[trgn]

i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with.

i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.

[SoftTalker]

A lot of people think they need to do this but it's really not true. You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids. And in terms of avoiding complications and having energy, 18-25 years old is probably the best time.

[dh2022]

In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it.

Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.

This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.

[asdff]

Daycare used to be essentially free when I was growing up. Some workplaces had a little daycare wing. Gyms had them. So many adult sort of third places just had a place to plop your kids with a smattering of toys. Now people are paying $3000 a month so they can go to a spin class.

[SoftTalker]

And yet I bet there are thousands of young people in Seattle having kids. These limits are all about what kind of life you want for yourself, and not about what is possible.

[Gareth321]

Implied in their comment is that they don’t want to be homeless and hungry, which I think is a fair prerequisite before having children.

[dh2022]

The parents at my kid’s daycare were in their late twenties / early thirties, had professional degrees (lawyers, physicians, tech) and only one kid in the daycare.

[edit to add this: I am talking from experience, it seems you are talking from hearsay]

[pixl97]

I mean, living in a garbage dump is possible, millions of of people do it around the world.

The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.

[trumpdong]

It's possible, but if you do it in a developed country they'd take you to jail. Just like the law imposed a minimum wage, it also imposed a mandatory minimum standard of living.

[theshackleford]

> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids

My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.

This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.

I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.

So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.

[em-bee]

but this comes from parents being expected to have their life figured out and not giving them any help. if we accept as normal that young parents will not have their life figured out then we will also make sure that we don't leave them alone but actually support them.

i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.

[theshackleford]

I think you are correct, but not in a manner likely to happen.

My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.

To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.

If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.

[em-bee]

ouch, i can't imagine the stress your parents must have been under that they lost control like that, or the pain you had to experience. i can somewhat sympathize. my dad had a rough temper too at times, but nowhere near what you describe. and we lived in germany where we got financial support from the government. not being able to pay rent is not a thing there. if that was all it took to set your parents off then this totally could have been prevented with a better welfare system.

[Xirdus]

You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.

The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.

[foobarian]

Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society

[trumpdong]

If you have kids and don't have life stability, everyone will call you irresponsible and the government may take your kids away, right?

[autoexec]

> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.

You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.

[saintvlad]

> You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though.

You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.

[trumpdong]

The government absolutely lets people starve to death. Have you ever tried to get any welfare? It's gatekept to hell.

[autoexec]

I haven't checked the data for myself, but supposedly, while still not a common cause of death, malnutrition is the fastest growing cause of death in the US (https://www.the-independent.com/life-style/health-and-famili...)

[sltkr]

Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/1102/

And according to your article, this is almost exclusively a problem with the elderly:

> Those aged 85 and older die from malnutrition at a rate about 60 times higher than the rest of the American population, with deaths in that group increasing about twice as fast.

(Of course, I'd expect those aged over 85 to be dying at a much higher rate from _most_ causes.)

[autoexec]

You should try it because I bet you'll find out why pretty fast. It just isn't worth it.

[Daishiman]

> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.

Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.

[Spooky23]

The only thing you lose there are the trips. If anything your social life can blossom.

My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.

[tasuki]

> If anything your social life can blossom.

Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.

[bombcar]

That's not true! Sometimes you get to spend time with grandparents of same-aged children!

[matchbok3]

It is hard to explain to 20 year olds that bragging about their trip to Europe means nothing when you are 45.

[abc123abc123]

How strange. My experiences when I was young mean way more to me, than say, a trip to the US now. Now it's just boring routine, back then, everything was new and fresh.

You must have had a very boring time when you were young. It is very sad.

[matchbok3]

Not sure what you are referring to. My point was that "traveling" is meaningless when you have a family.

The personal attack is immature. Grow up champ, you'll be happier!

[riversflow]

I have more energy in my 30s than my 20s

[everdrive]

Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.

[Spooky23]

Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.

Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.

Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.

[WarmWash]

You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.

[bombcar]

If you're at a certain income, additional kids is additional income as more and more gets taken care of.

And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.

eg: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/badgercareplus/fpl.htm

[Spooky23]

Yup. And it tends to cluster around rural and sectarian lines.

When people start having 6+, the formulas get weird and vary by state and sometimes county.

[m_fayer]

We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.

[TurdF3rguson]

Were they Catholic? Contraception was a sin back then.

[testing22321]

I was 41 when my first and only child was born.

Super happy I had so much life experience, not wanting to go out and party etc.

Trying to keep up with her snowboarding and biking and climbing and hiking and all the rest through her teen years is going to be a great motivator to stay fit and strong.

[ninininino]

Respectfully, you don't know why you put off children. You may tell yourself a story of why you have, but for example if there was an environmental contaminant shaping population level stats on endocrines and hormones that reduced human sex drive and desire for children, you wouldn't necessarily be conscious of that.

[close04]

People are very conscious that a child costs a lot to raise and the reality is usually worse than their estimates. They know children will impact their career and promotion opportunities, so a lower expected income just when they need it more. They know they no longer live next to their parents so the support structure they have in place is flimsy.

You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.

[mannanj]

You got people angry about that.

I agree with you.

Most people can be sick and not see it because they are surrounded by other sick people. To them, that baseline of health feels healthy. You won't even really know why certain other people may cry, and smile, and laugh so easily and you can't. Maybe you received conditioning and beliefs about it in your environment which molded you into the sick person you are, and the other healthy ones are the sick ones to you!

[card_zero]

That sounds more like "hormone-driven people don't know why they had children".

[trumpdong]

It sounds like "nobody knows why they do or don't have children"

[zbentley]

Eh, that argument works on any claim and is nonfalsifiable-ish, so I think it can be ignored.

People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.

If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.

[trumpdong]

We know some of the pharmaceutical residues in our sewage turn frogs gay (that really happened, that wasn't AJ making something up). We know pharmaceuticals can greatly affect people's sex drive, general mood, and other psychological factors. It's definitely not a stretch to guess we might be doing it to ourselves.

[dfee]

both points are fair, but operate at different levels. the former: willpower. the latter: constraints.

and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.

[ninininino]

I didn't make a claim humans have no free will, moreso that we cannot accurately judge our own motivations/drives.

[trgn]

yeah make sense, we do things, rationalize them later, i get it, i certainly am sensitive to it.

[aaarrm]

Okay