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> Then there are the free services. Ms. Palmer, who is 39 and lives near Washington, D.C., said that the free 20 to 25 hours of child care she receives every mo

> Then there are the free services. Ms. Palmer, who is 39 and lives near Washington, D.C., said that the free 20 to 25 hours of child care she receives every month from her parents contributed to her family’s decision to have a third child. If she were to pay a babysitter, Ms. Palmer estimates it would add up to around $6,000 a year. This kinda bugs me, not only because inter-generational child rearing has been the norm for most of history rather than something unique that deadbeat millenials are relying on, but also because it propagates the belief that anything you don't pay for with money is considered "free" (the bad "free", as in "deadbeat" or "moocher"). There's the whole debate that GDP is the wrong measure precisely because it doesn't measure these kinds of "unpaid services", but I prefer to look at it another way: a "livable" city is more than what restaurants and bars are around, but also who your neighbors and social connections are (I've heard this described as alternative forms of capital beyond financial capital like social and cultural capital). It's not that millenials are killing the babysitter industry, it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom.

cflewis 8y ago
"It takes a village" has really bitten for me, I've seen just how bad it is without. Moving to the Bay Area, far away from any parental help, seemed so great when I was 25. Now I have children that I am raising without family help, while trying to do well in my own career, can just be totally emotionally crushing sometimes.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  On top of that, here you can feel like you are working hard day in and day out, and you meet someone just like you, working just as hard, but they have $5M in stock because they worked for the right company at the right time.
  - arethuza 8y ago
    On the other hand, I knew a guy who turned down a job in the Bay Area for family reasons who eventually worked out that the stock he was offered was worth ~$300 million at the peak of the .com bubble. He was very philosophical about it :-)
    - mikepurvis 8y ago
      To be fair, though, how many people were lucky enough to get out right at the peak of the bubble? The more likely scenario is you've invested in that relocation, paying the financial and social costs, and then suddenly it's 2001 and you have no job, no stock, and no community to fall back on. So yeah, a philosophical view is probably wise. :)
      - dustindiamond 8y ago
        Mark Cuban.
  - Shebanator 8y ago
    Well, my wife and I always say that when it came to tech companies, we were "lucky but not that lucky." I worked for one startup whose IPO was filed the day before the bubble burst, and after that had a job offer from pre-IPO Google that I turned down because I figured the stock would be lower than my strike price by the time I could exercise. Oops.
- steve_adams_86 8y ago
  I'm deep in that too, right now. My partner badly wanted one last kid, and knowing we were already resource-tight and having no family around, I was very hesitant. Logistically I knew it would be a disaster but I agreed to it. I love the hell out of this kid, but "totally emotionally crushing" is apt. I'm not new to this, but I can only do so much. Working my job, being a stay at home dad, and having to maintain our relationship (plus my relationship with my son and adopted son) is genuinely outside of my ability. But it's what we have to do here. Expensive city, no connections, 3 kids. I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard, and I can't complain. I'm not. This is just what it takes, and I went into it knowing it would be temporary. Kids get a lot easier as they get older. A lot of things that are worth it in life take a lot of work. I'll feel better in a few years. At the moment I feel like I'm dying. At any rate, here's to things getting easier. I'm sure our hard work will pay off soon enough.
  - cflewis 8y ago
    It's the relationship with the significant other that suffers the most IMHO, and I think most people ignore that bit. You can just about find hours in the day to work a job and get the kids fed and to bed, but then you have < 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow. It feels like mine is on pause until the kids grow old enough to be left to their own devices, taking their own baths, brushing their own teeth, reading their own bedtime stories etc etc.
    - steve_adams_86 8y ago
      > 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow This is very real. Sometimes I sit to do some more work before bed and think wow, I'll finish this... Go to bed... And wake up as early as I can to work some more. Then my son will wake up, and I'll be with him until 6 or so in the evening. While he naps I work more. Rinse and repeat. It's a gauntlet. Things being on pause isn't really a bad thing at all, but it certainly feels bad in the moment. I have two 9 year olds though, and it's true. Eventually they want to read before bed on their own, they want to play on their own during the day, and the pressure is off. There's a lot more time. I also have the luxury that on weekends, during the day my older kids will play with the baby and give me a bit of a break. Sometimes even for an hour or so. It's usually an opportunity to catch up on work, but it's often badly needed and a big relief.
