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Comment by bdavbdav | Hacker News Reader

(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold

Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.

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Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am. On top of a $3000/mo mortgage. NE USA. When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded." Either that or they have one parent who cannot be employed outside the home.

Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529.

Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.

Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.

same here. not near her parents but close enough to both hers and mine that we can effectively have them rotate through consistently (got a spare room and king sized bed for the g-parents).

even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.

I think one dynamic going on here is there is more animosity between generations now than there used to be.

Many people get hyped up about their beliefs on social media, and when they go out into the real world they take some of that divisive thinking with them.

Apologies I'm really late replying to this...hope you see it.

I think this is an insightful comment with an element of truth and it's really, really sad. Yet another example of the net negative societal impact of social media.

Convenience/economic context aside, the grandparent/grandchild relationship/dynamic is incredibly important to a developing psyche.

> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded.

This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.

Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.

It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).

It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.

I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.

I'm expecting a kid in Jan. It was sort of unexpected (earlier than planned by about a year!). I'm gonna be honest I had a really grim talk with my partner about finances... I don't make tech money right now and my partner is not in a high paid field.

You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.

I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.

Congrats. Take care with the money, as always, but kids are the most rewarding “investment” imaginable.

> You can also hire a nanny.

Yes, or just have your servants watch them.

Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.

> It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.

Mostly women, and that helps keep the gender pay gap going.

> Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.

Where are you at?

Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.

Paying someone to watch your children full time so that you can do your full time job is inherently classist. Who takes care of the nannies kids?

The solution to "kids are expensive" being to just pay someone lower class to do it is absurd.

> You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.

You're re-inventing daycare here.

Just because something is classist doesn't mean its not an economically viable option for a large group of people.

> Who takes care of the nannies kids?

Nannies take multiple children (up to 4 here in France) at the same time. So he/she can take his/her own.

Also they only need to be nannied for a couple years, so there's like 48-40 other years of their lives where they can spend the bulk of their focus on the kid they're nannying instead of their own.

It's classist that I have to work every day and the owners of capital do not, so what?

There is nothing morally wrong with hiring someone to do labor for you.

The solution to "my garbage is piling up on the street" being to just pay a garbage person to remove it is absurd.

Not to mention, what is the point of having kids if you are just going to pay someone else to raise them?

>Where are you at?

There are two ways to hire a nanny. The "law abiding as a point of pride" way is comically expensive.

The "pay your neighbor's teenager cash" way is cheap.

If even that's too expensive for you then send your kids to whatever unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated daycare that some tradesman's wife runs out of her house.

Well, when millions of women started working in the 60s and 70s, do you think it decreased or increased salaries as a whole?

OP's comment was so wild, I can't believe it was anything but disguised sarcasm.

> Have a parent stay at home and not work

> Hire a nanny

> Move (presumably farther away from your job) closer to your (assumed idle) parents so they can help

> Take a couple of years off of work

These options are available to a vanishingly small percentage of working people, at least in the USA. OP must know this, so why even mentions these outlandish options?

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks.

In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.

Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.

Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.

Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.

Being a mom just sucks.

You've just reposted this again

I'm sorry dude, but you are clearly part of the 1%. No one I know can afford any of what you're suggesting. "Just take a sabbatical and put up the nanny in your guesthouse!"

> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy frak they must be loaded."

I had 5 kids in the 1990s-2000s economy.

I couldn't start out as a couple in this economy.

Over the last 30 years, rent went from ~$400/mo to ~$2k/mo. Most critical expenses increased similarly.

I now live with my adult kids because together we can afford to live.

If child care is that expensive, it's cheaper for one person to stay home, unless both parents have high paying jobs.

Revealed preference tells us people would rather have "no kids and 3 money" (credit to Homer Simpson).

As something of a tautology, when both parents have high paying jobs, child care can charge whatever they want. And they still have limited spaces, which the highly paid parents are now competing for.

It can be, but it's incredibly risky for women to stay home to take care of children. And, let's be honest - they're the ones actually putting in the effort here most of the time. Most women don't want to be at the complete financial behest of their husbands, nor do they want to risk missing out on a decade of work experience.

