It’s Not Just You: No One Can Afford Kids Anymore

if you want to see an extended entirely adree version of this video I want to remind you about our wonderful members only Community the society at tfd available here on YouTube or over on patreon the membership is exactly the same on both platforms so you can join through whichever platform you prefer if you want to support us here at tfd joining our members only Community is the best way to do that members get early access to the ADF free extended directors cut of this video you're about to watch as well as access to 20 plus adree bonus videos monthly workshops our Discord Community our book club and more when you join again you can join here on YouTube or you can join on patreon.com financial diet and join at the 499 level as many of you know we are a completely Independent Women owned and run small business and our 2024 goal is to become primarily supported by our incredible Community we love you guys whether or not you join the society but it'd be a lot cooler if you did I feel like a lot of the parenting content that I was seeing fell into one of two camps there was the kind of like mid to late 2000s mommy blogger Camp which was I am perfect and my children are perfect and my home is perfect and the organic bento box lunches I pack every day are perfect and then there was this other like Mommy Wine Time my husband is basically a giant toddler um everything about being parents is terrible like there was kind of this you do this then you have to be perfect or you're doing it wrong or these people who just monetize all the hard parts and never talk talk about the fun Parts it felt like those were the only two options like those are the only two ways to be app parent cuz those were the only portrayals that you saw consistently in the spaces where I was consuming content welcome everyone to this month's video essay and as you might have been able to tell from the title and thumbnail of this one we're going to be talking about one of the more underrated industries that my generation has left for dead on the side of the road and that is the having kids industry basically if you've looked almost anywhere in the news over the past last decade you've probably seen doomsday headlines like these that not only point out the fact that younger people are just not having as many kids but always doing what the news media does best when it comes to talking about Millennials and genen Z which is making it entirely our fault and indicative of an inherent moral failure and this is a topic that I've been wanting to cover for a long time because as many if not most of you probably know I am personally someone who identifies as childree by choice though you can also just refer to me as a child old hag or whatever term feels good for you but you may not know although some people occasionally point this out to me in the comments of my videos as a kind of gotcha moment I didn't always not want kids in fact in my very first book I'm only here for the Wi-Fi I actually talk kind of at length about the fact that I expected one day to have children I also talked about it in articles that I posted on the internet around that time and didn't really come into the secure decision with my husband that it wasn't the right choice for us until at least my mid to late 20s now now I don't personally look at the fact that I used to think I want to have kids and now don't as some kind of gotcha because first of all I contain multitudes even on a date A- day basis let alone over the span of 12 plus years but I do think it's always worth noting why I personally came to the decision that having kids wasn't right for me and we'll also be speaking to someone in this video who did change their mind in the other direction just for reference but for me when it comes down to it although I do love children I don't think that I am personally very adapted on a personality interest patience or just Vibes level to being a parent I'm much better suited to having different kinds of relationships with the kids in my life but also the things that I most value in my life my freedom my flexibility my ability to take on various hobbies and projects travel professional challenges and other things that take up quite a lot of my life and similarly for my husband he's very much like that as well I simply think that being a full-time parent would come at too much of an expense of those things that it would probably be very unpleasant I do genuinely think that if I were to have kids if I were let's say born in a generation where that was really not a choice for me or given what's happening in this country lived in a state where it's not a choice for me I might end up being one of those parents who regrets having kids because it's a lot more common than we think just check the number of people subscribed to the regretful parents subreddit either way not having children was a decision that I reached over several years and for many reasons and more than anything I feel very grateful to live in a time where that is a choice that's available to me and not something I have to be particularly ashamed of even if certain extended family members wish otherwise because let's be clear I think the world is infinitely better when people are able to proactively choose Parenthood and to opt out of it when it's not meant for them and more people should be able to make that choice I just like to take a second to thank this month's video sponsor betterment everyone loves a good budget but the truth is you can't just budget your way to wealth you also have to focus on increasing your income over time and starting and sticking with a consistent investment strategy luckily betterment can help take the guesswork out of investing you don't have to be a financial genius to make your money work for you betterment is the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle with their expert built ETF portfolios you'll be automatically Diversified across thousands of stocks and bonds at once their automated investing technology puts your money to work all from the comfort of your own phone plus they have tax smart tools that are designed to help you maximize your returns you don't have to be a pro to get started and be invested just click the link in this video's description to sign up in [Music] minutes introduction the child free by Choice Movement when you could have kids but don't want to so let's start by looking at what the child-free community even is while the term childree was first used at the turn of the last century it came into common use by by feminists in roughly the 1970s but as a sociological Trend it really started to pick up steam in the past two decades with a psychology to-day article highlighting it as an emerging Trend back in 2014 an auspicious year also the one in which I founded the financial diet and speaking as someone in the community I've definitely noticed anecdotally a decrease in stigma and increase in normalization and this does seem supported by the data which we'll get into but it's still worth noting that despite the increase in not having children as a proactive Choice even among the dreaded millenni generation on average people still do want kids and do end up having them speaking personally I am a coastal Elite in her mid-30s living in New York City and working in media and yet still almost every single one of my girlfriends either has children is in the process of having them or plans to have them Fox News would have a field day with my lifestyle choices and yet I'm largely surrounded by normies doing Normie things including having Normy babies so if that's my case I can only imagine what's happening in the midwest now I am just one child girly pop but it was important to me to speak with someone who is open about their decision online as well and who did it slightly before it even became a trend so I sat down with Tik Tock Mutual internet friend and simply one of the chicest women on Tik Tok Dominique Baker uh my name is Dominique Baker and I'm 46 years old and when I turned 29 I made the decision uh to officially be childree I had gotten married about 3 years prior and I thought you know I better make the decision I I better uh speak to my husband and find out if he wants to be childfree as well there was no tipping point there was no you know switch that had been flipped I kind of always knew that I didn't