Costs $2500-4000/mo for infant care where I am. On top of a $3000/mo mortgage. NE USA. When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded." Either that or they have one parent who cannot be employed outside the home.
> When I see a family of 5 my first thought is "holy fuck they must be loaded.
This is an interesting divide between social media reality of children and the real world.
Any parent will recognize that having 5 kids does not mean paying 5X the cost of infant daycare, which is obvious when you think about it. Infant daycare is expensive but it's also temporary.
It's also fascinating that so many people assume daycare is the only option. With 5 kids, having a parent stay home or work part time is fine. You can also hire a nanny. Many of my friends do a nanny share where two families split the cost of a nanny to watch both of their kids together. I have friends who took jobs working offset schedules for a while. Many people move closer to parents who are able to help (not an option for everyone, obviously).
It's also not the end of the world to take a couple years off work. It's a hurdle, but not the end of the road. Many people do it.
I think many childless people who don't spend a lot of time with parents or families become fixated on the infant phase. They see high infant care costs, sleepless nights, changing diapers, and imagine that's what parenting is like. In reality, it's a very short phase of your life.
> Most families in the US can't afford a nanny. Daycare is already stretching it.
Where are you at?
Nannies are cheaper than daycare starting at 1 kid and the cost becomes overwhelming in favor of a nanny when there's multiple kids. You can also have the nanny watch other kids in the neighborhood if you only have 1 kid.
Also they only need to be nannied for a couple years, so there's like 48-40 other years of their lives where they can spend the bulk of their focus on the kid they're nannying instead of their own.
There are two ways to hire a nanny. The "law abiding as a point of pride" way is comically expensive.
The "pay your neighbor's teenager cash" way is cheap.
If even that's too expensive for you then send your kids to whatever unlicensed, uninsured, unregulated daycare that some tradesman's wife runs out of her house.
OP's comment was so wild, I can't believe it was anything but disguised sarcasm.
> Have a parent stay at home and not work
> Hire a nanny
> Move (presumably farther away from your job) closer to your (assumed idle) parents so they can help
> Take a couple of years off of work
These options are available to a vanishingly small percentage of working people, at least in the USA. OP must know this, so why even mentions these outlandish options?
I'm expecting a kid in Jan. It was sort of unexpected (earlier than planned by about a year!). I'm gonna be honest I had a really grim talk with my partner about finances... I don't make tech money right now and my partner is not in a high paid field.
You make good points and I'm looking into all those options now. I have friends who are doing basically everything you mentioned between them.
I do think you missed the extra housing cost associated with children though. It seems like many families simply move out of the urban core when it's time to start or grow their family.
I'm sorry dude, but you are clearly part of the 1%. No one I know can afford any of what you're suggesting. "Just take a sabbatical and put up the nanny in your guesthouse!"
In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day.
Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-partem disorders, child birth problems, its just not nice.
Then when you finally get back to your career after 3 months - 5 years, you're passed on promotions, you're n-months behind your peers, and you just don't have the time to hustle for a promotion if you're time is consumed raising kids.
Or if you choose not to have kids, you get financially rewarded for your time. You get more professional responsibility and career development. You get external validation for your hard work (bonuses, promotions, etc). You get full control of your own money, without needing to budget with your partner. You get to live in a better location, because smaller places are more affordable near your work. You don't have a 1+ hour commute to your job.
That's what grandparents are for. Growing up my immediate family lived in the same neighborhood. My mother's parents lived two blocks away and walked over. My fathers parents lived ~15 minutes away. Everyone worked locally. Baby sitters were always named grandma :-)
Now you have to move across the country for a lucrative tech job, leaving behind your support network. You either plan for these things or deal with the consequences. Though I have a feeling many young tech oriented people starting their careers dont have family on their minds...
And lastly, it depends on where you live. An ex military friend moved to a shitty town in PA to be near his mother and sister and bought a hose using the GI bill. He has a federal job, five kids and a stay at home wife. Pretty wild to have a family of seven these days but he is happy and doing good. Family support helps big time.
I have been in tech for 7 years and it would be a stretch to afford the house I grew up in. Plus the commute to the city from my parents has increased from 45 minutes to 2 hours over the last 30 years. My high school recently closed down because families can't afford to live in the neighborhood.
The house my parents bought in the early 90s (after local inflation) would cost between 1/3 and 1/4 of what such a house goes for right now. Big surprise I didn't buy one, but I suppose with 2 incomes we would have bought one for that price.
