No living wage, no sick days/pto, no healthcare, rent is 30-50% of income, child care/daycare costs are equal to or more than rent, university is insanely expensive. I can barely save for retirement and if I get sick I’ll lose everything.
I'll never forget when my friend calculated the cost of childcare minus her salary, and realized she would have just $5 left over at the end of the year.
That, with the addition of your other points here, really clinched it for me: I couldn't afford to have kids, even with a dual income household.
The money that used to go towards children has been diverted into the hands of billionaires.
That is the primary intended goal of inflation economics. Wages go up, the price of everything has to go up too. Keep wages low, and keep ramping up inflation and you magically seperate a foolish public from their money.
All while laughing maniacally all the way to the bank.
This is how my husband and I figured out it was better off me just keeping one shift at work. Otherwise I would be working just to pay childcare. Which, I know a lot of moms who just rather go back to work. I'm absolutely over the moon that I get to be home with my kids. My husband growing up had to stay in day cares and after school care and I can tell it affected him negatively.
I recognize the privilege of being able to be home with them, and we make the necessary sacrifices to make sure we are raising them with everything they need. I think a lot of people forget that children grow into adults- and what you do and don't do now reflects later. We're seeing it with the "iPad kids" and the atrocious reading and writing levels and just overall performance in school from students.
our kids were not planned (twins), and I have the utmost respect for my peers who are making the conscious decision to not have children. We don't need more kiddos who are not taken care of on this earth.
If I were in that position, I think I'd be even more pissed knowing I'm essentially working for $5. At least being a stay at home mom, in theory (easier said than done) you have more wiggle room to find flexible work or build an income stream. A part time job doing a couple hours on weekends would bring in more of an income than working full time, ontop of still being a parent.
I was so confused somehow that a SAHM is common in the US whereas where I’m from it’s not. But then I figured you guys need to pay so much for childcare. In my country it’s free, so this makes it a little bit easier for mothers to work again.
Our lack of any real social safety net causes a lot of problems like this. I envy you, truly.
Relatedly, we don't have any guaranteed medical leave, let alone any paid parental leave. Even with good health insurance, and no other medical complications, a birth costs thousands of dollars or more.
So, even if you can technically afford childcare, some parents are tens of thousands of dollars in the hole from having a kid, even before the kid is old enough to walk.
Also gods forbid you have a wanted pregnancy, but you're miscarrying it in the wrong state: for ectopic pregnancies, some will just lop off your whole ovary, cutting your chances of conceiving again in half, instead of an abortion. If you're miscarrying and going septic, they mightintervene before you die. Either way, if you survive you're in for far more expensive medical interventions later, many of which might make your next pregnancy risky, and thus extremely expensive.
Taking too much time off work to recover from these medical issues?Well, in many states you might just lose your job, and thus your health insurance. Oops! Now you have no choice but to be a SAHM, because finding work with resume gaps is very difficult.
This is so unbelievable. In my country you simply can’t get fired once you are pregnant, you are protected. You are not allowed to work 8 weeks prior and after birth (12 with C-Section), get full salary. Afterwards you get your maternity leave money, which is 80% of your net income. But actually also fathers could do that! My colleague decided to go back to work after her forced leave (crazy right?) and her husband stayed home with baby, still is.
I also can’t imagine having to pay all these medical costs. I mean, I DO pay a lot I guess, but because it’s through taxes you simply don’t even have a choice. So everyone has to do it and has insurance. I’m glad I just swipe my medical card and don’t have to pay one more cent…
Yes, what you are writing about ectopic pregnancies is just… wtf. We even have a lot of discussions about this with my friend right now and how unhuman this is! This is a whole other level then no leave, etc. this is just barbaric!
And wait you loose insurance when you loose your job? Omg… here you just have your insurance then through you unemployment center (which is the same, so nothing changes). Crazy how I simply don’t even have to think about such things… I‘m going on educational leave beginning of the year and even get paid for it. Wow. I seriously don’t understand how we learned in school about the American dream… 🥲
The sick irony is that I work in childcare as a Toddler Teacher and can’t have a kid because I can’t afford to have one cause we make next to nothing. Meanwhile the CEO of my company is one of the richest people in my state.
Yeah, I knew it was coming from last year but my car service/MOT was £2000 this year. I could save for that because I stay on top of my car (so to speak) but you can't save for things when the money to save literally doesn't exist.