want to have kids but at that period of my life I was just like I I I think it's official I'm not going to be a mother and that was that I sat down my husband and I had a Frank discussion with him thankfully he was on the same page I wouldn't recommend anybody do that get married then make the decision or informing your partner that you want to be childree but I sense that he was on the same page as well my mom and dad were a little disappointed my dad of course threw around the whole what about my own legacy uh he was worried that none of his uh none of his three daughters would have kids and then he just sort of never really spoke about it ever again um my mother my mother was sad she definitely wanted grandkids but you know part of my decision over the years was that that helped me make my child fre decision was watching them struggle to raise three of us now we never wanted for anything but we I I knew even as a kid that we didn't have that much money I was not like my classmates you know their parents having Renovations done to their houses constantly or going to Disneyland every year buying new cars all the time we weren't like that whatsoever but um we wanted for nothing but at various points of my parents lives they worked two jobs to make ends meet um I wanted a little bit more for myself we also never traveled when I was younger we would do the occasional road trip to Philadelphia to see my grandparents but I always had this wander lust being a Sagittarian and I wanted to travel the world frankly securing my career building a strong career care traveling the world and continuing my education at the time were more important to me than settling down and having kids but where these doomsday headlines are not totally wrong is that there is some data on people having fewer children quote birth rates are falling in the US after the highs of the baby boom in the mid 20th century and the lows of the baby bust in the 1970s birth rates were relatively stable for nearly 50 years but during the Great Recession from 2007 to 2009 birth rates declined sharply and they've kept falling in 2007 average birth rates were right around two children per Woman by 2021 levels had dropped more than 20% close to the lowest level in a century why in part this decline is good news there are fewer unintended births than there were 30 years ago a decrease linked to increasing use of effective contraceptive methods like iuds and implants and improved insurance coverage from the Affordable Care Act also compared with earlier eras people today start having their children later these delays also contribute to declining birth rates because people start having them later they have less time to meet their childbearing goals before they reach biological or social age limits for having kids as people wait longer to start having children they are also more likely to change their minds about parenting we're just getting tired like here in New York City it is not at all uncommon to see women in their 40s and Beyond like having twins on a moment's notice and you're just like girl I can't even have a dinner on a moment's notice and there's definitely a level of increasing intentionality around the idea of being child-free by choice a 2021 poll by Pew research found that 44% of childless adults said they're unlikely to have children up sharply from 37% add to that the already established trend of families getting smaller so even when women are having kids they're having fewer of them I truly believe in North America the goal is to be a mom and have kids like this whole nuclear family of you know husband wife beautiful single family home like really cool SUV to cart your kids around uh the golden retriever the two perfect kids blah blah blah like that cookie cutter lifestyle is the goal it has been pushed on us our entire lives I don't see this whatsoever when I go to Europe I don't see this whatsoever when I am speaking to most of my family that still lives in England I think it's really pushed in North American society in the media the whole nine yards that if you don't have a mom if you don't have the perfect good-looking husband if you don't get the cool car and the nice stroller and have the two perfect kids and the dog like you are less than I think that's been shoved down our throats by North American Society for decades to get a deeper dive we wanted to sit down with the woman who literally wrote the book childfree by choice sociology Professor Amy Blackstone we saw during the feminist backlash of the 1980s that one way the conservatives saw to push against the feminist movement and to kind of keep women in their place was to develop this idea of intensive mothering and um to sort of develop motherhood as uh this thing that people could and should become experts in and to pressure women to do and be everything for their children so um that's when the concept of helicopter parenting emerged and if and you know so we we started to think at that time oh well good mothers are mothers who um always cook for their families and spend time cooking only the best and the most healthy uh meals for their family which takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money good mothers are mothers who enroll their kids in all kinds of activities which also costs a lot of money good mothers are mothers who spend all kinds of time finding the best and most expensive private schools for their children that costs a lot of money um good mothers are mothers who um enroll in classes to learn how to be good Mothers uh so again becoming an expert mother um becoming a good mother means becoming an expert mother which means um spending all kinds of mother money to become an expert mother now I mentioned earlier that I used to want children and then pivoted to not wanting them definitively but I did want to speak to someone who made the opposite transition so we sat down with Maggie Olsen Taylor a former contributor to tfd who used to be childree by choice and then later decided she wanted children yeah so there are a couple of different factors that um led to me changing my mind I didn't want to have kids for probably 10 years I was totally sure I didn't want them I was like I'm not interested it's not my thing um and then I went through a two or three year period where I was like well I don't know maybe and then ultimately decided like yeah I do want to have a maybe so um there were a couple things that changed for me one of the biggest factors was I as the person I chose to marry um I think there is a lot of Internet content out there about people like women especially who will have a baby and then their husband like doesn't really pull his weight and doesn't really help up with the baby and I find that content like very stressful um and had a lot of anxiety about like what if I have a baby with someone who just doesn't help out and then when I married someone who made it really clear that he was super excited to participate in all the baby care and really be a Hands-On parent a lot of those anxieties for me really went away um and I felt more confident about the fact that we would have like two people participating in racing this child one of the examples I love to give about having a Hands-On partner is that I did not change a diaper for the first three days of my son's life my husband did all of them so he really took over um like the Teddy was born um he was already like playing a huge role in like gracing our son he didn't kind of let it all fall to me so for me marrying the right person made a huge difference in how I felt about having a child and then just like wanting to share that experience with him I am one of three kids my husband is one of three kids all my cousins have siblings I grew up around a lot of people with siblings I didn't really feel like having just one child was an option for whatever reason cuz I just wasn't around a lot of children but as I got older and kind of met more only children and started thinking more from that perspective the idea of just having one child felt right to me I never could get excited about multiple children but once I thought oh I could just have one then I was able to get really excited about it now I listed just some of my personal reasons for not wanting kids but it's important to note that the reasons for not having children tend to be as diverse as the reasons for having them which brings us