Men are avoiding marriage due to the possibility of alimony, child support and courts favoring mother’s custody over children. It happened to my dad, my mom got over $1 million in 2011 when they divorced.

Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.

Divorce laws vary by state. California is equal property, and alimony kicks in immediately (no minimum length of marriage). As a female, higher earner, I paid my ex-husband alimony for a 1 yr 9 month marriage.

Do you feel that this is a fair way to distribute earnings upon divorce? When no children are involved?

My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.

What if you think about it this way: By default, a marriage is a contract agreeing to equally pool financial resources. If that contract feels unfair to you, it's usually possible to draft a contract with a different distribution, which people often do if one of the two has vastly more financial resources going into the marriage.

Does that make it feel more fair?

My take is that the spirit of the law is to compensate spouses for sacrifices and risks they took in support of the other spouse. So for example, if Spouse A reduces their earning potential for Spouse B (ex. a military spouses are disadvantaged in their careers b/c they move constantly, if a doctor moves to a rural area that can support their career but not their spouse's career etc) then Spouse A should be compensated by Spouse B because Spouse B's career growth depended on Spouse A sacrificing theirs. Other examples are if a Spouse stays home to care for dependents, if a Spouse puts another Spouse through graduate / medical / law school etc. It's about acknowledging that you gained because of someone else's actions and compensating for that, honoring your debts as it were.

I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.

> Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am.

That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)

Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...

And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.

I have been in tech for 7 years and it would be a stretch to afford the house I grew up in. Plus the commute to the city from my parents has increased from 45 minutes to 2 hours over the last 30 years. My high school recently closed down because families can't afford to live in the neighborhood.

The house my parents bought in the early 90s (after local inflation) would cost between 1/3 and 1/4 of what such a house goes for right now. Big surprise I didn't buy one, but I suppose with 2 incomes we would have bought one for that price.

Which worked great when people had long retirements and were procreating early. Grandparents are working longer, older age when their children have children, and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.

> and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.

These are just people who never liked kids. My friends parents were still working and went out of their way to watch the kids when available. Believe me, there are people who LOVE kids.

It's a lot to ask grandparents to take care of an infant full time during the work week. Here and there, on occasion, that is a completely reasonable thing to ask for. It helps strengthen family bonds. But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.

> But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.

This is disheartening to hear. You should not have to ask, like ever. My mother would KILL to have grandchildren and would absolutely love to repeat what she calls the best time of her life. She nags me for not having kids and I feel bad because she sees other grandparents and is saddened she is missing out.

I recently overheard a conversation between two older women who were both new grandparents and they conversation was about the pure joy of getting to raise kids again - BUT - you get to go home at night. They loved it!

If you have the right parents then you should never have these reservations. Otherwise it sounds like you have parents who had kids "because that's what you're supposed to do." So they never enjoyed it and dont want to repeat it. My condolences.

No, my parents and in-laws have routinely expressed how much they love to watch and spend time with my kid. But they're also retired and have lots of trips and hobbies going on. They're getting older and aren't as physically able as I am in regards to picking up and chasing after a highly mobile toddler. My husband and I aren't their only kids either. They also spend time helping out our siblings.

So it's really more of a me thing why I don't ask them to take care of him "full time". If I really needed them to, they would (and happily).

The funny thing is that childcare is ... actually free.

> Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this,

Indeed. I have a friend who's younger brother fell madly in love with a girl his family did not approve of. He left home at 19 to live with her then returned about a year later married, with his first child at age 20. Shortly after he had his second child he finished university then helped his wife finish university and nursing school. They're 37 now, 3 kids, both have a career, house, and they still go out with friends and have a solid social life. Just saw them this past weekend and his son is a young man looking at university, daughter is excelling in school, and a toddler (happy mistake.)

BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.

> BUT! He had a lot of help from family which is key.

