If that is true (though I've heard stories of young women finding out the issues with childbirth and raising a child AFTER they became mothers), I have no idea what the thought process behind it is.
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The Costs of Motherhood Are Rising, and Catching Women Off Guard
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Anecdotal, but my friend got married and had a kid, and his wife stopped working to become a stay-at-home mom. It wasn't exactly planned either, but costs of daycare are too high and would outweigh what she was making--she worked as a teller at a bank.
Friend is in the military and can't exactly take sick days, so this was the best solution.
Friend is in the military and can't exactly take sick days, so this was the best solution.
Companies can easily fix this by providing some sort of on site daycare. In fact, many already do.
I'm not seeing the problem with women, or men, who would sacrifice their career for their children though. Just having children is a sacrifice in many ways. You have to be less selfish overall and realize that your childrens well-being will take precedent a lot of the time.
I'm not seeing the problem with women, or men, who would sacrifice their career for their children though. Just having children is a sacrifice in many ways. You have to be less selfish overall and realize that your childrens well-being will take precedent a lot of the time.
I wonder how much of it also lies with a change in some women's emotions after having a baby. Several of my co workers had a lot of trouble going back to work after their kids were born simply because they didn't want to send them to daycare at a year old and enjoyed spending the day with their kid. Had my wife not been starting a university program when our son turned 8 months old, she would have likely switched to working part time to be with him more. It nearly broke her emotionally to go back to work/university after the 8 months even though I was home with him for 4 after that.
That's not to discredit financial or cultural aspects of it, just curious how many women have big changes on working etc after kids.
That's not to discredit financial or cultural aspects of it, just curious how many women have big changes on working etc after kids.
I think a combination of natural desire, genuine desire, day to day societal pressures (I'm assuming especially if you're in the south or go to church), and social media where every other facebook/pinterest/instagram post is about people having babies or their kids, really overwhelms a lot of those concerns.
Deciding to have children is often almost entirely an emotionally based decision and not a rational one. They're extremely expensive, time consuming, and exhausting. Yet we do it anyway for emotional fulfillment.
Looks like my decision to never have kids will pay off for the rest of my life. $1000+/month for childcare? lmao that's absolutely insane. I won't even bother to ask what the total budget for taking care of a kid for an entire year is because I don't want to know.
It's ~3000 a month for UCSF daycare. The shitty thing is there is also a 6 month waitlist to pay someone else to raise your kid.
Some women are unprepared, but most will know what will happen, because it's a societal expectation that a woman is supposed to give birth. Aside from that, many women want to have a baby of their own, that comes from them and most of the time shares genetics with their partner.
Well the kids don't go to daycare forever, but yes, it is still a massive cost. If you figure full-time daycare for maybe 4 years, that's about $48,000.
Average cost (for a middle income family) of raising a child in the US is just over $230k (that's through the age of 17). Now...a lot of that cost factors in housing, meaning, if you don't have a kid, you can just rent or buy a 1 bedroom apartment/condo, etc and be fine. Having kids increases the need for bigger and better housing. So if you're a person that would want to live in a somewhat bigger than needed place even without kids, that $230k number isn't quite as accurate.
Though I'm with you; never had the desire to have kids, and luckily, my wife has always been the same way. We're 38 now, so that's not changing.
I'm 30, and a surprising number of college-educated women my age that I know are becoming stay at home moms. They had good jobs and were moving up in their careers too. It's a lot harder than I think many realize. Just one of the myriad reasons we're not having kids.
Yeah, I have a salaried professional career and I've never felt pressured to work more than 40 hours, hell my actual work probably only totals up to like 30 hours. It's never hampered my advancement working strictly from 8 am to 5pm (hour lunch). And this is in the Rust Belt. My wife stays home with our twins, we own a home. I'm 26 and she is 28. My degree (history) isn't related to my work at all.
I imagine most of this is just luck of circumstance for me at least.
But seriously any job that pressures you to work more than 40 hours a week is a shitty job.
There's a key line in their findings:
While the follow up that more research needs to be done, I think that is an important component to this.
My wife is the assistant director at her childcare center, and prices are easily $200-$300 or so a week depending on the age of the child.
