I think we very rapidly went from a world with high child mortality rates, no access to birth control and children being at least moderately useful on the farm or doing some other work quite young to a world where having children is both a choice and very very expensive.
This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.
Worse: the costs are front-loaded and (all but) must come early-ish in your life.
The opportunity cost—the shadow, if you will, that the cost of children casts on your future retirement savings—is enormous. It’s way larger than the nominal cost. Big ouch.
College is quite cheap in many, many parts of the world where birth rates are still quite low - specifically in most of Europe, but also in Japan, Korea, at least compared to the USA.
Yes but those places (esp Europe) have youth unemployment / underemployment problems so similar issue with the next generation taking longer to establish themselves financially stable
Sure, I was just pointing out that the costs of raising children are not U-shaped in those places, they are just front loaded. Even if young adults are financially dependent on their parents because of youth unemployment issues, they don't start costing their parents more when they're 18-20 than when they were, say, 12-14.
Right right, but purely mechanically in terms of number of hours in school / after school activities / clubs / sports.. you could most easily have two working parents during that age range.
Many people tend to want to own their own place before having kids, then the mortgage costs mean they might only be able to afford to have one child. Each child means a parent stops working for at least few months, losing income. Housing costs are getting worse over time too in HCOL areas.
Also from a world where the ability of women to access decently paying jobs outside the home was heavily restricted to one approaching equality. Motherhood is one choice of many, with negative pay.
Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household.
My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today.
In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between tax & number of kids in childcare.. very well paying 6 figure jobs are basically just treading water for 5-10 years.
It leaves families with a a hard choice of heaving the lower paid spouse leave the workforce which helps kids and in short term makes economic sense, but ruins future savings for college/retirement prospects as its hard to re-enter the workplace after 5-10 years.
My own mother was in nursing, left workforce for ~20 years and returned working a retail job. My mother in law educated in accounting left the workplace for similar length of time and returned to nonprofit work.
Both of them had degrees that didn't cost 1/10th of what it does today so it wasn't as bad as it sounds. By comparison my wife's student loans weren't fully paid off until we were 35.
> people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare
For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course).
Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away from our home region for better jobs. My nearest family is a 4 hour drive away.
Combine this with a strong individuality streak (less reliance on neighbors and community) and you have to turn to very expensive childcare.
Raising children without that support is very daunting, at least to me.
It fits with everything in the rich world, especially the west, especially the US which is - replacing family/community/social/etc systems with pay-as-you-go solutions. And this is one of many areas it falls apart.
One of the major unspoken costs of having hotbeds of industry and the opportunity cost associated for not being in those hotbeds. Hotbeds are great for the entrepreneur but it still costs a hell of a lot in other ways that would otherwise enrich society.
1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people.
2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will. There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids.
Note that I think both of these things are good things. But the upshot is that, in pure economic terms, the short term cost of kids for society and for parents is high. Long term, they are a great investment, but even this is more true for society at large than for parents directly.
But if parents were only thinking about children in pure economic terms, birth rates would be even lower than they are. There are other really good reasons to have kids. But I think a lot of young people don't see or hear about that, or don't believe parents when they say it.
There was a great article from Cartoons Hate Her[0] where she made the point that one thing you can do to increase the odds your children will want to have children is to "make parenting look fun". The way I would say this is that you want to make sure kids aren't only aware of the not-fun parts (when their parents are mad and frustrated, it's obvious), but also the times when you're really enjoying having them around.
I think this applies at the society level too. Parenting does suck, but it's also awesome. We don't need to lie about the sucky parts, but we should make sure that's not all we're showing young people.
My two cents as someone that had his only child past the age of 40:
More than low birth rates, I think that the problem is that people are postponing children until the last possible moment biology allows for it.
The reason is that people need to have their life in order before having children. I imagine it was easier in the past than nowadays.
You have Children and need to work? Daycare is extremely expensive. Want to buy a house? Well, Children weights against you when trying to get a mortgage. And I am not even getting into the actual costs of raising a child.
People say that low birthrates are a problem, but while raising children is a personal endeavor, nobody is willing to make a collective problem (it is fairly unpopular to direct taxpayer money to pay for it).
I wouldn't say "more than", I would just say that these are both different problems, with different impacts. I don't think it's obvious which thing is a bigger problem. But yes, I agree that the root causes are likely similar.
Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.
Children are a massive asset for tax-payers. Money is a claim on the production of a country. Without that production, money is just a useless piece of paper or useless entry in a bank database. And for a country to produce, it needs people of working age.
More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing? It goes up until some cannot afford to pay and demand balances supply.
Without a working age population, your retirement assets will be inflated away into worthlessness.
Nobody thinks like this. Not a single intelligent, successful, prosperous woman is going to be even slightly motivated to have a baby over the long-term viability and credibility of fiat currency, whereas I personally know of two people who only exist because their welfare-dependent mother impulsively took advantage of a government cash bonus by getting knocked up by a man she barely knew, and then promptly did so again with a different one.
> Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing?
The cost does not change. This situation that you describe is already present a many countries who have an acute nurse shortage. The gap as always is filled by immigrants from the global south.
Everyone wants their kids to do better than they did.
But, if you are poor enough in a rich country, you have lower absolute aspirations for your own children / you probably get child related government benefits that approach your costs / etc.
If you went to college and want your kids to do the same.. the costs are enormous.
This happened depending on where you live in the course of 1-3 generations.
We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues.