Here's the real reason Americans stopped having kids
Trump is making it even harder to have kids--but it seems we are still stuck talking about Chappell Roan and cat ladies.
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Last week, I found myself watching my child’s 529 college savings plan plummet in value, and contemplated panic-moving the funds around to something more…stable? Than the tanking U.S. stock market? If that exists.
While googling what exactly “bond index funds” are (I have liberal arts degrees, I am not prepared for high finance as part of parenting), a headline popped up on my phone. “Trump just made it harder to have a kid in America,” it read. Yeah, I know! I said aloud to my screen.
But the Vox article wasn’t about sinking college funds; it was about another fresh hell that parents are facing: the ways that tariffs are about to hit parents, especially new parents, extra hard. Essentials like strollers, cribs, car seats, and onesies that are largely manufactured overseas, are projected to cost thousands more with tariff price increases. (And yes, the Buy Nothing and resale movement for parents is a boon for the environment and affordability! But parents will still get hit—price hikes impact resale prices, and the pipeline has to be refreshed at some point.)1
It already costs about $20,000 to care for a baby for just one year in the U.S., according to Baby Centre, and the gear is just a drop in the bucket of that. Most of that figure comes from exorbitant childcare costs and hospital and doctor bills (the hospital bill for giving birth alone is between $3,500 and $30,000 depending on insurance.)
It’s worth pausing on that figure: $20,000 per year. That’s like buying a car every year, for up to five years—and that’s for just one child. Vox called these early years of parenting a “time of enormous financial upheaval” for parents. Which, yeah. Who can afford to buy a car every year for five + years?
This little personal moment of cascading and compounding parenting costs that I had last week made me return to a question that has been looping in my head for years: Can Americans afford to have kids anymore?
This is a question that it seems no one wants to confront head on, but it is staring us in the face everywhere.
It’s behind everything from the fertility panic headlines, to culture wars over Chappell Roan saying that her friends that have kids are “in hell.” It’s behind the angst over celebrity tradwife influencers portraying an elite and aspirational version of child-rearing that’s about as out of touch as Katy Perry going to space in full makeup on a billionaire’s rocket.
That is to say—parenting, along with so many other things in the U.S., has become a class issue. Including the question of who can even afford to be a parent at all, and if children themselves have become a luxury item. 2
This problem is staring us in the face, but I’m never not astounded by the ways we just refuse to really believe this. People having fewer kids? We blame Chappell Roan, we blame feminism and “careerism,” we blame Chelsea Handler and “childless cat ladies.”
And this isn’t just coming from the right-wing media, either. I often think about an episode of the New York Times “The Daily” podcast a couple years back about the child care crisis. The tone of the interview between the host and reporter sounds a bit like two guys going, “Gee, wow, did you know that childcare is, like, really expensive? And did you know that women who do child care work get paid poverty wages?” As if this is a newsflash.
There’s a moment where the host has his “aha” moment about the dire straits of American child rearing, when the reporter describes a family that he met in Greensboro, N.C., who spends $24,000 of their $75,000 yearly earnings on childcare—a third of their income. As a result, the reporter says, they have decided not to have any more kids.
The host breaks in and exclaims, “Wait, they are not having as many children as they want because of the cost of providing childcare for the kids they have?” He sounds genuinely thunderstruck. This was the point where I had to hit pause and yell “Aaaaaaghhh!” at my kitchen ceiling.
Is this still shocking news? For years now, and especially since Covid, women have been shouting from the rooftops that America is failing them and that they need more support. But the distress call keeps being met with surprise and disbelief.
It seems like the fact that American families have been increasingly unable to support their children is a story that we, as a country, just don’t want to accept.
When did it become apparent to you that American families were in hot water? Not just like, oh, this is hard—but like, I just don’t see how people can go on like this?
Strangely enough, it became apparent to me before Covid, and before I even had a kid and got sucker-punched by the daycare price tag. About eight years ago, I was hired to report on poverty-related issues full time. I was getting a crash course on social issues and economics. There were a couple of big stories at the time, and after a while I started seeing patterns and was trying to connect the dots.
