You Made Babies Unaffordable But Now You’re Mad We’re Not Having Them
If you make it impossible to raise a family, don’t act surprised when people stop trying
Millions of young people aren’t having kids, and the people most upset about it are the ones who made family life impossible to afford.
Millions of women say they don’t intend to ever have kids.
Experts scratch their heads. But these young women watched their own mothers work themselves into exhaustion by trying to have it all and for some reason don’t want to do that.
Others watched their mothers prioritize care work over career for several years and, after an unexpected divorce, never recover financially. Are you surprised that such women are not eager to follow in their mother’s footsteps?
Child-free women are completely rational
And it’s not just women.
A lot of men also don’t want to have children.
Some men don’t like the idea of helping take care of kids instead of relaxing after work. They have heard of the days when a man could come home from work and expect an orderly house, a hot dinner on the table, a row beaming children and a wife in pearls and high heels handing him a freshly made drink at the door.
It probably seems rather unfair to such men that women interested in full-time homemaking expect their husband to earn a lot of money in order to support her and the children.
I like babies — a lot
I had two and would have had more if I could have done so responsibly. I’ll never stop wondering what that third child I was so, so tempted to conceive might have been like. I wouldn’t have been opposed to a fourth, either.
And I got pregnant with both my children the very months I decided I wanted to get pregnant. With that kind of fertility, I likely could have had many more kids … if I could have afforded them.
I had my kids in 1989 and 1992. It was hard enough then. Now?
Life is completely different now. I didn’t have any student loans to pay, because when I went to college in 1984-1988, it was way more affordable. True, I did have to find creative ways to feed and house myself. Pro tip: Always make sure at least one of your many jobs is at a restaurant! Another pro-tip: Be willing to live in a nasty apartment!
But still, I did graduate without debt, mostly because the federal government absolutely would not give me a loan. I’d have taken one if I could have, and would have used some of it to pay for things like groceries and a decent apartment.
I say that to point out that things were never exactly easy in the past. Being poor has always sucked.
But not having student loans and being able to buy a house for $37,500 with only a tiny FHA down payment of a couple thousand (borrowed) bucks did mean I could (barely) afford to have children.
It’s pretty ironic that the people who are most worried about the birth rate are the same people who have made babies so unaffordable.
It wasn’t the lefties like me who decided to set up a system that is the very opposite of trickle-down. Our economic system is set up like a giant sponge. We’re all working our asses off and producing wealth like the world has never seen and almost all of it is being sucked into the pockets of a handful of people.
What if we could keep a bit more of that wealth all our work is helping produce? What would we do with it?
I’ll tell you what most people would not do: We would not shoot rockets into space or build giant yachts or spend billions on personal doomsday bunkers.
A lot of people would use it to do things like pay for college, buy a house and have a baby, preferably with either mom or dad being able to prioritize parenting over career for a few years. It would be a nice bonus if the primary parent could be welcomed back into the full-time workforce after a few years, too.
The far-right oligarchs may say they want people to have more babies, but everything they do makes it harder for ordinary people to afford them. Maternity and paternity leave? Paid family leave? Subsidized child care? Universal healthcare? Better schools? Free or reduced-cost college? Affordable housing?
Nope, we can’t have those things. They might cut into profits for the 1 percent.
Daycare costs are out of hand
One of my family members paid more for her 4-year-old to attend daycare than for her house payment.
I have a whole liberal wish list that I’m not even going to get into. You know what’s on it. All of that stuff would help but it’s not enough. Even countries that have a lot of those things still have low birth rates. But people who want to have kids can.
Up to a certain point, I think lower birth rates are a good thing. The Earth has almost 5 billion more people today than it did when I was born. So many animals are going extinct because we’ve encroached on their habitat. We can’t keep growing forever unless we inhabit other planets and there’s no reason to think we’ll be able to do that ever, let alone on the timeline we’d need. Elon Musk is delusional and also seems to have a breeding kink. Ignore him; he’s done enough harm to the world.
We are fine with a few billion fewer people except that we supposedly need more young people to support older people, but do we? I don’t know many people who seriously believe they will entirely stop working until they are so feeble they have to.
Most of us are just hoping to move to part-time when we’re 70. Younger workers won’t have to support us if we’re still toiling away.
Most people still love babies
They just don’t love poverty, burnout and being left to parent alone in a society that doesn’t care.
Don’t miss my current special series, Poverty and Privilege, which comes out every Saturday:
Poverty and Privilege is the story of Richard, a man with generational wealth, and Lauren, a single mom struggling to keep her household afloat. The twist is they both have Ivy League educations but life has turned out very different for each of them. The story is true but names and certain identifying details have been changed.
