Yes this is my read too. It’s largely a cultural problem, not a resource one. The baseline expectations have gotten so high that not have a giant house and the latest electronics means you somehow can’t afford kids.
If you're responsible for yourself in either the U.S or Canada, and have built some kind of a life as an adult in a place that isn't right next to where your parents still live, assuming they're still together, then children are an expensive liability rather than necessary and relatively cheap labor used for supplying the rich ones with chocolate. Likewise, access to free in or inexpensive birth control and sex education allows a person to make less risky decisions for longer, rather than popping out 5 kids and figuring it out.
If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value. Which for a lot of people, is absolutely the case. And it’s only logical if you only care about your own individual desires.
It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
I completely agree with you. My wife and I made many lifestyle "sacrifices" in order to have kids. I put "sacrifices" in quotes, because driving in a cheaper car than your professional peers is only a sacrifice if you you are consumerist.
Is daycare "consumerism"? Other factors include stagnant wages, collage debts, amd even high medical costs - a vaginal birth with no pain medications and no complications can cost 5-figures (and may include a line-item for a parent holding the baby!).
Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless you're willing to subject your child to informal daycares. None of that is consumerism.
No one should be surprised that a country with a threadbare social safety-net and inflation outpacing childcare costs experiences a fall in birthrate - this can be explained in market-dymamics terms
Plenty of countries with good social nets have worse birth rates. Plenty of other countries with no social nets have high birth rates. I don’t think it’s particularly related, and as I said, I think it’s more of a cultural problem related to values and expectations.
I wish I hadn't included my last paragraph - all the replies are focusing on just that and not everything else I wrote!
I didn't argue a stronger social safety net would fix everything, just that having a weak one exacerbates the financial concerns, and is the major factor that would tip-over those who are not having children for mostly economic-reasons.
I know that feeling and I'm sorry to hear about your frustration.
That being said, I think the critique you're getting may be more fair to your post than you think. You bring up things like college debt and high medical costs, which are not US-like in most of the places with the lowest birth rate, and the day care situation, which often isn't either, in previous paragraphs.
I do think that even if we don't note that the post was likely US-centric, we'd struggle with the fact that it's the poorer people in the US are having more babies than the richer ones when trying to apply your explanation.
The same thing is happening in all western countries, and some other developed countries too.. Even those with free university level education, free health services, etc. Here in the UK we have the free healthcare (and maternity provision is still good), we do have university fees in most the UK, but the costs are far lower than in the US (fees are an order of magnitude lower than at some US universities, and there are cheap loans to cover fees and living costs). We have government subsidies for childcare.
We still have falling birth rates.
I actually think daycare is part of the problem - what is the point of having kids if you do not spend lots of time with them? The biggest advance would be more family friendly working hours.
i have earned a lot less to spend time with my kids, and i am so happy I did. The best thing that happened to me was to lose my job the day my oldest was born. Otherwise I would have been very well paid (I worked for an investment bank) but have hardly known my kids.
Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
I write this with the utmost sincerity: You as the would be father/mother brought your child into this world, the absolute least you could do is be the dad/mom they need in their life.
Don't come at me with how you must sacrifice your career and future for your kids: Of fucking course you have to! The moment you decide to have kids and bring them forth, "your" life is completely at the behest of your kids. That is what having kids means.
If you do not want or cannot handle the duty of sacrificing your life for your kids, do not have kids. There is no existence more tragic than a child born to parents who can not or will not spend their childhood with them.
I got downvoted for a far milder version of what you said. Going to watch this with interest.
I do not think parents can be entirely blamed. We have made having children too difficult for multiple reasons. Yes, you are primarily responsible, but good communities, family friendly work, access to extended family and other things all help.
Children were pretty much never raised exclusively by their parents throughout the history of mankind, were they? So I would put quotes around the word "need" instead.
I'm sure not exclusively, and I don't know what a typical daycare schedule is like because my wife stays at home, but e.g. my 2 year old gets up around 7am, and usually takes an hour to eat her breakfast. Then I guess to drop her off somewhere and get to work by 9, we'd have to leave close to 8. Then we might get home around 6, and it's time to eat dinner (again this takes her an hour), take a bath, and bed time.
So 5/7 days, she'd only get her parents telling her to hurry up and eat followed by putting her to bed. That's almost exclusively being raised by a stranger.
I might not put it as aggressively as the other commenter, but I do wonder why it seems common for my peers to use daycare (if they have kids at all). I know they have the means not to. We'll see what happens when the time comes, but I quite like the idea of home schooling or hybrid schooling depending on what everyone wants. The time you get is so limited; to me at least I don't see what could take priority over spending time with them while we can (again, this applies more to people in my social class who have the means). And when people talk about "sacrificing their career"... my work is the means, not the end. To speak of "sacrificing" career for family is just... baffling. Unless you are a trauma surgeon saving lives every day or an amazing scientist inventing cancer cures, I can't believe anyone would say it. Something like principal engineer or director at a fortune 500? It's just a way to make money.
