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> Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financia

> Americans are having fewer children, on average, than they used to, and that has some people concerned. Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. It would be fun to have a bigger family, but we'd be paupers.

mzi 3y ago
In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.
- ginko 3y ago
  What does that even mean? I assume you're referring to the cost of kindergarten? That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
  - AndrewDucker 3y ago
    Not here (UK), where it costs over £1,000 per child per month for care.
    - robertlagrant 3y ago
      This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
    - constantly 3y ago
      In America my friends pay $3,500 per child per month. The grass is always greener I suppose.
      - white_dragon88 3y ago
        wtf on???
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        $3,500 per month must be 99th percentile daycare cost in the US. Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
        mynameisash 3y ago
        Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo. [0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-age-care-setting https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
        midasuni 3y ago
        Hopefully that’s the infant:teacher ratio. 4 teachers per infant seems a little extreme, and means massive underpaid adults!
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        If I was the adult, I would need a 4 adult to 1 infant ratio. But yes, thanks for the correction.
      - wharvle 3y ago
        Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
        3y ago
  - sevagh 3y ago
    You have to pay that fee to bring the kid back from the hospital.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- holoduke 3y ago
  The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
  - seszett 3y ago
    Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands? It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case. That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing. It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
    - holoduke 3y ago
      After school care is also a form of daycare in the netherlands. Called BSO. It rougly the same price. Less hours, but higher hourly rate.
      - seszett 3y ago
        I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Is that 3kE per week? or per year? Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
    - brewdad 3y ago
      No one in the US outside of the billionaire/ultra high millionaire class is paying $150,000 a year for child care.
- AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
  That's absurdly cheap... I pay about $900/mo per child.
2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
> Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds. Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
  - toyg 3y ago
    At least, some of what was available before (abuse and incest) is typically not recreated by labor.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      Physical and sexual abuse are not exclusive (or even nearly so) to family...
      - toyg 3y ago
        But they are overwhelmingly more likely to happen in the family.
        argiopetech 3y ago
        Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken. I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.
js8 3y ago
If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Wait a second... this is starting to sound familiar. I swear there are policies that are too into place but I just can't my finger on it. Hmmm... /s
  - rayiner 3y ago
    I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self. I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world. Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals. Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.
cmilton 3y ago
Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.
- igetspam 3y ago
  Perhaps fathers could.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
    - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
      >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
      - igetspam 3y ago
        What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
        VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
        igetspam 3y ago
shortrounddev2 3y ago
It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"
- Ntrails 3y ago
  I'm going to quote from a recent FT article that I felt was pretty succinct https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f1301ab https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f130...: >[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
- VoodooJuJu 3y ago
  > "is this all I'm going to be?" Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
  - igetspam 3y ago
    Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it? Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
    - argiopetech 3y ago
      Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature. Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one. I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population. I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.
dalore 3y ago
Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places. It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.
- dudul 3y ago
  Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities? Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities. People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
  - sgerenser 3y ago
    Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
    - angmarsbane 3y ago
      It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
      - kristjansson 3y ago
        Wow, I’ve lived here for years (without kids) without knowing that. That’s LAUSD, or other parts of socal?
        3y ago
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
Can you break down the aspects of childcare that are financially crushing?
- Balgair 3y ago
  Not OP but: Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children. Median income in my area is ~$40k per year. There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual. Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue. Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think. But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow. Like, you know the 80/20 rule? Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
  - brewdad 3y ago
    The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future. The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
    - Balgair 3y ago
      Nah, I disagree. From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance. (Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment) Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have. From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same. That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.
- sarchertech 3y ago
  >but the reverse is true There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.
- anon291 3y ago
  alternatively, make grandparenting a thing again.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      And if they aren’t grandparents are working anyway.
    - anon291 3y ago
      There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Maybe grandparents don't want to raise kids any more and want to slack off in a life of leisure.
- digging 3y ago
  Or increase childcare funding ???
  - titanomachy 3y ago
chongli 3y ago
Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury. No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)? When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.
- titanomachy 3y ago
  The benefits to the children could take many years to realize, but the benefits to parents would be immediate. Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
  - paulryanrogers 3y ago
    Whatever parents think of kids themselves the reality is the costs are high and have been rising.
  - chongli 3y ago
    I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way. What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care! And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
  - satvikpendem 3y ago
    > Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.
jongjong 3y ago
The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.

mzi 3y ago

In Stockholm, Sweden you pay maximum 3% of your salary for your first kid, with a max 1 688 SEK. For the second child you pay another 2% (1125 SEK) and %1 for the third (563 SEK). From the fourth kid there is no charge.

