford another kid". And in aggregate, that leads to lower birth rates across society. And if society makes it cheaper to have kids, the birth rate goes up.

sudhirj 9y ago

This is re. India, but might also apply to other developing countries - public school is not an option. Because the public school system is so abysmal, it is used mostly by the very poor who have no other choice. Sending your kids to private schools is a fundamental aspiration, one that is realized even with single mothers who work as maids / domestic help. This point along puts a huge cost on having children, even for people below or just around the poverty line. When sex was the only recreation option available with no known birth control methods, lots of kids was the norm. That has changed now, though. People at all levels of society know that raising a child with an semblance of upward mobility is expensive, and logarithmically so - the good private schools are 10X more expensive than the regular ones, with the international schools going to 100X. Breaking the norms is difficult, but it looks like the country is already tending towards a voluntary one child policy, at least for any parents that hope their children will live better than they did.

bmcusick 9y ago

Globally, the main thing is that married families have transitioned from small farm cooperatives (where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house) to market-based work for both of them. The problem with market based work is that it's usually incompatible with keeping one eye on small children, unlike the household chores of a farm. Also, kids are pure burdens until they can join the market themselves, whereas farm kids could help collect eggs and feed chickens starting pretty young. In America at least the cost disease of education, housing, and healthcare all make it worse, but the first part is the primary culprit. And I'm not sure there's any fix for it besides long parental leaves and subsidized childcare.

TremendousJudge 9y ago
>where the husband works the fields and the wife in the house Back in the day, everyone worked the fields. The men, the women, and the children. Especially in times of harvest, the more hands, the better
xyzzyz 9y ago
Back in the day, in the farming days, people still had only 2 children on average survive to the adulthood — the population growth only really took off after industrial revolution. The biggest problem back then was that having more than 2 children impoverished them in the long run — it ensured that each kid had less land to farm than their parents. If you kept having above replacement fertility rate for a while, after a few generations the descendants had no land to farm, and with few alternatives afforded by technology-less society, this meant absolute poverty and starvation.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
As somebody who collected eggs and fed pigs at a very young age, it would have been much faster and more efficient for Dad to do it himself. :)
- bmcusick 9y ago
  Buddy, may I introduce you to the concept of comparative advantage? :-)

Broken_Hippo 9y ago

This article claims a lot of things and assumes many more. I think "affording" children has never been the primary goal of folks having children. Most folks aren't all that good at predicting what it will cost to raise a child or three. Some costs aren't as much with multiple children (used clothing, for example, or sharing rooms makes housing more affordable). Others are higher, such as child care and food costs. Some things are improved if one parent stays home. I think the main thing that drives folks to have smaller or larger families is desire to do so rather than costs themselves. Oddly enough, education can help as well, if you are in a country that thinks it needs more or less children in total. I find it appalling that it is socially unacceptable in many places for the man to stay home while the woman works. If my immigration status didn't depend on my husband working and we were at all keen on having children at all, I'd work while he stayed home with children. I'm not sure jobs are any more satisfying, as it is a difficult thing to compare. Many parts of the world simply didn't allow women the same sort of opportunities as men 100 or 150 years ago. Some didn't 40-50 years ago. I got turned down for a job 20 years ago because "females just couldn't do the work required". We also don't actually need large families any longer, not like we did in the past. Between better infant mortality rates, better survival of giving birth, and birth control, and the financial reasons given earlier, it really isn't as necessary. It's OK to do, but it should be a choice. I think society should have laws allowing maternity and paternity leave and time to tend to the children. This should include a parent staying home... at least until the child is in school and/or mature enough to spend some time alone. In so many places, this is missing. There are opportunity costs if someone has multiple children, though. What chances does a woman have to be CEO if she also wants 5 children in a 10-year time frame? If she takes the proper time off for both her pregnancy and infant care, it becomes difficult. This can be worked around with strong paternal leave policies: After all, once a woman is healed enough to do her job, she doesn't need to be the one staying at home. It also puts the opportunity costs on both sexes.

jeffreyrogers 9y ago
There's some evidence that when women start to out-earn their husbands they divorce at higher rates. Whether biological or social (and probably a bit of both), there is an expectation that men contribute more financially than women do, which explains a lot of why men work more after having children than women do. Plus, women obviously invest more in having children than men do.