Yep. When typical wages equal 100% of rent, how is a new couple supposed to sustain themselves?

one of my theories for why we specifically see highly-educated people waiting longer or opting out is that it's a consequence of tiger-mom/helicopter-parent upbringings

its a double-blow to deciding to have kids -- a) they were raised to pursue personal/career excellence which deprioritized becoming a parent, and b) when they look back at their parental role models they see an unsustainable level of over-involvement that they don't have the time/money to match and think that that's what's expected of being parents.

if we started normalizing more hands-off parenting styles where we let kids be kids and don't expect as much from parents, everybody wins.

Agreeing with you, and connecting it to the link, my parents talk about their childhood as basically being feral. You had multiple kids in the house who entertained/babysat each other (possibly by beating each other up, but whatever) and you also had streets filled with kids doing whatever (baseball in a dirt field, playing in traffic). The rule was to be home by the time the streetlights came on. Organizing and transporting to playdates etc. was not a thing.

I grew up in the 80s and 90s. This was my childhood. In the summer, I would play with the neighboorhood kids until dark and come home.

My mom would yell out the back door when it was time for dinner.

Look at the way our cities are built. I live in a grid based streetcar suburb and my kids can be let out feral. If you live in a modern subdivision ... Good luck. The roads are too big, and there is nowhere for kids to go. Meanwhile, my local city has free lunch at the park for kids every day during the summer and kids can go unaccompanied. I see tons of kids out riding bikes and walking by themselves.

Impossible in modern developments. You'd have to cross a six lane road with 50mph traffic to get anywhere not safe.

Agreed, the consequences of a car-dependent society are far reaching, and this is a very insidious one.

I'd also add that it may even be illegal in some places to let your kids outside by themselves at all. Even when it's not illegal, it just takes one busybody to call the police and you've got a potential charge waiting for you, all because you let your kid walk a couple blocks to school. And of course, this just exacerbates the problem further.

> this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.

My anecdote: As a parent, when I talk to people my same age or younger without children they often greatly overestimate the sacrifices necessary to have children. I can’t tell you how many times I've heard people (who don’t have children) make wild claims like having children means you won’t have good sleep for the next decade, or that they need a 4,000 square foot house before they have kids, or that it’s impossible to raise kids in a MCOL city without earning $200-$300K.

A lot of people have locked their idea of what it’s like to have children to the newborn phase and they imagine changing diapers, paying $2-3K infant care costs, and doing night time feedings forever. I’ve had numerous conversations where people simply refuse to believe me when I tell them my kids were sleeping through the night after a couple years or potty trained by age 2.

I think a lot of this is due to class isolation combined with getting a lot of bad info from social media. When you mingle with more of the population you realize most families with kids are not earning programmer level compensation and not living in 4,000 square foot houses, yet it’s working out.

Reddit is an interesting peek into this mindset. Recently there was a thread asking for serious answers from parents about if they regretted having children. The top voted comments were all from people who said “I don’t have kids but…” followed by a claim that all their friends secretly regretted having kids or something. If you sorted by controversial there were a lot of comments from people saying they didn’t regret it and loved their kids, but they were all downvoted into the negatives. It’s wild.

Well said. This all tracks strongly with my experience.

I’ve got one fantastic child, the relief of starting to get my time and freedom back is still enough to remind me I don’t what to loose that again, even temporarily.

The parents might be fine but the kids aren’t. I got my great programmer job entirely because of anger that my family was and continues to be in relatively bottom feeder jobs. The trauma associated with living in even relative poverty compared to your peers is hard to overstate.

Being a parent is a selfish decision - full stop. Antinatalism becoming socially acceptable is entirely due to an authentic ethic of compassion that the older generation and parents have abjectly failed to embody.

That's because they've been raised to believe it's hard.

And seeing the various lists of what is required of parents .... I guess I agree. But here's the kicker... You don't need any of that.

For example, we have three (soon to be four kids). My neighbors have one. I can't imagine how hard their life is parenting their one kid compared to ours simply because of how all consuming their parenting is. Every behavior of little Jimmy has to be scrutinized. Copious books are consulted for the best way to do every little thing. Jimmy must be reasoned with instead of just instructed. Old ways are rejected outright instead of adopted as methods that successfully formed our generation.

