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Happy Valentine’s Day! Make Some Babies!
Yesterday, there was a surprising story in the New York Times about the falling fertility rate. That wasn’t the surprising part; it’s that this was framed as a negative for our society. In the Upshot blog, Lyman Stone writes,
As a result, the gap between the number of children that women say they want to have (2.7) and the number of children they will probably actually have (1.8) has risen to the highest level in 40 years. (From 1972 to 2016, men have expressed almost exactly the same ideal fertility rates as women: In a given year, they average just 0.04 children below what women say is ideal.)
Lyman rests the blame for this disparity on more effective birth control (far fewer oops babies; which, if we’re honest, is how a lot of babies are made), pornography, later marriages, and smartphone use. All of this is true, but this is also:
https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/963677228281327616
Filipovic, a left-wing feminist, believes that government is the answer to solving these problems. Just because she’s wrong about the solution doesn’t mean she’s wrong about the problem, however. When talking to other parents or wanna-be parents, cost is the number one issue time and again. Because I’m a stay-at-home mom (in part because of financial considerations, though if we’re being honest, it’s a small part), the cost of one kid vs. three wasn’t a large increase.
What made having more children more expensive for us is healthcare costs: if all three kids are sick, a visit to the pediatrician alone is over $100. When you factor in specialists, occupational therapy for one of our kids, and a routine surgery, we spend more on out-of-pocket healthcare (after we pay our premiums) than we do restaurants and all forms of entertainment combined. Insert rant here about how much less affordable our healthcare has become in the last few years since Obamacare.
A funny thing happens when you have kids, though: men work harder and make more money. Yes, women make less, but we also value things like flexibility so that we can actually be around when we’re needed and wanted. But make no mistake, it’s hard having kids, and entails a great deal of sacrifice.
Which reminds me of this clip from the television show “Scrubs.” In it, Dr. Bob Kelso addresses a young patient who wants to have lap-band surgery in order to lose weight. He tells her:
That’s basically the motto in the Mandel house, about having more kids and just about everything else. Having kids is hard, but it doesn’t mean it’s not worth it, nor is it the case that it being hard is somehow a modern phenomenon. My husband Seth’s grandparents struggled financially much more than we do, lived in half the square-footage with more kids, and yet, when they reflect on their lives they tell us one thing: we wish we had had more.
Published in Marriage
We didn’t make ours, we outsourced . . .
Happy Valentine’s Day to you too! And thanks for the reminder. I’m making my wife – and my mother, and our three daughters, Lobster Newburg for V-Day dinner tonight, and I need to get started. Never made it before, but there’s always pizza delivery if I mess it up.
Think I’m done.
Three. All adults now. Oldest is married and starting his family. (My first grandchild is due in July.) Middle son will be crossing the Pacific in March to bring his bride home to Texas.
You know the reason we’re all not having kids anymore. We’re idiots! Well, maybe we’re just dumb enough to listen to people who claim it doesn’t matter. It does matter.
Regards,
Jim
Speak for yourself. I raised my three. Now they are getting married and having theirs.
She’s full of it. If someone cited a desire to increase the fertility rate as their reason for supporting those policies, I can almost guarantee that Jill Filipovic would cal that person a misogynist who thinks women are just baby factories.
No, it’s because there’s no government training program to teach them how. Oh wait, yes there is. It’s called “Public School”.
While I celebrate motherhood in all its glory (And I still can’t stop thinking about the “Altima” podcast – what a hoot! Jeff’s Garage should become a Ricochet pilgrimage . . .), it amazes me with all the talk and availability of birth control from condoms to the pill these days, single motherhood is still a major problem in this country. Do women not care any more?
I’m speaking for the last two generations that have continued to buy into this awful non-culture culture peddled by the left. If the younger generation really knew what they are being sold they’d hate the left for this alone.
Regards,
Jim
“Filipovic, a left-wing feminist, believes that government is the answer to solving these problems. Just because she’s wrong about the solution doesn’t mean she’s wrong about the problem, however.”
Before we look going to a more “European model” of family support, we may want to check and see if that is working. Current reports state that the additional funds are not fixing the problem.
https://www.thelocal.fr/20170117/birth-rate-in-france-dips-for-the-second-year-in-a-row
John,
You know like the libertarians say “unintended consequences”. Unfortunately, these consequences ruin the best part of people’s lives. For this, the left deserves to be hated.
Regards,
Jim
On the one hand, I’ve been told by my religious authorities to get married before I make a baby.
On the other hand, if I make a baby, the marriage thing might work itself out rather quickly.