- codekilla 8y ago
  Has anyone worked on creating a 'village' in the bay? Is there any thing like a network where people can watch each other's kids, or take them to activities, to take any pressure off? Like to be a member, you would of course need to have a kid, but instead of payment it's basically a time bartering system. I imagine the kids would benefit from interacting with other kids. I'm sure liability would be a nightmare, but perhaps it could be informal. I myself suffer from this as I have 6 kids, and am thinking about a move to the bay area.
  - nostrademons 8y ago
    You get this through informal channels - basically this is just a group of friends where someone offers to babysit the kids free-of-charge one day when their friend really needs it, and then the friend reciprocates, and they each bring in a few more friends that they know are trustworthy, and so on. I'd imagine thousands of such groups of friends exist (I suspect this is the primary form of support in many immigrant communities), but you wouldn't really hear about them, because it's all word-of-mouth through social connections. My wife and I have certainly done this for our friends, though, and it's come back to us. For more institutionalized settings, there's co-op daycares, but we looked into this and they're largely incompatible with having two working parents since the schedule usually requires volunteering in the middle of the workday.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    This is very hard to pull off, IME. Even when you have a group of friend who all have children (as opposed to 'we all have children who are friends, so now we are de factor friends') it takes a lot of coordination to keep something like that up. And then someone gets sick and days have to be switched and everyone gets grumpy, or someone's mother moves to the area and now doesn't want to be part of the 'informal daycare' group any more (leading to resentment, because the others are left hanging), etc. So the problem is a bit of a prisoners dilemma: you need to be able to rely on this group (having to scramble to find another solution is OK a few times a year, but not 3 times a month), but you also don't want to be 'tied down'. So the alternative is to have lots of rules and required 'volunteering'. Which basically turns into the same as 'real' daycare, except that you have to take the day off to do your 'volunteering' (in the case of 2 working parents). So it's just scrambling to solve all the problems that money is supposed to solve (be a fungible store of value), but while at all costs keeping 'money' out of it. Having been involved with attempts at systems like this, and having observed the problems in a few others, I no longer think it's feasible, at least not for dual income career oriented people. The places where I've seen it (more or less - it wouldn't work as a lifestyle for me) work are of the type of the mommy group of stay-at-home-parents, but those are hardly comparable to real daycare.
dfxm12 8y ago
Yeah, I was going to say, my grandmother took care of me & my sister while my parents, in their 30s, were at work, or if they needed a night out. This was in the 80s, so it's not anything "new" to 30-somethings.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  Same here, my grandmothers and great aunt raised me when my parents had to work. In the late 80s...it’s not uncommon, especially in immigrant families. It is seen as a good thing, not something to be ashamed about.
- treespace8 8y ago
  One of the new things with grandparents today is divorces. Because all of my child’s grandparents are divorced they are not able to retire / and have to work. This prevents them from being able to offer the same kind of child raising assistance as grandparents that stay together.
mikepurvis 8y ago
There's some really good work out there by people looking at how to think about and value these things. I particularly enjoyed these two titles: https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transition/dp/1583943978 https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transit... https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Mattered/dp/0865716730 https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Matte... The first one is (fittingly) available for free online, though my local library also had a copy: http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/ http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/
antisthenes 8y ago
> it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom Boy, if it takes until your 30s to understand that "wisdom", then I weep for my contemporaries. In strong nuclear families with inter-generational ties, it shouldn't take longer than your late teens to realize that parental support is normal at least until you have kids of your own. Having strong ties to your grandparents and parents should be the norm, and I'm very sorry for the Americans that haven't had the peace of mind from having a safety net of their extended families throughout their whole lives. This isn't meant to sound patronizing. Child rearing is one of the most labor intensive activities we have as a species and I for one will be taking all the help I can get.
- grawprog 8y ago