It's a lot to ask grandparents to take care of an infant full time during the work week. Here and there, on occasion, that is a completely reasonable thing to ask for. It helps strengthen family bonds. But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.
> But I would never ask my parents or my in-laws to care for my toddler 8-5 M-F. They already raised kids.
This is disheartening to hear. You should not have to ask, like ever. My mother would KILL to have grandchildren and would absolutely love to repeat what she calls the best time of her life. She nags me for not having kids and I feel bad because she sees other grandparents and is saddened she is missing out.
I recently overheard a conversation between two older women who were both new grandparents and they conversation was about the pure joy of getting to raise kids again - BUT - you get to go home at night. They loved it!
If you have the right parents then you should never have these reservations. Otherwise it sounds like you have parents who had kids "because that's what you're supposed to do." So they never enjoyed it and dont want to repeat it. My condolences.
No, my parents and in-laws have routinely expressed how much they love to watch and spend time with my kid. But they're also retired and have lots of trips and hobbies going on. They're getting older and aren't as physically able as I am in regards to picking up and chasing after a highly mobile toddler. My husband and I aren't their only kids either. They also spend time helping out our siblings.
So it's really more of a me thing why I don't ask them to take care of him "full time". If I really needed them to, they would (and happily).
Which worked great when people had long retirements and were procreating early. Grandparents are working longer, older age when their children have children, and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.
> and generally enjoying retirement more instead of grand parenting.
These are just people who never liked kids. My friends parents were still working and went out of their way to watch the kids when available. Believe me, there are people who LOVE kids.
Another option: In our case we both WFH which allows us to live near my wife's parents. Which means we have the luxury of an involved, local grandparent as an option over infant/childcare. We literally put the $ we'd budgeted for childcare into a 529.
Certainly don't want to speak for everyone but at least for us it's an enormous cost savings and is a "win-win" for everyone involved.
Another (seemingly less often discussed) advantage to WFH.
same here. not near her parents but close enough to both hers and mine that we can effectively have them rotate through consistently (got a spare room and king sized bed for the g-parents).
even just 2-3 days a week is huge from a mental health / down time / get things done around the house.
I think one dynamic going on here is there is more animosity between generations now than there used to be.
Many people get hyped up about their beliefs on social media, and when they go out into the real world they take some of that divisive thinking with them.
Apologies I'm really late replying to this...hope you see it.
I think this is an insightful comment with an element of truth and it's really, really sad. Yet another example of the net negative societal impact of social media.
Convenience/economic context aside, the grandparent/grandchild relationship/dynamic is incredibly important to a developing psyche.
As something of a tautology, when both parents have high paying jobs, child care can charge whatever they want. And they still have limited spaces, which the highly paid parents are now competing for.
It can be, but it's incredibly risky for women to stay home to take care of children. And, let's be honest - they're the ones actually putting in the effort here most of the time. Most women don't want to be at the complete financial behest of their husbands, nor do they want to risk missing out on a decade of work experience.
Men are avoiding marriage due to the possibility of alimony, child support and courts favoring mother’s custody over children. It happened to my dad, my mom got over $1 million in 2011 when they divorced.
Overall it seems like marriage is a bad gamble for both genders whenever divorce is easy to get.
Divorce laws vary by state. California is equal property, and alimony kicks in immediately (no minimum length of marriage). As a female, higher earner, I paid my ex-husband alimony for a 1 yr 9 month marriage.
Do you feel that this is a fair way to distribute earnings upon divorce? When no children are involved?
My interpretation is that one should not marry somebody who earns significantly less than them due to how courts will force payments with the possibility of jail time.
My take is that the spirit of the law is to compensate spouses for sacrifices and risks they took in support of the other spouse. So for example, if Spouse A reduces their earning potential for Spouse B (ex. a military spouses are disadvantaged in their careers b/c they move constantly, if a doctor moves to a rural area that can support their career but not their spouse's career etc) then Spouse A should be compensated by Spouse B because Spouse B's career growth depended on Spouse A sacrificing theirs. Other examples are if a Spouse stays home to care for dependents, if a Spouse puts another Spouse through graduate / medical / law school etc. It's about acknowledging that you gained because of someone else's actions and compensating for that, honoring your debts as it were.
I do not feel that the alimony I paid aligned with the spirit of the law, but it did align with the letter of the law in California.
What if you think about it this way: By default, a marriage is a contract agreeing to equally pool financial resources. If that contract feels unfair to you, it's usually possible to draft a contract with a different distribution, which people often do if one of the two has vastly more financial resources going into the marriage.