We lost my dad very suddenly when I was a teenager, so I've always had to consider that no matter how much money I make, I'll never be able to buy more time with him, but I can focus my resources on my family having more time together, and hopefully I can pass my kids that lesson without them having to learn it so directly (or at least so young. At some point we all need to learn that lesson directly). Having a stay-at-home-parent means we're buying 10,400 hours of her and her mom together before age 5. Good deal at almost any price, and it only becomes a better deal when you have more kids. Likewise with remote work, if I get an extra 1.5 hours per workday (commute + seeing them when I take a break), that's almost 400 extra hours together per year. Sometimes my daughter comes and sits on my lap while I'm working on the computer, and I'll put Curious George on for her on another monitor. How lucky I am!
When people in my social strata talk about daycare, I just want to shout at them. Not angry like the other commenter, but in a more pleading tone: don't you realize! Life is fleeting! Didn't anyone tell you! Oh well.
This is a different argument, and a bit weird one. Why do you want to shout at other people for having preferences that are different from yours (or rather your wife's)? For me personally supervising small kids 12/7/365 sounds like hell on earth, I'd prefer almost any other occupation.
Like I said it's more of a "stop! Don't you see what you're missing? You can't have it back!" kind of thing. If you're a neurosurgeon, sure, but are you really going to look back one day and wish you spent one more day in stand-ups or trying to increase conversion or debugging certificate issues or whatever? It's their lives and I'd never say anything (beyond abstract conversation online) but the degree to which it seems so normal is freaky to me. I do think being career-oriented is pushed very strongly by society (or the bubbles I'm in), especially on girls, which is something I worry about for my daughters. It makes me wonder sometimes whether introducing them to church would be a smart move even if I don't think I could ever really get into it.
I wouldn't want to supervise other people's kids all day, but my own? They do all sorts of cute stuff, and sometimes they just want to come sit on you and hug you. It's not even comparable to corporate office work. My biggest worry for them is that they won't get to have that too one day.
What if you have parents who are very willing to be the childcare you need? Is there really, seriously, "no existence more tragic" than a child who spends a few hours a day with a doting 50 year old grandmother? Or with their cousins and aunt and uncle? Or with a kindly neighbour and their kids?
> "Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself."
What do you think of "it takes a village to raise a child"?
I am not in favour of never letting them out of my sight because it is important they develop autonomy and be able to look after themselves. Seeing them growing and learning is one of the joys of being a parent.
The point is being involved, which is good for children and rewarding for parents.
There is some big logical fallacy going on here... there is a very, very vast space in between, as you are implying, staying 24/7 with your children and letting someone else raise your children for you (grandparents, nanny or whatever).
> Any time I see "parents" require daycare for "their" children, I always think (or in particular cases say): Don't have children if you can't raise them yourself.
Then it should be no surprise that fewer people are having children. Many potential parents are seeing a mismatch between their ideal conditions to having a child and their circumstances and/or the state of the world and choosing not to having children (or delaying)
Addendum: some parents think they can raise kids, but discover they cannot in the worst possible way. I don't judge anyone chooses to place a child in daycare, its much better for society than Shaken Baby Syndrome, for instance.
I agree with you entirely. It's hard not to imagine spending as much time with my son as I reasonably can. Even if he's a little challenging sometimes, it's really been one of the most amazing things I've ever been gifted in my life.
Fwiw my parents grew up poorer than me and had a lot of siblings. Listening to one of them, they had to refrain from flushing the toilet to save on water, shared beds, dropped out of high school to get a job etc. It was a totally different world but rightly or wrongly lots of child bearing. Among the older gen siblings (6) about half had kids.. no more than two each. In the subsequent generation again some had kids but only one or two. I have kids, wanted more but wife didn't. In this pace of things the birthrate clearly is going down. If two people have at most two kids then population is going to decline.
> It’s a liability only if consumerism is your only value.
It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach.
However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
I think you're on the right track. We collectively have an inflated sense of what qualifies as being in an appropriate financial/lifestyle position to have children (I know, because I do it too), but it's not necessarily the same as what qualified decades back. If you have an extra bedroom to fit bunks and can afford a bit more food, public schooling is fairly affordable and a lot of the rest is optional. We just got the bills for our kids' school year and it is nothing dramatic. The extra-curricular stuff (music, sport, etc) is what adds up. Holidays, especially overseas, are expensive. Interior design fit-outs for showy rooms are expensive.
Growing up, I didn't have a console until late teens. My children are 5-11yo and we would have 5+ consoles in the house. Last week, my mother (born in the 50s) was saying that she can't recall having an actual toy of her own while growing up. Now many of us plan to have a bedroom per child, study nooks, a second living room and/or parents' retreat, a dressing room, en suites, pool, and so on.
A century ago it was also normal to have two pairs of parents living near you to help with childcare.
I don't know how common it is today, but it's certainly much less common than it was a century ago.
