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Originally Posted by Listener2307 I find myself wondering whether the phenomenon is just American. Families are getting smaller and populations older in a great many countries. Inflation seems to be worldwide, too.
Seems to me it is just another part of what is driving population decline.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sydney123
In a nutshell….
Here in France 80% of the cost of daycare is subsidized by the government. The cost for the citizens is on a sliding scale depending on income. A low income family may pay as little as €50 a month per child for full time daycare. Higher earners can pay €400 a month and top earners €1000 a month. Daycare is tax deductible.
Our children start mandatory public preschool at age 3. We have both before and after school clubs where kids can be dropped off early to school and picked up later. Public school is free and the fore and after care costs €5 a day per kid. If you drop your school age kid @7:00 am and pick them up by 6:30 pm it will cost €25 a week virtually eliminating the need for outside daycare. Some employers offer on site child care for their employees as well.
For the under 3’s we have many options for day care…professional child minders, nurseries, private homes, Nannie’s, live ins, friends and family etc where the cost may vary, but are still considered affordable.
Interesting.
France has a fertility rate of 1.8, which is below the replacement threshold of 2.1. The last time France had a fertility rate that was above 2.1 was 1975!LINK
10 percent of France's population are immigrants, not born in France. LINK
Although France has good intentions and even good policy, they are not able to create the incentive that families look for to have children. In fact, no country has been able to reverse the world wide trend to have fewer children.
Maybe the child care problem will solve itself as fewer and fewer children are produced.
It is still possible to have one income and do just fine, it requires living in a low-cost city where you have a high paying job. One example is a guy that's a director for a county, making over $100k and his house cost only $350k. Here, however, the median home is $1.6 million, and the average day-care is about $2,000/month - that's $24,000/year. Even with the median household income at $195k, that's a big chunk, and property tax is over $12,000. Even the managers in tech here have a spouse working, some just making enough to pay for the daycare. These days it seems like keeping a career is more important than having a parent at home when the kids get off of school.
It’s unwise for either parent to not work. Life happens. Marriages end and the non working spouse has quite a hill to climb. And even if a couple stays married, only one person working has consequences. I have a coworker who just turned 70 and is moaning about not being able to afford to retire since only he will get SS or has a 401k. Well, that was what he and his wife decided and now they’ll have to deal with the results.
The large families from decades past didn’t have women in the workforce, by and large. This has been a conscious choice due to feminism and the push for “equality.” Now the kids are the losers in the situation.
No they’re not. Study after study show that there is no detrimental effect on children who attend high quality daycares. Sure, they’re not home with a parent (yes Dads can stay home too), but no SAHP is spending 100% of the hours between 7 and 5 doing activities with their child. That’s why studies show that some kids with a SAHP are less ready for kindergarten than kids in daycare. And those in a daycare that’s non home based do better than those in home based daycares.
They are losing out on having their parents raise them. They are being raised by strangers who change depending on their age.
Totally disagree with govt subsidizing all of it. There needs to be an income threshold as there is currently.
I guess “most couples” don’t want to figure it out but instead ship their kids off to avoid raising them themselves. That’s what it boils down to. Many moms work only to pay for the daycare and they rejoice when public school is available so they don’t have to be stuck with their kid and/or pay for the strangers any longer.
ETA the women don’t stay home simply as a matter of the biology of pregnancy. They are hardwired to do the work of raising children in every way possible. Men simply were not.
So once your kids go to K-12 school, you’ll no longer be raising them? Just kidding. Of course you will because school hours just like daycare hours are not 100% of the hours in a week.
Interesting.
France has a fertility rate of 1.8, which is below the replacement threshold of 2.1. The last time France had a fertility rate that was above 2.1 was 1975!LINK
10 percent of France's population are immigrants, not born in France. LINK
Although France has good intentions and even good policy, they are not able to create the incentive that families look for to have children. In fact, no country has been able to reverse the world wide trend to have fewer children.
Maybe the child care problem will solve itself as fewer and fewer children are produced.
You provide no data re the rate of decline without government incentives and a control group.
Obviously, many more women of childbearing age today are single, unmarried so that will play a part in a declining birthrate despite government incentives. Women are getting married at a later age, reducing the number of childbearing years for those who wish to be married before having children.
In 2018, a record 35% of Americans ages 25 to 50, or 39 million, had never been married, according to a new Institute for Family Studies (IFS) analysis of U.S. Census data. The share was only 9% in 1970.
Desperate parents take any chance they get, and often end up placing their kids in unsafe environments, where kids get abused or even killed (the fentanyl case in Bronx)
Add to that today's development on a "ghost gun" assembly plant being used as a 21-child day care facility.
I don't think the problem is soluble.