to chapter 1 a brief history of reasons for being child-free now while there are basically endless reasons why someone might choose not to have kids some are more documented than others now climate change is often cited as a big reason for not wanting children and I did happen to sit down for an episode of TFC this season with a woman who is both a climate journalist and extremely concerned about climate change but also a mother about the philosophy of her choice but for many people climate change both the future it represents and the climate impact Act of having children especially in the west is a big reason people site for not having them quote new research has found many people are now basing their decisions to not have children on their fears of climate breakdown the study by a team of academics at the University College of London is believed to be the first systematic review to explain how and why climate related concerns may be affecting reproductive decision-making their analysis found that in 12 of 13 studies stronger concerns about climate breakdown were associated with a desire for fewer children or none at all and it wouldn't be the financial diet if we did not acknowledge that the economy and cost of living are also one of by far the biggest reasons why people are not having children even if in many cases they would like to or would like more of them and we will break this down in a whole other chapter but just as a Topline note quote in fact 2020 was the sixth straight year of fewer new babies in the US and Americans reasons for putting off children or not having them at all are complicated but there's growing recognition of the role that money plays nearly three in five Millennials without children say they don't have any because kids are just too expensive another common reason is not wanting to repeat experiences from a bad childhood there's less data or research on this but there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that at least a faction of people choose not to have children because of their own childhood experiences quote enduring an overcoming childhood trauma is a huge reason why people choose not to have children explains behavioral health specialist Dr Larry Ford individuals who suffered from childhood trauma such as neglect abuse abandonment and living with the reality of an incarcerated parent among others don't feel equipped to raise a child of their own patients are still working out their own emotional and physical pain and they don't want to pass that on to a child and especially for women wanting to progress in their careers is a big factor in deciding to be child-free or at least delaying having children according to a 2022 survey from resume builder.com 33% of women who have children and or are currently pregnant say having children has had a negative impact on their own career and women's labor participation hit a 30-year low in 2023 likely due to some lasting effects of the pandemic where we saw more women taking on the role of stay-at-home parent or homeschooler than their male counterparts I couldn't get excited about the idea of having a child I don't know if there was any one thing I just there was nothing about it that like sounded fun to me um and looking back on that I think a lot of it was a product of the way that Parenthood is talked about on the internet and in social media in particular um I was in late High School when I first joined Facebook so when I was coming of age and coming to the time in life when you're starting to think about what you want out of your future family I was really heavily immersed in social media and I feel like a lot of the parenting content that I was seeing fell into one of two camps there was the kind of like mid to late 2000s mommy blogger Camp which was I am perfect and my children are perfect and my home is perfect and the organic bento box lunches I pack every day are perfect and then there was this other like Mommy Wine Time my husband is basically a giant toddler um everything about being parents is terrible like there was kind of this you do this then you have to be perfect or you're doing it wrong or these people who just monetize all the hard parts and never talk about the fun Parts it felt like those were the only two options like those are the only two ways to be a parent because those were the only portrayals that you saw consistently in the spaces where I was consuming content so neither of those sounded like fun choices to me I wasn't interested in being perfect I wasn't interested in following this path where you act like the only way to tolerate Parenthood is to engage in like mild substance abuse so I just like wasn't seeing anything that was compelling to me and I didn't really have any other real examples of Parenthood available to me so based on what I was seeing portrayed in media I was like this isn't anything I want and there are countless more reasons that people often cite for not having kids including the very popular they just simply don't want them which according to a Pew research study is the common response of 56% of people without children I know that a lot of black women are single moms uh there's a lot of fatherless children out there in our community I didn't want that for my kids now I I I'm not saying that you know I'm not making a sweeping generalization I think black women have it hard enough but uh I was lucky to find my husband I sat beside him in the second grade I sat behind him actually I got in trouble for reaching out and touching his hair because I'd never seen such white hair in my life white blonde hair and I've been with him ever since I was 15 we broke up a couple of times in University but I I don't know if I were single I didn't want to risk it was important to me to have a strong family unit if I wanted to become a mom and I didn't want to risk having kids getting divorced being single really struggling to raise my kids I think a lot of black single moms it's it's dually hard for them because we have all the sort of racist hurtles that we need to get over um a lot of us you know have troubles finding a partner who is worthy of us who will prove to be a worthy Dad it was important to me to um lead a life that mental to me lead a life that if I so choose to have kids they are well taken care of and to be supported by a partner who's worthy of me and my kids now regardless of people's reasons for not having children the underlying sentiment in so much of the fear mongering around the fact that people aren't having them is that they really should be and some of the same forces in our culture and Society who are most invested in people having children are least invested in creating structures where people might be able to do so in fact one very underrated systemic issue around people not having kids is just how little help there tends to be which brings us to chapter 2 The Village then versus now you've probably heard the expression that it takes a village to raise a child and this expression did not come from nowhere not only is it very literally true that the nuclear family is a really really difficult structure for taking on the exclusive burden of raising a family it's also very historically uncommon now there are some clear differences in what kinds of support is available to parents in the US between now and a few decades ago both for better and for worse for instance I'm sure we're all aware of the Dismal state of Parental leave in the US but it actually used to be even worse if you can believe it maternity leave is not federally mandated but it is required by some states and that is still fairly new which is obviously a positive change quote no US federal law provides a right to paid family or medical leave however important proposals have been Advanced such as one that passed in the US House of Representatives as part of the build back better Act and the family and medical insurance leave family act which has been revised and reintroduced for the 11 18th Congress 13 states have passed Family and Medical Leave laws including California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Maine Massachusetts Maryland Minnesota New Jersey New York Oregon Rhode Island and Washington State as well as Washington DC unlike the states listed above New Hampshire and Vermont do not legally guarantee workers the right to PID leave they only provide a voluntary opportunity