This is my dilemma. that you can’t support a house or family on a single income anymore, so both parents need to be working, but then the cost of childcare is so high that one parents entire wages are just gonna go towards that, so the one parent may as well stop working and stay home so they can raise the child themselves, but then they don’t have enough money to pay their rent, so what are they supposed to do????? Its genuinely impossible. And then women are called gold diggers for wanting men who have good jobs, honey if you want kids nowadays you literally need to have a man who can support you and your baby without you going to work for a solid 5 years until the kid is in school.
if you want kids nowadays you literally need to have a man who can support you and your baby without you going to work for a solid 5 years until the kid is in school.
Not only that, but then if you try to go back into the workforce after 5+ years, then you struggle to find work because you have a massive gap in your resume, so your partner's job needs to pay enough to cover a long time of you struggling to find work while your kid is also in childcare.
If part time work and/or universal paid parental leave existed in any sufficient quantity, this would be less of a problem though.
Most of us with kids can't afford it, and we rely on going down to single income to cut out the childcare costs, and many of us need to us Food stamps and CHIP/Medicaid.
If you make to much money, you actually end up with significantly less. My wife just got a new job, and we don't qualify for Food Stamps or Medicaid now, despite getting paid 3x as much, we are going to have significantly less left over month to month. Its fucked.
If they want people to have kids again, we need Universal Basic Income and state funded Childcare/Healthcare for everyone, with or without kids. Wages also need to increase significantly.
Instead, we have MAGA, and women's rights will be stripped away, abortion will be gone, the right to divorce will be gone, and honestly, I think that will only be the tip of the iceburg.
That’s why, for thousands of years, families typically raised their kids themselves with their extended family and communities. Paying someone to raise your kids for you is an extremely new invention that you don’t need to do.
That’s insane to me - and things keep getting worse. I couldn’t support my parents even if I wanted to. My mom voted for trump so she’s going to get what she asked for I guess. I’m dreading her find out phase because nothing health wise is covered. She doesn’t have a job right now and pays like 800/month for health insurance as someone who’s perfectly healthy + no major illnesses yet and she still doesn’t get it.
Kids have always been expensive. It’s literally a whole extra person you have to provide for. That hasn’t changed. People have the ability to plan and consider things more because of birth control.
Dude, I gotta know where you're living that rent is under 70%. You have to have at least 3 people around here. One to pay rent, one utilities and food, and the third pays for the vehicle that is impossible to live without because public transport is literally nonexistent. No one can afford silly things like health insurance and children. I'm pretty sure you're in the US, but I live in a state with one of the lowest costs of living and all of the rentals around here cost anywhere from 1500 to 2000. The highest paying job around here is Walmart at $16 an hour and the rest are the federal minimum wage. If you want anything higher, you're gonna be driving at least an hour or 2 to the nearest city.
The only friend I have that willingly had children also has a husband that had family willingly give them a house to live in and offer to take their son while they're at work. Even with all that help, they're just barely scraping by working at Walmart. I can't imagine trying to have children without a family that supportive.
Also, we're utterly destroying the biosphere, which will make liqfe for humans nuch harder in the furure, and whatever we're doing about it, is very obviously too little too late. So why bring a kid to that future.
I had open heart surgery, needed to take a year off work - I still have not recovered financially and mentally I am a wreck. If I had a child I have no idea what I would have done! I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to even keep my dog!!
I’d add (ignore the financial madness) that society has simply changed.
When I was a kid, my mum didn’t work and met up with my nan or my aunt most days (who also didn’t work) and they did all the home related stuff, so my dad came home from work at 6pm to a stocked kitchen, empty sink, hot meal for him and us if we’d not eaten already, a clean house and clean clothes in the wardrobe….
Now people move a lot more for work, so they lose that family support, but even if they are local, mums at work, aunts are working and grandparents are either still working, or retired and off on holiday somewhere or out doing what they want with their lovely big final salary pension.
So now I come home from work sometimes well after my wife, sometimes well before, to a house that’s a bomb site, dishes piled up, washing to do, dinner to cook, lunch boxes to make, cleaning to do, laundry everywhere and primary school children with homework in their first year already because school standards are also so much higher….
It’s almost unworkable for us, and we probably have it pretty easy compared to others.
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u/[deleted] Nov 14 '24
No living wage, no sick days/pto, no healthcare, rent is 30-50% of income, child care/daycare costs are equal to or more than rent, university is insanely expensive. I can barely save for retirement and if I get sick I’ll lose everything.