snowwrestler 9y ago

There is another way to look at children, which is from the societal level. New humans are still the most important inputs to human society. As societies become more specialized and productive, the powers and burdens of new humans go up. Thus, richer societies need fewer people, but each person needs to be more specialized and capable. And inversely, a society that is not producing new humans who are more specialized and capable, is a society that will have trouble advancing. Evaluating public policy from this perspective produces some different conclusions than the more traditional family-oriented perspective which is often used to look at policies related to children. Policies that empower women professionally and reproductively mean that only women who affirmatively choose to have children will have them--increasing the chance that they will have the means and will to invest heavily in each child. And policies that give each child the chance to maximize their potential can be seen as long-term investments, not handouts. Conversely, policies that permit or force children to develop sub-optimally are wastes that should be eliminated. Today many societies promote policies that encourage procreation (no access to sex education or contraception, incentives for more kids), but don't invest in children (no early childhood education, bad primary and secondary education, poor health care, poor food programs, etc.). If someone bought a car but refused to pay for gas and oil changes, you would probably say they are making some damn bad decisions. Either maintain the car, or if you can't afford to do that, don't get one until you can. Traditionally, the analogous kid blame game has fallen on the parents themselves. But parents are part of a larger society, and ultimately, given an ~80 year life span, will only manage about 25% of a new human life. Society will manage the other 75%, but in a lot of ways, our thinking about policy has not caught up to that reality.

fredmorcos 9y ago
This is gold! Thank you! :D
jl6 9y ago
I’m not going to disagree with your overall thesis, but there is something I find oppressive about the idea that society manages 75% of your life, rather than managing your own life during adulthood.

bobthechef 9y ago

Actually, I recall reading or hearing somewhere that the negative correlation between income and number of kids mostly applies to consumerist societies, which is what much of the West has become. I can't find the source ATM, so if you know, please post.

achou 9y ago

Demographic decline seems almost inevitable given our economic system, sans immigration. I'm a parent in SF. The cost of housing and availability of quality care (day care, nanny), and schools are definitely factors among the parent community here in deciding not to have more children. Many of the parents I know are doing well financially (they must be to be raising kids in SF), so I get to see the non-financial reasons for smaller families. One that's pretty important: quality of life. The opportunity cost of having children is about much more than money. The options for doing things you enjoy are hugely greater today than in the past. Fancy restaurants, sports events, cruises, gaming, live music, Netflix, social media. World travel. Rewarding work. You name it. The world has become much better and better at providing things that people enjoy spending their time and money on. Having children not only reduces the money you have to enjoy these things, it puts a huge damper on your time, and freedom to do so. Sure, you could go to that cool new restaurant with your young children. But it's a completely different experience than going without them -- so much so that it veers into negative utility. For some people enjoying family life and kids is more valuable than all of the other stuff combined. But as the world gets better and better at giving people alternatives to spend their time/money/freedom on that they enjoy, having more children will become less and less attractive for more and more people. Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates That's not paradoxical; strong social support networks have been known for a long time to produce reduced birthrates; the usual explanation for which is that it is because a significant reason people have children is as a form of do-it-yourself social insurance, especially for old-age support. Overall, “its too expensive to have kids” isn't the reason the US birthrate is lower than the past; if it was, birthrates would be higher in the upper income segments and lower among the poor, but it's exactly the opposite.

kevinmqaz 9y ago

Affording kids is all about choices. My wife and I have 4 kids under 7, and she does not work. We lived in Seattle last year and moved to Dublin Ireland in August. We have zero debt, own a house in the states and rent in Ireland. We don’t own cars in Ireland as they don’t honor the US license and I don’t want to do drivers ed again. Since moving here in August we went from zero in checking to an average daily balance of 10k last month; based only on my income here in Ireland of about 90k a year taxed at 42%. In that time we’ve paid for flights and trips for 6 to London ( we all got sick and had to ball none refundable lame), Barcelona ( 4 nights), Berlin ( 4 nights), London again ( booked 4 nights in May money already out of the account) and the big one back to the states this month @ 3k in tickets. We don’t eat out much, we don’t owe anyone / pay interest, we don’t spend money on things we don’t need that don’t a provide a good ROI. We’d rather walk around and explore a city then take a tour and pay to stand in line some where, we cut our own hair, shop at thrift stores or sales, Read we are frugal. Even in the states wife did not work. In the states our cars were paid for in cash, we had no credit card debit, and we built our own house with our own bare hands out of cash; it took 3+ years and we lived in a fifth wheel with 2-3 kids for part of it, but it was all paid for. We made the choices to have kids, and we worked out how to afford our choice and how to be happy. Why four kids — We watched the intro to idiocracy a few too man times and decided we needed to have more vs fewer kids to combat Clevon. We’d have more kids but we hit 40 this year and that was our stop having kids cut off. Spend 700$ a month on car payment, 500$ on month on eating out, 500$ a month on amazon, 2000$ on a house payment, buy alcohol and other vices for hundreds a month, ETC and shit adds up fast and you wonder how you can even afford yourself. Don’t have a car payment, or house payment, eat out less, don’t drink and smoke and the numbers are completely different. We have a huge rent payment in Ireland that was the biggest hit moving here. Going from paying property taxes to 2800 a month in rent hurt. But we rented a huge house and rent a room out for 600 a month; which helps off set costs. The house is walking distance to work, grocery, train, and kids school – the higher rent facilities the no care life style. We could live further out and pay half the rent but we would need 2 cars. We chose higher rent over cars.