* in the US
We currently pay something in the range of 250€ a month for after school care of our 2 kids, including lunch; full kindergarten care for both was around 500€ before in Germany.
Funny thing though: birthrates here are dropping even worse than in the US...
Are you serious?
This shithole country I live in. We have funds to create a gestopo and ice camps here in the US and there's no real support for new parents.
Comical that Republicans constantly bitch about people not getting married or having kids, then make sure there's no way they can support said kids. Fucking dimwits
US always wants to force women to stay home. What shithole doesn't have parental leave?
In many municipalities child care is even completely free of charge.
(Only for low-income families where I live.)
From society's standpoint it is also a good idea to let pedagogues mentor young kids and give them social interaction with same age peers. Also best way for foreign kids to learn the German language and customs, reduces possible later social problems.
Birth rate is, as inconvenient a truth that it is, inversely proportional to education and the liberty of women. You'd be hard pressed to give any developed nation that has a high birth rate.
Federal minimum wage was to keep a family of four out of poverty, this is a 1938 labor law; this law was in effect during our 'golden years' 1940s, 50s, 60s, 70s.
Today? They just ignore it as we have since the 80s; these are the results of steadily declining wages for 50 years.
BUT MUSK IS A TRILLIONAIRE HAHA STOCK MARKET 50K
They don't want babies. They want robots.
Since corporations are people, logic dictates that robots are also people. Robots are a construct run by humans, just like companies.
Oh, and money is free speech! Tee-hee we don't know what's happening this was all a coinkidink beep boop
They don’t want babies. They want robots.
Well, they want slaves. And they're still figuring out which direction to go
I've never quite understood this, because the birth rate is highest at the lowest income level. So, the people who are least able to afford child care have the most kids. I know people will say the reason is a lack of education or insufficient access to birth control, but if that's the case then what causes people to have fewer kids is a better education and more access to birth control, not unaffordability. And that seems to be supported by the fact that households making $50k to $75k have more kids than households making $150k to $200k. Yeah, they're both making less than $400k, but the people making $200k are much closer to $400k, yet they have fewer kids.
Inequality is the primary factor. If people making $150k to $200k can reasonably conclude that having children would be a burden on their future economic prospects (in an already uncertain future), they will decide against it. $50k to $75k is probably more in the "fuck it, we might as well have more sources of potential labor and income and maybe a subsidy or two since we're already at this point", and people making $400k or above have nothing to fear from child expenses.
Nah. The people having the kids aren't generally thinking about another source of labor. I come from a stinking, filthy kind of poverty. Sex is free entertainment and family planning costs money or time to get to the clinic and you have to deal with assholes who think the family planning clinics are abortion factories. So you think "if we're careful it won't happen, I'll just pull out".
A lot of quiverful ministries are also home to the very poor. Some of them are given teaching for how to get extra money from the government for every kid. The man works, the woman does not, and the older kids are in charge of the younger ones. Childcare solved, in their eyes. I could be mad at them for gaming the system, but I've already got too much anger in my heart over the government blaming it on the "welfare queen" stereotype. You know the lie. Black woman with 5 kids from 6 daddies, every one of the daddies is gone. When in reality the system gamers are poor white evangelicals of a specific flavor.
If you're looking at people in developed countries where more kids doesn't necessarily mean more labor, the difference can also be somewhat explained by religion and quality of life concerns. Extremely religious people in the us, who tend to be less educated and have lower incomes, may not believe in contraception and believe that "god will provide". That may sound like an exaggeration, but I personally know someone with 7 kids who cannot afford to feed them but thinks that they will go to hell if they use condoms and denying their husband is also a sin somehow. They just talk about how god intended for their family to struggle. That's not a mindset you generally see in high income families.
The other factor is quality of life (and yes, education). If you're making enough to afford a home and a good education for 1-2 children, you may be looking to give your child a good life and a good springboard for their future. If you know that no matter what you do, you will never be able to afford a college education for your child, then that makes having a child "less expensive" in that regard. You know you won't be able to afford sports or extracurricular activity equipment, or new clothes, so while a family earning more may spend a smaller percentage of their income on any single child, the resources they are expecting to be able to provide them increase. A lot of low income families may have the approach that if a child is fed they've done the thing. Check mark on parenting for the day. If that's the approach to parenting then it's less resource intensive than a more involved approach that some high income families may have. I want to be clear that this is not a moral failing or some kind of judgement being passed. I think a lot of people don't realize the day to day of very low income families. There are still people in the US raising families with no access to electricity or even running water. They have a very different background and understanding of what a family looks like. I don't think they are inherently evil for having more kids and being unable to provide for them in the way others may expect, but I also think that's not an excuse to allow children to live in unsafe conditions. I legitimately believe that if we had better education in low income and rural areas that you'd see this disparity drop, as they learn the different options education can provide and strive to ensure their own children get the best education and support possible.
pretty much, they're desperate for you to make more white babies
oh..you're not white?
i'm calling the polICE
I think you understand this pretty well. For educated people parenting is a choice. They wait for the right moment in the career, they make sure they will be able to provide their children with everything they may need and that their kids will have optimal conditions for growth and development, they consider their other passions and projects and weight them against having kids.
