alt Hacker NewsGermany recently discussed raising health insurance premiums for families (because families cause higher costs). Instead of the stick we need to use the carrot. Everybody is asking why birth rates plummet. It’s simple. Having a family costs a fuckton of money. I personally know a bunch of well-off people who have decided against children since they don’t think they’ll be able to sustain any way of middle class existence with kids. Having a program that supports mothers like this, cash, no strings attached, is awesome. The last thing people need is to jump 1000x bureaucratic hoops when they’re broke and have basically zero sleep. Hats off, cool charity!
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IMHO we should just accept the lower income. Since women entered workforce we got used to the inflated lifestyle. We should just accept that having a kid will cost you money and it's fine. It's the best purchase there is.
Some might decide to buy more expensive car or larger house and that's cool choice as well. But in the end will bring you just a temporary happiness and maybe some social status boost.
Screw consumerism, just have a child.
> It’s simple. Having a family costs a fuckton of money
I've got two young kids. I wouldn't say day to day expenses are particularly huge.
Sure you can go wild and buy them designer clothes/shoes they grow out of in 6 months, or you can fill every waking moment with white-knuckle entertainment and excitement and that all costs money. But you don't need to do that, the kids don't care what they wear so long as it's got a robot/unicorn/etc on it, and they're often very happy playing with a cardboard box, a small amount of generic Lego, and their imagination.
Food cost is almost a rounding error. Barely anything for an extra loaf of bread, an extra packet of cereal, some more chicken etc. peanuts.
The main cost - beyond needing to live in a larger house which I probably would have got anyway even without kids - is the opportunity cost of having kids: I've probably missed a promotion or two because I've had to say no to work travel, projects, late meetings with the US office etc to go kid related things. That and UK nursery costs are bigger than the mortgage, but again that is "optional" and only for the first few years.
Good luck
> Everybody is asking why birth rates plummet. It’s simple. Having a family costs a fuckton of money.
It's a factor, it's not the only factor.
Decrease in teenage pregnancies, decrease in alcohol consumption, contraception and day after pills, higher levels of education, less socialized culture, less generational housing etc.
Having a child is more than often a deliberate, calculated decision that is made by adults whereas in the old world pregnancies happened left and right with little to say about it. Support systems existed because the problem was pervasive. Now the problem is generally gone, and the support systems thereafter.
No country has managed to reverse the trend of declining birth rates. The better quality of life people have, the fewer children people tend to have.
It's not just about who does and who doesn't have children, it's also how many children per family. 1-2 children is the new normal. My grandpa was #7.