The first big story dominating the headlines was that almost a decade after the Great Recession, Americans had not recovered, even if the stock markets had. Savings had been wiped out—the median household's net worth dropped by 40% and barely recovered by 2017, according to the Fed. Most Americans didn’t have more than a couple months’ worth of savings in the bank. And meanwhile, student debt and the cost of healthcare had exploded—especially for Millennials.
The other headline circulating at the time was that curiously, fertility rates were down. Typically, a baby boom follows a recession. But the opposite was happening—a decade after the 2008 recession, birth rates had plummeted to a record low.
“Huh, it seems like people can’t afford to have kids,” I thought to myself.
I did some research. Sociologists had been studying the falling fertility rate with great interest. The data said that women were delaying having children by getting an education or joining the workforce. That didn’t seem to be the whole story.
“Could it be that more women are completing their education so that they can make more money, and are joining the labor force to make more money, in part so that they can afford to have kids?” I wondered.
But the headlines seemed to have a hundred other explanations for the fertility drop: Some big name male columnists brought out ye olde “women have too many choices these days and are too into their careers” arguments. Many (male) sociologists were convinced it had to do with delaying marriage, others thought the drop happily represented female empowerment. But also it was hook-up culture. Or maybe it was STDs!
Fast-forward, and the narratives haven’t changed that much. Two bestselling books came out last year making all the rounds in the media, urging young people to get married (and have babies). Neither addressed serious financial issues—as though failure to have a family was just a character flaw.
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Whether it’s Scott Galloway or David Brooks, oldish white guys with microphones really want young people to get married and settle down (granted Galloway is much more nuanced, but the message is very much there). The costs of having kids (and the significant costs of marriage for women and childrearing for women, vs. the benefits for men) are largely erased from these narratives.
Make the leap and have a family=everything is all good! They seem to say. It’s just that simple!
It’s not that simple.
Back when I was reporting on this, I pitched “People can’t afford to have kids” stories in several forms to my editor, but he preferred the Galloway-Brooks narrative. He grumbled about young people going out to eat too much (ye olde “Millennials and their avocado toast” cliché). He seemed to think that the problem would be solved if only women would stop paying for diapers, and just wash cloth diapers like his wife did. Simple!
Eventually in my reporting, I did find research that took the affordability narrative seriously. A Harvard law professor and her research team had been crunching data from thousands of bankruptcy records, and doing hundreds of interviews with filers. Way back in the early 2000’s they published their findings that having a child had become the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial disaster.
I repeat: Having a child has become the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial disaster.
And we have knowns this for almost 20 years. Weird that everyone from big-name columnists to celeb profs and sociologists to “family friendly” politicians haven’t made podcasts and Instagram Reels and written best-sellers about that narrative. C’mon, David Brooks!
The Harvard researchers also found that two-earner middle-class families with children were the group most likely to declare bankruptcy. Not because they were going on lavish vacations, but because they were burning through money on childcare costs, skyrocketing prices for houses in good school districts, and exorbitant college tuition.
They found that two-income families were making 75% more money than single-income families a generation before—but had 25% less discretionary income to cover living costs. They were working more and making more than their parents had, and still had a hard time covering basic expenses. (Gotta say, this feels very relatable to my parenting experience.)
Middle class parents were so strapped trying to provide for their kids that they were just one car wreck or healthcare bill away from ruin.
There it was, peer-reviewed and in black and white since way back in 2003: People can’t afford to have kids. Or, put another way: they’re going broke trying to do it the American way.
(And note, this was the middle class. The other heartbreaking figure that kept coming up in my research, that I could never get over, was that more than 10 million children—nearly 1 in 7—was living in poverty in America . One in seven children—in the richest country in the world. Hey David Brooks, feel free to take up that narrative, too.)
Why was this story not getting more attention? Why didn’t we hear about it as much as we did generalized fertility panic? Why is it STILL getting buried under accusations about lazy young people, selfish women, childless cat ladies, and general misogyny slop?
Well, this story did get a small bump in 2012, when one of the Harvard study’s lead authors wrote a book about it, and ran for U.S. Senate. Can you guess who it was? That’s right—Elizabeth freaking Warren (heart eyes forever).