Uneducated people simply have kids and don't really give it a second thought. You have kids, you feed them some junk food, give them phone to play with and that's it. You're a happy family.
Stupid people do stupid shit. Smart people use their brains.
To be fair not every uneducated person is dumb. And not every smart person makes good decisions. But overall, I think it's true.
Sad, but I’ve witnessed many versions of this.
A lot of that might also be location based. Where I am right now we're paying ~1700/mo for daycare. Wife got a job for nearly double our current combined income (for 260k) so moving to Boston, daycare going to ~3000/mo and housing going from 2k/mo to looking at 6-10k/mo. It almost feels like a paycut...but at least driving should become more optional.
Also why bring a kid into this hellfire right now.
Because now is the best time to be alive, ever. I could take you back 100, 200, 500, 1000, or 5000 years ago and things just get shittier and shittier the further back we go yet people kept having kids.
Not quite true. 20-30 years ago would be better than now. Slightly worse medical science is offset by everything else being farther up the collapse timeline.
I get our argument but I don’t think it’s accurate to overlook how terrible things have gotten in the past few decades just by taking the longview.
My support worker just got a new client and she said they bought their house for about 30k$ decades ago and are now sitting on millions.
Who the fuck can afford a house or kids or anything other than the bare minimum.
Costs keep going up, wages stay the same or often get smaller. What. The. Fuck.
No, it's not. It's not a constant progression.
In most countries, the best time to be alive was the 60s-90s. Since then the world has been going downhill in everything that matters. Yes, sure, tech has evolved and all. But having the wonderful opportunity to be glued to a screen for half your life doesn't make it the best time to be alive.
People dont stop having kids because they suddenly hate the concept. It's in our nature to have kids. We don't want kids anymore because society has turned so hostile that it completely overruns our instinct to have kids.
It's not even the best time to be alive during my lifetime
From a pragmatic point of view?
"In a time of dragons, raise dragon slayers."
Those fighting for a better future now will get old. Thankfully, so will those seemingly-immortal bastards ruining that future.
We need future generations, educated and supported and prepared to take up the mantle.
As Bruce Lee put it: "Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to overcome a difficult one."
We need to come back around to the idea that we are here for a bigger purpose than to be comfortable and happily wither, as even ~~if~~ when we are victorious, someone needs to maintain the solemn responsibility to keep evil at bay, because it will try again.
We all want our children to be happy and healthy and safe. But we also must prepare them to bear the same responsibility we do. Part of resistance and war against the principalities and powers and forces of darkness in this world, is to make sure righteous ideals live on.
Try not to dwell in the "woe is me" narrative. Today's younger generation has some challenges, but thinking "this is the worst any generation has ever had it by far" is total bullshit.
Society has become outright hostile to parents. Cost is a major reason, but far from the only one.
The future does not look too promising.
Yes.
You can't let them explore on their own to build independence and confidence without CPS being called on you.
When kids misbehave in public, all the boomers get their panties in a wad. My parents get flustered when the grandkids get loud playing together in a back bedroom.
Getting kids launched well in life, with some chance of adult prosperity, requires thousands and thousands of dollars in private clubs/ competitions/ tutoring/ schools/ etc - the highly competitive nature of the US economy has reached down into elementary aged children at this point. Where I live, people even pay for tutoring to get their children into GT programs.
Financial demands on parents have increased, but so have non-financial demands.
Unless you have a lot of support from extended family (which also means that you live near them), I really don't see how parents do it.
Lost my wife in September. Girls aged 6 and 3. I'm already a hollowed out husk of a human, without support from grandparents that live in the same city I don't know how I'd ever get by. I am a parent and I don't see how parents do it. Sorry to dump but this resonated with me.
It doesn't help that the state of schooling and instruction here has grown abysmal, largely non-functional.
Kids, on average, aren't learning shit here.
While "preparing for" and entering the economy of today and tomorrow. Things are grim.