ginko 3y ago
What does that even mean? I assume you're referring to the cost of kindergarten? That's just a small part of the overall cost of childcare.
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  Not here (UK), where it costs over £1,000 per child per month for care.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    This depends on the age of the child, of course. If you want them looked after full time from 6 months it's a lot more; if you want them in after school club when they're 7 so you don't see them til 6pm then it's much less.
  - constantly 3y ago
    In America my friends pay $3,500 per child per month. The grass is always greener I suppose.
    - white_dragon88 3y ago
      wtf on???
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        $3,500 per month must be 99th percentile daycare cost in the US. Most people play $1,500 to $2,500, for dedicated daycare facilities with the prescribed 4:1 or 7:2 teacher:infant ratio.
        mynameisash 3y ago
        Out of curiosity, I did some spelunking. The US Department of Labor has stats[0] which summarize county-level "median yearly prices for one child at the market rate." Still TBD what the comprehensive data show at P99. That said, among the county-level medians, it appears the maximum estimated cost in 2023 is in Arlington County, VA, at $28,747 for a single infant, which is $2400/mo. [0] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-age-care-setting https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/topics/childcare/price-by-ag...
        midasuni 3y ago
        Hopefully that’s the infant:teacher ratio. 4 teachers per infant seems a little extreme, and means massive underpaid adults!
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        If I was the adult, I would need a 4 adult to 1 infant ratio. But yes, thanks for the correction.
    - wharvle 3y ago
      Gotta be San Francisco rates, or a very fancy place. Nicer daycares (usually Montessori schools that also take kids under a year) in our US city are around $900-$1200/m. Less-nice, $700-900.
      - 3y ago
- sevagh 3y ago
  You have to pay that fee to bring the kid back from the hospital.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
holoduke 3y ago
The Netherlands is different: I have 4 kids. All going to daycare 3 days a week. Total costs 3000 euros. I get back arround 700 from the government. Still 2300 euros. Thats 100 euros more than my rent. Kids are expensive.
- seszett 3y ago
  Isn't daycare cost indexed on income in the Netherlands? It is here in Flanders, and I think it's quite reasonable (also, government subsidy goes directly to the creche, so you only pay the remainder). About 100 euros per child/day/week, in our case. That's cheaper than for you, but I suppose our income is rather lower since 2200 euros/month rent seems awfully high to me, in the end it seems more or less the same relative to what we pay for housing. It's also rare to have 4 children going to daycare at the same time, since they go to school at 2,5 years old, so the costs don't last for long.
  - holoduke 3y ago
    After school care is also a form of daycare in the netherlands. Called BSO. It rougly the same price. Less hours, but higher hourly rate.
    - seszett 3y ago
      I see. Here nabewaking is much cheaper, a couple euros per day at most (maybe more in expensive private schools, I don't know). It makes sense to me because it's much easier to keep older children compared to babies.
- Balgair 3y ago
  Is that 3kE per week? or per year? Because 3kE per week is more in line with US costs
  - brewdad 3y ago
    No one in the US outside of the billionaire/ultra high millionaire class is paying $150,000 a year for child care.
AlgorithmicTime 3y ago
That's absurdly cheap... I pay about $900/mo per child.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

> Each child on their own costs us more in childcare than our mortgage. That's insane and why I'm considering moving back to being near family.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
Makes sense to me. That is how expensive liability/labor is to “recreate” family bonds. Although, the labor received via family bonds will greatly vary based on family, and time period. What was available before may not be available now due to different options becoming available for the aforementioned family members providing the labor.
- toyg 3y ago
  At least, some of what was available before (abuse and incest) is typically not recreated by labor.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    Physical and sexual abuse are not exclusive (or even nearly so) to family...
    - toyg 3y ago
      But they are overwhelmingly more likely to happen in the family.
      - argiopetech 3y ago
        Re. sexual abuse, RAINN says 34% of child sexual abuse is by a relative. Unless you're replying to GP, specifically saying "incest is more likely to happen in the family" (which is definitionally true, but vacuous), this appears to be mistaken. I remain to be convinced re. physical abuse, particularly from other children, particularly given what I know of adult care homes.