Isn’t it wild that a prominent politician and presidential candidate wrote a book about how Americans are going broke trying to afford having kids, and still that story gets muddled and buried in conversations about family and fertility panic?
For some reason, it’s hard for us in America to admit that we can’t afford to have kids. We don’t like this story. We want to bury it, deflect, it, tell is slant.
And by slant, I mean we mostly want to blame women. It’s easier to blame women, apparently, than address the structures and policies that allow them to have as many children as they would like, or no children at all.
And look, there are people who just don’t want kids regardless of the price—which is a completely valid choice! There is also evidence that many people would like to have more kids if they could afford them.
Freedom would mean that we would have options to choose to have as many children as we want, or none at all. Instead, in this country, we have neither.
It’s almost like the systems and narratives around family and fertility panic3 have not been built to care about women and birthing people (or children) and the conditions of childrearing at all—and rather seek to control and manipulate them.
As I wrote about recently, the current administration claims to be the “party of the family” and with control of all arms of the government, it could do virtually anything it wanted—anything at all—to help American families. It could fund subsidized childcare, the number one obstacle that people report to having a child, or having more children—in a snap. And it has overwhelming voter support from red and blue voters—child care is a nonpartisan issue with 8 out of 10 voters supporting it.
Instead, the GOP is in the process of ravaging the American family, and trying to create a veritable hellscape for women-who are the backbone of most families. The GOP has always tried to own the narrative that they are the “pro-family” party” —from Reagan to J.D. “childless cat ladies are ruining America” and “childcare is an attack on normal people” Vance, while blocking any policies like childcare and family leave that would really turn things around for would-be parents.
And they have often been able to pull it off—in part by pretending that whether to have a family or not is the fault of selfish young people, and selfish young women in particular.
I never get tired of sharing this infographic showing that actually everywhere is better at taking care of families than we are in the U.S.:
And maybe a lot of us just don’t want to believe that America is a place where people can’t afford to have children—so we look for other reasons and people to blame.
Like the American Dream, we persist in holding onto the myth that America is a place where families, if they work hard enough, will thrive. Where people who work hard enough can afford to have children.
Maybe in our individualistic culture it feels shameful to admit that we need any help at all raising children—even though help with child-rearing is the norm in all our peer countries. That old American individualism might leave us really alone, if we let it.
Ironically, Elizabeth Warren’s family financial research wasn’t especially unpopular with conservatives because it championed the idea that women should be given the chance to have kids if they want them. And Warren, a mother herself, urged the radical notion that the option to parent was precious—more fundamental to human adult life than, say, another expensive hobby that you may or may not be able to afford, like windsurfing.
If we embraced the humanizing narrative that the choice to have children, or not have children, is a fundamental human right—essential to a life of life, liberty, and happiness, and used that to replace our bad narratives—think how different things could be.
In her book, Warren asked: “If the word gets out that families with children are three times more likely to collapse into bankruptcy, will even more women decide not to have children?”
I think we have the answer. We just don’t want to hear it.
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I bought my UppaBaby stroller second-hand in a parking lot from a nice dad, but to get the one that worked best for us still cost hundreds of dollars. Same with our bassinet which I hiked to Brooklyn for—to get the safety and Greenguard certification that I wanted, even second-hand it wasn’t free!
Speaking as a New Yorker, three kids is definitely considered a status symbol/flex :)
And spoiler: fertility panics are historically always about race anxiety and who “should” be having babies, i.e. white supremacy.
Love this: "That is to say—parenting, along with so many other things in the U.S., has become a class issue. Including the question of who can even afford to be a parent at all—and if children themselves have become a luxury item."
The term “fertility crisis” is bonkers, isn’t it? The problem has nothing to do with fertility. It has everything to do with personal choice and personal finances, and if you have kids, you know this. At least one of my daughters wants to be a PhD, and I accepted years ago that I’m probably never going to have grandchildren.
On the other hand, I think it’s important to recognize that the people who bleat about a “fertility crisis” only care about one type of woman having children: white women. So maybe they’ve baked their classism and racism into the term they use.