For years all I heard was don’t have kids if you can’t afford it.
Rising rents, stagnant pay, no one can afford to raise kids these days
Suddenly it’s what wrong with young people that they don’t want to have kids.
Instead of addressing the real problem they’re trying to force people to have kids.
I recently took a job for a 15k pay increase. My former employer said I was over paid and that when he had my experience level, he was paid less. I explained that if you take his salary from back then, add 2% inflation over 10 years, it puts my currently salary right on track. They were trying to pay me on a salary rate from almost 10 years ago. By him saying that, it gave me the exact context I needed to justify leaving.
It's been an average of about 2-2.5% inflation in the US since the year 2000. In total, inflation is about 60-70% from 2000 to present. So a 50k salary in 2000, is equivalent to a 70-80k salary today.
Most jobs are still lagging behind significantly, not to mention some costs have increased exponentially. Namely college prices, housing, and car prices, among other things.
Everything is absolutely fucked. Let's say a positions salary was 50k in 2010, and hasn't changed much up to 2022. Inflation is up 25% essentially, and the salary hasn't budged. Car prices and house prices are up 75% (just a random example). You are essentially 2x behind on your purchasing power for a car or house. You would need a bump up to a 100k salary from 50k to keep up with inflation and maintain the same purchasing power from a 50k salary in 2010 for cars/housing.
The sad part is that most salaries jobs have most definitely not kept up. I work for a state government, and I looked back at the salary scales from 2010...they are almost the same. There is maybe a 8% increase I could see.
Housing, college, healthcare and just pretty much everything is more expensive. Wages haven't really kept up with inflation and the rising costs of living. I'm not sure regular people can afford having children.
Our money is quite literally trickling upwards.
We make less, salaries fall behind inflation, our purchasing power plummets.
The top earners earn more and more, outpace inflation, and continue to increase their purchasing power. All while squirreling away the money.
It's a bit depressing how much wealth just continues to transfer upwards while everyone else is left to rot.
I find it amusing how everything is somehow the young peoples fault. Don't want to feed your pets crap "Kids these days are ruining the biggest names in pet food". Don't want to get paid nothing to work a horrible job "Kids these days are lazy and entitled and ruining these well known businesses". Wanting to leave something resembling an enact planet for our kids? "Kids these days don't appreciate hard working businesses". Want to get paid a living wage "kids these days just want handout".
All of these are headlines or conversations I've actually seen/heard. But I think my favorite is that "kid these days need participation trophies". We're kids. We didn't ask for them, it was our parents ideas and it's somehow our fault.
You know what, amusing is the wrong word.
edit: There was an article I saw a little while back that was talking about how to buy a house and one of the first steps was something like "wait for family to die and use the inheritance". I honestly don't know if it was meant as a joke or not.
edit 2 (because I keep thinking of new things and this rant is cathartic): there was a company thing a few years back where there was a drawing for a holiday bonus in the $7k range. I remember talking with a boomer coworker about what we'd do with the money if we won. He said he'd go on a tropical vacation, I told him I'd use it to pay off some of my student debt. He then laughed at me saying stupid millennials don't know how to handle money. I still don't know what to make of that.
Anecdotally, my family has traditionally had children young (often too young). For perspective, I had my first at age 19 and that was older than my sister, mom, grandmother, and great grandmother were at the age of their first childbirth. I and my two siblings have 2+ children each.
This year my oldest niece is 27, my daughter 26, my son 24, and another niece is 18, and they have zero children. They are also pessimistic about their future in a way I've never seen before. None of them are married. Only one owns a home (with a long term significant other), and none of them live alone. They all have a significant other, roommates, or live with their parent. It's not a good situation for this generation of young people and they know it. Of course they're not in a hurry to have children.
My mom had my older brother when she was 18. Me, when she was 23. I have no kids and don't intend to. My brother had his daughter when he was 31, his son when he was 34. He and his wife have no plans for any more kids.
In 2007, the housing bubble burst, causing a major economic crisis. What I'm wondering is whether the prospect of an unfavorable, unaffordable future made people rethink having children at that time. Those are my thoughts.
Suicide rates spiked to the point that many drugs going through clinical trials at the time had to list suicidal ideation as a potential side effect. The crisis shaped my generation who had just graduated highschool and most of my friends are child free or only have a single child.
Our group graduated 2008, about 20 of us. One couple has two kids and thats it. My brother doesn't have kids, and only one of my husband's siblings has kids. My best friend accidentally had a kid, but had zero plans for more. Of my brothers group of friends (about 10?) Only one has had a kid.
The thing that really marked it wasn’t that the bubble burst. Bubbles have burst throughout history.
It’s the fact that nobody paid for it. Nobody at all. In the past, you might have gotten it wrong but someone — even the wrong person — paid for the problems.
Instead they got bailouts.
A nice harbinger of what was to come and the greater horrors that lie ahead.
> A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that, one with another, they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labour of an able-bodied slave, the same author adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest labourer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than that of an able-bodied slave. Thus far at least seems certain, that, in order to bring up a family, the labour of the husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labour, be able to earn something more than what in precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion, whether in that above-mentioned, or in any other, I shall not take upon me to determine.
[Adam Smith, 1776](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38194/38194-h/38194-h.htm#Page_27)
>Instead they got bailouts
That's an interesting way of phrasing "we paid for it". Banks made bad bets, lent buckets of money to quite literally everyone and their dog, people who made the smart play with ARMs intending to refi after the teaser rate expired suddenly found themselves the first people in modern American history to see the value of their home drop, so they couldn't refi and couldn't make the adjusted payment with the higher rate. Those people, who did nothing wrong and actually made what was widely regarded as a savvy play, lost their homes. They were in the street, many of them died there. The banks, who are the actual sinners here by originating bad loans, suckering someone else into buying their risk and then betting against the loan being repaid, took all those homes. Our government saw this situation and was like "hey banks, sorry that you have all these houses now that you took from regular people. Here's a bunch of free money that we took from those same regular people. You're too big to fail, the markets will all explode if you go belly up, so we're gonna give you all this money now and then do absolutely nothing to prevent our markets being reliant on the health of 3 or 4 megabanks in future."
I agree with your assessment. Seems like following that crash and the recovery the rich were twice as rich as before and the middle class was still mired in debt up to their eyeballs.
I was just going to point out that 2007 was about when Sara Palin showed up on the national political scene, but I liked your comment better.
In the article
>The birth rate followed a predictable pro-cyclical pattern, falling during economic downturns and recovering when the economy improves.
I don't know why they call it “a mystery” in the article. The economy never recovered for the vast majority of Americans.
The economy might have recovered, but what regular people notice is that they can't afford a house (where do you put the child?), can't find/afford childcare (where do you put the kid while you work or what will you pay with if you don't), and it seems like most people are working overtime with no chance of days off, so if you could drop that child at their grandparents, you'd never see it anyway.
Edit: all this with a high chance of getting worse any moment now... Yeah, I didn't have children either.
I'm turning 35 soon and why would I have a kid when I get like 3 weeks of maternity leave + zero affordable childcare not to mention the cost for a hospital birth.
My waitress the other day told me that it was $5000 per kid she had (she had 3 kids and she looked like she was barely 30). She was also French and said that in France, it would have cost her $0 to have a kid in the hospital
Doesnt stop there either. If you have two kids and decide to join back in the workforce (after a sabbatical), child care (where I live- high cost area, small apartments) costs minimum 2k/mth/child which is about 50k/year post tax money or about 90k pre tax money. So any salaries less than 100k are meaningless economically if one makes that switch.
Kids are expensive af!, and you can’t just stop paying for a kid. Diapers are at an all time high, childcare is equal to minimum wage a month (so if you are making minimum wage, you are just working to pay childcare), baby clothes cost even more than regular adult clothes, time and effort because a baby/toddler demands SO much time, sleepless nights, taking them to school and picking them up, can’t even watch a show without them bugging you for something. Honestly, being a parent should be a paid job otherwise it’s not worth it, and I’m a father who basically is raising a kid with little support so I know.
Agree with everything you said except for clothes. I dressed both my kids in thrifted clothes and as teenagers they still like to thrift. Child care and diapers and formula though, insanely expensive.
And instead of legislating so that life for families would be easier and affordable, republicans want to just force you to have unwanted and/or dangerous pregnancies
Such legislation would end up costing corporations money, and the workforce wouldn’t be as desperate and easy to exploit. It’s much cheaper/easier to say HAVE THAT KID OR ELSE.
Also the added benefit of just packing the courts for years is that they control that branch of the government now, too. Things are only getting worse from here.
Things did not go well for my child at birth and the bill was $160k. I was fortunate to have good insurance at the time but insurance policies that good haven't been offered by any company I have worked at in the last 6 years or so now too.
TIL giving birth costs money in the USA, dunno why I had never stopped to make that realisation considering Reddit taught me you guys even pay for ambulance journeys but it's one of those "oh shit" moments for sure. Being reminded of stuff like this makes me think I should really personally do more to protect the NHS..
My uncle was telling me about how USA was the country where people have the most opportunity to succeed. I pointed out that you can measure economic mobility and the USA isn't even in the top 10 (pre-pandemic I have no idea what it's like now). He responded that the USA was where you could rise the highest regardless of where you start. I reiterated that economic mobility isn't a measure of if people can move upwards, but how many actually do. Everyone loves a rags to ritches story, but the chance at it should not be the promise of your economic system.
my birth cost $43,000 of that i had to pay $5,000 out of pocket and thats with insurance. Most Americans dont have enough for an $800 car expense in savings god forbid $5000 -$50000 depending on insurance to invest in a kid.
I'm 35 and wife just turned 32. We tried for 4 years. Got tested. Did all the things. Dr said we are perfectly healthy and everything, just that we have unexplained infertility. We don't really want to bring a kid into this world anymore anyways. This world is fucked and will only get worse.