js8 3y ago

If you want people to have more children, put them into harsher conditions. It works empirically quite well. Policies that prevent women from getting education, and reduction in social spending so that children can be forced into labor as soon as possible, seem to be the most effective. Creating more stress and economic uncertainty also helps; people will see having more kids as less risky option.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
This is missing the key component of women not having the option to not have children. Usually by limiting their access to contraception and ability to earn income. And a bit of social pressure to create expectations of them helps.
- igetspam 3y ago
  Wait a second... this is starting to sound familiar. I swear there are policies that are too into place but I just can't my finger on it. Hmmm... /s
- rayiner 3y ago
  I think that’s a jealous rationalization. In my diaspora community, women are educated and work, but also everyone has kids because the culture emphasizes family over self. I’m sure that will die out over time. But it won’t be the education and affluence that does it—they have that already. It’ll be the gradual assimilation into self-centered American culture.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    It has nothing to do with American, hence the effect being almost universal around the world. Evolution resulted in a shit mechanism for procreation and child rearing is costly, and requires a lot of short term pain. While there obviously are long term benefits, we see the same problem here of humanity needing to bridge short term pain with long term benefits and individual sacrifices for collectivist goals. Pendulums swing both ways, and the past was not pretty for women, and it seems like it will require over correcting before it swings back.

cmilton 3y ago

Perhaps mothers could stay at home with their children. Relieving the cost of child care.

igetspam 3y ago
Perhaps fathers could.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  It is honestly nuts that we were tricked into thinking equality meant our families had to work twice as hard. Single-worker households should be the standard, just, without the gender imbalance.
  - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
    >Single-worker households should be the standard... Yes, this is ideal for children. >...just, without the gender imbalance. But why take this detour? Why does there need to be a balance? How does enforcing a gender balance help children?
    - igetspam 3y ago
      What detour? This feels like a straight line to reasonable discourse. What does forcing one sex to be the DRI for childrearing improve for kids? Specifically, what does it improve for girls?
      - VoodooJuJu 3y ago
        With a hands-off approach, you would naturally see more women be the stay-at-home caregiver. If a balance is desired, that's when you would have to force things. I'm more curious about the motivation behind wanting to force a gender balance.
        igetspam 3y ago

shortrounddev2 3y ago

It's not just the raw cost, it's opportunity cost. You could make childcare free and would still have population problems because women have to put their careers on the backburner for children. When you have kids at the age of, say, 24, you have to ask yourself: "is this all I'm going to be?"

Ntrails 3y ago
I'm going to quote from a recent FT article that I felt was pretty succinct https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f1301ab https://www.ft.com/content/cb93c040-a719-446f-9ec2-9ead9f130...: >[On women having children] There is no other job in the world about which people in polite society would say, “Sure, it comes with a heavy hit to your career earnings, there’s still a risk that you might die doing it, but don’t worry...
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
> "is this all I'm going to be?" Sounds like a personal/cultural problem of yours that you don't regard motherhood very highly - that's pathological. Being a mother is one of the most noble roles a person can fulfill in their life. It's certainly more noble than being a careerist for corporatists.
- igetspam 3y ago
  Then why don't we pay them for it? Why aren't men clamoring for the role? Why do we often put "job" in quotes when we talk about it? Being a caregiver is absolutely noble but unless you're working in a professional environment taking care of the infirm, we don't really give the role much respect.
  - argiopetech 3y ago
    Men can't be mothers. It's not a job for which you can train. It's a role imposed upon you by nature. Fathers (and men, generally) can, of course, be caregivers, but that's only one of a mother's roles. It's far from the only one. I accept that your "we" is a group of people who don't value motherhood highly. Based on my wife's experiences as a pregnant woman and our experiences being out and about with our children, I don't think that's a common sentiment in the general population. I'll end with an unsupported assertion and a small mental leap: people are paid for work because it's the only incentive that will make them come to work. Since the 19th century, society has been progressively more successful at incentivizing women to abandon child rearing and home making in favor of commercial enterprise. Perhaps as a result (but certainly correlated), women's sense of well being has been dropping (at least through the latter third of the 20th century). Perhaps this link is causal, and the happiness lost is the reward for child rearing.

dalore 3y ago

Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places. It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.

dudul 3y ago
Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities? Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities. People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.
- sgerenser 3y ago
  Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.
  - angmarsbane 3y ago
    It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.
    - kristjansson 3y ago
      Wow, I’ve lived here for years (without kids) without knowing that. That’s LAUSD, or other parts of socal?
      - 3y ago

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

Can you break down the aspects of childcare that are financially crushing?

