4 ms·

That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like

That makes sense, but it feels to me like the more educated and higher-income young adults are the ones delaying kids / choosing not to have kids. It feels like lower-income young adults are more likely to start families.

jdewerd 3y ago
Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  That's not hypocritical, if you're not swinging from the rafters shouting about how a declining birthrate is the end of the world.
downrightmike 3y ago
That's a good example of anecdotal evidence
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like. So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
  - ejb999 3y ago
    couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
    - hotpotamus 3y ago
      Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure. It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
      - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
      - b112 3y ago
        It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves? Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation. People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening... Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor. If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births. It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious. There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex. Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries? There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s. That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring. This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing. Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.
Spivak 3y ago
Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage. But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.
slothtrop 3y ago
Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households. Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often). It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).

jdewerd 3y ago

Mmm-hmm, and the same group will jump at the opportunity to wag their finger and blame those lower-income young adults for the consequent economic hardship.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
That's not hypocritical, if you're not swinging from the rafters shouting about how a declining birthrate is the end of the world.

downrightmike 3y ago

That's a good example of anecdotal evidence

OkayPhysicist 3y ago

Higher incomes tends to correlate with better long term planning, and better controlled risk taking. Having a higher income also correlates with having grown up in a higher income household, and thus having more expensive ideas of what table-stakes childrearing looks like. So, as some well paid techbro, I probably had a relatively well-off childhood, and my perceived cost of having a kid is going to include A) paying for their entire college education B) paying for childcare, because I met my SO through my similar socioeconomic social circle and thus they also have a career C) moving to the suburbs where I can own a house large enough to house a family and D) still maintaining a level of wealth such that I can smooth over any unexpected expenses/life events.

hotpotamus 3y ago
And with our medical system, children are like a reverse lottery ticket (to borrow a term I saw elsewhere on HN) - if they're born with a medical issue, they may take millions in care - something I've seen personally happen to coworkers. I've got enough anxiety trying to maintain my own health insurance.
- ejb999 3y ago
  couples with two generous 6 figures salaries are not generally the people worried about unexpected huge medical expenses - they have good jobs, and good insurance.
  - hotpotamus 3y ago
    Tech jobs have had massive layoffs in the last few years. I've literally seen couples at the same employer laid off together. Certainly I've seen many colleagues with young children laid off and scrambling. My coworker literally told me a few weeks ago that her husband was laid off and as a result they had had to switch to our company insurance which was less generous. Tying your family's healthcare to the whims of your employer is one more risk that Americans are expected to endure. It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves?
    - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
      The healthcare costs issue is infuriating, because it's one that has an obvious, well-tested solution, that could be implemented tomorrow, if the gluttons in power chose to.
    - b112 3y ago
      It's merely one factor among many, I'm sure, but don't the results, ever decreasing fertility, speak for themselves? Why would you attribute decreasing fertility, something that affects every western nation on the planet, as something to do with US health care? It even affects Russia, China, Japan, literally every "modernized" nation. People have had condoms and other methods to prevent pregnancy, but no one ever cared about the cost of kids before the last few decades. This is merely an excuse, for what is really happening... Lack of fertility due to some environmental factor. If it was cultural, Japan and China ... nations most divergent from US and Western cultures, would not be affected the same way. It doesn't matter about access to the pill, or other measures, nations with or without the pill in wide use have low birth rates. Nations strong on women's rights, and more "traditional" views on women, also have reduced fertility and births. It's not cultural. It's not choice. It's not cost. It's not conscious. There is, quite literally, something affecting a drive to procreate, which is entirely different from the drive to have sex. Given that it's not cultural, and that it's not access to contraceptives, one has to wonder what it could be. Microplastics? Electricity? The types of food consumed, eg preservatives in modern foods seen in all the above countries? There can be guesses, but no one is even doing any substantial research into this. Meanwhile, the planet's population is set to halve within 30 years. And if this trend continues, if fertility / birth rates continue to decline as they have been, we will likely be down to 500M people worldwide before the 2100s. That is an immensely alarming trend, which leads to human extinction by the 2200s, due to "whatever it is" completely blocking all attempts to have offspring. This trend also doesn't take into account a global plague, or re-emergence of world war, or devastating health issues due to global warming. Should that happen, with "loads of our current, younger offspring" killed in war, or by plague, the trend is astonishingly scary and disturbing. Sorry to be a bit excessive in my reply, but the whole fertility thing is greatly disturbing to me.

Spivak 3y ago

Financial instability will do that to ya. You finally achieve a somewhat comfortable lifestyle but that requires DINK status to keep up the mortgage payments and then you look at having kids and it pushes you over the edge because daycare alone is half your mortgage. But when you thrive in financial instability and have a lifestyle that works with a parent that's out of work or not having stable income having kids doesn't add much to that.

slothtrop 3y ago

Seems to me very high income families have more kids, or otherwise, families with a stay-at-home mom will have far more children than in two-income households. Among the pressures here is a lack of support from grandparents, the affordability of daycare, availability of maternity leave (and by extension, the tolerance workplaces will have for it and how often). It's such that middle-class earners can see a dramatic change in lifestyle if they have more kids, which they don't want to compromise. In poor countries, it doesn't matter: the woman will stay at home, child mortality is high, you won't have contraceptives usually, etc. Another child is another worker (like the old days over here).