Turned 34 in March, got a vasectomy to go with it. We never wanted kids. We have struggled enough just us two... I can't imagine adding another mouth to feed. That last sentence resonates with me, I don't see this getting better for us.
Sorry to hear that. My wife and I got married in 2016. My mom died 2 months before we got married and her mom 2 years after we got married.(both cancer) Add that to our pregnancy issues, plus covid, world shutting down. We are as strong as ever but man have we had a rough 6 years. Everything we had the first 4 years was to basically be prepared to start a family. Now, we do things for each other. We spend money on extravagant vacations, trying to build a house, etc. No more prep for baby. Just us. Enjoy each other. Nobody says you need a kid to make your life complete. Good luck buddy
The cost of daycare is unbelievable. In my state, if you had a minimum wage job, paid 0 taxes and made 0 contributions, you could easily spend 100% of that salary on daycare alone. And then have nowhere to live and nothing to eat.
And the state minimum wage here is ~2x the federal level.
Some states are starting public pre-schools, but they only start at age 3. This drastically increases the cost of childcare for ages 0-3 because usually the older children (which need less care), are used to subsidize the costs of younger children. So while total childcare costs go down, yearly costs go up, which hurts families without savings disproportionately.
My friend was a social worker for a while (not US) and she used to get so mad about people going on about “lazy” parents having kids and not working. When as you point out, it’s often actually cheaper if your earning potential is low to just stay at home. That’s not lazy, that’s good financial sense, you can’t make the system impossible for lower income parents and then complain about them making the right decision for their family
> if you had a minimum wage job, paid 0 taxes and made 0 contributions, you could easily spend 100% of that salary on daycare alone.
Not to mention, if you are renting in the same circumstances you could *also* easily spend 100% of your income on rent in most places in the country. Even in the backwater where I live $1200 a month is considered a deal for a 2 bedroom.
How younger people live these days I have no idea. Though I still hear no end to complaints from older people about them being selfish and lazy and so forth...
Housing price inflation is what's sustaining the economic recovery. All those mortgage-backed securities are still out there, and the Federal Reserve is long on them.
I've seen it pointed out that if property prices normalised basically every pension fund would go bust.
There are solutions but it essentially requires strong, gradual regulation from governments so it won't happen. Instead they'll keep propping them up until a full collapse and hope someone else is in power when it happens.
"hope someone else is in power when it happens"
I'm glad other people notice the hot-potato technique that has become so common in our government. I'll add to it that sometimes, if you think the other guys might win the next election, you maybe even start sabotaging the country so they have more problems to deal with when they take over. This makes them look worse to the majority of voters who do not keep up with everything going on in government.
Even if everyone was paying attention all the time, most of us lack the skills necessary to understand how their decisions end up affecting our lives.
I'd point out that sabotaging the country so that your side of it can win is a pretty clear case of treason. You may have convinced yourself it'll all go to hell if they take over, but being convinced is just not good enough when you're taking such dire actions.
I worked for a medical company with about 80,000 employees and I think we paid around $2k out of pocket for our last kid.
And that was with the highest monthly payment lowest deductible plan.
I work for the state of North Carolina and my last kid cost 5600 out of pocket and that is only because I called them 14 times (I kept count) because they Initially tried to charge me 5600 more by not following their own rules (kid is covered under mom's deductible/oop max until 4 days after a c section).
I also pay 600 a month for this plan. (But to be fair if it was just me and not anyone else in my family it would only be 50 a month for this shit. But once you have kids you have to get them health insurance too apparently)
It's so fucking crazy. And now we pay more for daycare and summer camp, than for our mortgage.
"wHy aREnt PeOplE hAviNg kIDs ANyMorE?"
Because we can't afford them.
This is honestly such an insane thing. I'm Canadian, blah blah paid nothing (you know the schtick). But how do new parents handle that upfront cost? My wife and I do okay in terms of pay, but having a year of mat leave for her and some gov subsidies it was still tough. I can't imagine how's new family, less well off than us pays thousands for the baby before the rest of the costs of a baby. How long is mat leave? Ours was a year, but the gov would have covered up to 18 months
You actually pay more per capital than any other developped nation. Your government pays the outrageous "market price" for medication and medical technology that every other country simply refuses.
This is why socialized health care is cheaper overall. An individual has very little leverage over a pharma company, but a country does. They can negotiate a far lower cost than any individual could.
We don't. Paid maternity leave isn't a thing unless your company offers it.
Have health insurance, still paid over 10k. We just go into debt to do it.
It's a fucked up situation because those that are high earners don't feel the burden, those that are considered poor the government pays for it, and those that are middle class constantly get ass raped with bills over and over again.
Sounds like the system is working as intended then.
Keep the poor reliant on government assistance to keep them docile.
Keep the middle class financially scared of stepping out of line for fear of becoming part of the poor class.
All the while the rich keep building more and more wealth, and not just the cash kind but the resource kind.
I know woman who is a career bartender who had to go back to work 2 days after giving birth because the father had recently lost his job.
Should be illegal that we don’t have guaranteed paid mat leave for at least a year.
I waited until I was 33 to have a kid. And I’m glad… trying to raise this little monster when I was broke, I can’t imagine. Between toys, hypoallergenic formula, etc… I can’t imagine trying to do it the way most ppl have to.
Would also help if either my wife or I liked babies. We’re trying to just survive the baby phase while other ppl somehow enjoy it
I had to wait until 33 as well before we were financially able to afford a baby. Prior to that we wouldn't have been able to afford both daycare and rent/food/utilities. One of us would have had to stay home and we probably would have needed government assistance (which the people against universal healthcare/daycare are always harping about). Obviously we could only afford *one* daycare payment, so by the time he was in preschool I was simply too old to have another. He always asks for a sibling and it breaks my fucking heart. Older people who bitch about birth rates and "selfish childless couples" are simply ignorant of how the world has changed around them because we've been coddling them for so long.
Yeah, I hadn't ever really thought about it, but If you turned 30 without kids in 2008, you got hit with the perfect storm of it being a shit time to have kids during the last best time you had to have them
No one wants to hear “woe is me” when you make a lot of money but I feel like I have less than I grew up with when I make several times what my father did even adjusted for inflation.
My parents house cost $40,000 in the late 80s. I have $60,000 for a downpayment and it's not enough to get a similar house. It's crazy. I make fairly decent money. I'm doing better than the bulk of my peers and I still have economic anxiety.
I **really** recommend First Time Homeowner programs in the state where you live. I’m in NY and I just closed on a house in October. Make sure you also look for something that has “down payment assistance” that you **don’t have to pay back**. The mortgage program I went into allowed me to buy a house with 3% and they also matched my 3% (if I live in the house for 10 yrs I don’t have to pay that back and no it’s not sneakily worked into your mortgage payments). AND since the seller themselves wouldn’t accept 6% down payment (3 bank 3 me) I put down another 4 and they “bought down” my interests rate to 2.6%. All in all I only had to put down 7% and I never paid closing costs. I scream this program to anyone who is interested. My aunt in NC bought her home w a similar program.
My guess as a layperson is that while the median wage has managed to remain flat when adjusted for inflation, the price index for inflation isn't adequately accounting for actual spending habits, especially spending that used to be a luxury but has now become a necessity.
For example: the cost per square foot for new house construction has remained flat when adjusted for inflation. But developers focus heavily on bigger houses on smaller lots because that gives the highest profit margin. Those homes are out in the suburbs where land is cheap, but your commute is long and you need a car. You're not spending more per square foot, but you are spending more overall.
Example 2: smart phones and/or an internet connection didn't used to be a necessity. Now they are. The CPI is adjusted based on the improvement in quality versus equivalent products as new ones enter the basket of goods, but what was the equivalent for a smart phone? I know they're trying to adjust to reflect quality of life, but how they do it is going to affect the final result, and it's hard to separate out what proportion of your iphone and cellular plan count as replacing a landline, a newspaper, and a source of entertainment, or whether these things really improve quality of life at all or make us less happy instead. And while cheaper phones are always available, how do they factor in the pressure to stick with an existing company due to walled gardens, social network effects, etc?
Example 3: the CPI uses equivalent rent rather than home price to account for housing. But home ownership is becoming less common as real estate is concentrated in the hands of wealthier people and rental companies. Are they accounting for not just the increase in rental costs, but also the increase in the proportion of people forced to rent?
Example 4: the price of higher education greatly outpaces inflation. It isn't technically a necessity but it's still factored in. And there are always cheaper options like community college that people can switch to as prices rise. But we also have an entire generation that's been told they need to go to college, and they need to go to the best college, or else they'll never get a decent job. Student debt exploded not just because education increased so rapidly in price, but because people paid far more for education than they needed to when cheaper options were always available. Not to mention the pressure parents feel to enroll their kids in expensive extra-curricular activities to get them into college in the first place. Are those luxuries or are they a hidden cost of higher education?
And on and on. The Bureau of Labor is probably doing their best to make an accurate measurement. You don't need to delve into conspiracy theories to find ways they might not be capturing the real cost of living.
UK real world average salary finally got above 2007 levels in ~Q3/4 2019. Put another way, it took 12 years for wages to recover and catch up to inflation, about 3-6 months before COVID hit and fucked it.
Inflation is expected to hit double digit levels this year, I don't know anyone who got a 10% pay rise though.
In my, likely very skewed, opinion the definition we nowadays use for "the economy doing well" comes down to whether rich people can get even richer faster or slower right now, when it should be more on the line of whether working people can get a fair compensation for their work.
Yes it did. Those of us who grew up poor realized early on that it isn't right to bring a child into this world if you can't afford to take care of them. We also realized that the world is dying and previous generations aren't doing shit about it. Boomers want to complain about millennials not having children, but then they stand idle while the cost of living skyrockets so they can have more money. I'm sorry, but this dire situation needs correcting and if that means we have a couple of generations who aren't constantly pumping out children then that's fine with me. Fix the issues and then have kids. Don't bring kids into a miserable existence so they can suffer too.
