[dalore]

Not only that, the whole school system makes it so hard for parents. Say you have a few kids. They most likely will go to different schools in different areas. So now you have to get them all to different schools at the same time, at the same time as everyone else, and get to work. Then after school, they will all have different activities to go to at different places.

It's no wonder people are stopping at 1 kid or none at all.

[dudul]

Why do they need to go to different schools? Why do you need to pack them with evening activities?

Honestly, I think it has nothing to do with that. Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.

People just think having kids is expensive and will take up most of the free time they currently have, both are true.

[maxsilver]

> Nobody, once they reach the age of having kids sits down in front of a spreadsheet to start thinking of how to deal with dance and soccer activities.

I don't know why you say this. As a single parent, who is close to another single parent, and with 5 total children in the mix, we absolutely do stare at the Google Calendar spreadsheet view, trying to think of how to deal with dance and soccer.

> Why do they need to go to different schools?

Different kids are different ages, or have different needs. Pre-K is a different building from K-5, which is a different building from 6-8, which is a difrerent building from 9-12, which is a different building from the Montessori Learning center, which is a different building from the Special Education center, which is a different building from the Intermediate School District building.

It's absolutely possible to have 5 kids, each of them only 1 year or so apart, all of them in the "same district, same zone, same address", and still end up with kids spread across 2 to 4 different schools. This is especially true if any of your children are outside of perfectly average, in literally any way.

[dudul]

I was talking about before having children.

[sgerenser]

Not to mention in almost every part of the U.S. kids can either walk (if close enough) or take a bus. The “having to go to two different schools” issue never once crossed my mind as we were deciding whether and how many kids we wanted.

[angmarsbane]

It blew my mind when I learned that other states have free school buses. In SoCal you have to pay for the bus so everyone drives their kids to school which adds more traffic to already congested roads.

[nerdbert]

How expensive is this bus, that it's actually worth people's time to drive them in a car instead?

[kristjansson]

Wow, I’ve lived here for years (without kids) without knowing that. That’s LAUSD, or other parts of socal?

[angmarsbane]

I grew up in Ventura county so outside of LAUSD. Other Californians will have to chime in about Riverside, Orange County etc.

[dalore]

Because you have kids a few years apart. So there is the transition to high school. Then some schools are single-sex.

[dudul]

Ok so now it's even more ludicrous. So a couple in their early thirties is gonna sit down to discuss having kids and the deal breaker will be "well in 16 years Alice will be in high school and Bob will be finishing elementary school, so for 2 years we will need to drive them 15min from each other. You know what? Let's just not have kids, I don't think I can deal with this."

[wharvle]

Some absolutely see how full their schedules are gonna be with one, give some consideration to what that’ll look like with two, older and at different ages, and stop at fewer than they might have if they hadn’t thought about that.

[gsich]

Public transport exists, although it's not usable for everything.