5 ms·
I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs ri
by SamuelAdams 6y ago
I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.
- ploika 6y agoMuch more of the decrease in the past century is due to increased access to education and full time employment for women, increased availability of contraception, and decreasing child mortality.
- curiousgal 6y agoI wonder when will the hostile immigration policies kick in and accentuate that.
- mywittyname 6y agoWhat part of the world are you from? Hostile immigration policies seem to be alive and well in most of North America and Europe and have been for a while now.
- ldbooth 6y agoThat is tied to the changing of jobs as well. Jeremy Diamond has a lot to say bout this in Guns,Germs,and Steel. My grandfather was raised on a farm, where at the age of 16-18 he was fully employed without a college education or debt. Today, parents plan their families with a view toward paying for college. Corporations own the housing stock and get between people and equity, pushing up the cost of housing. It's so many things, I sure hope to hit that stability and start a family. No one makes plans to struggle economically.
- gautamcgoel 6y agoIt's Jared, not Jeremy.
- ldbooth 6y agoAh thanks, touche!
- jokethrowaway 6y agoYes, I agree with you. People are overall better off because of technological improvement, but making a living is harder (wages didn't grow with prices, modern life has more costs attached to it). Also families are much more unstable nowadays, with divorces being common. Children growing up in stable families do better in several parameters, therefore instability has a ripple effect on society.
- HelloMcFly 6y agoDivorces aren't rare, but they also hit a 50-year low last year. This wasn't a COVID outlier, it's the continuation of a trend. Lots of reasons for this that don't necessarily undercut your argument though (e.g., fewer people getting married in the first place). https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces
- harambae 6y agoDid you scroll down to "Share of children who were born outside of marriage" on your link? Because it's way up. Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids?
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids The value of stability in marriage is not just stability for kids, so yes. That being said, the import of people having kids before getting married when is hard to assess without data on both the single vs. cohabiting parenting split (which the source has some reference to) and on the stability among unmarried cohabiting parental couples.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoI would argue that it's also due to kids having "more" rights via the culture perpetuating entitled rights. So a mild spanking could be consider by many as straight up child abuse. People scoff if you let your kid just poke the world around without asking who, what, where, why. Kids needs to grow into their own and the current culture doesn't allow that.
- afavour 6y agoI don't know that isolating the cost of raising kids is necessary when you can see the drop in overall wealth by generation. Millenials (who are the prime "kid having" generation right now) own far less wealth than any generation that came before them. Is it really in any way surprising that fewer are having kids?
- missedthecue 6y agoDon't poorer people have more kids on average?
- gryn 6y agobecause historicaly wealth was correlated with levels of education, but in this case people are more educated so they nope out of it.
- jseliger 6y agoThe rent really is too damn high: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-future-in-seattle-do-millennials-have-a-future-in-any-superstar-cities https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...
- swiley 6y agoHousing and Education are probably the biggest costs. Maybe healthcare too.
- LargeWu 6y agoChildcare can easily run over $1000/mo per child. More for infants. When my 2nd child was born, it cost us over $500/week.
- stevekemp 6y agoThis really does depend where you live; we paid €250/month for daycare for our child from the age of 1 upwards. Even having a baby is very expensive in the USA, in terms of costs for the delivery, and the very very short maternity leave available to the majority of women. By contrast we had almost a year of paid leave, and paid something like €250 for a birth - which was mostly based around the cost of the room we had for a week after the delivery.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoHow does the total fertility rate in your country compare to the US (1.78 in 2020), considering your country's pro-natalism policies?
- stevekemp 6y ago1.41 births per woman (2018).
- toomuchtodo 6y agoAlways interesting that the birth rate continues to decline even when generous benefits are provided to parents to have children (extended paid leave, cash payment per child, etc).
- andrew_ 6y agoWe're at $1800/month for an infant and toddler in daycare. Wife and I both work. Thankfully the company I work for has an HSA for childcare.
- ed25519FUUU 6y agoThe clearest impact is has is on accounting for our social safety nets. For example the Social Security program is solvent to 2035, and that will probably come down quite a bit in the short term even with increased immigration. https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html
- dahart 6y agoThere are certainly tallies of the expenses. I don’t know about over time, but Googling immediately got me the number $233k in 2015 from the USDA. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-child https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil... I’ve seen many other such lists over several decades, so charting the average costs over time should be possible. It might be worth checking out the countries that have implemented child bonuses to check the hypothesis that costs are the reason. https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate/ https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate... (Not to mention what others nearby have called out: look at birthrates tallied by socioeconomic status. If birthrates go down with increasing income, maybe costs aren't a major factor in birthrate declines, perhaps increasing income is the reason?) What this kind of thing doesn’t tell us is anything about the alternative choice that is much more difficult to model: what is the cost of not having children. There are cities in the US and countries in the world whose economies are collapsing due to population loss. And I’ve watched people in my life go through breakdowns due to angst over not having kids. I’ve lost at least one very close friend in part because I chose to have kids and he chose not to. The costs also don’t really help evaluate the goals or the choice to have kids or not. The reason to have them usually isn’t primarily financial, and for most people the reason not to have them also isn’t primarily financial, even if there’s a secondary influence like costs.
- ph4 6y agoMy first kid was just born last week. The hospital billed my insurance company $45k. This is for an uncomplicated, straight-forward vaginal birth.
- ed_balls 6y agois it really $45k in US? Or just the company told you they are billed 45k but they "negotiate" it down to 10k. In my country a birth in private hospital cost $3k...
- ph4 6y agoI'm sure there are all sorts of negotiations and esoteric adjustments going on behind the scenes - $45k was the total of the itemized invoice sent to my insurance company. I'm unsure exactly of how much it will cost me out-of-pocket, but I'm expecting $3-4k.