to purchase insurance coverage now none of this is to say that we were anywhere near what we should be compared to other countries Most states that offer Family Leave allow up to 12 weeks in a 12-month period with varying additional allowances for disability leave but this almost World unique lack of support around leave and recovery time for new parents is even worse when you consider just how little support is around those same new parents in the United States we have very few supports for parents for people who want to become parents uh it's a darn expensive thing here in this country if you compare the US to other Western s uh we are just about the worst in terms of supporting Parenthood we have terrible parental leave policies so for parents who work it's almost impossible to take time off to spend time rearing your kids you got to keep working um and find a way for your kid to get care usually that means dayare there's another cost um so uh which contributes to the rising cost that's not to say that dare care providers are paid what they're worth but it is an expense that parents often pay because employers and the government aren't going to pay it um we've all heard about Rising health care costs so adding another member of your family also means contributing to their healthc care costs as well so there are all kinds of places um where we see the costs of rearing kids Rising well we may have at least some parental leave now depending on what state you live in or what company you work for it also used to be much more feasible to support a family on just one income in the early to mid 20th century the American economy and individual workplaces were designed with one major assumption in mind the American Family unit included a working father and a stay-at-home mother women entering the workforce on mass starting around the 1970s was a result of the women's Liberation movement yes but it was also an economic necessity for many families due to inflation not only is the extremely isolated nuclear family model not optimal for raising kids even that previous Village of one parent always being in the home for the most part has all but evaporated and it's difficult for so many Millennials especially to imagine themselves having kids because they're still treated like kids themselves because so many of them can't afford to live the way adults are supposed to quote young adults many burdened by Financial struggles are now living with their Folks at a higher rate than people of their age did 50 years ago the proportion of young adults who live in a parents home more than doubled between 197 and 2021 from 8 to 17% according to a recent Pew research report and as we've discussed a lot on this channel buying a home is becoming less and less of a reality especially for younger Generations from a study from former real estate brokerage firm homebay buying a home should cost about 2.6 times what the average American makes in a year in reality it costs 5.8 times the median household income making home ownership an increasingly elusive dream for today's home buyers if home prices had grown at the same rate as incomes since 2000 the median us home price would cost nearly 294,000 about 32% less than today's price of 433 and as parents are stretched more and more thin with less and less support both institutionally and personally child care costs are increasing at about twice the rate of inflation ask any parent in your life and believe me I do because I find this situation Wild and the numbers people will throw at you on what it cost to keep your kid in child care sound honestly fake in some instances Child Care literally costs more than College tuition quote around 47% of parents spend up to $188,000 a year on their child care expenses according to a new cost of care report from care.com while 20% of parents indicated they spend more than $36,000 in a year and the data shows that child care is incredibly more expensive than when our parents were being raised even when adjusting for inflation quote the cost of child care has increased 220% in the last three decades according to Lisa Hamilton president of the NE E Casey Foundation which since 1990 has tracked this and other issues around child well-being in an annual kids count report the organization's 2023 report released in June found that 133% of children under the age of five live in a household where caregivers had to make job changes because of child care issues 5 years ago that number was 9% the report also found more than half of working parents with infants or toddlers reported having been late to work or leaving early in the previous 3 months due to child care issues and 23% reported being fired for it the topic of child care and how expensive it can be is pretty common in the tfd office so I pulled in my longtime cooworker Rachel who has been navigating child care in New York City for years to speak a little bit on the topic now especially New York City there's like pressure to put your kids in some sort of like daycare that is kind of like schooling where they're learning like what they would learn in like kindergarten or first grade as early as like 2 years old in New York City it's like pretty standard if you send your kid to full-time daycare meaning like 8 8:30 a.m. to like 300 p.m. is a full day and then anything after that say like 3 to 5 30 or 6 is like considered extended care so for like 8 to 3 5 days a week like around 30 to $305,000 is pretty standard and like I was a little surprised I didn't realize it was going to be that high but then once we decided to make the decision to do it when I would speak to other parents they'd be like oh yeah like I'm paying you know 40,000 or like you're getting a a deal in some ways when I first started looking into child care options for our family I wondered how the hell like normal people afford this obviously New York City there's people with tons of wealth but even so if you make $100,000 a year and maybe you take home what like 60 to 70,000 of that you're still for daycare that costs like3 to $35,000 a year you're paying that out of pocket and so so you get to a place where you sort of Wonder like does one of us stay home because it's not worth the cost like it would be cheaper to like maybe have one parent home that like takes care of the kid fulltime and like live on one salary like that's definitely part of the conversation that happens when you're deciding you know can you afford this child care or is it worth it neither me or my husband like wanted to be stay-at-home parents and so we started my son in like 3 days a week he never got acclimated so we moved him to 5 days and my parents offered to help pay like 25% just to like take a bit of the burden off of mine and my husband's shoulders and so like I know not everyone has that situation or that privilege but had I not had that like I think we'd maybe be having a different conversation that has taken like a huge burden off of it for us I think people are really struggling if you're not like you know like a seven fig family which like there's a bunch of Articles and you know studies about this like in your York City if you're a family like a dual income household and you make less than $300,000 paying for child care is a struggle just based on what the you know standard cost is and so we're able to afford it because we get help and I'm grateful for that because otherwise you know that's it's a substantial amount of of money every year coming out of our income hey it's me from the future and I'm here with a quick little ad break because I'd like to take a second to thank this video's sponsor rocket money without regularly auditing our spending a lot of less than ideal purchases can easily fly under the radar for instance I recently had to confront just how much I was spending on takeout thanks to a month-long no restaurant spending Challenge and most Americans probably don't realize that we are spending on average over $200 a month on subscriptions but luckily today's sponsor rocket money is here to help rocket money is the personal finance app that helps you lower your bills and manage your money better it can safely and securely identify recurring charges and cancel unwanted subscriptions for you you can even easily cancel from within the app no wasting time calling customer service rocket money can also analyze your spending habits to create a custom budget