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Birthrates: It's not (just) money, it's time
For over a decade now, sociologists have noted a curious quirk to birth rate data when sorted by income. While total fertility rates do decline with rising income (as has long been popular wisdom, depicted in eg. Idiocracy and so on), they do so only to a point. After a certain threshold, fertility rates shoot up again, as this chart shows. In the US (the above research is from 2022), this inflection point happens, depending on data, somewhere between $250,000 and $300,000 for white couples.
One interesting thing about fertility rates is that people always say they want more children than they have:
This is usually ignored because it is undone by revealed preferences in the richest societies on earth, or it is used as argumentative fodder for the left when they argue that fertility rates have declined because people can't afford as many children as they want (sometimes ridiculed given that people are vastly richer than in other nations or at other times when TFR has been much higher).
But maybe these two pieces of information do, together, tell us a little bit about why many PMC types in the West don't have more children, or children at all.
What happens at, say, $500,000 a year (in most of the US) that makes having three children so much easier? The answer seems obvious to me - affluent people can afford to spend time away from their children, and therefore feel more comfortable having (more of) them.
100 years ago, when up to a quarter of the working class in developed countries were employed as domestic servants, a middle-class mother who did not particularly want to spend all day, every day with her children did not have to do so. There were other women to handle that kind of thing. This was before most of these kind of women worked much, but even so, spending all day, every day with the children wasn't interesting. My grandmother, who grew up bourgeois in Berlin on the eve of the Second World War, remembered rarely ever seeing her mother as a young child until they had to flee to the US.
I grew up with rich people, and one of the interesting things one notices is that the people from the very wealthiest families, centimillionaires and billionaires, often marry very young and have children young. I know a number of (completely secular) rich white couples with three children aged 27-30, the time when many professional Americans are barely out of graduate degree programs or still stuck in a tough junior role or in residency. I'm still friends with a few of them, and the big thing that strikes me is how unchanged their lives are from many childless late-20s PMC people. They have nannies for the kids, so they can go back to work within a few months if they choose to. They have maternity nurses when the babies are first born, so they never need to wake up at night. They have people to look after the kids if they want to go to a summer wedding in Italy, or to a week skiing in Aspen. They can come and go from their homes as they please without worrying about who will look after the children, whose food, clothes, hygiene, trips to and from school and so on are handled by others. They see their children when they want to hang out with them, on their terms.
I understand, also, the British upper-middle and upper class urge to send kids to boarding school at a young age. Freed from daily parental obligation, relationships often grow stronger, not weaker. And parents are freed, again, to enjoy life on their own terms.
I think a substantial proportion of would-be parents, particularly in the PMC, don't particularly want to raise their own children, at least not all the time. They don't want to do the dirty work. Clearly the deal the super-rich have isn't economically viable to give to everyone else. But maybe some things are. State-funded boarding schools from a young age, state-funded daycare (open 24/7, not just during daytime on weekdays), state-funded maternity nursing so you can drop your baby off and visit it (or take it home occasionally) instead of not sleeping through the night for a year or two. I know this sounds insane, but I genuinely think this might lead more people to have (more) kids in the West.
I've talked about this before, but me and my wife have had two kids at a comparatively late age, ie. the younger one is 11 months and the older one is 3 years and we are around 40. If we could magically become ten years younger we might have another child, now there's no dice - not just because the age makes it unlikely, but because we just wouldn't have the stamina for three little ones.
While we don't have that much money (especially when compared to my assumptions about the general earnings of this forum), the time and energy issues are absolutely more crucial as to why we feel burdened, not only because we are getting older but also because the most natural "extra nurses" apart from day care - the grandparents - are old too, around 80 (and my father dead), and also live on the other side of the country.
Once one's a parent, one quickly realises that your friend circle just isn't that much help - the childless ones just don't seem reliable enough, and the ones with children tend to have their hands full with, well, their children, who are often equally as young as yours.
