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Comment by thegreenswede | Hacker News Reader

No. I want kids but I don't want them until I can afford stable housing. And if that's hard for me as an overpaid tech worker, then I understand why most people are delaying kids or not having them at all. If most young people are still living with parents or roommates well into their 30's, then it's not a mystery why my generation isn't having kids. Nothing to do with 'life is so good kids aren't desirable anymore'.

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Then why does the birth rate steadily go down as you move up the income curve? My experience is that my wealthy adult peer group just has almost no interest in having children while my high school friends, many struggling badly financially, all already have families.

Higher standards. The person you are replying to wants stable housing on some of the most desirable land in the world. The conditions for upper middle class people to have kids are exceedingly high by any standard.

I don't think it is an absurd or even high standard to want reasonably priced (30% of income) shelter (whether owned or rented) within a reasonable commuting distance (30 mins one-way) of a job.

Am I truly out in left field on this?

You're solving for this with the constraint being your job. If you tried to solve this problem with family being the constraint and the job and financial situation being more variable, all of a sudden your options open up. Your constraints show your priorities.

You don't want just a job. You probably want an elite and interesting job, which for a dev to be paying out a large percentage of their salary is probably in San Francisco or Seattle or New York.

You could take a boring remote job with more average pay out in Kansas if family were a priority and pay off a house in a year or two.

If you're poor, children make you more poor. If you're tenuously upwardly-mobile, children can derail you into being poor.

The more money you make the higher the potential loss in terms of child support and alimony should there be a divorce.

Yea, pretty much this. I'm half of a two person couple well into the upper middle class - we live in a one bedroom condo that costs more than half a million dollars... kids are not a realistic financial decision.

You and I are probably in similar situations (I rent a 1-bedroom apartment in an upscale-ish area) and you probably earn more than me but I live very comfortably.

I've personally never had any interest in having kids. Whatever it is that makes kids appealing, I've never had it.

But I think I agree with you and I don't understand why I think I agree with you.

Kids do seem like a crazy financial decision today. But if we wanted to, we could for sure have a kid and get by. Plenty of people have plenty of kids on a lot less money.

Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?

I don't think any of these answers are bad. I just think it's interesting.

Indeed, most of my daughter's friends in early elementary school lived with their parent in a 1BR, studio, or a rented bedroom. One of them had 3 siblings, making 5 people in a 1BR apartment.

I guess maybe parents had fewer expenses when I was a kid (I was born in 1983)? No cable bill, no cell phones, fewer video games, no streaming services?

IIRC, housing, child-care (especially if you include after-school activities), and health-care (If you are un- or under-insured with your job) dominate the increased expenses. Housing is a strange one because a lot of parents will try to move to a better school district, so parents may end up paying more for otherwise similar housing than non-parents.

FWIW, the things you give as examples are rounding-errors in our budget (though only two of our kids have cell phones so far); we don't have cable, pay $22/mo for streaming services, buy used video games, and pay an average of $60/mo for our phone bill. We spend over $300/mo on groceries for comparison.

> Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?

I find it interesting that this is almost the only post in the entire thread that arrives at the need to do a little introspection.

Apparently, the ability to do that is much rarer these days than I thought.

It's not ability it's just willingness. Go to the recent Scrum threads or any discussion of remote work. It's all just these incredibly strongly held opinions that people feel the need to share over and over.

> Are kids just not worth what they used to be?

I think this is a big part of it. As much social pressure as there is to have kids today, it seems reduced from how it was even a single generation ago.

Raising kids is expensive[1], time consuming, and in general a pain-in-the-ass. With reduced social (and even legal) pressure to stay married, and increased expectations of a career for women (without any accompanying reduced expectations for men), it's entirely unsurprising to myself that many opt-out of it.

1: Mandatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/946/

>And if that's hard for me as an overpaid tech worker,

What's your salary compared to the median household income in your area? How do other people make it work?

Are you korean?

No but I replied to your comment before it was updated I think. It only said 'life is maybe too good for kids anymore' when I saw it but now I see more text.

sorry about that

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