Cost of Raising Children

This has been studied by sociologists and it basically comes down to people having more opportunities outside of the home to make money. For poor families, kids are viewed as an asset since you can use their labor to earn income through farming or other services. For higher-income homes, having a kid means you might have to reduce hours at work, miss promotion opportunities and so on. So people decide to not have kids.

Look into the marginal cost of raising a child. Children are a bigger expense for upper-middle class people who expect to send their children to a private school, pay for them to go to an expensive college, want each kid to have their own room, etc. For poorer families the main expense of a child is food. The younger ones can wear hand me downs, it is possible to shove two or three children in one room, etc. The poorer the family is, the less having another kid costs until it is actually a negat

because money by itself isn't the issue. otherwise poor people would not have kids. the real issue is that having children conflicts with having a career and other interests.

Home ownership and prices have no effect on people having kids. Income does. You'll find loads of kids in low income areas but far fewer in middle income areas.Everyone online complains about wealth being the reason they won't have kids, but it's not the case. Once people make one step up in their career, they want to make another and kids become an impediment. No matter the country, you'll find higher numbers of kids when people (and especially women) are deprived of educ

You are assuming that people not wanting to have kids has to do with some worldwide sentiment rather than the simple reality on the ground – it is just not financially viable anymore. Costs like housing, healthcare and college tuition have risen thousands of percent more than inflation and wage growth in the last few decades. More and more households have both spouses working full time and still not able to afford a decent house or minor luxuries. Add in childcare, education, supplies and more f

It could be they didn't have enough money to have kids.Nowadays most families can't afford kids at the same standard of, let's say 40 years ago with the same amount of parents time.I think it's crucial to be at home for kids and at maximum one working parent working full time

Student loans, housing costs, job prospects, healthcare, childcare. People are making a rational decision to avoid children they can’t afford. We as a society need to re-examine the causes of rising costs of essentials so reproduction is no longer financially infeasible.

I don't think going from 2.x kids per family to 1.x or even lower was mostly about money. It's about opportunity costs (and the resource that you must allocate between the alternatives is mostly time).To put it differently: in 80s your standard of living was X no matter if you had kids.Now if you have kids it's 2X and if you don't it's 5X (assuming the same effort).That's why giving people with kids enough money to survive don't help much. It changes i

In many western countries the reason why people aren't having as many kids as before is because it's too expensive, and because housing is too expensive. You aren't going to have children, if you're still living in your parent's basement, or sharing an apt with roommates.Childcare in the US, for example, is outrageously expensive. If you aren't lucky enough to have a grandparent or other relative do it for free, or for nominal compensation, your childcare cost is

100%I think this popular narrative of "kids are too expensive" is mostly a media fiction. It's more about individual comfort. Money can be a factor in comfort, but it's hardly the only one.Poorer immigrants tend to have many children. Even today, poorer people in general have more kids than wealthy folks. Just look at the data - it contradicts the headlines.As Peter Zeihan likes to say, kids were free labor for the farm and made life easier. In today's world, th