One less-discussed fertility thing might be the culture where it's almost a rite of passage, at least in educated circles, to not only move away from home but frequently to a whole different city from your parents. It's fun when you can go out drunk and party without fearing you'll run into your older relatives and they disapprove, but once you're a parent, the far-away grandparents thing starts getting acutely more real.
My mom visited my family recently and kept commenting on how busy I was, while I ran around trying to take care of my four kids (one a infant) while on maternity leave. She spent most of the time on the couch or "cleaning up" (really, messing up the careful system we have to make sure everything gets cleaned up.) She spent almost no time with the kids, let alone in a way that would have taken them off my hands. She was mostly determined to take posed photos of the kids, culminating a very staged attempt at getting a video of her reading a book to all the kids, keeping two of them up past their bed times. I don't think she learned anything from the experience, though the video is hard to watch with all the crying from the younger two.
I had an Au Pair, but she left the weekend before my mom showed up. It was a month early, and we would then have a gap between Au Pairs, but we didn't question her decision to leave too much. A week before she left, the Au Pair started asking me about my mom's visit. It turns out she had been under the impression that my Mom was coming over to take care of my kids, because that's what happened in her country when a new baby was born. I could only laugh.
My mom had me when she was 33. She has struggled with her weight since bearing kids and has low energy, was diagnosed with something wrong with her thyroid at some point. Playing with the kids would be hard for her on a physical level. I don't think she even has the strength to carry the 2 year old.
There are a lot of factors in lower fertility. Increased maternal age has effects for multiple generations, overall decline of health in the older population means less help to the next generation of mothers.
As someone with five kids (one special needs) and a mother in law who is similarly useless / kind of narcissistic, I was filled with second-hand rage reading this. Hang in there, that's really hard.
Yeah, I don't know why she thought the two month old would be interested in listening to her read... I think she has forgotten most of what it is like to have small kids. That thought gives me weird feelings. On the one hand, I know that one day most of my kids will be able to feed themselves breakfast and lunch, take their own baths, entertain themselves, and my role as a parent will be very different. I look forward to the role changing.
On the other hand, I want to be there for my kids when they have kids. If I forget what it's like, I will not be able to help as much. I'm already disappointed in Future Me's inevitable failure.
This was just the example that was easiest to convey. The most enraging thing was on a zoo trip. The zoo has a ski-lift-like ride where you can get a better view of the animals. My oldest, A, and second oldest, C, were tall enough to ride, but short enough that they needed a riding partner. My husband took C first, they got on the lift without a problem. I stayed with the younger two and the strollers.
My mom took A. While waiting for the chair lift to come up behind them, my mom kept trying to get A to look at me, yelling at me to take a photo, trying to get A to smile. The chair came behind them, my Mom sat on it easily, kept looking over my way trying to get me to photograph her. My daughter did not sit on the chair easily and was pushed forward. I kept shouting, "A! A!" helplessly behind three layers of steel gates and a long line. A ride attendant caught up and got my daughter on.
I was furious, muttered, "Stupid fucking woman cares more about photos than the life of her grandkid!" Mothers with young children heard me and glared. I was anxious, worried my daughter would fall off, pacing around until finally they came back around.
Not as bad, but we took my MIL with us on a very expensive kids vacation to a certain place in Florida.
It was amazing how negative my MIL was most of the time and how little she seemed to want to interact outside of taking “photos.” Her grandkids were having the time of their lives but she seemed incapable of connecting. I just don’t get it.
The modern west has rejected any sort of religious or moral system and replaced it wholesale with individualist, materialist nihilism. It shouldn't be a surprise that many people act this way.
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Is this meant to be a 'men are idiots and bad parents' thing? Why wouldn't the mothers be on side?
One can quite easily tell that you’re responding to a woman by the writing style.
And also the fact that /u/OracleOutlook mentioned that she was on maternity leave in a previous post in this subthread.
And also that on that same post the story began with ‘and my husband took c first’.
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I'm a woman. People glared because I cursed in front of their small children.
I am not a smart man.
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