My great grand mother gave birth to 16 children, who had healthy childhoods and good educations. My family was not wealthy. Nowadays only the wealthy could afford to raise 16 children, with good childhoods and good education. If people now are more affluent than they were in the past, then why is it more difficult to raise children? For those who wish to have large families, it seems obvious that the last 100 years have seen expenses related to raising children rise at a rate faster than the median wage has risen.
It's not that it has gotten harder to have kids, but that people come to expect and want to provide more.
I had a perfectly decent living standard growing up, but I also remember very clearly in retrospect the economic uncertainty and the things my parents did to save money, and no uncertainty I've faced has been anywhere near that. Of course it's not like that for everyone, but overall, living standards are up massively, yet fertility rates are down, and the two are firmly correlated.
If I were to budget like my parents did, I could afford many kids. But I don't want to budget like that. Not because I resent how we had it, but because I don't want to go back to that just for the sake of having lots of kids.
Kids used to be a backloaded financial asset, essentially low cost labor. Now they're a major financial liability. If you are middle class and have four kids, you're probably not really middle class anymore.
Also, the stuff related to making kids expensive (school, housing, medical care) is working out of a completely different economy than the cheap TV economy that makes us the richest of all time. Medical care is far more an expensive by proportion of household income than it was in, say, 1955, as is school and housing. Add to that the breakdown in social structures that means you won't get family to take care of your kids and it just doesn't look that hot to have a kid these days, even if you want one.
Our expected spending on children has also grown dramatically. For example back then there was an expectation that someone would always stay home an look after the kids, now we expect them to go to day care. Back then 4 kids sharing a room their entire childhood was normal, now each kid is expected to get their own room. Back then kids where expected to entertain themselves, now we expect them to attend all sorts of after school activities. Back then they where expected to either go straight to work after high school or pay their own way through college either by working or scholarships, now the parents are expected to help pay for college, and so on.
Basically it's not that having kids per se is more expensive, it's that providing kids with the quality of life we've come to be expected to provide them with is expensive.
I suspect the main reason it's difficult is because of the individualistic nature of western nations. In a society where people live with multiple generations of family raising children is probably much, much easier.
Add to this the fact that everyone wants to have the best schools, houses and things in general, and the income that's necessary to get and maintain said things and you see that having modern children is a trap.
Raising kids is difficult and time consuming. As people gain more opportunities to do other things than raise kids they chose to do those other things instead. It's an opportunity cost issue, not a literal cost issue. That's why the birth rates goes down rather than up as you climb income percentiles. People with more money have more opportunities.
The only real force to counteract that is cultural/social pressure to raise kids which has also fallen off pretty hard. It might be less obvious to younger people or people with younger parents but having kids was much less of a "decision" for couples not that many decades ago and was much more just an assumed fact. If you didn't, people assumed there was something wrong with you.
It used to be that having a large number of children was more important to your family's survival. Childhood mortality was higher, and children often contributed to the family business. My dad was one of 11 born to a farming family, and the kids were expected to help operate the farm.
I happen to know a bunch of large families (7+ kids), and I think the common thread among them is:
* The choice to be open to more children into the family, whether by birth, adoption, or fostering, is not primarily because they perceived themselves to have extra free time or extra resources, but because they had more love to give. Which is not to say that families who have fewer are less loving, or that material circumstances don't factor into the decision. But it seems like the families I know recognized that they could parent more children, and give them all sufficient love and care, and that was the motivating factor.
* They tend not to have highly scheduled, highly involved kids -- and the kids turn out just fine.
* There are increased costs as the number of children increases. But having, say, six children does not cost twice as much as having three.
Consider that it's more expensive to have children have children as well. It's not so much too little material wealth as it is too little wealth to sustain the "normal" childhood. Not so long ago, kids existed as cheap labor and a retirement account. One didn't need to treat them like human beings much less provide literacy or schooling to them. Whatever functional uses they had before have been replaced by machines and and markets. Today, unless one is passing down the family company, having a kid serves no functional purpose except as a "fun" activity or cultural performance. Anyone who is having children today is choosing to invest in/burden themselves with a more expensive responsibility than previous generations had.
