[PebblesHD]

While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves.

Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.

[ok_coo]

To echo this statement, I wasn't financially stable until ~35. We still do not own a home/condo and I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. My spouse and I may just move in with family to split costs and live cheap.

To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way.

TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.

[souprock]

They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.

[lotsofpulp]

The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.

[souprock]

3.5 kids per adult then.

So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.)

Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay.

Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.

[lotsofpulp]

Were all 11 kids under the age of 3?

FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages.

I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.

[souprock]

I have 12 kids, with one more to be born this summer. The 4th and 5th were twins.

Babies are not difficult. Teenagers are difficult. I have experience with both.

[lotsofpulp]

>TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.

I imagine most people are not sufficiently saving for retirement, and/or don't have sufficient savings for emergency (medical/loss of income/disability/legal/etc) expenses either.

[dylanz]

The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA

I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.

[maxk42]

Alright unpopular opinion time: You could afford a house if you were willing to move to a more undesirable area.

With the rise of remote work in the past year, people (not necessarily you) have more options than ever before for housing, yet they continue to cluster in small, desirable, high-rent areas rather than living less glamorously in exurban or rural areas.

House prices in my neighborhood have broken the $500k mark (and much more in other places nearby), yet a quick zillow search shows housing in several areas less than an hour from my house available for below $100k with stagnant prices. If I were willing to live even further afield, I could get a mobile home for below $75k, and in the eastern half of the US I see hundreds (thousands?) of places available for below $50k.

If you want the prices to improve then stop paying high prices.

[jimmaswell]

Poverty is usually associated with increased unwanted pregnancy (which must have come from sex) though.

[temp-dude-87844]

The paper "Declines in Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 2008-2011" [1] by Lawrence B Finer and Mia R Zolna is linked by the CDC on their page about Unintended Pregnancy, and is a notable source of data on unintended pregnancies. This paper clearly states how they determined whether a pregnancy was intended:

"Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner."

When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy.

Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575

[brailsafe]

While I've been aware of this for some time, it just occurred to me that unwanted children would actually cause more poverty, and any effort to prevent mitigation of that actually distributes more suffering.