Decisions, decisions…
But wait. Paul Ehrlich back in the ’70s said we should stop having kids. He and the Left said we were a Population Bomb. Don’t tell me he was wrong about something!! So confused . . . .
We normalize and idealize relationships that can’t lead to reproduction, and we marginalize and demonize normal heterosexual behavior.
So what do you think the result is going to be?
This is the hallmark of a dying society.
Bruce,
How many times does the left get to be catastrophically wrong before people stop voting for the idiots? Don’t answer that. Just sit and contemplate.
Regards,
Jim
A society of the perverse, by the perverse, and for the perverse.
Regards,
Jim
I think the low birthrate has a more primal cause. True, the economic cost of kids is high, but in a society determined to build a comprehensive welfare state, the potential economic benefit of having kids is eclipsed by the state’s ever growing welfare institutions. In a “Life of Julia” world, kids are re-categorized as an optional personal fulfillment accessory, rather than a necessity for sustaining extended life. This is new. Up until the middle of the 20th century, unless you had accumulated some form of passive income, living comfortably into old age was unlikely without a passel of supportive children. Not so since the New Deal and Great Society. It’s understandable why people have fewer kids in our post-agrarian welfare state. A welfare state makes having kids economically obsolete.
I used to despair about this. But I don’t anymore. There are so many small pockets of communities where couples are having 5-8 kids each. It is mostly in religious circles, and mostly the 40 and under set. But when I converted to Catholicism at 20 and anticipated having a large family, I thought I would be all alone, and exiled. The reality is that people who chose to have lots of kids have to live a different kind of life- either the mom stays home, or extended family help out. It’s hard to watch a lot of TV or have a lot of spending money, and usually alternative schooling or homeschooling or charter schools are the default. This means that the effect of popular culture is minimized. And those people find each other and build really nice communities where women don’t feel ostracized for having more than 2 kids, and, for the most part, people are very encouraging and helpful.
Even outside religious communities, I see an impact. My best friend from high school is having her fifth child. Her husband is just a local contractor. They are poor, but they are very good parents and they love their children so much. She gets a lot of flack from the 2-child-limit older generation, but even without a lot of luxuries and without a lot of family approval, it is obvious to her that children are good, and that lots of kids are a blessing.
These families are obviously not the majority, and I know plenty of people who will have 1-2 kids. But I think it is so much easier to be counter-cultural now than it was in the 70s and 80s.
Bravo, Ray.
In this post https://econimica.blogspot.com/2017/10/economic-recovery-but-for-who.html, the Economica blog explains who is benefitting and who is losing out since 2007 and before, and the situation with our birthrate.
The long and short of it is that our population younger than 55 since about 2007 is hardly growing, while those in the older cohort 55 and older continue to grow substantially in number putting enormous pressure on Medicare and Social Security. I have seen other studies that suggest with the exception of those metro areas big in finance, tech or entertainment, our cities across the country are not seeing population growth below 65 years of age. This is a serious situation that seemingly few are talking about.
I’d have loved more still, but things didn’t work out.
Know how that goes.
Government actuarial systems are nothing but destruction and theft.
What is wrong with that woman? How will she afford to buy them all iPhones and Gender Studies degrees?
You know who’s fighting the trend? Bavarians.
Ms. Filipovic needs to think through the problem a little more than she apparently has. The three things she lists (paid parental leave, affordable childcare, and pregnancy discrimination) all pertain to employment. Since the fertility problem seems to be a reduced number of families having more than two children, I wonder if any of those things she lists would really have an impact. My anecdotal experience is that beyond two children, one parent (usually but not always the mother) is “stay at home,” and so employment focused “remedies” aren’t going to have much impact.
As to men working harder, that was my personal experience, though in part enabled because Mrs. Tabby chose to be a “stay-at-home” mom. That she took care of so much of the household and children tasks, I could focus more energy on my employment, which got me more promotions and raises.
[I keep putting “stay-at-home” in quotes because our experience was that she was out doing a lot of stuff outside the home with our children – playgrounds, play groups, library, etc. When we got our first minivan, we put on it a license plate frame that said, “MTD – Mom’s Transit District.”]
…and funding this stupidity requires the procreation of 3.2 our whatever FICA slaves per couple . Personally, I think LBJ’s multiple bright ideas lowered the birth rate among people that actually can pay for and develop eh, hem FICA funders.
The only way you can fix it is through an intelligent immigration policy that raises GDP per capita. Good luck with that.
The other way is to abolish the welfare state. But that would take even more luck.
Right but why are people talking about universal basic income and inequality? Keynesianism requires redistribution at this point. The system is idiotic.