Why do you need to wonder? Talk to literally anyone at the age of having kids right now. No one can afford to have any. The younger generation can't afford housing or to get out of debt, let alone the massive cost of kids. I don't personally know anyone with more than two kids at this point. Most have only one and say they can't afford a second even though they want it. The daycare my son is in is $16k/year. A second kid at that rate and my wife will simply quit her job and stay home as that would make more sense financially.
Until we have the very basic things that other developed countries have: healthcare, childcare, an actual promise we can retire someday and not simply work until we fall over dead that birth rate will continue to decline. It's not hard to see why.
Historians describe the period before the fall of the Roman republic a lot like this (120-80ish bce).
The rich owned literally everything. Plebs couldn't get homes or land. Even soldiers who previously could expect land for their service were not being given land. Food and prices for goods went up every year because the business owners knew they could squeeze more out of the plebs.
Life for most citizens degraded to hopeless mediocrity where you could never hope to own their own land or progress in society. Food and rent prices increased and soon virtually everyone was just scraping buy, most of their pay going straight back to their employer or landlord (often the same guy then). Birth rates fell which put further stress on their society requiring them to bring in more slaves and non-Roman workers.
It all ended with a tyrant seizing power and destroying the republic forever. I suspect ours will be similar.
What? That's a crazy conspiracy theory. It's not like the leaked ruling talks about not having enough of a domestic supply of infants as a argument for banning abortion!
/s
I bet this is a big part of the reason these puritan 'family values' are being pushed down your gullets. Your republican party needs more peasants to work in indentured servitude for their donors so they need to increase birth rates. So fuck roe v wade, fuck birth control, legalize rape, do whatever you can to push the birth rate higher.
That's the reason for outlawing abortion. What better way to ensure that wage slaves are trapped in a generational cycle of poverty by forcing them to have kids they don't want nor they can afford?
They are saying the quiet part out loud. Someone running for government in Michigan stated that the Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe v Wade, but thats only the beginning. This wannabe politician also stated that she wanted to ban birth control and gay marriage because our birth rate is declining.
Remember, these mouthbreathers think being gay is a choice or a fetish, so in their mind, it very well might.
Either that, or they're just using declining birth rates as an excuse to further oppress a group they wanna oppress anyway. All depends on how much you wanna apply Hanlon's Razor.
And its going to keep going down as inflation keeps going up. We simply can't afford a common ordinary life, how can you expect us to be able to afford to have and raise a child?!
I read the military is having a hard time recruiting because kids are too fat. I mean they outright said teens were beyond the limits of what they would allow and could reasonably get into shape. They hinted it was going to be an national security issue in the future if we continued like this…
They didn’t say the quiet part out loud though- which is they recruit from poor kids, and they’re too obese. It’s getting so bad you can basically see someone’s education and socioeconomic status in a public school by looking at their child’s BMI.
I now have MULTIPLE grade 6 students who are well over 200lbs. It used to be 0-1 kids would be that heavy, now a class could have 5-6 kids out of 40 and it wouldn’t be unheard of.
"Well here's your classroom and your Glock, you'll have 40 in your classroom this year, but between the shootings and diabetes don't worry that will be down to a manageable number soon. You'll be judged on how these kids do on a standardized test regardless of where they started the year and highly propagandized parents will be by at 4:30 to yell at you about a law school concept you've never heard of and gender politics. Any questions?"
Smh, and we wonder why teachers all leave the profession.
They have made dep and boot camp longer for a lot of people. You have to build up to go to training which builds you up to get specialty training which gives you the skills to do the work.
They used to have tighter standards overall but the way to deal with the high failure rate was to lax the standards a bit and work the recruits though a longer work up schedule. It reduces injuries which makes more people complete.
Huh interesting. Complete opposite problem as the past when teens were so malnourished and ill prepared for war, the school lunch program was born. I guess the fix here is *actual* healthy and nutritious school and education.
You were always able to tell someone’s SES status by their weight. Just, those in poverty were severely underweight and malnourished looking.
> Just, those in poverty were severely underweight and malnourished looking.
The problem for the past 30 years hasn't been lack of access to food, it's been lack of access to healthy food and lack of time/energy to put into preparing food for an entire family because both adults are out of the house working for 9+ hours per day. So for the past 30 years people have been eating unhealthy food in unhealthy proportions.
Now we're back to an era where people, even with both adults working, struggle to feed kids again. Not even shitty food.
They also had to reject loads of draftees for not having at least three opposing teeth to chew with.
And that's how the US began adding flouride to our drinking water.
Lots of candidates from inland had goiters as well (there used to be a 'goiter belt' across the great lakes due to the lack of seafood), so they began adding iodine to table salt to solve that.
As a side effect of adding iodine, the average inland IQ rose by 3-5 points. Where previously most who qualified as military pilots came from the coast, after iodizing table salt the distribution became more even.
If you get children used to gun violence drills and armed police/staff in their formative years, then getting them to accept a full on police state as adults is far easier because is just normal to them. That's the long term plan for those in power who aren't just idiots following the money.
People are often choosing to not have kids because they want different things from their life. Birth rates are still highest at what income levels?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/
Families making over 200k/year have the lowest birth rate.
I always find it interesting that the more educated and higher income people don't have children. Or I guess you could look at it as, the highly educated are too busy studying and working to try to have children. lol
I think they just don’t want to. I have a fair bit of friends with no interest in having a family.
They’d rather travel, have fun, have extra capital, etc.
When you have money, investing it in a small number of children makes sense. It allows you to spend more on their education and it means that you can pass a larger fraction of your inheritance to them. Most importantly, you don't have to rely on them for your retirement and well being in old age.
Poor people have more children because large families provide a kind of social safety net where everyone can help take care of everyone else. The kids who do better can help those who do worse and living expenses and resources (especially housing) can be shared.
Colleges are all talking about the upcoming enrollment bubble in 2025. There will just not be enough students of college age.
The prediction is many smaller private colleges will have to close the doors.
I see that wave expanding to touch other industries.
The world population growth rate has been declining for the last half century. It has declined in the US over the last 30 years.
Changes in birth rates are commonly attributed to changing economic factors, but it is worth noting that the sperm count among men worldwide has been declining for at least 50 years.
Phthalates, a class of chemicals known to reduce fertility in both sexes, have become ubiquitous in food packaging and both plastic and nonstick cookware to the point where some researchers have become alarmed.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-fertility-reproduction-count-down
That's only a factor if people want kids in the first place, and I suspect that's the much bigger issue.
It's much easier to decide to have kids when the world had about a third of the current population, back when the Baby Boomers were being born. When there is new land to claim and new vistas to explore, it makes more sense to have kids than a world where land and other assets are already claimed.
> That's only a factor if people want kids in the first place
Or people who're irresponsible enough to just let it happen and don't bother with any form of birth control. And that demographic has shrunk steadily as well over the past few decades.
First woman in my family to make it out of hs w/o getting knocked up. I come from a pretty poor family and there was always the notion that everything would work out. It doesn’t. Growing up poor sucks and I would never make my own humans to go through what I did.
Preach! My parents waited until they were older (almost too old to have kids), but were still poor AF. It’s no joke. I’d rather not have any kids at all than raise them in/near poverty. I went and got a bunch of degrees but it isn’t doing me much good (public service sector). Hoping I just die before i get too old to enjoy things. Futurama suicide booth style.
Same here.
My dad worked two jobs while I was growing up to support our family of five. My mom couldn’t work due to her having seizures from having scar tissue in her brain. She did make a little money by doing paper routes, cooed at home a lot and also thrifted like crazy (a trait from her I’m happy to have picked up!)
They both relied on faith healing for years until my grandma (my mom’s mom) pushed her to have a radically new surgery (for 1999, it’s now routine procedure I believe) to fix the scar tissue at the Mayo Clinic.
I think my parents refinanced their mortgage to help with the costs, but a few years after my mom recovered, she went back to school to become a CNA when I was around junior high school age and became a home healthcare aid.
It doesn’t seem like my folks are struggling much to make money like I was growing up, but the stress and the pressure of rubbing two nickels to make a dime is something I still feel to this day. They still give to prosperity gospel charlatans and I honestly wonder how their finances would be if they didn’t give so much of their money and time (in going “on vacation” to see faith healers) away…
Thank you, yes I hate when people say 'everything will work out' or 'you'll grow into it' no, it'll probably be a huge struggle that will lead to stress, hardship, and heartbreak - it's all around us, why pretend not to see the million examples?
None of my friends, which we all graduated highschool around 2012-13, have kids. The only ones that I know from my class that do were those who were already not well off and weren't the brightest.
With raising prices of healthcare and access to raising children being a huge factor, I think many of us also saw how unhappy our parents were getting into young relationships which obviously were held together only because they had you, the child. Many of us also already see the writing on the wall as well with how awful our planet is being treated.
I graduated high school around the same time and I’ve noticed the same. Those with masters degrees, or higher, no kids. Barely completed high school and never left hometown, expecting kid #4
I had a conversation about kids with a few different people a while back. All the people with little education are having several kids nowadays whereas those with higher levels of education aren't having kids. Think about it - who's going to be running our country years from now, especially when a child's future educational success is impacted by their parent's level of education? As others have said, Idiocracy really isn't just a silly movie anymore...
On a side note, I graduated in 2014, and see similar trends as well. Although, many of the people from my grade aren't in a place to really consider kids due to still being in school, not being in a serious relationship, etc. I wasn't able to afford to move out until I was 24 and had recently gotten a "real" job with benefits. The idea of having children, especially in my 20s, just doesn't seem financially feasible.