that works with your lifestyle automatically monitor your spending by category and get notifications for when you've exceeded your limits rocket money has helped save its customers up to $740 a year with over $500 million in canceled subscriptions go to Rocket money.com tfd or click the link in the description to get started for free you can also unlock even more features with premium that's rocket money.com tfd to get started for [Music] free one category of expenses that have been more significant than I expected was the cost of breastfeeding so my child is exclusively breastfed he's three in a half months old and you know you hear breast is free because it doesn't cost money the way formula does but I have also spent a lot of money on nipple cream and nursing bras and nursing sweatshirts and pads to put in my bras so that I don't leak milk everywhere and also I'm doing a ton of laundry because I'm constantly soaking through bras so I have been surprised by the fact that even though the product itself is free the accessories that are necessary well not necessary the accessories that I have chosen to invest in for the sake of breastfeeding cost money on top of that if you were to put a dollar amount on my time and the amount of time I spend breastfeeding it would be astronomical so I spend probably 24 hours a week breastfeeding or doing something related to breastfeeding whether that's pumping getting ready to breastfeed burping my baby whatever if I were to put a dollar amount on that based on what I charge per hour as a freelancer it would cost more than I actually earn as a freelan it's it's a the time cost of breastfeeding is significant in a way that I don't think I fully realized until I was doing it I think the biggest benefits for me are are time and resources so I know that there are plenty of parents out there uh who have the wherewithal to live a fabulous life and be great parents but I don't see too many of those around and I feel that a lot of women especially put their lives on hold to become mothers and then when they're in the throws of it there's a little regret I've spoken to many a mom who wished that either they had waited or that they didn't have kids and I just didn't want that for myself uh as a black woman I am more than aware that family like that nuclear family unit that we are all so used to in North America is incredibly important and it's frankly a goal that many of us black women strive for or strive towards but I just I didn't want that for myself I feel like I have no biological clock I wanted to be able to have enough money to travel the world and to live the life that I sort of wanted to live I didn't want to struggle like my parents did and while it was traditionally very common for the village to include let's say older family members who step in and help care for children and that is still the case for some families increasingly older Generations are having to work themselves well past retirement age combine that with people having to move far from their homes to find better employment options and the village we used to depend on for raising children has essentially evaporated and like so many other things over the past few decades become a luxury item that only the wealthy can truly afford and what really sucks is that we've seen how much of a difference emergency measures can make in family's Financial stability but our government is never willing to make these changes permanent the expanded child tax credit immensely helped families during covid but after its lapse the rate of children in the US living in poverty went from 5.2% in 2021 to 12.4% in 2022 more than doubling to me what the data makes clear is that even for people who want to have children we've done basically everything we can to abandon them and make it as difficult and expensive as possible and this is all the more baffling when you consider Chapter 3 The societal level implications of people not having kids now as someone who is a massive fan of the in my opinion still criminally underrated 2006 cly Owen film Children of Men I know more than most how scary it can be when a population stops having kids entirely now obviously that's a joke that's an extreme example but I should say up front in this chapter that it's sort of a mixed bag when it comes to a society having fewer children but as I mentioned earlier what's really baffling to me is how much again the people in our society who are most invested in people having more children are least invested in making it easy the people who are mostly the religious right and conservatives who Hound people about having kids and pressure people to have kids are placing their emphasis in the wrong place um they're pressuring people who say they don't want to have kids to have them anyway um rather than looking at and listening to the people who are saying they don't want to have kids and and finding ways to form policy that would support these people rather than taking away their rights rather than taking away birth control rather than removing the right to abortion rather than limiting immigration which is one way that we could increase our population um they could be actually listening to the people who aren't having kids who are saying hey it's expensive to rear a kid hey I'm not getting any support when I do um they could they could take an approach to say hey how could we support you in this endeavor um and they're not doing that so you know it's hard to prove a counterfactual I don't know what would happen um but we could look to Nations where it is happening um and we know from research where it's happening um in Scandinavian countries where where Child Care is free and where parental leave policies are being offered uh yes uh fertility is low there um but we do know that parents are happier so at the very least uh we we could be happier but let's just talk a little bit about some of the actual possible outcomes of a society having fewer and fewer children Japan is facing a demographic crisis 43% of cities are losing population the birth rate is far below the rate of 2.1 per woman needed for a steady population the current global population is nearly 8 billion times are seeming to be a lot more difficult take South Korea for instance which is faced with the world's lowest fertility rate slay quote the number of babies expected per woman probably drop this year to 72% and will continue to fall through 2025 when it's expected to reach 65% South Korea already had the world's lowest fertility rate at 78% as of 2022 and the latest forecast by statistics Korea puts the population in 2072 at 36.2 million a 30% decline from the current 51.7 million even though the fertility rate may recover a bit to 68 in 2026 the population is expected to fall every year starting in 2025 and South Korea is faced with a particularly difficult situation from a security standpoint low fertility threatens to undermine South Korea's economic future by shrinking its Workforce and slowing consumption it also casts a long Shadow over National Security by reducing the pool of Men available to join the military to counter threats from North Korea and experts have pointed to various reasons for South Korea's declining fertility rates including rising cost of living and child care and increased tensions between genders but aside from concerns like National Security you may be wondering why a shrinking population could possibly be a negative thing right there are already so many people on the Earth as it is but there are many valid concerns when it comes to caring for aging populations if they're not being replaced with at least a 1:1 ratio of young people from a New York Times opinion column quote for many futurists the primary challenge posed by declining population growth is economic when people live longer and have fewer babies the population ages leaving fewer working age adults to support a country's swelling number of retirees aging might take a particularly heavy toll on middle-income countries historically as industrialized countries have become richer the labor force grew more rapidly than their non-working population providing a demographic dividend but in some developing countries including Brazil and China fertility rates have fallen to round or below replacement level much more quickly than they did for their higher income counterparts and their populations now face the risk