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There are a bunch of surveys on people not having kids. It’s economics. Money (or lack thereof) is the thing. One might think “well city dwellers have more mon

by rtpg 3y ago

There are a bunch of surveys on people not having kids. It’s economics. Money (or lack thereof) is the thing. One might think “well city dwellers have more money!” But a huge issue is housing. There’s a supply issue and a cost issue there that simply is a non-issue for rural populations. Searching for some genetic reason is one thing, but “we cant make a comfortable living space for future children” is just a major point that comes up in surveys and just makes sense.

superchroma 3y ago
People bang on and on about the money aspect, but the reality is that the income bracket to go from just covering the bills in urban areas to being wealthy enough to be able to foster a child and not take a serious haircut on quality of life (and yes, with space and other concerns taken into account) is quite large.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
  Do you have kids? Because the reality is that if you did and you lived in an urban area, you are friends with many couples with kids, and no one is going past two, because they cant afford it without critical haircut to QoL. And often this is families making 3x mean wages . with at least 1 parent working as an engineer or FAANG job. I ask again. Are you a parent?
  - superchroma 3y ago
    I think we agree?
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    We’re not “going past two”, but it’s not money holding us back. I’m the sole earner in my household, which consists of myself, my wife, and our two daughters. My income puts us right at 4x the mean household income for the county where we live. My wife is already primarily a homemaker, and even with the two kids I have to move things around for work to pitch in when there are scheduling conflicts. The problem isn’t money - it’s time and energy. For us to have more children, we’d almost have to hire domestic help.
    - IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
      Correct. And that happens to be our situation too. isnt that dependent on money?
      - medvezhenok 3y ago
        It's dependent on expectations. You could raise kids in the past with much less money + time because they would be expected to entertain themselves (and probably would spend a bunch of time outdoors getting into trouble). Today you would get CPS called on you for that. Given current expectations for raising kids, yes, it's a time+money sink. Then again, I think America over-parents on the whole, so altering expectations can also help.
        IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
        You are making my point. Parent did that too. The latter said "almost as if we would need domestic help" its exactly a factor of money. Lets not kid ourselves. There is no education that is happening in the timesink that is food prep, showering, securing and hustling kids to and fro activities. Rural kids are far more independent, better prepared and more likely to eat better than their urban counterparts. The elders, in fact, help each other and the younger ones,and therefore make the large family a force multiplier in the rural areas. Add on top of that the lack of cheap living space for a large family, and its a death sentence for the large family in an urban setting. You cannot multiply a driver. Or a car. Or another room for a 3rd child. And if you could scale it up, it comes down to money anyway. Time is money. A large family is just more money.
WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
> It’s economics. Money (or lack thereof) is the thing. That's a big one. My formerly inexpensive region now requires 3-4 typical incomes to keep the lights on. We're so many decades past the "One Income, One Family" ideal that even the Fed can't envision a world without everyone working at least one job. There's a second factor. Between my parents generation and my kids generation - the amount of time required for parenting has gone up ~10 fold. We're about as close to 24/7 parenting as is (even theoretically) possible.
chaostheory 3y ago
It’s not socioeconomics https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam... The number of children goes down as income increases. There is a biological component
- rtpg 3y ago
  Absolutely wild that you link “income goes up, children goes down” as an argument that it’s not socioeconomics! Income is part of socioeconomics! That graph obviously does not agree with my explanation, but it’s an argument against a biological component.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  Replying to myself since your comment is dead. I mentioned income because of your comment regarding “the lack of money as the main cause of declining birthrates” If you look at Canada, its birthrate started going down when its economy was good and housing was cheap during the 1950s, which was before the sexual revolution. Theirs also started and progressed later eg abortion there wasn’t even legal until 1988. If you look at other countries, birthrates are going down even in countries where the sexual revolution never occurred Edit: you also can’t ignore BPA, a synthetic estrogen, that is everywhere especially in food products which use plastic containers. PFAS chems aka Teflon are also everywhere and now they’re even finding traces of gore Tex inside human bodies The root causes are not socioeconomic
strken 3y ago
I think it's not having enough money to meet current lifestyle expectations. It's technically possible to raise a family of nine in a two-bedroom dwelling with three beds, and one of my great-grandparents grew up in such a household, but to live like that today would be considered child abuse. People prefer to view this as a lack of money due to increasing cost of living or stagnant wages because those are more comfortable to talk about, but an increasing standard of living raises the awkward question of whether it's even a good thing to have more (or any) kids.
Meekro 3y ago
Some of the worst places to live in the world (Somalia, Sudan, Gaza, etc) also have the highest birth rates. I'm sure the lack of birth control contributes here, but I still feel like we're missing a piece of the puzzle. In any case, "comfortable living space" is something only wealthy first-world couples think about before having children -- and those couples usually end up childless whether or not they have that space. Fertility rates in most developed countries go down, not up, as couples get richer. Poor couples think they'd have more kids if only they had more money, a bigger house, access to good schools, etc. but the couples who have all that stuff are actually having fewer kids than anyone else.
- chaostheory 3y ago
  We have more pieces of the puzzle now. The more industrialized a nation, the less the fertility. Even developing nations are no longer safe. Every area but central Africa is affected now that includes China and India. We are living in a slow and boring version of Children of Men, except it’s men who are infertile and not women
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    The more industrialized the nation the more women are able to control how many kids they have, and in many cases have to have fewer because they need to be able to work full time. This isn't "children of men", this is educated workers choosing to not have kids and instead have a higher standard of living.
    - chaostheory 3y ago
      Your theory would work if this didn’t occur in paternalist societies in developing countries where the sexual revolution didn’t occur. Yet it’s still happening there. The root cause isn’t socioeconomic
denkmoon 3y ago
I earn decent money and I can't imagine trying to raise a family in the shoebox I live in. I would have to sacrifice a significant portion of my monthly savings to afford a better living situation (ie. essentially condemned to being a lifelong renter), and that's before considering the other costs of raising a family.
- pclmulqdq 3y ago
  Is there a reason that you don't leave if that is how you feel about it? As a software engineer who left a big city, even though you may end up with a 50% pay cut, your purchasing power actually increases significantly. A lot of people end up stuck in a situation like this due to other factors, like family, but far more people live with this mentality without anything that really ties them to the city except fun and the perception of better economic prospects.
  - rtpg 3y ago
    No amount of personal wealth in the countryside makes it so that I can walk to the supermarket and to a couple other places. Urban life is appealing to many for reasons beyond fun, and for a lot of reasons that aren’t solvable in rural areas by purchasing power. To your point I think there’s a lot of that which is more manageable than expected, and there are a lot of spectrums to navigate there
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    I think about this a lot, as I live in a big city, and it's a hard sell. I can walk to everything I need, and am an easy train / uber / car ride to anything that walking isn't practical for (e.g. big grocery store run). My parents live in rural WA, and it's about a 30 min drive into town for, like, anything. Go to the gym? drive. Groceries? drive. Meet friends for coffee or beer? Drive. I was there for Christmas, and even a light snow made getting into town dicey. Meanwhile, it snows heavily where I live and outside of bitter winds necessitating a beard it never stopped me from getting anywhere.
  - denkmoon 3y ago
    Full time working from home doesn't work for me/my head, I need to go into the office a few days a week. I don't think I would thrive in a fully remote job, and I haven't seen a single job listing for a software developer outside of the major cities. In Australia for context. I also genuinely like living in the city, not for the "fun" but because of the convenience. Everything I need is within a few minutes walk of my apartment.