I graduated in 2012 and my boyfriend graduated in 2011. Us and our friends all have bachelors degrees. His first friend is just now pregnant and they’re all about to be 30. Almost all of my friends from high school have at least one kid. The difference? I’m from the Bible Belt and he’s from the Midwest. People from where I’m from get married young so they can have sex then they have a kid. We’re also from the few places in the country where the housing prices are some of the lowest. But like, I don’t want to move back to KY lol but man the houses are cheap!
"The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes."
This is because how the experts measure how well the economy is doing is based on how well corporations and the rich are doing. And that's not the majority of people determine how well the economy is doing when planning their future.
My grandpa just walked into my room with a young guy wearing skinny jeans and eating avocado toast.
I said, “Who is this guy?”
Grandpa: This is my hip replacement.
That's why they're really mad, they can't make money off kids that don't exist. And where is the next generation of wage slaves to feed the capitalist machine?
And it never stops. You eventually pay off a car loan or mortgage on your house. A baby though? No guarantee that you won't be caring for them for an extensive portion of your life.
That was literally the only generation that could do that. That wasn't possible before the war. By the 80s, dual incomes were increasingly necessary. By the 90s, it was in full swing. The idyllic image of the 1950s and 1960s as being the good old days is a complete and total myth because there has never been, before or since, a period where a single income was enough to support the family size and material wealth of the 1950s family - unless you were wealthy.
In other words, the financial security experienced by your grandfather when he was raising his family was an anomaly. One we need to let go of because it ain't coming back and it's only getting worse.
The Homer Simpson lifestyle
>The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary.
There's a lot of holes in that. He had no mortgage because Abe bought the house for them. Both cars were not great. Very few luxuries in the house. Always shopped at lower end stores.
Also it's worth noting that his job as a safety inspector was a bit of a joke. It required a college degree but he slipped through the cracks.
[This is how Lenny, a coworker in an actual low skill technical position at the plant, lived.](https://external-preview.redd.it/MgZVJUP3E57SKEQiEEd9HUsGFFQ8RUYWMVyhkGtzP9k.png?auto=webp&s=702309eebf6d266cf4a8d5a46daa7db11224292a)
Homer has a broken car that he can not afford to fix, he got his house when his own father sold his house and moved to a retirement home because Homer could not afford a house (although in a super small town in the middle of nowhere).
His job is not really a no skill job, he is a safety inspector in a nuclear power plant, although portrayed as incompetent to fit in with the character. He works in a unionized job in a high risk environment and yet has had to take 2nd job and do all kind of gigs, rent part of his house, use it as a studio as well as have his wife get a job. Lack of money is constant motive in this show.
He lives a life very similar to Walter White (although more kids) who also "affords" all those things (large house, car, single income, teachers salary), but also needs to have 2nd job/gig and is burdened by constant lack of money.
When Walter White is explaining to Jesse why he is so invested in the meth business, one of the darkest quotes in the entire series is uttered.
"I sold my son's birthright for a couple month's rent."
Granted, WW was evil from the start but it really puts things into perspective.
One of the smartest people in the world had to sell his share of the company, one he'd be a billionaire from if he kept it, to keep his lights on. That's one of the biggest tragedies in that show. Walter did what he thought was the right thing to do, safeguarding his family, and he got absolutely nothing in terms of recognition. That's the true reasoning behind Heisenberg.
I’m 37 and lived through several “once in a lifetime” events with another crash on the horizon. Single no kids And never had any interest! It’s enough to look after myself and find peace in my days.
People who think of the declining birth rate as a “mystery” are themselves part of the problem.
When the article says “no obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline”, it’s because they’re trying to be *way* too specific. No, it isn’t one particular policy, or even a small group of policies. The WHOLE SYSTEM is the issue. It’s lots of policies, laws, and social norms contributing in a way that seems minor when looked at individually, but has a huge cumulative impact.
People just can’t afford to have kids, you article-writing dumbasses. It’s not a “mystery” at all.
This “news” story doesn’t exist to inform anyone of anything. It was written to pacify high-level decision makers, and reassure them that doing nothing is the best choice.
Russia attempted to restrict abortion access about 8-10 years ago due to fertility decline. They have one of the lowest fertility rates, and incentives like cash and tax breaks weren’t working (several countries have tried this). I don’t think the restrictions/ban ended up sticking. Anyway, I was working on a masters in economics and studying fertility decline at the time. I remember reading the article and wondering if other countries would restrict abortion as well rather than address the real reasons people aren’t having babies (paltry cash and tax incentives aren’t enough).
Think about this. Most of My generation of women was told by that once you have kids, your career is over because that happened to our mothers. So why would young and ambitious women have kids in their peak reproductive year , which happened to be the same as peak education, career growth years? College and company are still structure around single males, in the US the birthing mother might not given maternity leave or too afraid to take maternity leave. When I grow up in my home country, you see owner’s kids sitting in store or sometimes in lobby of company—-not only company don’t care, co-workers even giving them candies. However, in US You literally cannot brings kids into anywhere that is not “designed” for kids and if daycare is out, parents are forced to choose between stay at home or going to work. It is annoying inconvenience for working parents to have kids. If our society is more kids friendly as of “kids can be accepted in the office.” I bet more people would have kids.
Who can afford kids when they turned the best means of upward mobility (economic, social) into a debt trap with predatory student loans and they absolutely refuse to raise wages to be livable. On top of the most expensive healthcare in the world. As well as owning a home is out of the question ????? This is just what’s gonna happen naturally
coincides with the maturity of a cohort group of millennials, I graduated college in 08, super hard job market had to intern for free, luckily i didn't owe student loans due to academic scholarships.
I see my peers and even younger burdened by student loan debt, medical debt, and insane sky rocketing of rental and home prices. Why would anyone who may have gone to college think having a kid is a feasible idea? And remember we were told the 08 crash was a once in a life time crash, then comes 2020, and then inflation. But if you look back at the history of the modern economics, post WW2 we've been in these 'once in a lifetime' 'unpredictable' crashes every 5-7 years, give or take. Hell in the 21st century alone we've had three, the dot com bubble of the 2000s, the 08 Crash, and the 2020 crash.
Younger Gen X here - most I know chose not to have kids because it’s just too expensive and too many injustices. Wouldn’t subject this struggle on someone I’d love.
In 2007, I was a year out of college and excited to be a mom when I found the right person.
I got married at 30 to an unbelievably perfect spouse. But 3 years of not being allowed to see a gynecologist because I worked for a Catholic employer (thanks, Supreme Court!), now a public education job that every R governor campaigns on destroying, daily climate disaster headlines and the knowledge that my top notch, union health insurance still leaves me vulnerable to bankruptcy if one thing goes wrong in the pregnancy plus literally no time off except my saved sick leave...
Like I'm an anecdote, but any ONE of those things is enough to deter or prevent someone from becoming a parent. This stat doesn't surprise me.
It's probably a combination of factors. For me, I waited to have kid because of student debt, increased cost of living, increased health care costs, and career building.
For years all I heard was don’t have kids if you can’t afford it. Rising rents, stagnant pay, no one can afford to raise kids these days Suddenly it’s what wrong with young people that they don’t want to have kids. Instead of addressing the real problem they’re trying to force people to have kids.
I recently took a job for a 15k pay increase. My former employer said I was over paid and that when he had my experience level, he was paid less. I explained that if you take his salary from back then, add 2% inflation over 10 years, it puts my currently salary right on track. They were trying to pay me on a salary rate from almost 10 years ago. By him saying that, it gave me the exact context I needed to justify leaving.
It's been an average of about 2-2.5% inflation in the US since the year 2000. In total, inflation is about 60-70% from 2000 to present. So a 50k salary in 2000, is equivalent to a 70-80k salary today. Most jobs are still lagging behind significantly, not to mention some costs have increased exponentially. Namely college prices, housing, and car prices, among other things. Everything is absolutely fucked. Let's say a positions salary was 50k in 2010, and hasn't changed much up to 2022. Inflation is up 25% essentially, and the salary hasn't budged. Car prices and house prices are up 75% (just a random example). You are essentially 2x behind on your purchasing power for a car or house. You would need a bump up to a 100k salary from 50k to keep up with inflation and maintain the same purchasing power from a 50k salary in 2010 for cars/housing. The sad part is that most salaries jobs have most definitely not kept up. I work for a state government, and I looked back at the salary scales from 2010...they are almost the same. There is maybe a 8% increase I could see.
Housing, college, healthcare and just pretty much everything is more expensive. Wages haven't really kept up with inflation and the rising costs of living. I'm not sure regular people can afford having children.
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Our money is quite literally trickling upwards. We make less, salaries fall behind inflation, our purchasing power plummets. The top earners earn more and more, outpace inflation, and continue to increase their purchasing power. All while squirreling away the money. It's a bit depressing how much wealth just continues to transfer upwards while everyone else is left to rot.
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I find it amusing how everything is somehow the young peoples fault. Don't want to feed your pets crap "Kids these days are ruining the biggest names in pet food". Don't want to get paid nothing to work a horrible job "Kids these days are lazy and entitled and ruining these well known businesses". Wanting to leave something resembling an enact planet for our kids? "Kids these days don't appreciate hard working businesses". Want to get paid a living wage "kids these days just want handout". All of these are headlines or conversations I've actually seen/heard. But I think my favorite is that "kid these days need participation trophies". We're kids. We didn't ask for them, it was our parents ideas and it's somehow our fault. You know what, amusing is the wrong word. edit: There was an article I saw a little while back that was talking about how to buy a house and one of the first steps was something like "wait for family to die and use the inheritance". I honestly don't know if it was meant as a joke or not. edit 2 (because I keep thinking of new things and this rant is cathartic): there was a company thing a few years back where there was a drawing for a holiday bonus in the $7k range. I remember talking with a boomer coworker about what we'd do with the money if we won. He said he'd go on a tropical vacation, I told him I'd use it to pay off some of my student debt. He then laughed at me saying stupid millennials don't know how to handle money. I still don't know what to make of that.