of getting old before getting rich now on the other hand there are certainly arguments to be made that a declining population could be a positive thing for people and the planet that we live on from the same New York Times opinion piece fertility rate declines may also be making climate change easier to combat albeit not in the way many think as Sarah Kaplan of the Washington Post has explained fossil fuel consumption is driven primarily by increases in affluence not the number of people on the planet per se so while population growth in poor countries hasn't led to large increases in Planet warming emissions a sudden Baby Boom in high inome countries like the United States almost certainly would and while most of the concerns about population decline are based on the economy or national security from an article in scientific Amer quote for those more worried about economics than life on Earth the World Bank estimates that the ecosystem collapse could cost $2.7 trillion a year by 2030 deoe recently estimated climate chaos could cost the United States alone 14.5 trillion by 2070 as we respond to the increasingly frequent and intense damage caused by extreme weather and wildfires and threats to communities farms and businesses from droughts and unpredictable weather while many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055 but a per capita income increase of 10% and we also can't talk about declining birth rates in the US and their broader effects without talking about abortion now first and foremost Reproductive Rights are a crucial part of this conversation and also a deeply Financial issue quote carrying an unwanted pregnancy quadruples the odds that a woman and her child will live below the federal poverty line according to the turnaway study a University of California San Francisco research project that tracked women who get access to abortions versus those who'd been denied them over a 10-year period it also triples the chances of the woman being unemployed yet we're already seeing reports of states with abortion bans seeing increased birth rates and I would bet that we'll see plenty of conservative pundits pointing to this as a positive for the future if abortion Bans are putting more and more people into poverty especially in states with the worst Healthcare and parental leave policies can this actually be seen as a net good this correspondent says no but if you think about the corporate magnates who benefit from keeping an entire class of workers In Perpetual poverty I mean it might be a slay the point is while declining populations are a mixed bag on the extreme end there can obviously be massive issues but the goal should be a healthy sustainable population where no one is having to exist in a constant state of suffering in order to support the overall structure like if keeping the population growing comes at the cost of millions more children each year living in poverty I don't necessarily know that's a trade-off we want to make which brings us to chapter 4 the elephant in the room how difficult it can be to actually have children Now setting aside all that we discussed in Chapter 2 about some of the structural societal or familial barriers in having kids there are also the very real physical limitations that a lot of people experience especially when you consider hopeful parents who aren't even in hetero relationships so how many people are child-free not by choice obviously there are all of the reasons that we previously discussed but among child-free adults quote about 2 in 10 and say that it's due to medical reasons the data doesn't specify what medical reasons Encompass but we can reasonably assume that at least some of those respondents are referring to issues getting pregnant and according to a 2023 report from the World Health Organization quote around 17.5% of the adult population roughly one in six worldwide experience infertility showing the urgent need to increase access to Affordable highquality fertility care for those in need and there are many medical conditions that are shown to cause infertility the list is too long to cover completely here but it really covers everything including STI Eating Disorders substance use disorder endometriosis PCOS thyroid disease and many more you never know when people are in one of those categories by choice or not you know infertility is very very real and a lot of people maybe don't have children but are desperately longing to have children I think it's just really important to remember not to judge people in either category because they may not be in that category by choice and there may be factors that put them in one category or the other that we have no idea about and may be very painful or sad for them and just being a little more sensitive to that and being a little more aware of that I think would serve people on both sides of the vents and people often point to IVF or invitro fertilization as an option for people who can't conceive naturally but it's hardly a sure bet and this is aside from the extent to which IVF is now under attack in the same states that are looking to remove basically every option for Family Planning at this point quote the average success rates of IVF on the first attempt varies but it's generally around 20 to 35% the national average for women younger than 35 able to become pregnant by invitro fertilization on the first try meaning the first egg retrieval is 55.1% however that number drops steadily as the woman ages also IVF is not a financially viable option for many people if you're pricing IVF at fertility clinics in the United States expect to be quoted roughly 12,000 to $1,000 for one cycle this however doesn't mean that you'll pay that figure and be done there are parts of the IVF process some required some optional that most clinics treat as add-ons to the base fee depending on your needs a single IVF cycle can cost $30,000 or more more often the total bill will fall somewhere between $5 and $220,000 and while some people can get IVF covered through Insurance many cannot quote insurance coverage for IVF generally depends on what coverage plan your employer has elected to offer where you live can also play a role 19 states have laws that require employers to provide fertility benefits however which treatments must be covered and who qualifies for coverage is different from state to state also small employers often defined as companies with 50 or fewer employees and self-insured employers are often exempt from these laws and none of this is even talking about how physically and emotionally taxing these fertility treatments can be as we mentioned earlier more and more women are choosing to delay having children because of the huge impact it will have on their careers this is not in their heads by the way you can see a direct correlation between women having children and diminishing their earning potential or career options as compared to men who typically benefit from having children and when you combine it with just how expensive it can be to raise that child it makes total sense that people would need to wait until they're more established in their careers have higher incomes have more stable lives have maybe paid down more debt in order to start the process but when you're starting later it's almost automatically going to be more difficult and therefore more costly and when you look at just how much of a personal trial and challenge having children can be for people who want them and how much of an important identity not wanting them can be for others you really start to see chapter 5 the millennial dichotomy dinks versus tradwives when it comes to the cultural narrative around having children versus not having them just as much as the child-free movement and the aention Dinks which we'll explain in a second have become their own phenomenon on social media and otherwise so has the ultra idealized view of what it means to be a parent and especially a mother we've spoken in previous videos about how our generation in part because we were really the first to grow up with social media as we know it pioneered the concept of mommy blogging family channels and just generally putting an extreme premium on playing the role of being the perfect parent so we'll talk about both of these extremes and the narrative they represent for Millennials but let's start by taking a look at the dinks Montage of couples who