Take for example potty training. They started at the 'right' age of three years old. Their kid has taken months to potty train. Little Jimmy has to be reasoned with and convinced to use the potty. Every mistake results in an elaborate ritual they read about in a book.

Meanwhile, we have three kids all of whom potty trained around the 1.5 year mark. We never read books. We just did what our parents did. We stuck out a potty and let them run around naked and every time they made a mistake we stuck them on the potty.

I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to change diapers for 3 years.

There's numerous examples of this. For example, little Jimmy has a whole menu and there's a ritual to introduce new food to him that they read about in a parenting book

They were shocked to see us feed our 8 month old whatever we had on the table that was safe for them to eat.

They have various 'rules' for other babysitters, including grandparents, for little Jimmy. Meanwhile we just trust our parents.

The entire thing results in them spending a helluva lot more time on little Jimmy than we do on our kids. And because of this, little Jimmy is not only overparented but also the family does less. We camp, ski, kayak, vacation internationally, etc with our kids (same age as little Jimmy). For them, they cannot without breaking their various protocols.

Anyway, listen to the wisdom of the ages. Children are very easy. Your entire body and psyche was made to make and raise them.

Perhaps Jimmy's spoiled by parents over parenting to their own detriment.

Or perhaps the kid's on the spectrum/whatever and they're desperate to find anything that works for them until he finds his happy place taking pictures of trains.

I have a hard(er) kid and then an easy one. The experience for daily life examples such as yours is night and day.

Having a strict routine sucks for the reasons you mentioned but it's a fantastic coping/management strategy compared to a possibility significantly worse existence.

Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44529456

According to that the issue is culture. We, as a species, have effectively just changed into people who no longer want kids (on average). Changing culture is hard. Sure, every little economic reason might have been some small influence on that culture but fixing the monetary issues will not suddenly snap the culture back. The culture has fundamentally changed.

Just to cause arguments, some things which I'm guessing were an influence in getting her. Cars? (easy to get away from family/village, the culture that valued family). TV/Cable/Video-Games/Youtube? (infinite entertainment 24/7). Fast easy prepared food? (no needing to meet with others for meals). Computers/SmartPhones/Internet? (infinite entertainment and/or ways to interact with others but not actually meet). Suburbia? (the need to drive to be close others)

"We gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them, but it didn't measurably increase their marginal propensity to have kids at all! Clearly the root problem couldn't possibly have anything to due with economics!"

It's wild how quick and eager economists are to discard money as a driving factor when the solution could possibly involve more social spending. If this were about taking credit for success, they would be tripping over themselves to explain how economics drives the cultural factors, lol.

Did you just make that up? I don't see what that has to do with the linked study

It's mentioned in the piece:

As Lyman Stone wrote in 2020, “pro-natal incentives do work: more money does yield more babies… But it takes a lot of money. Truth be told, trying to boost birth rates to replacement rate purely through cash incentives is prohibitively costly.”

> Money is not the issue according to this from 4 days ago

The article does not say that. In fact, it notes that money (and correlated housing) are significant, generous incentives have a positive impact, but most importantly they need better data because there are complex trade offs around opportunity cost which are inadequately captured by the available data.

> According to that the issue is culture.

This is a much stronger claim than the article makes, especially given their careful recognition of limits in the data, the global nature of the trend, and especially the interrelated nature of economic constraints and preferences. The speculation in your last paragraph aren’t discussed - they’re talking about things like how much people derive satisfaction from careers or the way people’s choices are influenced by their peers, which again are highly related to economic constraints (e.g. if housing costs are a major barrier, odds are that your friends are also affected and so you’re all having fewer kids later). They mention things like travel in the opportunity cost category, but that needs better data to tease out whether people are not having kids because they want to travel or whether people who have decided to delay/not have kids are making the much smaller financial commitment to have a vacation. There’s a lot of thoughtful discussion in that piece about teasing out the interrelated factors and it really highlights that there isn’t a single magic fix.

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