  Well....my mom and grandparents are dead and my dad is worse off financially than me so...not sure what options I really have when it comes to that.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - heavenlyblue 8y ago
    That parent comment is amazing in it’s own sense: how delusional do you have to be to think that what you have there is the norm? I had a friend how is still paying off his mother’s and brother’s living. The kind of thinking that usually comes with the thinking of the parent is along the lines of “he does not have supporting parents then he must be some sort of a badly socialised monster who never had a life”. Well, or maybe it’s you who is a useless child who never grew up on the first place?
    - rayiner 8y ago
      > That parent comment is amazing in it’s own sense: how delusional do you have to be to think that what you have there is the norm? It is the norm. Not having multi-generational family support is a major handicap, but that predicament is not the norm, even among less advantaged people generally.
lm28469 8y ago
Globalisation doesn't help with that. It's now easier than ever to move to a "hot spot", most of the time for work. But no one knows each other, everyone come for "the game" and their career. Social networks and instant messaging gives you the illusion that you still have a community. It's all good in your 20s, when you're in good health, and when it's easy and cheap to make friends. Then you hit your 30s and find out that you don't have any community, everyone moved somewhere else, the city is too expensive for a 2-3 bedrooms flat, and even if you stayed you'd have to work full time (if not overtime), which means you'd need someone else to bring your kids to school and take care of him/her after work, which isn't free. It's a lot like the "get a loan to buy a car, buy a car to go to work, work to pay the loan" analogy. It's not a life, you merely exists for work and pay other people to take care of what used to be the core experience. At the end of the day the only thing you're looking for is a meal and this new netflix show your heard about. The worst part is, as you said, that it's now frown upon to rely on your community because it's "free", and surely you haven't made it if you rely on free things.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  I think what's especially twisted about this situation is the two-sided nature of it. If you come from wealth, it's easy to get into a good school, and your parents can subsidize you while you're launching your career (or outright create a career for you). If you don't come from wealth, and you get to a city, and you start making over $200k, it's hard to even take advantage of it. Instead of having parents to subsidize me, I have parents who are pretty broke and in bad health. How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries? Flip that even further to people who come from really poor countries like India. I can't imagine if my parents were working $1 an hour -- how could I pay $3k in rent? How can you invest thousands of dollars in yourself when your parents don't even make that much in a year? But if you don't make those investments, you're never going to get ahead... It's not just that wealthy millennials have a huge advantage, but coming from a poor family has a HUGE disadvantage in terms of social mobility as well.
  - badfrog 8y ago
markmiro 8y ago
Inter-generational child rearing is an old tradition, but in recent US history wasn't it the case that your parents help you less but also ask less of you (think retirement homes). Maybe the trend of adults relying more on their parents is only a failure if adults aren't expected to take care of their parents later on.
anth_anm 8y ago
So I just shouldn't bother having kids if I don't live in the same city as my parents? That's great. Awesome society.
- softawre 8y ago
  You can do it, but it will just be a lot harder to do. Personally I decided to stay in the Midwest and make 170k instead of 300k, but I have my family, and family matters more to me than an extra 130k in salary.
  - CodeCube 8y ago
    This is why we need more remote work! People need to be able to live where they need (or want) to live for a plethora of reasons ... brains are just as good in the midwest, or in the south, as they are on the coast.
- peruvian 8y ago
  It's a data point you should consider, particularly if baby sitting, nannies, etc. are very expensive in your area. People underestimate how much help one needs in raising kids because a few decades ago the mom would either not work or work an easier/part time job. This still happens in rural or semi rural areas in the US. Nowadays in the city both parents are in 8-9 hour day high intensity jobs. You may have time for your kid, but you have less energy.
ljm 8y ago
I'm not so keen on the description here, but at the same time it's impossible to deny that there are people who take advantage of the good of society while simultaneously decrying it. If we want to talk about moochers and deadbeats we need to stop looking at people in poverty who behave in ways we don't like. It's easy to call them names, but they're doing the best they can with the very little they have. Shift the perspective to huge corps like Walmart, who rake in billions and themselves depend on state welfare to do so. In the UK we call these people 'benefit scroungers', yet their impact on the British way of life is practically zero compared to what those with money can do, to the point where it's a false problem.