I am actually really angry that in the aftermath of Covid, and all the ground that children lost, that we did not overhaul schools to be year-round like they are in Asia. Kids lost whole years of education with the endless school closures!! Why the fuck didn't we make it up with the summers?! Why did we just go back to the same shitty broken system?!
It’s almost self-reinforcing poverty. You can have one person stay home and take care of the kid(s) and lose the income, or you can give what amounts to an entire year’s wages to the daycare to take care of the kid while you work full time. Some may be able to squeeze some part time work in if they’re lucky enough to find a job that doesn’t try to make them work shifts outside of daycare hours. Day care is raising your kids for you, they start off life without you around much.
Question:
Is the plan to make it so only very rich and poor people have kids?
The reasoning behind my question is that rich people are generally selfish and thus will vote in a selfish way. And poor people can usually be easily controlled or could be discounted/removed from the voting arena.
I realise I'm generalising here.
But the reasoning is there, if they 'wipe out' the generation of people who usually vote against then that helps, right? Or am I being too fantastical and conspiracy theorist?
Generally declining birthrates and specifically the disappearance of the middle class are almost inevitable in late-stage capitalism (the stage where outward expansion is complete, so capitalists must turn their gaze inward and increase exploitation at home). Although, let's be clear, everyone except the capitalist loses in this scenario, and it will hurt people who are currently in poverty much harder than it will the middle class who are only beginning to drown.
But there isn't some conspiracy making this happen. It is only the machinery of the system that makes true the statement, "If I don't, someone else will."
I'm sure many of the educated oligarchs know that this is how the system works. It's why they're all building bunkers. It doesn't need a shadowy cabal in a smoky room, though. Profit inventivizes all.
The plan is dead for a long time now. Capitalism only works if the working poor population gets renewed. They lost track of the plot and focused too much on wealth growth. Now we are in the late stage of capitalism. The stage where it no longer works but they'll pretend it does until it collapses under their feet.
That stage might take decades though, most of us won't enjoy what comes next.
Capitalism has never been a plan, it's a cancer
The plan is to pillage the wealth of the local population via insane asset prices and extreme rentierism around essentials such as housing and then when the amounts being returned by the pillaging and exploitation start to slow down due to the impact from decades of lower birthrates because of living in such a dystopia, importing young adults from countries with higher birth rates - i.e. immigrants - and have far-right political forces funded by the very people pillaging the country loudly blame said immigrants for the feeling of life getting worse and even pain that most people feel as consequence of the pillaging of the country.
Certainly this is what I've seen in multiple countries in Europe.
The plan is to move all the money to the top 0.1%. Low birthrate is just a side effect of that. The plan was always to fill in the gaps in workforce with illegal immigrants who are cheaper and easier to steal money from. Currently I'm not sure what the plan is. Robots? Abandon manufacturing altogether?
Oh good grief. Okay so if childcare should be no more than 7 percent then if you pay 1200 per month you should make $200k. This doesn’t mean that if you have two kids and pay $2400 per month you need to make $400k. That math ain’t mathing. Not everything else goes up.
It kinda does.
Daycare in my area was $2500 for two kids (with a discount). That's just daycare. This ain't even a fancy ass daycare, nor is this a fancy city. Everything is just that fucking expensive now.
Man, I think that's the going rate for one kid in my area (DC suburb).
And despite the horrors of reality, some people are still fighting and even dying to get into the US.
If childcare costs $400,000 then would it be more financially viable to have one parents stay at home and provide care and quit their job/career?
Neither of the parents probably make that much, so if it saves $400k it would save money. If that figure is actually true.
Federal guidelines say that childcare is affordable if it consumes no more than 7% of household income. Citing data from Child Care Aware of America, LendingTree found that the average annual cost of care for an infant and a 4-year-old is $28,190 nationwide.
That would require household income of $402,708 a year to meet the 7% benchmark.
Childcare doesn't cost $400k (at least not according to the article, or even the headline). The article says it costs $28k. Most people are going to make more than $28k/yr, so keeping the second job is still a financial positive.
Did you at any point between misreading this headline and deciding you'd solved a blindingly obvious problem, think to read the link?
This isn't Twitter. Stop with your responses to 140 characters.
Oh and by the way, "just stay home" is pretty shitty as a solution even in itself because taking years off work is significantly damaging to one's career and women are disproportionately expected and pressured to be the ones to do so.
Yeah back in the 'golden years' of the 90s the were saying you needed to earn twice as much as our family did to afford kids. Somehow we raised 2, through university and all without going bankrupt.
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