My sister and her two kids came to live with us for about a month and a half after she injured herself and couldn't take care of her kids while her husband was deployed. We paid for the childcare, and even though my wife got an employee discount, we were still paying roughly $370/week for both kids. It's crazy.
I was going to say something really snarky, but I love y'all here, so I'll dial it back a bit.
Lets just say that there are many MANY places, especially if you're salaried, that expect at MINIMUM, 45 hours a week.
It's very tough at lower wages when you basically work 20 out of 40 hours a week just to pay for the childcare to be able to work at all, it's impossible to get ahead much.
That's my wife, she had a hard time going back to work, because sometimes she feels that work Takes so much from her that she wonders if our child is getting 100% from her when she is home. I definitely do think something changes once you have a child, I don't think it's just a financial aspect
For us, it really isn't a financial aspect, we are lucky that we have family that can watch our children
In all my time searching and interviewing for jobs before I got my current one I've never once encountered that mentality. Seems really toxic and shitty to me.
And even if that's the case it doesn't make it any less of a shit job.
OP
OP
So you're talking about lawyers, doctors, surgeons, consultants, many developer jobs in the gaming industries, many sales positions, entrepreneurs, I could go on and on.
Great that you have a good work life balance, but working more than 40 hours a week is way more common these days.
https://www.lawcrossing.com/article/1928/Many-white-collar-employees-put-in-60-or-70-hours-per-week/
People are in a position where they need the career to be able to give the kids the life they want. It's a noble idea to sacrifice your career for the sake of the kids but you also gotta eat
My wife didn't get paid maternity leave when she gave birth. We just had to dip into savings to cover costs. And that's not including the medical bills we got despite having "full coverage". Copays are a bitch.
Word. I'm paying 1400 a month for daycare. And that's not some super fancy place, that's just the standard in the area. My mom would like to help but she's already got her hands full with my disabled sister. My wife's mom helped the first year with daycare. Was super clutch and allowed us to save a bit more and deal with some medical bills.
Word. I'm paying 1400 a month for daycare. And that's not some super fancy place, that's just the standard in the area. My mom would like to help but she's already got her hands full with my disabled sister. My wife's mom helped the first year with daycare. Was super clutch and allowed us to save a bit more and deal with some medical bills.
My wife is about to start nursing school, I work 3rd shift, and we have 4 kids to manage. I have no idea how/if it's going to work. Even if she can somehow manage the kids and get through school, I dont know how we'll have the time to both have jobs and take care of the kids. It's tough.
It's really common in tech and games industry.
I'd like to add that in Japan we were paying a measely 90 bucks a month for day care. Private pre-school was also only 250 a month. My brother also pays about $1000 a month for his daughters daycare at a so-called really good place, and I went to go look at it last time I was there and it's kind of a joke compared to the kind of schools my kids were going to at a fraction of the cost.
Thanks for posting this - while my job is similar to yours OP (NYC workaholic represent), my wife works in healthcare and gets to leave her work at work.
We are expecting our first in December... going to be interesting to see how this all works out.
Do you have a solution? If you want a high paying IT job in / around NYC this is life. I'm not interested in moving away from our families and I would like to be able to afford 3x college tuitions in 20 years.
We are expecting our first in December... going to be interesting to see how this all works out.
Do you have a solution? If you want a high paying IT job in / around NYC this is life. I'm not interested in moving away from our families and I would like to be able to afford 3x college tuitions in 20 years.
Mostly because many states now regulate and only allow X amount of kids per Y amount of teachers. Back in the day child care was cheap because Sherie down the street would watch 20 kids every day out of her house for $150/mo each. Now a days, the ratio is regulated to something like 3:1 or 4:1 or something so day care facilities have to staff a LOT of teachers to supervise kids. Those numbers shrink even smaller when talking about infants. Want to brake the rules? Lose your license to sit and lose your source of income.
Blame regulations for high costs.
Kids are more expensive the younger they are too. If mom goes back to work and puts a 3-4 month old in child care, that could cost ~$1200-1400/mo alone. Why? Because children that young are required to only have 1 or 2 other kids to the same teacher, driving up costs there but also because they need to be fed, changed and had eyeballs on them 24/7. Kids get cheaper the older they get. For instance, that same child at 2 years old may only now cost $600/mo. Got 2 or 3 kids? Most places will do multi child discounts as well.