by rtpg 3y ago

superchroma 3y ago

People bang on and on about the money aspect, but the reality is that the income bracket to go from just covering the bills in urban areas to being wealthy enough to be able to foster a child and not take a serious haircut on quality of life (and yes, with space and other concerns taken into account) is quite large.

IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
Do you have kids? Because the reality is that if you did and you lived in an urban area, you are friends with many couples with kids, and no one is going past two, because they cant afford it without critical haircut to QoL. And often this is families making 3x mean wages . with at least 1 parent working as an engineer or FAANG job. I ask again. Are you a parent?
- superchroma 3y ago
  I think we agree?
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  We’re not “going past two”, but it’s not money holding us back. I’m the sole earner in my household, which consists of myself, my wife, and our two daughters. My income puts us right at 4x the mean household income for the county where we live. My wife is already primarily a homemaker, and even with the two kids I have to move things around for work to pitch in when there are scheduling conflicts. The problem isn’t money - it’s time and energy. For us to have more children, we’d almost have to hire domestic help.
  - IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
    Correct. And that happens to be our situation too. isnt that dependent on money?
    - medvezhenok 3y ago
      It's dependent on expectations. You could raise kids in the past with much less money + time because they would be expected to entertain themselves (and probably would spend a bunch of time outdoors getting into trouble). Today you would get CPS called on you for that. Given current expectations for raising kids, yes, it's a time+money sink. Then again, I think America over-parents on the whole, so altering expectations can also help.
      - IG_Semmelweiss 3y ago
        You are making my point. Parent did that too. The latter said "almost as if we would need domestic help" its exactly a factor of money. Lets not kid ourselves. There is no education that is happening in the timesink that is food prep, showering, securing and hustling kids to and fro activities. Rural kids are far more independent, better prepared and more likely to eat better than their urban counterparts. The elders, in fact, help each other and the younger ones,and therefore make the large family a force multiplier in the rural areas. Add on top of that the lack of cheap living space for a large family, and its a death sentence for the large family in an urban setting. You cannot multiply a driver. Or a car. Or another room for a 3rd child. And if you could scale it up, it comes down to money anyway. Time is money. A large family is just more money.