cflewis 8y ago

"It takes a village" has really bitten for me, I've seen just how bad it is without. Moving to the Bay Area, far away from any parental help, seemed so great when I was 25. Now I have children that I am raising without family help, while trying to do well in my own career, can just be totally emotionally crushing sometimes.

beamatronic 8y ago
On top of that, here you can feel like you are working hard day in and day out, and you meet someone just like you, working just as hard, but they have $5M in stock because they worked for the right company at the right time.
- arethuza 8y ago
  On the other hand, I knew a guy who turned down a job in the Bay Area for family reasons who eventually worked out that the stock he was offered was worth ~$300 million at the peak of the .com bubble. He was very philosophical about it :-)
  - mikepurvis 8y ago
    To be fair, though, how many people were lucky enough to get out right at the peak of the bubble? The more likely scenario is you've invested in that relocation, paying the financial and social costs, and then suddenly it's 2001 and you have no job, no stock, and no community to fall back on. So yeah, a philosophical view is probably wise. :)
    - dustindiamond 8y ago
      Mark Cuban.
- Shebanator 8y ago
  Well, my wife and I always say that when it came to tech companies, we were "lucky but not that lucky." I worked for one startup whose IPO was filed the day before the bubble burst, and after that had a job offer from pre-IPO Google that I turned down because I figured the stock would be lower than my strike price by the time I could exercise. Oops.
steve_adams_86 8y ago
I'm deep in that too, right now. My partner badly wanted one last kid, and knowing we were already resource-tight and having no family around, I was very hesitant. Logistically I knew it would be a disaster but I agreed to it. I love the hell out of this kid, but "totally emotionally crushing" is apt. I'm not new to this, but I can only do so much. Working my job, being a stay at home dad, and having to maintain our relationship (plus my relationship with my son and adopted son) is genuinely outside of my ability. But it's what we have to do here. Expensive city, no connections, 3 kids. I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard, and I can't complain. I'm not. This is just what it takes, and I went into it knowing it would be temporary. Kids get a lot easier as they get older. A lot of things that are worth it in life take a lot of work. I'll feel better in a few years. At the moment I feel like I'm dying. At any rate, here's to things getting easier. I'm sure our hard work will pay off soon enough.
- cflewis 8y ago
  It's the relationship with the significant other that suffers the most IMHO, and I think most people ignore that bit. You can just about find hours in the day to work a job and get the kids fed and to bed, but then you have < 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow. It feels like mine is on pause until the kids grow old enough to be left to their own devices, taking their own baths, brushing their own teeth, reading their own bedtime stories etc etc.
  - steve_adams_86 8y ago
    > 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow This is very real. Sometimes I sit to do some more work before bed and think wow, I'll finish this... Go to bed... And wake up as early as I can to work some more. Then my son will wake up, and I'll be with him until 6 or so in the evening. While he naps I work more. Rinse and repeat. It's a gauntlet. Things being on pause isn't really a bad thing at all, but it certainly feels bad in the moment. I have two 9 year olds though, and it's true. Eventually they want to read before bed on their own, they want to play on their own during the day, and the pressure is off. There's a lot more time. I also have the luxury that on weekends, during the day my older kids will play with the baby and give me a bit of a break. Sometimes even for an hour or so. It's usually an opportunity to catch up on work, but it's often badly needed and a big relief.
codekilla 8y ago
Has anyone worked on creating a 'village' in the bay? Is there any thing like a network where people can watch each other's kids, or take them to activities, to take any pressure off? Like to be a member, you would of course need to have a kid, but instead of payment it's basically a time bartering system. I imagine the kids would benefit from interacting with other kids. I'm sure liability would be a nightmare, but perhaps it could be informal. I myself suffer from this as I have 6 kids, and am thinking about a move to the bay area.
- nostrademons 8y ago
  You get this through informal channels - basically this is just a group of friends where someone offers to babysit the kids free-of-charge one day when their friend really needs it, and then the friend reciprocates, and they each bring in a few more friends that they know are trustworthy, and so on. I'd imagine thousands of such groups of friends exist (I suspect this is the primary form of support in many immigrant communities), but you wouldn't really hear about them, because it's all word-of-mouth through social connections. My wife and I have certainly done this for our friends, though, and it's come back to us. For more institutionalized settings, there's co-op daycares, but we looked into this and they're largely incompatible with having two working parents since the schedule usually requires volunteering in the middle of the workday.
- roel_v 8y ago
  This is very hard to pull off, IME. Even when you have a group of friend who all have children (as opposed to 'we all have children who are friends, so now we are de factor friends') it takes a lot of coordination to keep something like that up. And then someone gets sick and days have to be switched and everyone gets grumpy, or someone's mother moves to the area and now doesn't want to be part of the 'informal daycare' group any more (leading to resentment, because the others are left hanging), etc. So the problem is a bit of a prisoners dilemma: you need to be able to rely on this group (having to scramble to find another solution is OK a few times a year, but not 3 times a month), but you also don't want to be 'tied down'. So the alternative is to have lots of rules and required 'volunteering'. Which basically turns into the same as 'real' daycare, except that you have to take the day off to do your 'volunteering' (in the case of 2 working parents). So it's just scrambling to solve all the problems that money is supposed to solve (be a fungible store of value), but while at all costs keeping 'money' out of it. Having been involved with attempts at systems like this, and having observed the problems in a few others, I no longer think it's feasible, at least not for dual income career oriented people. The places where I've seen it (more or less - it wouldn't work as a lifestyle for me) work are of the type of the mommy group of stay-at-home-parents, but those are hardly comparable to real daycare.

