Children are simply too expensive. My first child cost me over $15,000 in co-pays. School for six hours a day is $1100 a month. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates it'll cost over $230,000 to raise a child to 18. That's before college.

Depends. If someone seduces a doctor (see the trial of Conrad Murray who was Michael Jackson's propofil fixer who was in deep shit to multiple strippers for one night stand child support) for 20% you could take away 40k tax free and move to a quaint midwest town and come out quite ahead. Also if you're poor as dirt and just feed the kids rice and lentils and rely on (now increased) benefits and public institutions for everything else you can come ahead too. Whether this has anything to do with high fertility rates at the low income bands is up for interpretation.

> Children are simply too expensive ... School for six hours a day is $1100 a month.

What? Public school is free and taxpayer-funded in the US.

Sure after kindergarten. But in the preceding 4 years that’s the payment. And that presumes I want to put my kid in public school, where frankly, academics and safety are severely lacking.

Put my daughters into Cheerleading at end of Covid lockdown. At one mark My wife did the math. “7,000 in fees paid to gym” Doesn't even include the private lessons, Hotels, tickets for competition. Special training mats and octagons, etc.

At least kids absolutely love it.

> Children are simply too expensive.

These days? HELL, YES. Modern capitalism (including the education-industrial complex) has learned that kids are just about the ultimate leverage to squeeze money out of their families. And has gotten far too damned good at doing that.

Operative word: grandmother, i.e. not contemporaneous with the actual crisis that’s happening.

It’s obviously not a new thing, it’s the old thing. But the new thing (not having kids) is a big, big problem for most modern civilizations at this point.

Correct. But when they're gushing over $Age_Old_Concept as if it was some incredible new revelation from highest heaven - that's pretty much my standard reaction.

On a farm, kids are free labor, you already have land to build as big a house as you want, and you've got lots of extra food to feed 'em.

You might want to read some accounts of life on lower-middle-class farms, ~120 year ago. Yes, kids were free-ish labor...but basic day-to-day life was incredibly laborious, compared to today. Having kids didn't give you any more land, nor more teams of horses to pull additional plows. Cost of land was not the constraint on the size of your house. Food was not free & unlimited, even in a year with a good harvest. Crop yields were nothing remotely resembling today's post-Green-Revolution & artificially fertilized numbers. Food preservation technology, to have a balanced diet off-season, was home canning and root cellars. The former was highly laborious. The latter had plenty of limitations, even if your local subsoil and water table were ideal for it.