WarOnPrivacy 3y ago

> It’s economics. Money (or lack thereof) is the thing. That's a big one. My formerly inexpensive region now requires 3-4 typical incomes to keep the lights on. We're so many decades past the "One Income, One Family" ideal that even the Fed can't envision a world without everyone working at least one job. There's a second factor. Between my parents generation and my kids generation - the amount of time required for parenting has gone up ~10 fold. We're about as close to 24/7 parenting as is (even theoretically) possible.

chaostheory 3y ago

It’s not socioeconomics https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam... The number of children goes down as income increases. There is a biological component

rtpg 3y ago
Absolutely wild that you link “income goes up, children goes down” as an argument that it’s not socioeconomics! Income is part of socioeconomics! That graph obviously does not agree with my explanation, but it’s an argument against a biological component.
chaostheory 3y ago
Replying to myself since your comment is dead. I mentioned income because of your comment regarding “the lack of money as the main cause of declining birthrates” If you look at Canada, its birthrate started going down when its economy was good and housing was cheap during the 1950s, which was before the sexual revolution. Theirs also started and progressed later eg abortion there wasn’t even legal until 1988. If you look at other countries, birthrates are going down even in countries where the sexual revolution never occurred Edit: you also can’t ignore BPA, a synthetic estrogen, that is everywhere especially in food products which use plastic containers. PFAS chems aka Teflon are also everywhere and now they’re even finding traces of gore Tex inside human bodies The root causes are not socioeconomic

strken 3y ago

I think it's not having enough money to meet current lifestyle expectations. It's technically possible to raise a family of nine in a two-bedroom dwelling with three beds, and one of my great-grandparents grew up in such a household, but to live like that today would be considered child abuse. People prefer to view this as a lack of money due to increasing cost of living or stagnant wages because those are more comfortable to talk about, but an increasing standard of living raises the awkward question of whether it's even a good thing to have more (or any) kids.

Meekro 3y ago

Some of the worst places to live in the world (Somalia, Sudan, Gaza, etc) also have the highest birth rates. I'm sure the lack of birth control contributes here, but I still feel like we're missing a piece of the puzzle. In any case, "comfortable living space" is something only wealthy first-world couples think about before having children -- and those couples usually end up childless whether or not they have that space. Fertility rates in most developed countries go down, not up, as couples get richer. Poor couples think they'd have more kids if only they had more money, a bigger house, access to good schools, etc. but the couples who have all that stuff are actually having fewer kids than anyone else.

chaostheory 3y ago
We have more pieces of the puzzle now. The more industrialized a nation, the less the fertility. Even developing nations are no longer safe. Every area but central Africa is affected now that includes China and India. We are living in a slow and boring version of Children of Men, except it’s men who are infertile and not women
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  The more industrialized the nation the more women are able to control how many kids they have, and in many cases have to have fewer because they need to be able to work full time. This isn't "children of men", this is educated workers choosing to not have kids and instead have a higher standard of living.
  - chaostheory 3y ago
    Your theory would work if this didn’t occur in paternalist societies in developing countries where the sexual revolution didn’t occur. Yet it’s still happening there. The root cause isn’t socioeconomic

denkmoon 3y ago

I earn decent money and I can't imagine trying to raise a family in the shoebox I live in. I would have to sacrifice a significant portion of my monthly savings to afford a better living situation (ie. essentially condemned to being a lifelong renter), and that's before considering the other costs of raising a family.

pclmulqdq 3y ago
Is there a reason that you don't leave if that is how you feel about it? As a software engineer who left a big city, even though you may end up with a 50% pay cut, your purchasing power actually increases significantly. A lot of people end up stuck in a situation like this due to other factors, like family, but far more people live with this mentality without anything that really ties them to the city except fun and the perception of better economic prospects.
- rtpg 3y ago
  No amount of personal wealth in the countryside makes it so that I can walk to the supermarket and to a couple other places. Urban life is appealing to many for reasons beyond fun, and for a lot of reasons that aren’t solvable in rural areas by purchasing power. To your point I think there’s a lot of that which is more manageable than expected, and there are a lot of spectrums to navigate there
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  I think about this a lot, as I live in a big city, and it's a hard sell. I can walk to everything I need, and am an easy train / uber / car ride to anything that walking isn't practical for (e.g. big grocery store run). My parents live in rural WA, and it's about a 30 min drive into town for, like, anything. Go to the gym? drive. Groceries? drive. Meet friends for coffee or beer? Drive. I was there for Christmas, and even a light snow made getting into town dicey. Meanwhile, it snows heavily where I live and outside of bitter winds necessitating a beard it never stopped me from getting anywhere.
- denkmoon 3y ago
  Full time working from home doesn't work for me/my head, I need to go into the office a few days a week. I don't think I would thrive in a fully remote job, and I haven't seen a single job listing for a software developer outside of the major cities. In Australia for context. I also genuinely like living in the city, not for the "fun" but because of the convenience. Everything I need is within a few minutes walk of my apartment.