dfxm12 8y ago

Yeah, I was going to say, my grandmother took care of me & my sister while my parents, in their 30s, were at work, or if they needed a night out. This was in the 80s, so it's not anything "new" to 30-somethings.

0x8BADF00D 8y ago
Same here, my grandmothers and great aunt raised me when my parents had to work. In the late 80s...it’s not uncommon, especially in immigrant families. It is seen as a good thing, not something to be ashamed about.
treespace8 8y ago
One of the new things with grandparents today is divorces. Because all of my child’s grandparents are divorced they are not able to retire / and have to work. This prevents them from being able to offer the same kind of child raising assistance as grandparents that stay together.

mikepurvis 8y ago

There's some really good work out there by people looking at how to think about and value these things. I particularly enjoyed these two titles: https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transition/dp/1583943978 https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transit... https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Mattered/dp/0865716730 https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Matte... The first one is (fittingly) available for free online, though my local library also had a copy: http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/ http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/

antisthenes 8y ago

> it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom Boy, if it takes until your 30s to understand that "wisdom", then I weep for my contemporaries. In strong nuclear families with inter-generational ties, it shouldn't take longer than your late teens to realize that parental support is normal at least until you have kids of your own. Having strong ties to your grandparents and parents should be the norm, and I'm very sorry for the Americans that haven't had the peace of mind from having a safety net of their extended families throughout their whole lives. This isn't meant to sound patronizing. Child rearing is one of the most labor intensive activities we have as a species and I for one will be taking all the help I can get.