Could it be possible that in the 24+ (?) years since you had these children that things have perhaps changed, and your views on the affordability of children are a quarter of a century outdated?
IMHO the reason is that in rich societies people has many possible activities to perform. They feel that parenting kids is not one of the most attractive ways to spend their time on. Furthermore raising kids cost more in rich countries than in poor ones, so they can't afford as many as their parents or grandparents could.
I'm not arguing for having that many children, just that its a basic way to benchmark how expensive being alive is. Clearly these people having so many children werent just randomly taking on impoverished hardship. Things were tight, but they had reasonable economic security with so many children. This points to a dramatic drop in wages in the last 50 years
Yes, when you focus on the costs of raising kids, which are high today. But they weren't always as high, especially not the marginal costs of one more kid.
Also, the key point is that when people's wealth are based mainly on work actually getting done, as on a farm with room to expand, then you get richer with more kids. It's when access to capital becomes more important - including as land becomes expensive - that you get poorer with more kids.
I think this is true. I recently read "The Fates of Nations" by Paul Colinvaux, which was very interesting. One of his main points was that people are very smart about choosing how many kids to have, and they generally choose to have as many kids as they can afford. For richer people, it tends to be less, since they want to give their kids all the best: the best schools, the best daycare, set them up with a good start in life, etc. For poorer people, they don't spend as much on their kids. They don't worry so much about education because it's often out of their reach, so they have more kids since it doesn't cost them as much. (The book isn't so much about demographics as about how demographics have shaped history throughout time.)
It's not costs per se as we see fertility rates drop in tandem with rising wealth.
But indirectly, probably, in the form of raised expectations. You want to give your kids at least what you had as a child, ideally more, and that gets increasingly tied to high costs.
Children are more expensive now because of societal pressure to raise kids to a higher standard because people have less of them.
Imagine all the hand wringing that would ensue if at lunch with my colleagues (which is a rough approximation of the HN demographic) I mentioned that I got a 5yo hand-me-down car seat instead of buying the latest and greatest. Generalize that pressure to pretty much every child raising related expense.
Your last paragraph kind of highlights the point of my previous comment though, which is that the vast majority of people who have children today and who had children in the past had few or none of those things, and were absolutely fine with it. This is a modern hyper optimization of, “I can’t have kids unless they have the absolute perfect life situation.”
At the end of the day, it is a cultural “problem” that potential parents are unwilling to have children. If anything, the material costs of entertainment, food, education, etc. are magnitudes lower today than a century ago, and yet a century ago it was normal to have 3-4 children.
That's also with modern medicine. Back in the day you had to have lots of kids because nearly all of them died and you needed someone to work the farm and care for you in old age. In modern society, they're viewed more as an expense.
> Large families simply happen due to poverty. When poor, you want more children because there's strength in numbers. Plus the women are staying home and can afford to have children.
Poverty and risk, fertility changes lag behind medical advances / availability e.g. in europe the large families were mostly around the first half of the 20th century (to soon after WWII), where culturally you wanted to have a fair number of children so you'd have some living to adult age (and also manpower on the farm) but medicine had also progressed and spread enough that almost all of them would survive to adult age.
Culture quickly caught up and the default assumption that all children will live to adult age means even farming families aren't really large anymore (not to mention machines & automation makes the manpower of many children less relevant).
Developed countries are mostly at the point where medical advances are getting available, leading to huge families because the cultural aspect hasn't caught up yet.
>It's economic. People are having kids because they can support them.
That's one factor, but there is also a huge additional psychological component to people feeling like they can support children.
The higher a family income, the fewer children they have. This tracks every more strongly with your family income as a child. People who were raised in poverty have more children, independent of their current income.
In short, more money you have or had as a child, the the fewer children you will have.
The general consensus is that this has to do with feelings of financial readiness. People who grew up with less money are less scared of raising children without everything money can provide.
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