How can families afford children?

Yeah, I read that wrong. Whoops

We've run the numbers thoroughly. 40% of her take home goes to childcare. 50% to student loans. Tbf getting in to debt for a degree in the humanities is generally a horrible idea but we all have dreams.

Yeah, the word "manage" is not great because of the supervisory overtones, which have oppressive connotations.

What I mean in more words is the process by which we create the logistics we need to thrive (food, clothing, shelter, power, comms, currency, etc), combined with the incentives to produce the society we want to live in (physical safety, freedom of expression, opportunity for work and love, etc.).

It's hard to talk about this without judgmental overtones. But essentially what I mean is, picture your best life--how do we make that possible for each and every person? It won't happen by accident. And it's to everyone's benefit it we can make it more likely.

And when that doesn't happen--when people don't have the skills to find work, when they commit crime, when they fall to addiction, when they're mentally or physically ill, etc... at that point we do sort of "take them under management." They go on unemployment or disability, they go under medical and mental care, they go into prison. Those are direct costs we all pay, and probably even greater is the opportunity cost of that human life. (And not just from a strictly economic perspective, but also art, emotion, love, etc.)

But people become part of society when they're born. And a lot of what makes each person who they are, is set during childhood. Letting a person go without investment for 20 years, then paying direct costs to manage them if it doesn't work out, doesn't seem smart to me.

If you take any life and trace it back to the beginning, early management is in the family. But there is a lot that society can do to help that process be more successful. And I would argue it's in all of our benefits.

And again, to make it clear, I'm not talking about authoritarianism. In modern democracies, in an ideal sense, we should be managing ourselves. To some extent we're discovering the society we want as we go along, so our management system need to be adaptable, and that's what democracy should give us. I'm advocating for certain policy choices we can make democratically--give women more power of their lives and reproduction. Invest fully in the health and education of all children. Provide support to families so that they can do a better job of raising their kids. Etc.

Demographic decline seems almost inevitable given our economic system, sans immigration.

I'm a parent in SF. The cost of housing and availability of quality care (day care, nanny), and schools are definitely factors among the parent community here in deciding not to have more children. Many of the parents I know are doing well financially (they must be to be raising kids in SF), so I get to see the non-financial reasons for smaller families. One that's pretty important: quality of life. The opportunity cost of having children is about much more than money.

The options for doing things you enjoy are hugely greater today than in the past. Fancy restaurants, sports events, cruises, gaming, live music, Netflix, social media. World travel. Rewarding work. You name it. The world has become much better and better at providing things that people enjoy spending their time and money on.

Having children not only reduces the money you have to enjoy these things, it puts a huge damper on your time, and freedom to do so. Sure, you could go to that cool new restaurant with your young children. But it's a completely different experience than going without them -- so much so that it veers into negative utility.

For some people enjoying family life and kids is more valuable than all of the other stuff combined. But as the world gets better and better at giving people alternatives to spend their time/money/freedom on that they enjoy, having more children will become less and less attractive for more and more people.

Policies will only do so much to reverse this. Many European countries have much more family oriented policies than the US, yet look at the reality of their birthrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageing_of_Europe.

Affording kids is all about choices. My wife and I have 4 kids under 7, and she does not work. We lived in Seattle last year and moved to Dublin Ireland in August. We have zero debt, own a house in the states and rent in Ireland. We don’t own cars in Ireland as they don’t honor the US license and I don’t want to do drivers ed again. Since moving here in August we went from zero in checking to an average daily balance of 10k last month; based only on my income here in Ireland of about 90k a year taxed at 42%. In that time we’ve paid for flights and trips for 6 to London ( we all got sick and had to ball none refundable lame), Barcelona ( 4 nights), Berlin ( 4 nights), London again ( booked 4 nights in May money already out of the account) and the big one back to the states this month @ 3k in tickets.

We don’t eat out much, we don’t owe anyone / pay interest, we don’t spend money on things we don’t need that don’t a provide a good ROI. We’d rather walk around and explore a city then take a tour and pay to stand in line some where, we cut our own hair, shop at thrift stores or sales, Read we are frugal. Even in the states wife did not work. In the states our cars were paid for in cash, we had no credit card debit, and we built our own house with our own bare hands out of cash; it took 3+ years and we lived in a fifth wheel with 2-3 kids for part of it, but it was all paid for. We made the choices to have kids, and we worked out how to afford our choice and how to be happy.

Why four kids — We watched the intro to idiocracy a few too man times and decided we needed to have more vs fewer kids to combat Clevon. We’d have more kids but we hit 40 this year and that was our stop having kids cut off.

Spend 700$ a month on car payment, 500$ on month on eating out, 500$ a month on amazon, 2000$ on a house payment, buy alcohol and other vices for hundreds a month, ETC and shit adds up fast and you wonder how you can even afford yourself. Don’t have a car payment, or house payment, eat out less, don’t drink and smoke and the numbers are completely different. We have a huge rent payment in Ireland that was the biggest hit moving here. Going from paying property taxes to 2800 a month in rent hurt. But we rented a huge house and rent a room out for 600 a month; which helps off set costs. The house is walking distance to work, grocery, train, and kids school – the higher rent facilities the no care life style. We could live further out and pay half the rent but we would need 2 cars. We chose higher rent over cars.