don't have kids and can't afford to go to Disneyland anytime they want so for those who may be unaware dinks AKA dual income no kid couples have turned into quite a large community on Tik Tok filled with couples bragging about how great their child-free lives are and in all transparency I say this as a member of a dink couple there are also even the self-proclaimed dink wads or dink with a dog not beating those allegations either I fear yes indeed that is a a painting of my own dog that to be fair someone sent to me as a gift but nonetheless oh also a lot of people keep saying that this is a Westy my dog is not a Westy um my dog is a a mut she's males haves and Pomeranian um her unusual her unusually Westy tilted looks are just an accident of genetic fate but anyway as it comes to content creation just as much as there has been a movement of people glamorizing and idealizing the life with children these are generally people who are glamorizing the life without them generally speaking dinks are people for whom not having children doesn't come out of any real Financial concerns because as the name suggests they usually both earn good salaries and this is not to say that dual income no kid couples are morally bankrupt for not having kids I obviously am one of them and I don't consider myself morally bankrupt morally questionable sometimes but certainly not bankrupt but so often the tone of self-proclaimed Dinks can come across as kind of smug honestly because often there is a false conclusion being drawn that their choice not to have children is the reason that they have plenty of extra disposable income now sure they're technically saving money on child care and other child related costs by not having kids but they're not representative of the average household in the US it's not an exact metric but dinks are typically identified as child-free couples making a combined $200,000 or more according to Business Insider and per the most recent census the average American house old income is $74,500 in many ways privileged couples making the privileged choice to not have children and to luxuriate in their disposable income isn't any better or worse than any other aspirational lifestyle content and again I do fall into that category even if I don't necessarily make it the center of the content I create it's important to remember that if you are coming into a relationship with two robust incomes it's not your choice not to have children that's suddenly making you PR privileged you were privileged to begin with and I'm just personally of the opinion that centering really anything around having immense Financial privilege in a situation where so many people are struggling and as we discussed the child poverty rate more than doubled in 2 years feels a little toned deaf to me but speaking of toned deaf on the other side we have the mommy bloggers the largely Millennial content creators who built their entire online identities around being an idealized version of a parent usually a mother a gender reveal party went terribly wrong why aren't gender reveals illegal okay just kidding you can reveal listen first of all let's be clear about two things one the baby will reveal its gender when it's good and ready how about that two the arms race of parties we got to we got to tone it down we have showers we have gender reveals we have well by the way I said showers that's Bridal and baby showers we got Bachelorette trips we got the weddings we got the receptions we got a sip Andy we got a sprinkle for the next kids like as Carrie Bradshaw once put it when are we celebrating the single people those poor people are having to put themselves into credit card debt to celebrate like now everyone for every life choice gets like six parties it's enough if you want to reveal a gender do it at the shower and even then but in all seriousness aside from the general phenomenon of every single milestone in a child's life and development being its own cause for not just celebration but social media content after taking off online around the early 2010s gender reveal parties and videos have become ubiquitous in certain communities to the point where not having one could make a parent to be seem less than thrilled about the new public Persona that comes with being a parent as one mother wrote for huff po back in 2019 when the gender reveal question had first been broached I brushed it off it seemed like something I could avoid during my pregnancy like soft cheeses and Sushi then the calls came asking if I had made up my mind about a gender reveal Pary since my ultrasound dat was fast approaching was this one of those pregnancy protocol things I was supposed to do I felt pressured to decide and as I mentioned many people moms and particular take the sharing and documenting and celebrating of every single aspect of their child's existence one step further they're not just stay-at-home moms but share content about their lives as stay-at-home moms the most extreme embracing the tradwife moniker and spreading the gospel of embracing a place in the home cooking cleaning taking on Child Care duties and generally being being subservient to their husbands I love to cook and clean just just don't tell the feminists we are going to be raising our daughters to be Homemakers and not career woman a man's home is his castle so he should be treated as a king also I'm going to do one of my favorite things here and reference one of my own Tik toks on the nonsense of the tradwife content here's the thing about the tradwife content on here that's always working to convince young women that marrying a wealthy man is their ticket to financial and personal security leaving aside the fact that unless they have an ironclad PR up this leaves them incredibly vulnerable if the man ever decides to leave them for a newer and younger model and leaving aside the fact that the tradwife worldview is also usually wrapped up with countless other noxious beliefs about gender roles and even setting aside the fact that especially since wages haven't kept up with cost of living since roughly 1979 it's near impossible to find any salary that can support an entire family in an upper middle- class lifestyle what's most offensive to me about this is that the very premise is completely flawed you don't become wealthy through marrying a wealthy man you marry a wealthy man through already being wealthy if you look statistically at the kinds of women that super high earning men marry in hetero Partnerships it's women who are themselves High earning women who are Highly Educated highly career-driven and yes also High earners so even if the goal was just to marry a rich man is your retirement plan you would still have to girl boss your way there unfortunately and since this video isn't about the tradwife movement we're not even going to touch on the fact that the content creators pushing these agendas are themselves often contributing to their households financially but that might be something think about the one pattern I see is once they have kids they don't get the help that they expected from their partners and then that leads to all sorts of feelings of inadequacy not being a good mom hopelessness exhaustion and wondering if it was worth it because not only are you taking care of one or two or three kids or whatever you also have this Manchild who's not helping who's not pulling his weight uh that's the pattern I've seen that a lot of these women are married to men who do not help do not pull their weight around uh the house even though having a child was the right choice for me and I'm so glad I did it I still understand why people choose not to and I affirm the fact that there are plenty of people who yeah I don't think they'd enjoy it and that's okay that doesn't mean I think they'd be a bad parent if they chose to have one or have a child but like if it's not for you it's not for you and that's okay it's a huge huge life change and we should not give people a hard time if they're like I don't think this is for me I just don't want to do it that's totally fine we are a generation that in many ways pioneered what it means to perform Parenthood online and have made every aspect of having a child into an identity you are meant to display publicly we also even as much as the girl boss generation because that's also what Millennials are have pushed for women to have more professional agency