[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.