Part 1, Unlikely Allies in an Unequal America
Part 2, The Country Club Lunch
Part 3, One Family’s Fall From the Middle Class
Part 4, Billable Hours Don’t Pause for Birth
Part 6, How Marriage and Divorce Shape Financial Futures
About Michelle Teheux
I’m a writer in central Illinois. If you like my work, subscribe to me here and on Medium. I also have a new Substack aimed at authors who want to self-publish books, called The Indie Author. My most recent book is Strapped: Fighting for the soul of the American working class. My most recent novel is The Trailer Park Rules. If you prefer to give a one-time tip, I accept Ko-fi.
All wealthy families are alike; each poor family is poor in its own way.
— Leo Tolstoy, if he had written about a trailer park
For residents of the Loire Mobile Home Park, surviving means understanding which rules to follow and which to break. Each has landed in the trailer park for wildly different reasons.
Jonesy is a failed journalist with one dream left. Angel is the kind of irresponsible single mother society just shakes its head about, and her daughter Maya is the kid everybody overlooks. Jimmy and Janiece Jackson wanted to be the first in their families to achieve the American dream, but all the positive attitude in the world can’t solve their predicament. Darren is a disabled man trying to enjoy his life despite a dark past. Kaitlin is a former stripper with a sugar daddy, while Shirley is an older lady who has come down in the world and lives in denial. Nancy runs the park like a tyrant but finds out when a larger corporation takes over that she’s not different from the residents.
When the new owners jack up the lot rent, the lives of everyone in the park shift dramatically and in some cases tragically.
Welcome to the Loire Mobile Home Park! Please observe all rules.
Yes, strange as this may sound back when we had our baby in 1984 I was working walking 2 miles to work in Montana Winters to make slightly more then $12.00. 4 hrs@$3.32 I always thought there is no way t could get worse for people. I was walking because the starter went out on my 1969 Datsun which cost all of $200 the year before. The apartment we lived in was free because I was scraping 13 layers of wall paper and leadbased paint off the walls when I wasn’t at Kmart in the shipping department.
We were 19, and 20 with a 2 month old. No help from parents or family. Pretty soon we found out our baby had a heart defect and was only given a 2 percent chance. After, 2 weeks at Primary childrens hospital we came back home $130000 poorer, but with our baby, I got a better job, making $5.00 an hour but had to quit, our baby needed 24 hour care and the counselor told us we needed to get on public assistance to get these hospital bills paid or we would never be out from under it. After a couple of years on public assistance we got kina use to it but it was very difficult for both as we were from middle class families and never expected this situation to play out like it did.
Later after we moved into a section 8 apartment we were the only married couple in 4 8 plex’s we lived in. I was the only husband surround by 50 or 60 young, single mothers, very challenging for a strapping 21 year old if you get my drift.
As time went buy, our child got healthy and we were able to slowly make progress, I started working construction and she got an office job, 5 years later we bought our first house. None of our family would co sign for a loan so we found a guy that would carry us on a trailer house. We had $2000 saved up after a year of trying, he took the down payment and carried us on a $5000 note. I was never as proud to be a home owner even if it still had wheels under the skirting. We liked being a family except the poverty part, when I turned 22 we thought she as pregnant again, we both panicked and I got a vasectomy the next day, we were just barely making it and there was no way we could afford another.
5 years after we bought out 14x70, my father passed at 57, he left us a $10 k life insurance policy just enough, we sold our trailer and bought our next house, 1991, by now I am working for the state of Montana as a telephone student loan counselor, my wife is working processing Medicare claims, between the both of us we were pulling down $2000 a month, with our $445 a month house payment we were just barely making it. Then she got severe carpal tunnel and had to quit her job, my job wasn’t enough for us to live on so I went on the road in search of the American dream. I found it in Elko NV, I got my dream job at an underground hard rock mine. I traded my cushy safe office job for a hard, dangerous and dirty but well paying job. At 32 after11 years of marriage we were able to live like our parents. We bought a new house, a new car and my wife stayed home.
We decided to have another baby but I had to get a reversal which we paid $12000 out of pocket for, unfortunately it didn’t work but that was actually fortunate because a few years later I had a disabling mine accident in 2002. Luckily we had been careful and frugal so we had some rescources but I was told I would never worry again at 40 and to apply for social security. I applied and was denied of course like everyone, after a couple of years I recovered enough to get another desk job which I did for another 12 years until I reapplied and finally received ssdi in 2014. Now I am old, very old62 but just a day over 90. Severe pain every day, no medical care and looking at getting out to get my health issues squared a little if possible.
Our lives sucked most of the time, without the minimum amount of public assistance there is no way we could have raised even one. Had I known in 1984 what I know now I would not have chosen to have a family. It was much to difficult then, I can’t even imagine doing it now.
Can confirm. Just got our daycare rate increase for this year. It’s going from $775 per week for three kids to $910 per week, a 17% increase. It’s almost triple our mortgage payment each month, if you only count principal and interest (not property taxes and insurance). And that’s for a middle of the road (not the cheapest, not the most expensive) daycare in Wisconsin. I had planned on only having two children, but was blessed with twins for my second pregnancy. I’m just counting the years till we get through daycare. 😣