'Only The Rich Can Afford Big Families Now' — Why Having Kids Has Become A Luxury Item
Children used to be a financial asset — now they’re a liability.
Wesley Tingey | Unsplash Modern medicine makes it possible for fertile couples to avoid pregnancies and for many infertile people to achieve them. So, for the first time in history, it should be possible for most people to choose.
The technology allows it, but our economic and political systems don’t.
Some people who want kids can’t afford to start a family — these days, it's a luxury only the rich can afford.
However, some women who don’t want to have children are forced to give birth against their will.
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It’s ironic that we’ve overcome biology with medical technologies like IUDs and IVF that make such choices physically possible while we impose economic and political forces that make such choices financially impossible or legally impermissible.
Throughout history, parenthood was a nearly inevitable part of life. Conception, pregnancy, birth and childcare didn’t cost a thing except for the efforts of the mother and the family members who assisted her.
Eventually in Western society, families would pay a small fee to a midwife. Later, a doctor would be the one to attend the birth, and doctors made a concerted effort to take over the childbirth business in order to make more money.
Midwifery care was denigrated as unsafe, unscientific, and old-fashioned, even though a home birth under an experienced midwife’s care was usually safer than birth in a germy hospital with an untrained doctor where childbed fever killed as many as 10 percent of the women who birthed there. (See the story of Ignaz Semmelweis for more.)
The official reason why women were pushed to see doctors instead of midwives was the safety of the mother and baby, but the real reason was money.
Pro tip: the real reason for everything our society does is money.
Quite recently, this trend has reversed. This was also done for financial reasons. Obstetricians began adding nurse midwives to their practices once they realized they could increase their incomes by letting the midwives handle the routine births while they concentrated on performing cesareans and other lucrative gynecological surgeries.
The average cost of a hospital birth in the U.S. is about $18,865, but complications can blow that number up into the stratosphere.
And, of course, you can never predict whether your pregnancy will develop problems that could easily bankrupt you.
The cost of the birth is just the beginning. You can breastfeed, use cloth diapers, and dress your baby in hand-me-downs, as I did, to save money. But the most significant cost of having children is child care, and that’s true even if the plan is for one of the parents to stay home.
I had planned to continue working after having my children, but as soon as I held my daughter in my arms, I changed my mind and settled on working part-time.
I had a harder and harder time saying goodbye to her to go to work each morning. When she was almost a year old, I quit and then went on to have another child. In all, I was home for about seven years.
I returned to full-time work the week my son started kindergarten. I don’t know what childcare would have cost me if I’d continued working.
As a newspaper reporter, I made such low wages that I’m not sure I would have even earned enough to pay the daycare fees for two kids. I started a home business just to help keep the family afloat.
However, it’s quite clear to me now, as a 59-year-old woman who won’t be able to retire, that staying home for seven years irreparably harmed my career prospects. Theoretically, if I had continued working all along, as my first spouse did, I’d have earned more over time. I might even now be looking forward to retiring in a few years.
I wasn’t concerned about my financial future at the time. I saw my income as a bonus to the family’s finances. My main role was to take care of the children and home and any extra money I brought in was gravy. Never in a million years did I think I’d need to live off my salary; if I had known what was coming, I’d have needed to change careers while I was still young enough to do it.
My first marriage ended, and four years later, I remarried. My second husband had never been married and had no children. We wanted to have a baby together, but we just couldn’t figure out a responsible way to do it, so we didn’t, and part of me will always be sad about that.
Had affordable childcare existed, it would have changed everything.
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We probably all know young people who would like to have babies but know they can’t afford them. By the time they have set aside enough money, will the woman’s fertility have aged out? It happens.
Plus? As much as I love my children and am grateful to have them, there’s no question that if I had worked on my career and devoted my resources to something besides raising children, I’d at least be comfortably middle-class and possibly even well-off by now.
I have no regrets, but I can see how women like me serve as a cautionary tale to young women weighing whether to have kids.
The GOP really wants us to have more babies.
At first, I wondered why. With AI, there won’t be enough jobs for everyone. Shouldn’t we instead have fewer children?
That was before I understood Trump’s and Musk’s war fever. I now believe they want us to have lots of babies so we’ll have extra bodies to send to war. Of course, an additional reason is that when families have children and childcare costs are high, a lot of women are forced out of the job market.
Unless Mom is a highly paid professional, it may make more sense for her to stay home and care for the kids than to keep working. That makes her financially beholden to her husband and helps keep everyone in their nice little traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker.
Even those of us who relished our days of full-time motherhood understand how dangerous that arrangement is for women now. I wouldn’t recommend it, even though I believe it is the best thing for my children.
Of course, to maintain the traditional gender roles, the husband has to have a job that can support the whole family; those jobs are few and far between now. Most families need two salaries.
The conundrum is that Mom’s wages are needed, yet she can’t afford to work because the cost of childcare might actually exceed her take-home pay. It’s a catch-22 with no easy answer. Government-subsidized child care and/or extended paid maternity leaves solve the problem in many countries, but the U.S. prefers to throw mothers to the wolves.
Babies are a luxury.
Children used to be seen as part of a family’s “treasure.” They’d grow up to help work the farm or family business. They were a financial asset. The more children you had, the better off your family would be, in the long run.
Now? They’re a financial liability. When you see a family with several children, it’s nearly as reliable a sign of wealth as a Rolex watch or a Birkin bag.
We have declined to devote sufficient tax dollars to family needs like healthcare, childcare, and education. If you’re a member of the working class, your only choices are not to have children at all or to sacrifice almost everything else in your life to their care, understanding that your inability to hire tutors, send them to camps and buy them the right clothes is probably dooming them to remain forever in the working class.
And some people still wonder why so many young women have decided to remain child-free!
Michelle Teheux is a freelance writer, journalist, and former newspaper editor who writes about her experiences abroad.