However, if parents have a certain lifestyle they want to make possible for their children like: paying for daycare/aftercare so your spouse can keep their career, helping pay for college, having sufficient retirement to not burden them, etc the costs are clearly becoming untenable for middle class families.
I don't know if it is "rational" (for some sense of that word): kids will excel if they are, simply, loved. Sure, going to great schools is nice. But having a supportive home is way more important than those expensive things.
But I went to subsidized Catholic schools through junior high. Then a public high school. Then a "state" university -- where we had "in-state" tuition that was reasonable.
My dad was an auto worker. My mom was a nurse that ended up with a career in administration as I got older. (He was also an alcoholic and may parents divorced -- but that's a longer story.)
We were fine. I did just fine.
That said, I think most people want better for their children; certainly my blue-collar parents cajoled me via all their means to go to school so that I wouldn't be forced into the jobs those with a poor education must subsist on. I will say that I just don't have it in me to put a child through what I was put through; the pressure was more than I was really able to withstand, but fundamentally I agree with their reasoning, especially as someone with some physical disability, careers that require a lot of physicality are closed to me. That said, it's not a cycle I have any desire to perpetuate.
Actually, I guess that is true. I grew up in a blue collar area with pretty bad (or maybe just "average") schools. So I do (erroneously) relate public schools with being bad :)
I certainly would want more for my kids if I had them. But I (and most people) do have more than my parents did.
Are you a baby boomer? Because this is not true for my generation, the millennials[0]
I mostly think generational "conflict" is foolish (I mean, I get to inherit from the wealthiest generation in the history of the world, so it's not all bad I guess?), but it is worth considering that people who have come of age and lived through different periods of history will be shaped differently and have different views of the world. If those views lead them to believe that having children is not desirable, than so it is; I don't know that there's really much to be done in the end anyway.
I'll hazard a guess that you're Gen X based on our brief conversation here, which I believe was actually the first US generation to see themselves worse off on their parents than average, but I think the difference is almost negligible? Certainly it's bit of an in-between generation, squeezed by the bulges of the Boomers and their echo generation, the Millennials, and I'm honestly not too up on the dynamics there.
[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-net-worth-versus...
I know that some charts show that the newer generations might not be doing as well as previous. And maybe I'm too optimistic. But I think it is hard to argue that -- even if our "wealth" is lower on some chart -- our world is much better. The web didn't even exist when I was a kid. Medical tech continues to advance. Pollution (of the non-CO2 kind) is down. Crime is (generally) down -- though it does fluctuate. We're not dying in wars. And so on.
Plus our lives are different enough now (marry later, etc) that it isn't easy to compare 1:1. Houses are bigger and have more bathrooms. We have way more entertainment at our disposal. We tend to work in offices rather than manual labor. And so on.
Finally, as you said, Millenials will be the ones inheriting all that Boomer wealth.
So I'm pretty sure at the end of the day, when you add it all up, the newer generations are continuing to continually have better lives than those before them. (But I can't prove it, so feel free to ignore me :)
The web didn’t exist, but then neither did social media, which apparently is driving record teenage depression and anxiety (and I’d guess it isn’t limited to teenagers either). You could actually disconnect from your work since you didn’t have PagerDuty ever ready to call you in. I loved the web of the 90’s to mid 00’s as well, but what we have today is not that.
People don’t just marry later, they marry less (and as we’ve noted, have fewer children). You can choose to see this how you wish, but generally the pro-natalists see it as a bad thing; another sign of increased social fragmentation.
Houses are bigger yes, but that means less affordable; homelessness is rising.
The real kicker for me though is the falling life expectancy in the US. It’s literally been attributed to “deaths of despair”; drug overdoses, suicide, and other misadventure. That’s despite the advances in medicine.
Cancer rates are increasing (I literally found out yesterday that my sister has a growth that may be cancerous; she’s got a biopsy scheduled, and a woman who I dated died of cancer before she turned 40). Reasons are unclear but record rates of obesity can’t help. On that one at least we may have turned the corner with some really revolutionary drugs that are quite expensive now but I do believe will come down in price.
I don’t really want to do the pollution/CO2 thing because I’ve had enough already. Suffice it to say it’s hard for me to be an optimist.
I think the drug issue is complex. Too complex to talk about. I'm lucky that I don't have whatever my dad had.
FWIW, I suspect cancer "rates" are going up due to detection. I think the rate of dying by cancer is going down (https://www.cancer.org/research/acs-research-news/facts-and-...)
We'll survive climate change. We're installing solar and wind power at a crazy rate (and the rate continues to increase): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/12/climate/clean...
https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/05/cancer-cases...
So basically cancer said, “screw the millennials in particular”? It’s actually a bit darkly comedic.
If it is paid for by others, will they really value it? A lot of children just don't value what is handed to them.