My wife stayed home for the first 2 years of both of our kids and immediately went back once they were 2. It worked perfectly, and its not expensive once you learn the system and now to game it in your favor. If you just pop out kids and put them in childcare without understanding your options, then sure.. its expensive. Also another reason to have kids younger is both parents aren't likely to have developed careers. You can get through the first 1-2 years on each kid while scrapping by and young which leaves YEARS ahead of you to get back into the work force and build a career.
I know several people in their mid 30s just now having kids, both parents working as professionals and they've built expensive lifestyles before having kids. Meaning, very expensive mortgages, cars/trucks, toys etc etc.. Layer in kids then, and well they're fucked because both parents have to work to sustain that lifestyle. Prior to having kids a few of these friends were all vocal about "waiting until the they could afford it". Well now that they can afford it, they can't actually because they waited too long and learned the hard way just like parents who had kids in their early 20s.
In the end, parents all figure it out.
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Damn, the only way to do it and have everything is to have a nanny or aupair then.
I don't want kids either, but just before I relocated my exgf, whose a vet at 27, started getting baby fever. If we had been expecting I wonder how it would work given where we lived. Oh well, I'm on a different timeline now.
I don't want kids either, but just before I relocated my exgf, whose a vet at 27, started getting baby fever. If we had been expecting I wonder how it would work given where we lived. Oh well, I'm on a different timeline now.
OP
OP
I'd say it's not optimal, correct. Where our those extra doctors coming from?
I think there are a ton of societal pressures as well, got to have organized activities, because we want well rounded kids, got to drive kids for 'play dates' because you are stressed out about your kids playing with the right places and kids etc.
When I was growing up, I got on my bike and just rode around town, playing with neighborhood kids. I think maybe it was easier for parents that worked in the 80s and 90s due to the fact that 'free range' style of parenting wasn't yet looked at
When I was growing up, I got on my bike and just rode around town, playing with neighborhood kids. I think maybe it was easier for parents that worked in the 80s and 90s due to the fact that 'free range' style of parenting wasn't yet looked at
We had a solution, powerful unions, but gosh what happened to them? Next best solution would be to institute a UBI and make some tight legislation to protect workers.
Or the people could collectively rise up to exercise their power and protect themselves.
I think that doctors are a bit different from the standard office worker we are talking about. One would hope that they became doctors because they care about helping people and not just for the money.
But if we fix healthcare the populace gets healthier and doctors don't need to work as much.
OP
OP
I don't think that solution would work in a more mobile workforce. Unions made sense with longer job tenures. The average job length is much lower today.
Moreover, there will always be competitive people who will put a value on working longer hours. It's not an easy problem to solve.
So? Your anecdote shouldn't bias this issue. Everyone knows that professional consulting is a job where you have no life most of the time. Consultants spend more time traveling than home with their family, especially young ones at big firms like McKinsey.
Nobody goes into consulting thinking they're gonna have time to start a family in a year.
Kind of annoys me that we start off like this when this is not the real reason why having children is harder today.
OP
OP
That was my personal anecdote, but the pressure of professional jobs are still a huge factor on why many women are dropping out of the workforce after having children. These are not easy jobs to juggle with a family. If they were, why is this occurring?
Did you read the article at all?
I feel you're looking at trees instead of the forest here.
I half agree with you. The reason it's harder to have kids these days is poor labor laws in addition to higher demands from employers. If you have any European friends talk to them about their labor laws and you'll feel no matter what position you have it's still worlds apart in the US.
OP
OP
Yes, and that's what the article ends up mentioning, our laws haven't caught up to these new social demands. The study in progress cites the US and UK. I don't know about UK maternal leave laws? Are they decent?
However, when those legal protections are not in place, you will have couples making due however the can, and more women opting out of work while their children are young is one of the consequences of inadequate parental leave laws.
Yup. With the amount of debt I am going to have after finishing med school next year, I realized that not having children is the only way I will be able to live a comfortable life (I am a male, btw). They are soooo expensive (and time-consuming). Times have changed. Kudos to anyone who can manage all of it and a hefty career
OP
OP
Right, I'm not blaming employers. I'm saying the job situation are a huge calculus in the decision women are making.