Prior to us having children, my wife worked at Parents' Magazine and Forbes Magazine. While she did not love working at Forbes, it gave her daily circulation in the professionally vibrant world of New York City. She did not particularly enjoy full-time parenting during her two maternity leaves, and was far happier working four days a week, with Wednesday being her day at home with the children.
Even if women don't need to work, people don't find child care fulfilling. Educated people are having children later and thus have experienced the world outside their own childhood bedroom and college. Having once seen the outside world, as much as most mothers love their children, it's hard going back. Children aren't in school full time until age five or so. We put our children into nursery school, but that only occupied two hours a day, four hours at age four.
Even during the "good old days" of 1996-2001, when we used an in-home nanny, their quality was uneven. We often let a few go before deciding to keep one. Our first nanny suddenly left two days after Labor Day 1996 when her husband wanted her back, and threatened to call U.S. immigration authorities if she did not return. We had another one from 1996-8, who had legal status. We hired one more in August 1998. I sponsored her application for permanent legal status in February 2001, under a then-new program, and partially paid for a lawyer I engaged for her. She finally got her "green card" in 2010. I used her again as elder-care for my mother starting in 2012. She died died in 2014.
It was difficult to find quality help then and I doubt it's any better now, seeing the traffic on social media from people seeking child and/or elder care.
This is not always 100% true. In many cases, you have two exhausted individuals, trying to both do well at work and contribute at home and often failing in both tasks. They very often are at risk of being laid off and losing their jobs.
On the other hand, a single earner presumably has time and energy to do their work well, to be motivated, well rested, etc. So very often the risk for one well rested, stress free person to lose their job are about is similar to the two stressed out, exhausted parents trying to work...
A single earner who has an adult at home to take care of kids maybe, but a lot of us were single earners (my kids are in their 40's) and had to also take care of the kids. It is exhausting, but necessary and worth it in the long run (at least for me). I had help sometimes from relatives, but no help from the kids dad or his relatives (though I found it was better to stay away from all of them anyway). My daughters have it easier, one has a husband that has stayed home with the kids so she could have a high paying career, but now that the kids are older both of them have high paying careers. The other has a good job and her son's dad helps in many ways even though they are not together, but there is no way they could afford 900.00 a month for daycare.
You can't make generalized statements about any of this because everyone has different circumstances. Day care is expensive and someone said 900 a month for one child is reasonable, but that is if you are a two earner family that earns way above minimum wage (both earning 30.00 an hour or higher, 12.00 an hour does not pay the rent). Especially now when rents are high and the cost of living keeps going up.
You provide no data re the rate of decline without government incentives and a control group...............
The question is what would the fertility rate be if France discontinued the subsidized childcare adjusting for demographic trends.
The fertility rate is the number of babies born per woman in her lifetime in France.
When it falls below 2.1 the population will decline. It is only a matter of how fast it will fall. My point is, nothing France has done has increased the fertility rate enough to affect a rise in population.
Most - or maybe even all - of Europe is in the same situation, and that is, without immigration the population of Europe would decline.
Many countries have tried, but providing for child care has not significantly moved the needle in any country. Women do not respond by having more children. They respond by advancing their careers and enjoying their free time.
I'm not saying that is a problem; I am saying that is what is happening.
Every parent's nightmare when dropping a child off at daycare.
"New York City police are hunting for the husband of a nursery owner after a one-year-old died from a suspected drug overdose at the facility and three other children were taken to hospital.
Nicholas Dominici died after inhaling fentanyl at the nursery operated by Grei Mendez, who has been arrested.
Fentanyl was found under a mat used by the children for napping, police said.
Three children were revived with Narcan, an overdose-reversing drug, after police were called to the Divino Niño nursery in the Bronx on Friday night.
One kilo of fentanyl was discovered "underneath a mat where the children had been sleeping earlier", said NYPD chief detective Joseph Kenny on Monday."
It’s unwise for either parent to not work. Life happens. Marriages end and the non working spouse has quite a hill to climb. And even if a couple stays married, only one person working has consequences. I have a coworker who just turned 70 and is moaning about not being able to afford to retire since only he will get SS or has a 401k. Well, that was what he and his wife decided and now they’ll have to deal with the results.
Actually his wife does receive SS, even better is she didn't have to pay into the system. She gets 1/2 of whatever her spouse gets, plus his full SS. The 401k is just poor planning on their part. Sounds like they had a little too much fun when they were younger and now are paying the price by having to work longer. Nothing wrong with that. Life is about choices.
Edit: if they get divorced, the ex-wife would receive her husbands SS as well as 1/2 his 401k balance. So they're both protected in event of divorce.
Single income can work if you are willing to sacrifice.
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