grawprog 8y ago
Well....my mom and grandparents are dead and my dad is worse off financially than me so...not sure what options I really have when it comes to that.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- heavenlyblue 8y ago
  That parent comment is amazing in it’s own sense: how delusional do you have to be to think that what you have there is the norm? I had a friend how is still paying off his mother’s and brother’s living. The kind of thinking that usually comes with the thinking of the parent is along the lines of “he does not have supporting parents then he must be some sort of a badly socialised monster who never had a life”. Well, or maybe it’s you who is a useless child who never grew up on the first place?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    > That parent comment is amazing in it’s own sense: how delusional do you have to be to think that what you have there is the norm? It is the norm. Not having multi-generational family support is a major handicap, but that predicament is not the norm, even among less advantaged people generally.

lm28469 8y ago

Globalisation doesn't help with that. It's now easier than ever to move to a "hot spot", most of the time for work. But no one knows each other, everyone come for "the game" and their career. Social networks and instant messaging gives you the illusion that you still have a community. It's all good in your 20s, when you're in good health, and when it's easy and cheap to make friends. Then you hit your 30s and find out that you don't have any community, everyone moved somewhere else, the city is too expensive for a 2-3 bedrooms flat, and even if you stayed you'd have to work full time (if not overtime), which means you'd need someone else to bring your kids to school and take care of him/her after work, which isn't free. It's a lot like the "get a loan to buy a car, buy a car to go to work, work to pay the loan" analogy. It's not a life, you merely exists for work and pay other people to take care of what used to be the core experience. At the end of the day the only thing you're looking for is a meal and this new netflix show your heard about. The worst part is, as you said, that it's now frown upon to rely on your community because it's "free", and surely you haven't made it if you rely on free things.

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
I think what's especially twisted about this situation is the two-sided nature of it. If you come from wealth, it's easy to get into a good school, and your parents can subsidize you while you're launching your career (or outright create a career for you). If you don't come from wealth, and you get to a city, and you start making over $200k, it's hard to even take advantage of it. Instead of having parents to subsidize me, I have parents who are pretty broke and in bad health. How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries? Flip that even further to people who come from really poor countries like India. I can't imagine if my parents were working $1 an hour -- how could I pay $3k in rent? How can you invest thousands of dollars in yourself when your parents don't even make that much in a year? But if you don't make those investments, you're never going to get ahead... It's not just that wealthy millennials have a huge advantage, but coming from a poor family has a HUGE disadvantage in terms of social mobility as well.
- badfrog 8y ago

markmiro 8y ago

Inter-generational child rearing is an old tradition, but in recent US history wasn't it the case that your parents help you less but also ask less of you (think retirement homes). Maybe the trend of adults relying more on their parents is only a failure if adults aren't expected to take care of their parents later on.

anth_anm 8y ago

So I just shouldn't bother having kids if I don't live in the same city as my parents? That's great. Awesome society.

softawre 8y ago
You can do it, but it will just be a lot harder to do. Personally I decided to stay in the Midwest and make 170k instead of 300k, but I have my family, and family matters more to me than an extra 130k in salary.
- CodeCube 8y ago
  This is why we need more remote work! People need to be able to live where they need (or want) to live for a plethora of reasons ... brains are just as good in the midwest, or in the south, as they are on the coast.
peruvian 8y ago
It's a data point you should consider, particularly if baby sitting, nannies, etc. are very expensive in your area. People underestimate how much help one needs in raising kids because a few decades ago the mom would either not work or work an easier/part time job. This still happens in rural or semi rural areas in the US. Nowadays in the city both parents are in 8-9 hour day high intensity jobs. You may have time for your kid, but you have less energy.

ljm 8y ago

I'm not so keen on the description here, but at the same time it's impossible to deny that there are people who take advantage of the good of society while simultaneously decrying it. If we want to talk about moochers and deadbeats we need to stop looking at people in poverty who behave in ways we don't like. It's easy to call them names, but they're doing the best they can with the very little they have. Shift the perspective to huge corps like Walmart, who rake in billions and themselves depend on state welfare to do so. In the UK we call these people 'benefit scroungers', yet their impact on the British way of life is practically zero compared to what those with money can do, to the point where it's a false problem.