America can't afford kids anymore, but we might have a chance to change that
Children don't have to be a luxury item--if we accept that they have become one.
Matriarchy Report is two journalist moms writing about family issues from a feminist perspective. Research, interviews, personal stories. We help connect the dots between systemic issues and your family life. Also: geriatric mom power. You can read past issues here. Click the button below to subscribe and get this newsletter in your inbox, free.
When did you know 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?
I have been thinking about this because I listened to this week’s “The Daily” podcast episode about the child care crisis, and the Democrat infrastructure bill that would provide child care subsidies, and a living wage for child care workers. It’s all good info—but the tone of the interview 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—and they do it just because they like taking care of children?”
There’s a moment when you hear the host have his “aha” moment about the dire straits of American child rearing. The Times reporter is describing 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, he 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.
Because on the one hand, it’s great that the Times is covering this stuff, and on the other hand, the message doesn’t really seem to be getting through. Is this still shocking news? For the last 1.5 years 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.
I probably take the failure of this narrative a little personally, because I tried to tell it for years. But 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.
Here’s when I realized that American families were in hot water—and surprisingly, it was before I had a kid and got sucker-punched by the daycare price tag (“One car payment every week!” as one of my dad friends likes to put it). I may have remained clueless before then, but as luck would have it, six years ago and before I had a baby, I was hired to report on poverty-related issues full time. I was churning out 3-5 articles a week, and 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. Post-recession, earnings were lower and stagnant and were not keeping up with the cost of living. 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.
In short, Americans were in the hole. And meanwhile, student debt and the cost of healthcare had exploded.
The other interesting 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 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.
“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 (not male) thought the drop happily represented female empowerment. But also it was hook-up culture. Or maybe it was STDs!
I pitched “People can’t afford to have kids” stories in several forms to my editor, and he approved some but sidelined many of them, grumbling about families being short on money “because people go out to eat too much these days.”
Eventually, I stumbled on this: A Harvard law professor and her research team had been crunching data from thousands of bankruptcy records, and doing hundreds of interviews with filers, and 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.
They 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.
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 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 as of 2019. One in seven—in the richest country in the world!**
How was this story not getting more attention? Why didn’t we hear as much about it as we did the falling fertility rate, I wondered. This story did get a small bump later, when one of its authors, Elizabeth Warren, ran for senator and published her findings in a book that she wrote with her daughter.
Isn’t it interesting that even though a prominent politician and presidential candidate wrote a book about how Americans are going broke trying to afford having kids, it’s still not in the mainstream conversation, and American pundits are still flabbergasted by this information?
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 this story, deflect it, question it, tell it slant.
And now, women have been shouting from the rooftops for the last year and a half that America is failing them and that they need more support. But the big story in the media is about the price tag of the Build Back Better Act that’s in Congress now, instead of headlining that it would:
Cap child care costs at 7% of income for middle-class families, saving the average family $14,800 per year, according to the White House website.
Make preschool free for 3- and 4-year-olds, and bring U.S. spending on young children more inline with other wealthy countries.
Provide 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave, replacing at least two-thirds of earnings up to $4,000 per month; the lowest-paid workers would receive 80% of their income.
Expand child tax credits to cut child poverty in half.
Pay child care and elder care workers a living wage and support 1.1 million jobs a year in that sector.
Provide two years of free community college and subsidize tuition for lower-wage families.
Invest in climate change innovations and support 763,000 jobs in that sector.
Why is this not dominating the headlines, as though it wouldn’t change life for a lot of us, and for our children? Especially because these proposals have overwhelming voter support in polls—child care is a nonpartisan issue with 8 out of 10 voters supporting it.
Maybe we just don’t want to believe that America is a place where people can’t afford to have children as it is. 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 parents, if they work hard enough, can afford to have kids. Maybe it feels shameful to admit that we need any help—even though help with child-rearing is the norm in our peer countries. That old American individualism might leave us really alone, if we let it.
Ironically, Elizabeth Warren’s family bankruptcy research wasn’t especially unpopular with social conservatives (though she herself is) 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 that the option to parent was more fundamental to human adult life than just, say, another expensive hobby that you may or may not be able to afford, like windsurfing.
“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?” Warren asked in her book.
I think we have the answer. We just don’t want to hear it.
Instagram: @matriarchyreport Twitter: @laneanderson and @allisonlichter
Timely, true, and excellently reported with clarity. A major reason I didn’t have a second child was financial, which still pains me. Thank you for talking about these difficult and important issues.
Lane, this is a well-thought out article. Thanks for sharing your valuable research and background with us. I do have one question. If child-care costs are exhorbitant yet child-care workers are underpaid, where is all the money going?