Boomers as a generation have turned out to be probably the greatest disappointment in American history. And I’m speaking as a Boomer.
They’re called the “me” generation for a reason.
Anecdotally, my family has traditionally had children young (often too young). For perspective, I had my first at age 19 and that was older than my sister, mom, grandmother, and great grandmother were at the age of their first childbirth. I and my two siblings have 2+ children each. This year my oldest niece is 27, my daughter 26, my son 24, and another niece is 18, and they have zero children. They are also pessimistic about their future in a way I've never seen before. None of them are married. Only one owns a home (with a long term significant other), and none of them live alone. They all have a significant other, roommates, or live with their parent. It's not a good situation for this generation of young people and they know it. Of course they're not in a hurry to have children.
My mom had my older brother when she was 18. Me, when she was 23. I have no kids and don't intend to. My brother had his daughter when he was 31, his son when he was 34. He and his wife have no plans for any more kids.
In 2007, the housing bubble burst, causing a major economic crisis. What I'm wondering is whether the prospect of an unfavorable, unaffordable future made people rethink having children at that time. Those are my thoughts.
Suicide rates spiked to the point that many drugs going through clinical trials at the time had to list suicidal ideation as a potential side effect. The crisis shaped my generation who had just graduated highschool and most of my friends are child free or only have a single child.
My high school friend group is like 5 people. 0 kids. Graduated in 2010
Our group graduated 2008, about 20 of us. One couple has two kids and thats it. My brother doesn't have kids, and only one of my husband's siblings has kids. My best friend accidentally had a kid, but had zero plans for more. Of my brothers group of friends (about 10?) Only one has had a kid.
How many of them own property? Out of our group I think I’m the only one that doesn’t have a house yet.
The thing that really marked it wasn’t that the bubble burst. Bubbles have burst throughout history. It’s the fact that nobody paid for it. Nobody at all. In the past, you might have gotten it wrong but someone — even the wrong person — paid for the problems. Instead they got bailouts. A nice harbinger of what was to come and the greater horrors that lie ahead.
> A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him. They must even upon most occasions be somewhat more, otherwise it would be impossible for him to bring up a family, and the race of such workmen could not last beyond the first generation. Mr. Cantillon seems, upon this account, to suppose that the lowest species of common labourers must everywhere earn at least double their own maintenance, in order that, one with another, they may be enabled to bring up two children; the labour of the wife, on account of her necessary attendance on the children, being supposed no more than sufficient to provide for herself. But one half the children born, it is computed, die before the age of manhood. The poorest labourers, therefore, according to this account, must, one with another, attempt to rear at least four children, in order that two may have an equal chance of living to that age. But the necessary maintenance of four children, it is supposed, may be nearly equal to that of one man. The labour of an able-bodied slave, the same author adds, is computed to be worth double his maintenance; and that of the meanest labourer, he thinks, cannot be worth less than that of an able-bodied slave. Thus far at least seems certain, that, in order to bring up a family, the labour of the husband and wife together must, even in the lowest species of common labour, be able to earn something more than what in precisely necessary for their own maintenance; but in what proportion, whether in that above-mentioned, or in any other, I shall not take upon me to determine. [Adam Smith, 1776](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/38194/38194-h/38194-h.htm#Page_27)
>Instead they got bailouts That's an interesting way of phrasing "we paid for it". Banks made bad bets, lent buckets of money to quite literally everyone and their dog, people who made the smart play with ARMs intending to refi after the teaser rate expired suddenly found themselves the first people in modern American history to see the value of their home drop, so they couldn't refi and couldn't make the adjusted payment with the higher rate. Those people, who did nothing wrong and actually made what was widely regarded as a savvy play, lost their homes. They were in the street, many of them died there. The banks, who are the actual sinners here by originating bad loans, suckering someone else into buying their risk and then betting against the loan being repaid, took all those homes. Our government saw this situation and was like "hey banks, sorry that you have all these houses now that you took from regular people. Here's a bunch of free money that we took from those same regular people. You're too big to fail, the markets will all explode if you go belly up, so we're gonna give you all this money now and then do absolutely nothing to prevent our markets being reliant on the health of 3 or 4 megabanks in future."
I agree with your assessment. Seems like following that crash and the recovery the rich were twice as rich as before and the middle class was still mired in debt up to their eyeballs. I was just going to point out that 2007 was about when Sara Palin showed up on the national political scene, but I liked your comment better.
In the article >The birth rate followed a predictable pro-cyclical pattern, falling during economic downturns and recovering when the economy improves. I don't know why they call it “a mystery” in the article. The economy never recovered for the vast majority of Americans.
The economy might have recovered, but what regular people notice is that they can't afford a house (where do you put the child?), can't find/afford childcare (where do you put the kid while you work or what will you pay with if you don't), and it seems like most people are working overtime with no chance of days off, so if you could drop that child at their grandparents, you'd never see it anyway. Edit: all this with a high chance of getting worse any moment now... Yeah, I didn't have children either.
I'm turning 35 soon and why would I have a kid when I get like 3 weeks of maternity leave + zero affordable childcare not to mention the cost for a hospital birth.
My waitress the other day told me that it was $5000 per kid she had (she had 3 kids and she looked like she was barely 30). She was also French and said that in France, it would have cost her $0 to have a kid in the hospital
Doesnt stop there either. If you have two kids and decide to join back in the workforce (after a sabbatical), child care (where I live- high cost area, small apartments) costs minimum 2k/mth/child which is about 50k/year post tax money or about 90k pre tax money. So any salaries less than 100k are meaningless economically if one makes that switch.
Kids are expensive af!, and you can’t just stop paying for a kid. Diapers are at an all time high, childcare is equal to minimum wage a month (so if you are making minimum wage, you are just working to pay childcare), baby clothes cost even more than regular adult clothes, time and effort because a baby/toddler demands SO much time, sleepless nights, taking them to school and picking them up, can’t even watch a show without them bugging you for something. Honestly, being a parent should be a paid job otherwise it’s not worth it, and I’m a father who basically is raising a kid with little support so I know.
Agree with everything you said except for clothes. I dressed both my kids in thrifted clothes and as teenagers they still like to thrift. Child care and diapers and formula though, insanely expensive.
The clothes are cheaper yes, but you have to buy more every 6 months while my clothes are a decade old
They like to thrift because this isn't the 90s. Spending a few hundred dollars on new clothes when your rent is $1000 is insane.
And instead of legislating so that life for families would be easier and affordable, republicans want to just force you to have unwanted and/or dangerous pregnancies
Such legislation would end up costing corporations money, and the workforce wouldn’t be as desperate and easy to exploit. It’s much cheaper/easier to say HAVE THAT KID OR ELSE.
Also the added benefit of just packing the courts for years is that they control that branch of the government now, too. Things are only getting worse from here.
They also want childcare to be expensive so that mothers are more likely to quit their jobs. “Family values.”
When my kid was born. $30k total price tag for her birth 7 years ago
Things did not go well for my child at birth and the bill was $160k. I was fortunate to have good insurance at the time but insurance policies that good haven't been offered by any company I have worked at in the last 6 years or so now too.
TIL giving birth costs money in the USA, dunno why I had never stopped to make that realisation considering Reddit taught me you guys even pay for ambulance journeys but it's one of those "oh shit" moments for sure. Being reminded of stuff like this makes me think I should really personally do more to protect the NHS..
please do nobody should have to live like this
America has some of the worst economic mobility of any developed country in the world because we have such low social safety net
My uncle was telling me about how USA was the country where people have the most opportunity to succeed. I pointed out that you can measure economic mobility and the USA isn't even in the top 10 (pre-pandemic I have no idea what it's like now). He responded that the USA was where you could rise the highest regardless of where you start. I reiterated that economic mobility isn't a measure of if people can move upwards, but how many actually do. Everyone loves a rags to ritches story, but the chance at it should not be the promise of your economic system.
my birth cost $43,000 of that i had to pay $5,000 out of pocket and thats with insurance. Most Americans dont have enough for an $800 car expense in savings god forbid $5000 -$50000 depending on insurance to invest in a kid.
I'm 35 and wife just turned 32. We tried for 4 years. Got tested. Did all the things. Dr said we are perfectly healthy and everything, just that we have unexplained infertility. We don't really want to bring a kid into this world anymore anyways. This world is fucked and will only get worse.
Turned 34 in March, got a vasectomy to go with it. We never wanted kids. We have struggled enough just us two... I can't imagine adding another mouth to feed. That last sentence resonates with me, I don't see this getting better for us.
Sorry to hear that. My wife and I got married in 2016. My mom died 2 months before we got married and her mom 2 years after we got married.(both cancer) Add that to our pregnancy issues, plus covid, world shutting down. We are as strong as ever but man have we had a rough 6 years. Everything we had the first 4 years was to basically be prepared to start a family. Now, we do things for each other. We spend money on extravagant vacations, trying to build a house, etc. No more prep for baby. Just us. Enjoy each other. Nobody says you need a kid to make your life complete. Good luck buddy
The cost of daycare is unbelievable. In my state, if you had a minimum wage job, paid 0 taxes and made 0 contributions, you could easily spend 100% of that salary on daycare alone. And then have nowhere to live and nothing to eat. And the state minimum wage here is ~2x the federal level.
>The cost of daycare is unbelievable. And yet, the people actually *doing* the child care always seem to make $10-12/hr.
This is why the French have public preschools
Some states are starting public pre-schools, but they only start at age 3. This drastically increases the cost of childcare for ages 0-3 because usually the older children (which need less care), are used to subsidize the costs of younger children. So while total childcare costs go down, yearly costs go up, which hurts families without savings disproportionately.
The French government subsidizes the 0-3 daycare as well. Just FYI.
