8 ms·

Children are astronomically expensive. Most working class and middle class parents cannot envision affording a second child so they have just one.

ant6n 5y ago
In the US it really seems to be. I don’t even understand how my American friends can have kids - daycare is so expensive it makes more sense for one parent to just stay home. In Canada, children are already much more affordable (esp. in Quebec). In Europe even more so. Once education, health care and day care are affordable (or free), children are not astronomically exoensive.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  If you compare the total fertility rates in Canada and Europe (~1.5), even with their pro natalist policies, America still has a higher fertility rate (~1.7) with abysmal support for parents. Likely attributable to families that opt out of paid formal child care, and Medicaid picks up the slack for those below middle class means.
  - bordercases 5y ago
    American is more culturally diverse than Canada or Europe, I would see how the population breaks down in comparison.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    I’d say the higher birth rates in US are due to religion and poverty. I also wonder how many immigrants continue living like in 2nd/3rd world country.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      The data concurs. When education goes up and religion goes down, fertility rates decline [1]. With regards to immigrants, children of immigrants rapidly align to fertility rates in their host country (at least in the US) [2]. [1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... [2] https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-2008-2018 https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-20...
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      From our experience religion seems more important. There is some support for this observation: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility
      - toomuchtodo 5y ago
        It’s important to note the the Institute for Family Studies is pro marriage, pro family, and pro natalist. They advocate for traditional family models and more kids versus less. https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission
- xondono 5y ago
  We pay for that dearly with lower wages and higher taxes.
- xnyan 5y ago
  It's not a good situation because they all require fairly large sacrifices, but there are alternatives to paid childcare. I work with a developer who's taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old during working hours because the pandemic caused his and many other daycares in in our area to close and there's simply no availability right now anywhere else. He's absent a lot during the day, but he makes it to all the important meetings and spends a significant amount of time working in the evening after his wife comes home from her job, so overall puts in the same amount of work as before. He has no life whatsoever outside of working and taking care of his kids, but no outside care involved. They are looking really hard for available daycare.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  It is definitely a heavy burden for low income families. But I don't think it is as expensive as some people make it out to be. I just checked at the daycare we send our kid to part time. And it looks like all day, 5 days a week, including breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack is $875/mo. And I live in an expensive California suburb. Now, that will certainly get expensive if you have multiple kids under 5 all going at once. But it turned out to be a lot cheaper than I thought. I think some of the parents complaining are the same ones that are "applying" to these fancy, artisanal day cares that will teach your toddler how to do algebra in French.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    900$ is rent for many ppl. It’s half a full time minimum wage job. In Quebec daycare is more like 150$/month, in Berlin 50$. That’s a huge difference. Btw, parental leave is another item that makes kids cheaper in social democratic countries. Thats paid leave on one hand (e.g. 12 months), or unpaid leave allowing you to return to your job after an extended absence (e.g. 36 months).
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Well, the only really expensive thing is daycare. I'm afraid there's no ready solution to that - unless we're willing to get back to the idea of extended family and village to raise a kid. PS. I have three kids, I know what I'm talking about.
- steve_adams_86 5y ago
  I’d argue that in a nuclear family culture, kids are also expensive in indirect ways which are hard to account for. You sacrifice a lot of personal time and often health when you need to be there for kids virtually constantly, and while daycare is very expensive in some places ($1200 CAD/month for us) I feel like it’s one of the more manageable costs. During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money. I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison. Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize. In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    > both parents typically need to work I think that's the key. I'm still trying to figure out for myself if it has something to do with "we need more women in workforce"
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t... (Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained) > Warren’s central argument in the book is that this rise in household income was almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of two-earner families. And adding income by adding a second worker, she argues, has very different economic implications than rising pay for a single worker. In practice, the book says, the increasing ubiquity of two-earner households leaves families in more precarious financial circumstances with more brittle budgets that were more prone to tip over into insolvency if a problem cropped up. > The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet: > The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting. > Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities. > Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.
stephc_int13 5y ago
As they should be. Children don't raise themselves, this is real work. I am not talking about money, but time, opportunity cost. Rapid population growth has been achieved by forced dedication of half of the population to this task, this is not free.
tengbretson 5y ago
There are entire communities in the US that view children as assets rather than liabilities and for the most part they seem to be doing just fine.
pengaru 5y ago
I watch low-income multi-child parents pay for groceries and formula w/EBT and WIC vouchers on the daily. Children are subsidized by the government, it's definitely not cost-prohibitive.
- graeme 5y ago
  Those programs don’t affect cost based decisions for people not eligible. WIC for instance can’t be had over 185% of poverty line, which is $49025 for a family of four. (That’s $185%, the poverty line is lower)
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  Formula? These parents definitely have too much money to spend.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    With a working mother, going 100% breast milk can be a very difficult task. And that's not even considering the scenarios where breast milk may not be an option.
    - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
      Scenarios when breast milk is not an option do exist, but they're extremely rare. Story time: when we were expecting our first one, me and my wife went to the hospital for their maternity facilities tour. Hospitals have these monthly, so that expecting mothers know what to expect (a pun?). In the end of the tour the nurse asked who's gonna breastfeed and who's using formula. 7 out of 10 went with formula. FUCKIN 7 OUT OF 10. All were first time mothers, so no, it's not that they knew something was wrong with their tits. So unless you gonna tell me something is in the air of Alabama [1], no, I'm not buying your argument. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/facts.html https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/facts.html
      - boomboomsubban 5y ago

