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The reality for a lot of families is that having children is frighteningly expensive. The twin costs of childcare and a reduction in parental work hours (often

• oramit 6y ago
  A coworker and his wife just had a child. They got on wait-lists before the child was even born because of the huge demand. They also told me that they were lucky to find a place (work subsidized) that was less than $1k.
• giantg2 6y ago
  "Multigenerational households where grandparents provide childcare are one solution around this problem that I've seen." Except many grandparents are still working, especially to cover healthcare costs.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • notsureaboutpg 6y ago
    In the US, elderly people have Medicare, so why is this happening?
    • Forbo 6y ago
      I vouched for your comment, because I'm also curious. What healthcare costs is Medicare not covering?
      • giantg2 6y ago
        There are parts A-D. They can vary by part and by state, other factors too. I think you generally pay about $1k-$2k per year in premiums in total for all parts. There are also deductibles and copays. For example, the deductible is about $1500 for hospital stays and copays for doctors visits is 20% of the medicare approved costs. So it's lower than private insurance, but not negligible. It can get pretty expensive if you require lots of procedures or medications, as many people do at that age. Here is an article claiming the average cost for A and B parts is almost $8k per year. https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/02/05/heres-the-average-americans-annual-medicare-bill.aspx https://www.fool.com/retirement/2017/02/05/heres-the-average...
        • throwaway201103 6y ago
          My plan is to beat the game by not playing.
      • lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Medicare pays primarily for emergency hospitalization scenarios (referred to as Part A). Anything that happens outside of a hospital stay (called outpatient services) and medications come from Parts B, C, and D. Coverage for parts B, C, and D is insanely complicated and involves some means testing and who knows what else. There’s private health insurers involved too, and if you can’t afford that, then you can go to the state’s Medicaid, which is also means tested. The whole thing makes you want to kill yourself, which might be the objective.
        • throwaway201103 6y ago
          And "Medicare for all" is a serious proposal?
          • lotsofpulp 6y ago
            I don’t think people mean copy it in it’s current form, at least not forever. It’s just a catchy name to refer to a program where the government pays for healthcare, even though the current iteration of Medicare is hardly that. The idea is probably to expand the current system to everyone, which is better than nothing, and then work on improving it.
            • giantg2 6y ago
              I would image that's the plan, although with different motives. By placing a majority of the people into a broken system, you bring the people's attention to it and force a new system into existence using that public support. If you look at the strategy behind the ACA, it is intended to lay the framework for a replacement by a federal plan/system.
            • seanicus 6y ago
              Hard to get velocity behind improving something half the voting population would rather be rid of, even if it's against the very same voting population's best interest. So it goes in the US.
              • 6y ago
    • giantg2 6y ago
      Medicare isn't free. You still have copays for visits, procedures, and medications (deductible and premium costs vary too!). The other point is that you would have to have pretty large generation gaps to have child care while the child is still young if depending on Medicare. Once they're older they generally can stay home alone for a bit. Medicare age is 65. So for example, the grandparent would need to give birth to the parent at age 32.5 and the parent would have to give birth to the child at age 32.5. That would be for the oldest child, so you would be giving birth even later in life for the other children. I believe pregnancy after age 34 is considered to be a geriatric pregnancy. If you take the generational gap the other direction, then you could have great grandparents providing child care if the next generation starts at 22. Higher education and financial stability might be a barrier in this scenario. Then if we are talking about raising the birth rate, how sustainable is this model when families have 3 or more children? Meaning 1 set of grandparents would be responsible for 3 sets of parents assuming this model is used on a wide enough scale to affect the birth rate. This is exasperated is using the great grandparent example.
    • watwut 6y ago
      Some are not that old. If you have child at 22 and your child is 22 when having another kid, you are 44 when being grandparent. Hardly retirement age.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• analog31 6y ago
  A lot of people move away from home to find work, especially if educated, and don't have access to grandparents. Also, as people are waiting longer to have kids, the grandparents are older and not as capable -- or may even be in need of care themselves. In addition to childcare, there's also health care and education to pay for. Middle class families get virtually no help on either front.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Also, as people wait longer to have kids, the mother's body is less and less able to bounce back from pregnancy. I know tons of couples who have 2 kids in their 30s, but 2 only so that the first kid can have a sibling. CDC recommends 3 years between births for a woman's body to recover, and I don't know many women eager to continue having kids past 35.