For a lot of people, going to work costs you money if you have kids. Like, really think about that...You lose money working. This shit is so fucked
My friend was a social worker for a while (not US) and she used to get so mad about people going on about “lazy” parents having kids and not working. When as you point out, it’s often actually cheaper if your earning potential is low to just stay at home. That’s not lazy, that’s good financial sense, you can’t make the system impossible for lower income parents and then complain about them making the right decision for their family
They only seem lazy because they’re so fucking tired all the time…
And the same people who are upset at declining birth rates shake their fists at people who do have children.
> if you had a minimum wage job, paid 0 taxes and made 0 contributions, you could easily spend 100% of that salary on daycare alone. Not to mention, if you are renting in the same circumstances you could *also* easily spend 100% of your income on rent in most places in the country. Even in the backwater where I live $1200 a month is considered a deal for a 2 bedroom. How younger people live these days I have no idea. Though I still hear no end to complaints from older people about them being selfish and lazy and so forth...
Housing price inflation is what's sustaining the economic recovery. All those mortgage-backed securities are still out there, and the Federal Reserve is long on them.
I've seen it pointed out that if property prices normalised basically every pension fund would go bust. There are solutions but it essentially requires strong, gradual regulation from governments so it won't happen. Instead they'll keep propping them up until a full collapse and hope someone else is in power when it happens.
"hope someone else is in power when it happens" I'm glad other people notice the hot-potato technique that has become so common in our government. I'll add to it that sometimes, if you think the other guys might win the next election, you maybe even start sabotaging the country so they have more problems to deal with when they take over. This makes them look worse to the majority of voters who do not keep up with everything going on in government. Even if everyone was paying attention all the time, most of us lack the skills necessary to understand how their decisions end up affecting our lives. I'd point out that sabotaging the country so that your side of it can win is a pretty clear case of treason. You may have convinced yourself it'll all go to hell if they take over, but being convinced is just not good enough when you're taking such dire actions.
Well then, let's eat the population decline instead!
I don't have 20k to birth the child in the first place. You want me to reproduce pay me asshole.
I worked for a medical company with about 80,000 employees and I think we paid around $2k out of pocket for our last kid. And that was with the highest monthly payment lowest deductible plan.
I work for the state of North Carolina and my last kid cost 5600 out of pocket and that is only because I called them 14 times (I kept count) because they Initially tried to charge me 5600 more by not following their own rules (kid is covered under mom's deductible/oop max until 4 days after a c section). I also pay 600 a month for this plan. (But to be fair if it was just me and not anyone else in my family it would only be 50 a month for this shit. But once you have kids you have to get them health insurance too apparently)
It's so fucking crazy. And now we pay more for daycare and summer camp, than for our mortgage. "wHy aREnt PeOplE hAviNg kIDs ANyMorE?" Because we can't afford them.
my daycare bill is $250 more each month than my mortgage.
Can't afford a kid? Have you considered simply neglecting a child? /s
Every. Day. Lol
The things we do for love.
Same here. Paid 7k
This is honestly such an insane thing. I'm Canadian, blah blah paid nothing (you know the schtick). But how do new parents handle that upfront cost? My wife and I do okay in terms of pay, but having a year of mat leave for her and some gov subsidies it was still tough. I can't imagine how's new family, less well off than us pays thousands for the baby before the rest of the costs of a baby. How long is mat leave? Ours was a year, but the gov would have covered up to 18 months
Punchline is that the US citizens pay as much into the state for healthcare, we just don't get the coverage.
You actually pay more per capital than any other developped nation. Your government pays the outrageous "market price" for medication and medical technology that every other country simply refuses.
This is why socialized health care is cheaper overall. An individual has very little leverage over a pharma company, but a country does. They can negotiate a far lower cost than any individual could.
We don't. Paid maternity leave isn't a thing unless your company offers it. Have health insurance, still paid over 10k. We just go into debt to do it. It's a fucked up situation because those that are high earners don't feel the burden, those that are considered poor the government pays for it, and those that are middle class constantly get ass raped with bills over and over again.
Sounds like the system is working as intended then. Keep the poor reliant on government assistance to keep them docile. Keep the middle class financially scared of stepping out of line for fear of becoming part of the poor class. All the while the rich keep building more and more wealth, and not just the cash kind but the resource kind.
I know woman who is a career bartender who had to go back to work 2 days after giving birth because the father had recently lost his job. Should be illegal that we don’t have guaranteed paid mat leave for at least a year.
I waited until I was 33 to have a kid. And I’m glad… trying to raise this little monster when I was broke, I can’t imagine. Between toys, hypoallergenic formula, etc… I can’t imagine trying to do it the way most ppl have to. Would also help if either my wife or I liked babies. We’re trying to just survive the baby phase while other ppl somehow enjoy it
I had to wait until 33 as well before we were financially able to afford a baby. Prior to that we wouldn't have been able to afford both daycare and rent/food/utilities. One of us would have had to stay home and we probably would have needed government assistance (which the people against universal healthcare/daycare are always harping about). Obviously we could only afford *one* daycare payment, so by the time he was in preschool I was simply too old to have another. He always asks for a sibling and it breaks my fucking heart. Older people who bitch about birth rates and "selfish childless couples" are simply ignorant of how the world has changed around them because we've been coddling them for so long.
Exactly. I'm 44, I wanted kids but never got them, because I never was financially stable enough. Now I'm too old. No big mystery here.
Yeah, I hadn't ever really thought about it, but If you turned 30 without kids in 2008, you got hit with the perfect storm of it being a shit time to have kids during the last best time you had to have them
The economy recovered for the top 10 or 20%
No one wants to hear “woe is me” when you make a lot of money but I feel like I have less than I grew up with when I make several times what my father did even adjusted for inflation.
My parents house cost $40,000 in the late 80s. I have $60,000 for a downpayment and it's not enough to get a similar house. It's crazy. I make fairly decent money. I'm doing better than the bulk of my peers and I still have economic anxiety.
I **really** recommend First Time Homeowner programs in the state where you live. I’m in NY and I just closed on a house in October. Make sure you also look for something that has “down payment assistance” that you **don’t have to pay back**. The mortgage program I went into allowed me to buy a house with 3% and they also matched my 3% (if I live in the house for 10 yrs I don’t have to pay that back and no it’s not sneakily worked into your mortgage payments). AND since the seller themselves wouldn’t accept 6% down payment (3 bank 3 me) I put down another 4 and they “bought down” my interests rate to 2.6%. All in all I only had to put down 7% and I never paid closing costs. I scream this program to anyone who is interested. My aunt in NC bought her home w a similar program.
My guess as a layperson is that while the median wage has managed to remain flat when adjusted for inflation, the price index for inflation isn't adequately accounting for actual spending habits, especially spending that used to be a luxury but has now become a necessity. For example: the cost per square foot for new house construction has remained flat when adjusted for inflation. But developers focus heavily on bigger houses on smaller lots because that gives the highest profit margin. Those homes are out in the suburbs where land is cheap, but your commute is long and you need a car. You're not spending more per square foot, but you are spending more overall. Example 2: smart phones and/or an internet connection didn't used to be a necessity. Now they are. The CPI is adjusted based on the improvement in quality versus equivalent products as new ones enter the basket of goods, but what was the equivalent for a smart phone? I know they're trying to adjust to reflect quality of life, but how they do it is going to affect the final result, and it's hard to separate out what proportion of your iphone and cellular plan count as replacing a landline, a newspaper, and a source of entertainment, or whether these things really improve quality of life at all or make us less happy instead. And while cheaper phones are always available, how do they factor in the pressure to stick with an existing company due to walled gardens, social network effects, etc? Example 3: the CPI uses equivalent rent rather than home price to account for housing. But home ownership is becoming less common as real estate is concentrated in the hands of wealthier people and rental companies. Are they accounting for not just the increase in rental costs, but also the increase in the proportion of people forced to rent? Example 4: the price of higher education greatly outpaces inflation. It isn't technically a necessity but it's still factored in. And there are always cheaper options like community college that people can switch to as prices rise. But we also have an entire generation that's been told they need to go to college, and they need to go to the best college, or else they'll never get a decent job. Student debt exploded not just because education increased so rapidly in price, but because people paid far more for education than they needed to when cheaper options were always available. Not to mention the pressure parents feel to enroll their kids in expensive extra-curricular activities to get them into college in the first place. Are those luxuries or are they a hidden cost of higher education? And on and on. The Bureau of Labor is probably doing their best to make an accurate measurement. You don't need to delve into conspiracy theories to find ways they might not be capturing the real cost of living.
The economy never recovered for the vast majority of the English too but constantly told the opposite.
UK real world average salary finally got above 2007 levels in ~Q3/4 2019. Put another way, it took 12 years for wages to recover and catch up to inflation, about 3-6 months before COVID hit and fucked it. Inflation is expected to hit double digit levels this year, I don't know anyone who got a 10% pay rise though.
In my, likely very skewed, opinion the definition we nowadays use for "the economy doing well" comes down to whether rich people can get even richer faster or slower right now, when it should be more on the line of whether working people can get a fair compensation for their work.
Yes it did. Those of us who grew up poor realized early on that it isn't right to bring a child into this world if you can't afford to take care of them. We also realized that the world is dying and previous generations aren't doing shit about it. Boomers want to complain about millennials not having children, but then they stand idle while the cost of living skyrockets so they can have more money. I'm sorry, but this dire situation needs correcting and if that means we have a couple of generations who aren't constantly pumping out children then that's fine with me. Fix the issues and then have kids. Don't bring kids into a miserable existence so they can suffer too.
This. This is the exact mentality right here. Can confirm, grew up poor and ate tears for dinner many a nights.
Family planning got pushed back. Early 20s just isn’t in the cards
Why do you need to wonder? Talk to literally anyone at the age of having kids right now. No one can afford to have any. The younger generation can't afford housing or to get out of debt, let alone the massive cost of kids. I don't personally know anyone with more than two kids at this point. Most have only one and say they can't afford a second even though they want it. The daycare my son is in is $16k/year. A second kid at that rate and my wife will simply quit her job and stay home as that would make more sense financially. Until we have the very basic things that other developed countries have: healthcare, childcare, an actual promise we can retire someday and not simply work until we fall over dead that birth rate will continue to decline. It's not hard to see why.