we've also glamorized and supported content that has extremely traditional roles about what a woman's job should be in the home you're not defined by your uterus you're not defined you know if you don't have kids you are not this bad person because you chose you didn't choose motherhood you are we are as women not less than because we opted for a different life I I think my life is Stellar I mean it like if I want to go to Toronto tomorrow and buy a pair of shoes I don't need can do that if I want to fly to Africa next week and go on a safari I can do that uh I love the freedom to choose I just wish that I didn't go through all of that sort of the pity the pity is what bugs me the women who were my age back in my late 20s and 30s who were like oh poor you you're not a mom like I just wish I didn't go through that I love that it's more accepted these days a lot more women are embracing it and it's something to Aspire to I wish that I had a role model like that I wish that I had a woman in my life when I was growing up who was childree because like everybody was a mom uh yeah I I just want women of today young women of today to know and teenage girls to know that we are not a monolith not all women are exactly the same you are not a bad person if you don't want kids people who force you into that sort of Lifestyle and thinking are the ones who need a reality check they're the ones who need to mind their own business and like the the whole world is your oyster I talk to people still who dread going to family events because they know they're going to hear when are you g to have a baby when are you guys getting pregnant um or even at their weddings they hear okay it's time you're married uh which I can't believe I mean Lance and I had just had our 29th wedding anniversary and we got those questions the day of our wedding and it just I'm go Gob smacked that that's still happening 30 years later but apparently it is um so I I I know that that pressure still exists um and I'm sorry I I mean I wish I wish I could be like a little angel on everybody's shoulder to support them through those moments I think that we've come a long way and I know that we have much further to go which brings us to chapter six motherhood The Impossible choice for women now one thing I mentioned at the beginning of this video was how many parents who have children actually on some level regret making those choices according to one study between about 5 and 14% of parents expressed feelings of regret around having children and like listen is that all of them obviously not but like 14% that's kind of a lot and as I mentioned there's an entire and very active subreddit on this very topic now part of the reason that regret around having children is fairly uncommon to hear spoken about is obvious right like that doesn't feel great to admit especially when your children who generally speaking you chose to bring into the world are around to hear it but it is something that's very important to normalize at least to understand that just because people aren't saying it doesn't mean they're not thinking it and this is specul ation but I've often felt that one of the reasons why women in particular might be so dissatisfied with the reality of having children is because of how different The Experience tends to be versus this Ultra idealized experience that were're often shown in the media pop culture and on our social feeds we still have a very specific representation of motherhood that is based on the kind of single inome household that we mentioned earlier which really hasn't existed since the late 1960s as we've talked about before in our episode of TFC with Eve rodsky the author of fair play women even working women and most women do have to work to help support their households are expected to take on the vast majority of the childbearing and domestic burden which sure used to be the case but not on top of also having a job even for people especially women who may love the abstraction of having children and love their children as people are very likely to not love the experience of what it means to be a mother in America and this extreme focus on the retrograde and no longer super accurate picture of what it means to be a parent is likely fueling the pretty strong backlash that a lot of people are demonstrating toward the concept of having children at all as someone who strongly Embraces a child free by choice lifestyle often where I feel most out of step with the community is the very vocal minority that's basically anti-natalist you don't have to look very hard on a lot of child-free communities and forums to see people really openly expressing hating children hating parents and hating the entire concept of Parenthood now I'm not going to get into a political or ecological debate about the anti-natalism movement although I definitely don't align with it but I will say that when it comes to the Very extreme negative emotions you often see in the child-free community when it comes to parents and children although it can be unpleasant to read especially I would imagine if you do have kids to me it often feels more like a response to the types of roles that we're still expecting people again especially women to fit into we still very much impose this belief that being a mother is the most important thing you can be as a woman that having children is the ultimate purpose and only thing really worth celebrating in a person's life after a certain point again let's go back to the normalization of basically only ever seeing a person's children on social media once they have them and being so insistent on everyone's path being Parenthood that even parents themselves who might regret it are shamed and ostracized if they dare speak about it it's not totally shocking that there would be a strong negative reaction to that kind of Paradigm especially again in a society where we make it nearly impossible for people to afford children ultimately as a millennial who made the choice that having children was not right for me I feel very privileged that this was a choice I was able to come to organically and in a healthy way although it's led to some uncomfortable and unpleasant conversations in my life overall it wasn't a situation where I was EXT ordinarily stigmatized or ostracized because of it and I do want to acknowledge that for a lot of people in a lot of different cultures and family situations not having children can have much more extreme consequences but I do still very much feel the pressures of being a woman in a society that expects me as a default to have children and then has to be walked backwards from that point into the fact that I don't I've had many an Uber driver for example ask me if I have children and then say no I don't want children um try try to pitch me on the concept during a 30-minute drive and I don't mind this because I understand that for many if not most people having children is the most wonderful thing that they've done in their lives it's a kind of experience and love that I'll never personally be able to relate to it's also worth noting that it's almost always men who are pushing this often like women who have children when they hear that I'm like I very much don't want them they be like God bless you sometimes they'll be like I don't either don't tell my kids that but the point is although I come from a very privileged place in this decision I'm still very aware that it's a decision the world doesn't necessarily want me to make and yet on the flip side it's a decision that our society makes impossibly hard on many of the people who want to make it like so much in our current economic situation there are almost no good choices but I strongly believe one thing if we were to make it a more value neutral decision that people could actively opt into children would have better parents and if we made it easier on parents especially new mothers to actually raise raise their children we would have much happier families as always guys thanks for watching and I'll see you back next month for our newest video [Music] essay

Channel: The Financial Diet

Views: 256,269

Keywords: the financial diet, chelsea fagan, lauren ver hage, personal finance, finance, money, lifestyle, childfree by choice, millennials not having kids, waiting to have kids

Id: rS7EmoK7-Cs

Length: 65min 44sec (3944 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024