ant6n 5y ago

In the US it really seems to be. I don’t even understand how my American friends can have kids - daycare is so expensive it makes more sense for one parent to just stay home. In Canada, children are already much more affordable (esp. in Quebec). In Europe even more so. Once education, health care and day care are affordable (or free), children are not astronomically exoensive.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
If you compare the total fertility rates in Canada and Europe (~1.5), even with their pro natalist policies, America still has a higher fertility rate (~1.7) with abysmal support for parents. Likely attributable to families that opt out of paid formal child care, and Medicaid picks up the slack for those below middle class means.
- bordercases 5y ago
  American is more culturally diverse than Canada or Europe, I would see how the population breaks down in comparison.
- ant6n 5y ago
  I’d say the higher birth rates in US are due to religion and poverty. I also wonder how many immigrants continue living like in 2nd/3rd world country.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    The data concurs. When education goes up and religion goes down, fertility rates decline [1]. With regards to immigrants, children of immigrants rapidly align to fertility rates in their host country (at least in the US) [2]. [1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s... [2] https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-2008-2018 https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-20...
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    From our experience religion seems more important. There is some support for this observation: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      It’s important to note the the Institute for Family Studies is pro marriage, pro family, and pro natalist. They advocate for traditional family models and more kids versus less. https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission
xondono 5y ago
We pay for that dearly with lower wages and higher taxes.
xnyan 5y ago
It's not a good situation because they all require fairly large sacrifices, but there are alternatives to paid childcare. I work with a developer who's taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old during working hours because the pandemic caused his and many other daycares in in our area to close and there's simply no availability right now anywhere else. He's absent a lot during the day, but he makes it to all the important meetings and spends a significant amount of time working in the evening after his wife comes home from her job, so overall puts in the same amount of work as before. He has no life whatsoever outside of working and taking care of his kids, but no outside care involved. They are looking really hard for available daycare.
jjeaff 5y ago
It is definitely a heavy burden for low income families. But I don't think it is as expensive as some people make it out to be. I just checked at the daycare we send our kid to part time. And it looks like all day, 5 days a week, including breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack is $875/mo. And I live in an expensive California suburb. Now, that will certainly get expensive if you have multiple kids under 5 all going at once. But it turned out to be a lot cheaper than I thought. I think some of the parents complaining are the same ones that are "applying" to these fancy, artisanal day cares that will teach your toddler how to do algebra in French.
- ant6n 5y ago
  900$ is rent for many ppl. It’s half a full time minimum wage job. In Quebec daycare is more like 150$/month, in Berlin 50$. That’s a huge difference. Btw, parental leave is another item that makes kids cheaper in social democratic countries. Thats paid leave on one hand (e.g. 12 months), or unpaid leave allowing you to return to your job after an extended absence (e.g. 36 months).

AlexTWithBeard 5y ago

Well, the only really expensive thing is daycare. I'm afraid there's no ready solution to that - unless we're willing to get back to the idea of extended family and village to raise a kid. PS. I have three kids, I know what I'm talking about.

steve_adams_86 5y ago
I’d argue that in a nuclear family culture, kids are also expensive in indirect ways which are hard to account for. You sacrifice a lot of personal time and often health when you need to be there for kids virtually constantly, and while daycare is very expensive in some places ($1200 CAD/month for us) I feel like it’s one of the more manageable costs. During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money. I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison. Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize. In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.
- AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
  > both parents typically need to work I think that's the key. I'm still trying to figure out for myself if it has something to do with "we need more women in workforce"
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/two-income-trap-elizabeth-warren-book https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/23/18183091/t... (Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap, explained) > Warren’s central argument in the book is that this rise in household income was almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of two-earner families. And adding income by adding a second worker, she argues, has very different economic implications than rising pay for a single worker. In practice, the book says, the increasing ubiquity of two-earner households leaves families in more precarious financial circumstances with more brittle budgets that were more prone to tip over into insolvency if a problem cropped up. > The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet: > The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting. > Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities. > Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.

stephc_int13 5y ago

As they should be. Children don't raise themselves, this is real work. I am not talking about money, but time, opportunity cost. Rapid population growth has been achieved by forced dedication of half of the population to this task, this is not free.

tengbretson 5y ago

There are entire communities in the US that view children as assets rather than liabilities and for the most part they seem to be doing just fine.

pengaru 5y ago

I watch low-income multi-child parents pay for groceries and formula w/EBT and WIC vouchers on the daily. Children are subsidized by the government, it's definitely not cost-prohibitive.

graeme 5y ago
Those programs don’t affect cost based decisions for people not eligible. WIC for instance can’t be had over 185% of poverty line, which is $49025 for a family of four. (That’s $185%, the poverty line is lower)
AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
Formula? These parents definitely have too much money to spend.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  With a working mother, going 100% breast milk can be a very difficult task. And that's not even considering the scenarios where breast milk may not be an option.
  - AlexTWithBeard 5y ago
    Scenarios when breast milk is not an option do exist, but they're extremely rare. Story time: when we were expecting our first one, me and my wife went to the hospital for their maternity facilities tour. Hospitals have these monthly, so that expecting mothers know what to expect (a pun?). In the end of the tour the nurse asked who's gonna breastfeed and who's using formula. 7 out of 10 went with formula. FUCKIN 7 OUT OF 10. All were first time mothers, so no, it's not that they knew something was wrong with their tits. So unless you gonna tell me something is in the air of Alabama [1], no, I'm not buying your argument. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/facts.html https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/facts.html
    - boomboomsubban 5y ago