• trianglem 6y ago
  There is no reason to give a career — a poor abstraction built around the simple concept of doing work for money — higher value than rearing a child, something millions of years of evolution has gender specifically selected for.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    That poor abstraction is what allows most people to provide their children with the quality of life they deem necessary.
    • trianglem 6y ago
      Then call it what it is, working for money, and put it in its place. Doing that lets you see the true value of child rearing — even its economic value.
• golemiprague 6y ago
  Women getting into the workplace have made it expensive. Women don't generate enough economic value to cover the economic value they provided as housewives. Even the small economic value they do create is usually eaten by increased rent or mortgage to match the increase in family income. It was a bad deal for everybody to get women out to the workplace.
• globular-toast 6y ago
  Yeah, that's mostly due to feminism as some of the already buried comments here point out. You only have to look back a short time and there was no such thing as "child care". The children were cared for by their mothers. Imagine that! A mother having time to raise her own children! Now they are "free" to be drones in the corporate machine instead and can't get out because the family needs that money. The children now get the privilege of being raised in a child care farm instead of by loving family. Oh, and nobody has time to cook or clean any more so it's ready meals and takeaways every night. What progress...
  • seanicus 6y ago
    Pretty sure the economic impact of doubling the workforce as well as decades of frozen wages has had a significant effect on social acceptance of 2-worker households, but blame whatever boogeyman/woman you'd like to.
    • curryst 6y ago
      I'm not a fan of blaming feminism (there's a very valid point that it's unfair that the woman is/was expected to be the home maker), but I do see a correlation between the rise of 2-worker households, stagnating wages, and the difficulty of raising children. The line of thinking here is that feminism caused 2-worker households, which doubled the workforce, which caused wage stagnation. Basically that doubling the workforce crashed the price of labor, but companies were unable to reduce everyone's salaries, and instead stagnated wages until inflation caused them to fall to the new price of labor. I find it crass to blame feminism for that, though. Women should have always been free to join the workforce, and the problem is really 2-worker households, not that women are able to work. I think single-worker households address some of these issues, but there's no reason to point and say women were the problem. It's just as valid for the wife to go work and the husband to take care of the house. Single-worker households aren't going to make a comeback, imo. For one, we, as a society, don't really respect homemakers. It's unskilled labor, and we grant it about as much value as most unskilled labor. And the more likely you are to be able to afford having a single-worker household, the more drastic the gap in prestige between the worker and homemaker becomes, which creates a weird power dynamic. I.e. if you're a hotshot lawyer and your wife stays at home, that's a huge gap in how you're perceived by other people. The second reason is that wages have effectively fallen through stagnation and inflation. Even if we forced all households to only have a single worker tomorrow, I'm doubtful wages would rise to where they might have been. Third and finally, a lot of homemaking is stuff people don't really want to do. Time with the kids is great, but does anyone really enjoy vacuuming, or cleaning the bathroom, or doing dishes? This might just be my perspective bleeding through, but the work itself seems awful. And worse yet, you do it either almost entirely alone, or while children are playing/screaming/fighting around you. It's physically demanding, and generally not mentally stimulating. Longer-term, I would bet that the solution to this is a) more optimized services (i.e. a cleaning service that cleans all the houses on your street, like landscaping people often do), and b) robotics that are able to handle small bits of this. Roomba is a good example. They're reasonably effective at vacuuming. Give it a decade and they'll probably be able to actually replace vacuuming. We will also need a way for people that can't afford the upfront price to have one, which will probably come forth in the form of a subscription (give us a $100 deposit, and then we'll charge you $1 every time it runs).
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Multigenerational does help, and it helps immensely if they had kids (you or partner) when they were younger (20s), or else they are more likely to have health issues and low energy themselves.