[michaelochurch]

No, that's actually how it works.

First of all, if you have kids older than about 3, no more renting. You can't put your kids through a move just because your landlord decided to raise prices 20%. If you move 5 times in their first 15 years, their likelihoods of having psychotic mental illness in adolescence and adulthood go way up.

Extreme commuting is no longer an option either. If you commute 3 hours per day in addition to a 9+ hour job, you're going to be miserable and irritable and your kids are going to see you at your worst and end up fucked-up. Then they'll end up needing the validation of VC-istan narcissism too... the cycle repeats.

Then, housework. If you have two people working career jobs, and you have kids, you're way beyond being able to do your own cleaning. If you don't have kids, you don't need to hire maids because having a tidy place is optional and most people just do without; but that shit no longer flies when you have helpless creatures you must keep alive. If you're both working career jobs, you need the resources to hire for all that shit to keep the place clean.

Finally, tuition and health insurance.

Mostly, it's goddamn fucking housing, though. Seriously, all this NIMBY shit that keeps house prices high is one of the most twisted dysgenic programs ever devised. It creates a world in which future-oriented smart people realize how fucked-up everything is and refuse to bring more people into the world, while the present-focused dumbasses (and the rich psychopaths making money off this horrible arrangement) breed like rabbits. Compassionate people who actually observe the state of the world objectively (and realize that it's borderline torture to force some being that hasn't yet been afflicted with existence to be born into this ruined world) are being selected against.

[tptacek]

It's as if you actually life in a world where people with kids don't routinely rent.

Here is a powerful clue for you: if you talk to actual people in the real world, you will find schoolteachers, construction workers, real estate agents, Windows desktop support staff, and even meter readers who are successfully raising children. I know it's jarring to hear this, but software developers do not actually have it hard in this regard.

edited for brevity

[bearmf]

Well, I know several software engineers with kids in NYC. Some live in NJ, some live in Brooklyn, some live in Manhattan. In fact, among married immigrants almost everyone has at least one kid after 30. Often mother does not work or works part time and looks for kids. Almost everyone of the "extreme commuters" has kids.

Tuition and health insurance is about the same everywhere. Housework is not that hard, maids are not that expensive. Absolute cleanliness is not something that kids require, neither is owning a (2-bed, 3-bed, huge) house.

In my opinion, your restrictions are quite arbitrary. So you would not have kids while working as a software engineer, but plenty of people do.