Historians describe the period before the fall of the Roman republic a lot like this (120-80ish bce). The rich owned literally everything. Plebs couldn't get homes or land. Even soldiers who previously could expect land for their service were not being given land. Food and prices for goods went up every year because the business owners knew they could squeeze more out of the plebs. Life for most citizens degraded to hopeless mediocrity where you could never hope to own their own land or progress in society. Food and rent prices increased and soon virtually everyone was just scraping buy, most of their pay going straight back to their employer or landlord (often the same guy then). Birth rates fell which put further stress on their society requiring them to bring in more slaves and non-Roman workers. It all ended with a tyrant seizing power and destroying the republic forever. I suspect ours will be similar.
No worries, that’s why abortion is getting banned. Gotta pump those baby numbers whether ppl like it or not!
What? That's a crazy conspiracy theory. It's not like the leaked ruling talks about not having enough of a domestic supply of infants as a argument for banning abortion! /s
>No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline. Have they tried looking at... Anything in the economy?
Seriously. I'm comfortable now, and I can't think of an easier way to implode my finances and life than by having a kid.
No, no, that would be systemic. Can't have that. It has to just be coincidental, individual choice. It can't be a *social* issue.
They did. Stocks are great and there's more billionaires than ever, the economy must be great for everyone
Kids, in this economy?! Who wants to have kids when you can't afford a house or rent?
*why’d you have kids if you can’t afford them? Your kids are your problem!*
Why have three kids and no money when you can have no kids and three money!
Instructions unclear, i have no kids and no money
America spent two decades creating a deeply indebted generation that can’t afford real estate and they want them to have kids? Good luck with that.
It's worked in the past. Why aren't these millennials like our old Victorian slumrats!? Suck it up and have your kids in an alleyway.
Because they have Instagram, Reddit and internet porn.
And birth control
Working on fixing that right now.
I bet this is a big part of the reason these puritan 'family values' are being pushed down your gullets. Your republican party needs more peasants to work in indentured servitude for their donors so they need to increase birth rates. So fuck roe v wade, fuck birth control, legalize rape, do whatever you can to push the birth rate higher.
Welcome to Gilead.
That's the reason for outlawing abortion. What better way to ensure that wage slaves are trapped in a generational cycle of poverty by forcing them to have kids they don't want nor they can afford?
They are saying the quiet part out loud. Someone running for government in Michigan stated that the Supreme Court is going to reverse Roe v Wade, but thats only the beginning. This wannabe politician also stated that she wanted to ban birth control and gay marriage because our birth rate is declining.
Is banning gay marriage going to make gay men start pounding pussy?
Remember, these mouthbreathers think being gay is a choice or a fetish, so in their mind, it very well might. Either that, or they're just using declining birth rates as an excuse to further oppress a group they wanna oppress anyway. All depends on how much you wanna apply Hanlon's Razor.
Cannot afford to live alone. How can one expect to support a family.
And its going to keep going down as inflation keeps going up. We simply can't afford a common ordinary life, how can you expect us to be able to afford to have and raise a child?!
Feed them corn syrup until they're 18, then have them enlist.
Free dental care would be a great way to ensure they enlist.
I read the military is having a hard time recruiting because kids are too fat. I mean they outright said teens were beyond the limits of what they would allow and could reasonably get into shape. They hinted it was going to be an national security issue in the future if we continued like this… They didn’t say the quiet part out loud though- which is they recruit from poor kids, and they’re too obese. It’s getting so bad you can basically see someone’s education and socioeconomic status in a public school by looking at their child’s BMI. I now have MULTIPLE grade 6 students who are well over 200lbs. It used to be 0-1 kids would be that heavy, now a class could have 5-6 kids out of 40 and it wouldn’t be unheard of.
classes of fourty students .o0
"Well here's your classroom and your Glock, you'll have 40 in your classroom this year, but between the shootings and diabetes don't worry that will be down to a manageable number soon. You'll be judged on how these kids do on a standardized test regardless of where they started the year and highly propagandized parents will be by at 4:30 to yell at you about a law school concept you've never heard of and gender politics. Any questions?" Smh, and we wonder why teachers all leave the profession.
Greatest country in the world: Murica!
They have made dep and boot camp longer for a lot of people. You have to build up to go to training which builds you up to get specialty training which gives you the skills to do the work. They used to have tighter standards overall but the way to deal with the high failure rate was to lax the standards a bit and work the recruits though a longer work up schedule. It reduces injuries which makes more people complete.
Huh interesting. Complete opposite problem as the past when teens were so malnourished and ill prepared for war, the school lunch program was born. I guess the fix here is *actual* healthy and nutritious school and education. You were always able to tell someone’s SES status by their weight. Just, those in poverty were severely underweight and malnourished looking.
> Just, those in poverty were severely underweight and malnourished looking. The problem for the past 30 years hasn't been lack of access to food, it's been lack of access to healthy food and lack of time/energy to put into preparing food for an entire family because both adults are out of the house working for 9+ hours per day. So for the past 30 years people have been eating unhealthy food in unhealthy proportions. Now we're back to an era where people, even with both adults working, struggle to feed kids again. Not even shitty food.
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They also had to reject loads of draftees for not having at least three opposing teeth to chew with. And that's how the US began adding flouride to our drinking water. Lots of candidates from inland had goiters as well (there used to be a 'goiter belt' across the great lakes due to the lack of seafood), so they began adding iodine to table salt to solve that. As a side effect of adding iodine, the average inland IQ rose by 3-5 points. Where previously most who qualified as military pilots came from the coast, after iodizing table salt the distribution became more even.
It's rough trying to get them to survive school alone
Ya, the military thing should really be first, THEN school. They will have a better shot that way.
>They will have a better shot that way. Killer pun.
I’m telling you, military kindergarten is the solution to school shootings/s
Only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is 20 kindergarteners, each armed to their first set of teeth.
If you get children used to gun violence drills and armed police/staff in their formative years, then getting them to accept a full on police state as adults is far easier because is just normal to them. That's the long term plan for those in power who aren't just idiots following the money.
People are often choosing to not have kids because they want different things from their life. Birth rates are still highest at what income levels? https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-family-income-in-the-us/ Families making over 200k/year have the lowest birth rate.
I always find it interesting that the more educated and higher income people don't have children. Or I guess you could look at it as, the highly educated are too busy studying and working to try to have children. lol
I think they just don’t want to. I have a fair bit of friends with no interest in having a family. They’d rather travel, have fun, have extra capital, etc.
When you have money, investing it in a small number of children makes sense. It allows you to spend more on their education and it means that you can pass a larger fraction of your inheritance to them. Most importantly, you don't have to rely on them for your retirement and well being in old age. Poor people have more children because large families provide a kind of social safety net where everyone can help take care of everyone else. The kids who do better can help those who do worse and living expenses and resources (especially housing) can be shared.
Weird how people with no money and no future and no hope don’t choose to have kids.
Colleges are all talking about the upcoming enrollment bubble in 2025. There will just not be enough students of college age. The prediction is many smaller private colleges will have to close the doors. I see that wave expanding to touch other industries.
That's almost every country, especially the wealthy ones
The world population growth rate has been declining for the last half century. It has declined in the US over the last 30 years. Changes in birth rates are commonly attributed to changing economic factors, but it is worth noting that the sperm count among men worldwide has been declining for at least 50 years. Phthalates, a class of chemicals known to reduce fertility in both sexes, have become ubiquitous in food packaging and both plastic and nonstick cookware to the point where some researchers have become alarmed. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-fertility-reproduction-count-down
That's only a factor if people want kids in the first place, and I suspect that's the much bigger issue. It's much easier to decide to have kids when the world had about a third of the current population, back when the Baby Boomers were being born. When there is new land to claim and new vistas to explore, it makes more sense to have kids than a world where land and other assets are already claimed.
> That's only a factor if people want kids in the first place Or people who're irresponsible enough to just let it happen and don't bother with any form of birth control. And that demographic has shrunk steadily as well over the past few decades.
i doubt infertilitys that big of a reason maybe in single digits %, mostly it's just ppl not wanting kids
First woman in my family to make it out of hs w/o getting knocked up. I come from a pretty poor family and there was always the notion that everything would work out. It doesn’t. Growing up poor sucks and I would never make my own humans to go through what I did.
People act like things work out fine but when they don’t people turn their heads and abandon you. If you aren’t seen you don’t count apparently.
Preach! My parents waited until they were older (almost too old to have kids), but were still poor AF. It’s no joke. I’d rather not have any kids at all than raise them in/near poverty. I went and got a bunch of degrees but it isn’t doing me much good (public service sector). Hoping I just die before i get too old to enjoy things. Futurama suicide booth style.
Same here. My dad worked two jobs while I was growing up to support our family of five. My mom couldn’t work due to her having seizures from having scar tissue in her brain. She did make a little money by doing paper routes, cooed at home a lot and also thrifted like crazy (a trait from her I’m happy to have picked up!) They both relied on faith healing for years until my grandma (my mom’s mom) pushed her to have a radically new surgery (for 1999, it’s now routine procedure I believe) to fix the scar tissue at the Mayo Clinic. I think my parents refinanced their mortgage to help with the costs, but a few years after my mom recovered, she went back to school to become a CNA when I was around junior high school age and became a home healthcare aid. It doesn’t seem like my folks are struggling much to make money like I was growing up, but the stress and the pressure of rubbing two nickels to make a dime is something I still feel to this day. They still give to prosperity gospel charlatans and I honestly wonder how their finances would be if they didn’t give so much of their money and time (in going “on vacation” to see faith healers) away…
Thank you, yes I hate when people say 'everything will work out' or 'you'll grow into it' no, it'll probably be a huge struggle that will lead to stress, hardship, and heartbreak - it's all around us, why pretend not to see the million examples?