I've decided not to have kids, but quite a few people I know have been having them, and there's a stark difference in costs between the friends who have family nearby and those who don't. Several new parents I know even decided to move to be near at least one set of parents, at least for the first few years of their kids' lives.
I don't really know anyone who has decided to not have kids primarily because of cost, though. But I don't know if the child-free people I know are typical.
It is still pretty common for parents to live nearby:
> Over all, the median distance Americans live from their mother is 18 miles, and only 20 percent live more than a couple of hours’ drive from their parents.
Although "a couple hours drive" is probably too far to help with daily childcare activities. And in the past the grandparents were likely in the same building or across the street.
I mean, 20% is the difference between the current US fertility rate (1.64) and a rate above 2.
Obviously the 20% of the population more than 2 hours from their parents isn't abstaining from children absolutely, but it's the right order of magnitude to be a significant factor.
> This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
I think, in America at least, this is being amplified by a general gut perception that the middle class is shrinking (which does indeed seem to be happening). Even people who aren’t reading about or following the phenomenon can feel it to some degree: as middle incomes have become less common, there are a lot more high earners and more low earners.
Maintaining a high income is not a given, so the perceived risk of failure to remain in the upper-middle class now includes not just falling back to a comfortable middle class existence, but falling further down the ladder, to a place in a growing underclass with a starkly lower quality of life and future prospects.
This creates a feedback cycle: people have this gut feeling that if they don’t compete for high end jobs to live in expensive areas with good schools their kids won’t get into a good college, which is a requirement to maintain membership in this new, enlarged, hypercompetitive upper-middle class. Competition for these houses, colleges, and jobs goes through the roof. Life decisions become more stressful because the perceived stakes are higher. This in turn contributes to choices around kids: will you be able to navigate this such that your kids live a comparably comfortable life to the one you have had? How many kids can you do that for? What will life be like for a kid who for whatever reason can’t be a programmer/doctor/lawyer/etc?
No, I think you're mischaracterizing my argument. I didn't even mention schooling, I didn't mention entertainment, I didn't mention anything material, but I also didn't articulate the thought very well in retrospect.
There's nothing perfect, it's just a roof in the place you've established yourself, and eating, perhaps along with staying mentally and physically fit. It's just a basic question of whether someone's circumstances can be stretched further; in many cases they can, but in many more they can't, and if whatever reason they didn't spend the entire first part of their life aligning all the variables necessary to handle the basics, and getting lucky, then it seems more probable to be a disaster than not.
It's not about perfection, it's really high level stuff. First, get a long-term partner who fits certain criteria. Lets say attraction is last on that list because we've decided not to be perfect, we've decided to be like the previous generation who didn't care about their health or mental well-being at all and get the first person we have sex with pregnant, and take it to completion. Halfway through the pregnancy we realize we're totally incompatible, can't even equitably share space with the other person, and actually they're not even remotely invested in improving as a human. That's fine, it'll work out in the end, ignore your burgeoning depression.
Next step, get a place together. It's not looking good, but ignore that, it's for the sacrifice you've decided to make right now for some reason. You remember that your parents had you in a small 1 bedroom apartment that was probably crap, but they only paid $300 a month for. You currently live in a modest studio that's $1500 a month, and an upgrade to a 1 bedroom would go up to $2500. Maybe we get lucky and get a rustic basement for $1750. There are co-ops, but they have thousands of people ahead of you in line. Of course, there are always small towns in rural areas, so maybe we can move there, maybe get a job in the sawmill.
It's all just silly. If you're in a position to, and want to have kids, then you do, but otherwise there's no intrinsic reason to and getting there could be a tenuous personal decision to introduce a whole lot more strain in probably an already strained position.
If you're in the former camp, great. You still live close to parents probably, have had a stable job for a while that's not going away, there's not a ton of competition for rentals or whatever, and have a great supportive relationship that isn't volatile. You might be surprised, but that can be tough to come by. If you can pull it off you can pull it off.
> At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
Curiously, the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child was from 1924.
Yeah, it's easier to have kids if you care less about their wellbeing, and if one of the ways of dealing with the expense is sending them to work in a factory.
I'm not sure how to respond to comments like this, because they obviously aren't made in good faith.
Potential parents today aren't choosing between "having kids and sending them to slave away in a factory" and "perfect childhood with every toy imaginable and no financial need."
The contemporary Western world is immensely wealthy on a material and informational basis, orders of magnitude beyond even a half century ago. I don't think people understand this at any level, mostly because they don't know much history.
People used to value the labor of their children. At the dystopian tail-end of it, they valued selling it on the market, which is what's being referenced.
But, generally, my impression from light reading is people throughout history thought of children as progressing pretty quickly into helpfulness. Now, though, people have jobs children can't help with, ever, which keep them too busy to project-manage children into helpfulness around the house. So people have them exclusively for their company (which, again my impression from light reading, has not been at all the historical norm).
If it wasn't a resource problem, giving birth in a US hospital would not cost $30k in shockingly common cases.
I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children.
That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
I feel for your particular situation, but I don't think this explains the overall situation.
Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.
The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.