Sure the government should step up, but we're talking about employment behavior occurring because of the current reality.
Financial drawbacks is the #1 reason I will probably never have kids. A gap in my career would kill it, and the best daycares around me are super expensive with years long waiting lists.
Also, my coworker is always lamenting about how much little time she gets to spend with her kid—maybe two-three hours a day at the most considering work eats up at least 10 hours every day.
Also, my coworker is always lamenting about how much little time she gets to spend with her kid—maybe two-three hours a day at the most considering work eats up at least 10 hours every day.
We have twins and pay 2000 UK pounds a month. It's insane.
My wife gave up her career after our son was born.
She planned on this as she didnt want our kids to be raised by babysitters . She brought this up before we even got married to make sure I was ok with it .
Being a single income household limits us a fair bit but I put my kid first.
I couldn't imagine life without kids so the sacrifices are worth it to me .
She planned on this as she didnt want our kids to be raised by babysitters . She brought this up before we even got married to make sure I was ok with it .
Being a single income household limits us a fair bit but I put my kid first.
I couldn't imagine life without kids so the sacrifices are worth it to me .
My wife sees our little one about 3 hours a day, so that is about right.
People should realize they are trying to pack in way too much shit in their lives. Stop trying to make your children "star kids" with STEM classes, violin lessons, and college prep stuff at prestigious institutions especially if you can't afford that shit without spending most of your waking hours at work. No one has to live this way and most kids would benefit a hell of a lot more by having a parent around more often than not.
Back in the day most people didn't leave the raising of their kids up to babysitters who weren't family. I doubt there was ever a Sherie down the street that watched 20 kids. No single person can effectively watch 20 kids. Regulations exist for a good reason.
They are expensive as you want them to be. If you just raise them normally with one parent at home and without piling on tons of gadgets and lessons and daycare, they do not necessarily have to cost a lot in terms of money.[/QUOTE]
Back in the day most people didn't leave the raising of their kids up to babysitters who weren't family. I doubt there was ever a Sherie down the street that watched 20 kids. No single person can effectively watch 20 kids. Regulations exist for a good reason.
They are expensive as you want them to be. If you just raise them normally with one parent at home and without piling on tons of gadgets and lessons and daycare, they do not necessarily have to cost a lot in terms of money.[/QUOTE]
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Because of the crazy hours my wife works as a nurse, the cost of child care with two kids plus my 3 year old being special needs I ended up being a stay at home dad. It just doesn't feel worth working just to pay for daycare and my son has autism so I cannot and would not put him in daycare.
Some people move from the city to the suburbs when they decide to become a family in order to have a different kind of life. Other people take it one step further and move to a more "family friendly" country with subsidized daycare and more paid parental leave. The people from the UK that were mentioned in the article have access to the EU freedom of movement which lets them move to a different EU country.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/10/18/which-countries-are-most-generous-to-new-parents
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-other-countries-address-affordable-childcare
"It's never nice for a child or their parent when a little one is ill, but families in Sweden benefit from generous policies allowing mums, dads, and other caregivers time off when a child is unwell. Here's what working parents should know about their rights.
When can I take it? You can take VAB to care for an unwell child if they are aged between eight months to the day before their 12th birthday.
How much time can I take off? It's possible to take as many days as needed each year, up to a total of 120 per child.
Will I get paid? Yes. You're entitled to approximately 80 percent of your wage up to a maximum limit."
https://www.thelocal.se/20180315/wo...what-you-need-to-know-when-your-child-is-sick
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2016/10/18/which-countries-are-most-generous-to-new-parents
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-other-countries-address-affordable-childcare
"It's never nice for a child or their parent when a little one is ill, but families in Sweden benefit from generous policies allowing mums, dads, and other caregivers time off when a child is unwell. Here's what working parents should know about their rights.
When can I take it? You can take VAB to care for an unwell child if they are aged between eight months to the day before their 12th birthday.
How much time can I take off? It's possible to take as many days as needed each year, up to a total of 120 per child.
Will I get paid? Yes. You're entitled to approximately 80 percent of your wage up to a maximum limit."
https://www.thelocal.se/20180315/wo...what-you-need-to-know-when-your-child-is-sick
Which is literally most jobs nowadays. Good luck finding the traditional 9-5