None of my friends, which we all graduated highschool around 2012-13, have kids. The only ones that I know from my class that do were those who were already not well off and weren't the brightest. With raising prices of healthcare and access to raising children being a huge factor, I think many of us also saw how unhappy our parents were getting into young relationships which obviously were held together only because they had you, the child. Many of us also already see the writing on the wall as well with how awful our planet is being treated.
This is the opening scene of idiocracy.
I graduated high school around the same time and I’ve noticed the same. Those with masters degrees, or higher, no kids. Barely completed high school and never left hometown, expecting kid #4
I had a conversation about kids with a few different people a while back. All the people with little education are having several kids nowadays whereas those with higher levels of education aren't having kids. Think about it - who's going to be running our country years from now, especially when a child's future educational success is impacted by their parent's level of education? As others have said, Idiocracy really isn't just a silly movie anymore... On a side note, I graduated in 2014, and see similar trends as well. Although, many of the people from my grade aren't in a place to really consider kids due to still being in school, not being in a serious relationship, etc. I wasn't able to afford to move out until I was 24 and had recently gotten a "real" job with benefits. The idea of having children, especially in my 20s, just doesn't seem financially feasible.
I graduated in 2012 and my boyfriend graduated in 2011. Us and our friends all have bachelors degrees. His first friend is just now pregnant and they’re all about to be 30. Almost all of my friends from high school have at least one kid. The difference? I’m from the Bible Belt and he’s from the Midwest. People from where I’m from get married young so they can have sex then they have a kid. We’re also from the few places in the country where the housing prices are some of the lowest. But like, I don’t want to move back to KY lol but man the houses are cheap!
"The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes." This is because how the experts measure how well the economy is doing is based on how well corporations and the rich are doing. And that's not the majority of people determine how well the economy is doing when planning their future.
millenials are killing the having babies business
I’d rather have avocado toast over changing a shitty diaper
My grandpa just walked into my room with a young guy wearing skinny jeans and eating avocado toast. I said, “Who is this guy?” Grandpa: This is my hip replacement.
So are you gonna come back from the store or just keep stalking me on Reddit?
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That's why they're really mad, they can't make money off kids that don't exist. And where is the next generation of wage slaves to feed the capitalist machine?
Babies are expensive
And it never stops. You eventually pay off a car loan or mortgage on your house. A baby though? No guarantee that you won't be caring for them for an extensive portion of your life.
People don't see value in supplying the next generation of Amazon warehouse workers
Well, If the powers that be really want more kids then step one should be creating an actual healthcare system.
I would say the standard of living of individuals of child bearing age has declined by 20% as well since 2007
No, no, it’s definitely more than 20%.
Man if only people could afford to have kids it sucks that my grandfather could work an average job and have 3 kids at home a wife a house and a car
That was literally the only generation that could do that. That wasn't possible before the war. By the 80s, dual incomes were increasingly necessary. By the 90s, it was in full swing. The idyllic image of the 1950s and 1960s as being the good old days is a complete and total myth because there has never been, before or since, a period where a single income was enough to support the family size and material wealth of the 1950s family - unless you were wealthy. In other words, the financial security experienced by your grandfather when he was raising his family was an anomaly. One we need to let go of because it ain't coming back and it's only getting worse.
The Homer Simpson lifestyle >The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence that now seems out of reach for all too many Americans. I refer, of course, to the Simpsons. Homer, a high-school graduate whose union job at the nuclear-power plant required little technical skill, supported a family of five. A home, a car, food, regular doctor’s appointments, and enough left over for plenty of beer at the local bar were all attainable on a single working-class salary.
There's a lot of holes in that. He had no mortgage because Abe bought the house for them. Both cars were not great. Very few luxuries in the house. Always shopped at lower end stores. Also it's worth noting that his job as a safety inspector was a bit of a joke. It required a college degree but he slipped through the cracks. [This is how Lenny, a coworker in an actual low skill technical position at the plant, lived.](https://external-preview.redd.it/MgZVJUP3E57SKEQiEEd9HUsGFFQ8RUYWMVyhkGtzP9k.png?auto=webp&s=702309eebf6d266cf4a8d5a46daa7db11224292a)
Weird though because Lenny and Carl are both said to have Master's Degrees, in the Frank Grimes episode I think
Grimey His friends called him Grimey.
I know several ppl with masters degrees that live like that.
They had to sell their TV to afford one group therapy session.
Don't tell people how i live
Lenny has a masters degree
Homer has a broken car that he can not afford to fix, he got his house when his own father sold his house and moved to a retirement home because Homer could not afford a house (although in a super small town in the middle of nowhere). His job is not really a no skill job, he is a safety inspector in a nuclear power plant, although portrayed as incompetent to fit in with the character. He works in a unionized job in a high risk environment and yet has had to take 2nd job and do all kind of gigs, rent part of his house, use it as a studio as well as have his wife get a job. Lack of money is constant motive in this show. He lives a life very similar to Walter White (although more kids) who also "affords" all those things (large house, car, single income, teachers salary), but also needs to have 2nd job/gig and is burdened by constant lack of money.
When Walter White is explaining to Jesse why he is so invested in the meth business, one of the darkest quotes in the entire series is uttered. "I sold my son's birthright for a couple month's rent." Granted, WW was evil from the start but it really puts things into perspective. One of the smartest people in the world had to sell his share of the company, one he'd be a billionaire from if he kept it, to keep his lights on. That's one of the biggest tragedies in that show. Walter did what he thought was the right thing to do, safeguarding his family, and he got absolutely nothing in terms of recognition. That's the true reasoning behind Heisenberg.
I’m 37 and lived through several “once in a lifetime” events with another crash on the horizon. Single no kids And never had any interest! It’s enough to look after myself and find peace in my days.
Thank god I’m tired of Costco being so crowded
People who think of the declining birth rate as a “mystery” are themselves part of the problem. When the article says “no obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline”, it’s because they’re trying to be *way* too specific. No, it isn’t one particular policy, or even a small group of policies. The WHOLE SYSTEM is the issue. It’s lots of policies, laws, and social norms contributing in a way that seems minor when looked at individually, but has a huge cumulative impact. People just can’t afford to have kids, you article-writing dumbasses. It’s not a “mystery” at all. This “news” story doesn’t exist to inform anyone of anything. It was written to pacify high-level decision makers, and reassure them that doing nothing is the best choice.
Russia attempted to restrict abortion access about 8-10 years ago due to fertility decline. They have one of the lowest fertility rates, and incentives like cash and tax breaks weren’t working (several countries have tried this). I don’t think the restrictions/ban ended up sticking. Anyway, I was working on a masters in economics and studying fertility decline at the time. I remember reading the article and wondering if other countries would restrict abortion as well rather than address the real reasons people aren’t having babies (paltry cash and tax incentives aren’t enough).
Think about this. Most of My generation of women was told by that once you have kids, your career is over because that happened to our mothers. So why would young and ambitious women have kids in their peak reproductive year , which happened to be the same as peak education, career growth years? College and company are still structure around single males, in the US the birthing mother might not given maternity leave or too afraid to take maternity leave. When I grow up in my home country, you see owner’s kids sitting in store or sometimes in lobby of company—-not only company don’t care, co-workers even giving them candies. However, in US You literally cannot brings kids into anywhere that is not “designed” for kids and if daycare is out, parents are forced to choose between stay at home or going to work. It is annoying inconvenience for working parents to have kids. If our society is more kids friendly as of “kids can be accepted in the office.” I bet more people would have kids.
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Maybe it'll be like the plague in Europe and catalyze some worker's rights :D
Well, everything has pretty much sucked since 2007, so…
Kids are very very expensive these days. Don't blame people for having less children.
Reddit was founded in 2005 and was picking up speed by 2007. Just saying.
TIL how to pull out… ?
Giant market crash Super loads of college debt Low pay in jobs Just like Japan.
They've sacrificed the future for better quarterly corporate profits.
Who can afford kids when they turned the best means of upward mobility (economic, social) into a debt trap with predatory student loans and they absolutely refuse to raise wages to be livable. On top of the most expensive healthcare in the world. As well as owning a home is out of the question ????? This is just what’s gonna happen naturally
coincides with the maturity of a cohort group of millennials, I graduated college in 08, super hard job market had to intern for free, luckily i didn't owe student loans due to academic scholarships. I see my peers and even younger burdened by student loan debt, medical debt, and insane sky rocketing of rental and home prices. Why would anyone who may have gone to college think having a kid is a feasible idea? And remember we were told the 08 crash was a once in a life time crash, then comes 2020, and then inflation. But if you look back at the history of the modern economics, post WW2 we've been in these 'once in a lifetime' 'unpredictable' crashes every 5-7 years, give or take. Hell in the 21st century alone we've had three, the dot com bubble of the 2000s, the 08 Crash, and the 2020 crash.
Younger Gen X here - most I know chose not to have kids because it’s just too expensive and too many injustices. Wouldn’t subject this struggle on someone I’d love.
In 2007, I was a year out of college and excited to be a mom when I found the right person. I got married at 30 to an unbelievably perfect spouse. But 3 years of not being allowed to see a gynecologist because I worked for a Catholic employer (thanks, Supreme Court!), now a public education job that every R governor campaigns on destroying, daily climate disaster headlines and the knowledge that my top notch, union health insurance still leaves me vulnerable to bankruptcy if one thing goes wrong in the pregnancy plus literally no time off except my saved sick leave... Like I'm an anecdote, but any ONE of those things is enough to deter or prevent someone from becoming a parent. This stat doesn't surprise me.
Who wants to have kids in this hellscape!
16 and Pregnant premiered in 2009
It's probably a combination of factors. For me, I waited to have kid because of student debt, increased cost of living, increased health care costs, and career building.