Balgair 3y ago
Not OP but: Near me the cost of daycare is ~$500/wk, so ~$26k per year per kid. No discounts for multiple children. Median income in my area is ~$40k per year. There are a fair few state and local discounts for people near the poverty line, but things get complicated, as usual. Other aspects get rolled up into the financial costs of childcare, and they are not negligible at all, but daycare is typically the largest issue by far. As in, just solving daycare won't fix the issue. Also, daycare costs change a lot depending on location. I have friends in TN that are at ~$1000/wk and friends in the Bay Area at ~$400/wk. So the local CoL seems to have a smaller impact than you'd think. But yeah, daycare, man. You have to square that circle somehow. Like, you know the 80/20 rule? Kids are not like that. They're more like an eclipse. In that, there is a big difference between 99% and 100% of totality. With kids, you're not going to get a movable effect with just addressing 20% of the issues. You really gotta address all of the problems to get the needle moving. That's not a popular thing to say in government, because that means that kids are expensive things to try and fix and that little victories really don't matter all that much.
- brewdad 3y ago
  The little victories matter in the same way that the Snowball Effect works for paying down debt. It feels good to see marginal improvements and those improvements allow for even greater improvements in the future. The problem comes when we stop at the first improvement or use that as an excuse to not fix new problems as they arise.
  - Balgair 3y ago
    Nah, I disagree. From where I'm at, the little victories do not add up or 'scale' in SV parlance. (Now, granted, I'm focusing on increasing a country's birthrate here, not on individuals. That's a separate discussion than the one I'm having in this comment) Like, we see in the data that these very expensive little programs and attempts to get the birthrate up seem to not really get more babies out there. In fact, it seems that the more that a family has coming in, the less kiddos they have. From my seat, what I see is that governments are trying to do these very expensive 20/80 rule kinda things. Stuff like 1.5 years of parental leave, Nordic birth boxes, free school meals, etc. Many countries are doing all this kinda stuff at once, sorta, for a little while. And it's not really seeming to move the needle much all the same. That's kinda my point. It's not that you can do a program here and see a spike in birthrate, or an initiative there and see another spike. Birthrates and having kids is a whole circle thing where, I think, you're only really going to get a real change in the birthrate if you do a lot of these very expensive programs all at once. The snowball effect does not work with birthrates, I think. You gotta do avalanches. And yeah, that's a near impossible thing to make happen without tyrannical power.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Perhaps if childcare was not such a crushing financial burden people would have more kids!? If expense was the main thing limiting fertility, you’d expect that fertility would be positively related to income, but the reverse is true.

sarchertech 3y ago
>but the reverse is true There have been some interesting changes over the last 20-40 years in that regard. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Analytical-Series/new-economics-of-fertility-doepke-hannusch-kindermann-tertilt https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/fandd/issues/Series/Anal...

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

The solution about 0% of people want to hear to reducing childcare costs is that you have to allow higher children-pet-daycare worker ratios, which likely means in turn more iPad babies.

anon291 3y ago
alternatively, make grandparenting a thing again.
- michaelt 3y ago
  Shame people are having kids later than ever (thanks to college debt), and moving to where the jobs are, so the grandparents are older and further away than ever before.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    And if they aren’t grandparents are working anyway.
  - anon291 3y ago
    There are many ways to encourage this. I think grandparents who can show they are providing material care to grandchildren should receive heavy tax relief, and maybe even subsidies (like a grandchild tax credit). Or, allow tax free sales of properties for grandparents to downsize go a place closer to children
- pixl97 3y ago
  Maybe grandparents don't want to raise kids any more and want to slack off in a life of leisure.
digging 3y ago
Or increase childcare funding ???
- titanomachy 3y ago

chongli 3y ago

Children used to be an asset, not a liability. More hands to help on the farm! Now they’re an expensive luxury. No matter how much we want to subsidize child care, it’s a huge investment that takes decades to start showing any returns. Would you invest in a company like that? Especially with no ability to meet the founders before hand (they haven’t been born yet)? When you put it that way it seems crazy. Especially when you take into account how strongly the outcomes are linked to parental education and income.

titanomachy 3y ago
The benefits to the children could take many years to realize, but the benefits to parents would be immediate. Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. That’s certainly one way to run a society.
- paulryanrogers 3y ago
  Whatever parents think of kids themselves the reality is the costs are high and have been rising.
- chongli 3y ago
  I’m talking about financial benefits. Emotional benefits like bonding with your children are great. They just don’t pay the bills. And they don’t accrue to society at large in any measurable way. What society gets out of investing in children is measured purely in economic terms. That calculation is quite messy if we’re talking about government provided full time child care! And honestly I think paid child care is a red herring of an issue. The real problem is that housing costs have ballooned out of control. This has forced moms back into the workplace in order to pay the mortgage on two incomes. If housing was cheap like it was back in the 50s-70s, we wouldn’t be worrying about child care costs!
- satvikpendem 3y ago
  > Your last paragraph seems to suggest that only well-off people should be having kids. The parent's explanation (no pun intended) is descriptive, not prescriptive or with a value judgment attached. They are describing how it is today, not necessarily how it should be.

jongjong 3y ago

The entire economy is manipulated. People have zero surplus. That's why they can barely afford to have a single child. It was my dream to have 2 children. I could only just barely afford 1.