There, I said the quiet part out loud.
People are finally beginning to pay attention to declining birth rates, since it will send Social Security into a death spiral, and there are plenty of efforts in Congress to provide tax cuts to promote people having more children. These efforts are doomed to fail, because more tax dollars motivates exactly zero people to have more children.
I have five kids at home, and in honor of them today, I’ll give you the top five reasons people don’t have more kids.
Number 5: Our public schools suck
I live in a fairly nice community, and my oldest daughter goes to a high school “academy” which has a specialized track for medicine. You have to apply to get in, so you would think it would be a fairly rigorous education. Sadly, you’d be wrong. There are kids that have failed classes in multiple semesters still hanging out, and just like how not prosecuting criminals brings more crime, not punishing poor performance brings more poor performance.
The older families at our church say “Well just homeschool,” but that is NOT cheap if you use a co-op, online curriculum, or anything other than doing it yourself…which takes a lot of time. Worse still, the child-hating Democrats in my state shot down bills that let homeschoolers participate in sports or get tax credits for expenses, so you get punished socially and financially for choosing homeschool. Worse still, the price of private education has skyrocketed, so if you’re a one-income family with mom or dad at home with lots of kids (like my family is), you better be loaded with money or else it’s a non-starter.
The fact is most large families have to rely on public school, and because they suck so bad, parents spend more time than they did in the past to supervise them, which takes away time from their own activities. You either tolerate loser teachers that don’t understand history, homeschool your kids or pay out the nose for education. Not exactly desirable. And speaking of the time suck…
Number 4: Most after school activities are run by inconsiderate people with no children
My son was in rec league baseball for a while. Good fun, but he would be out at games until 9 pm some nights…on school days, when he’s in middle school. When I was growing up, 9 pm was considered late as a middle schooler. You might be awake at home, but certainly not doing regular activities.
Not anymore. I regularly have kids in activities until 9 or even 11 pm at night! Ballet dance competitions and late night sports are by far the biggest offenders, but it’s everywhere now. These involve driving at night, getting home late, and then (for you as the parent anyway) waking up early to drive the 30-60 minutes to get to work (or more if you live in a big city). Talk about wearing you down! Worse still, half of these places have no pauses for dinner, so if you have a big family with small kids, pray you can pack enough food and that your little ones aren’t tired and cranky.
I particularly hate people that plan meetings or activities over dinner or lunch…pet peeve of mine.
All of this means most of my friends with two kids can manage a grueling rec softball season, but I have to balance five kids desires against my desire to get some sort of sleep. All at the expense of any hobbies I might want. Which brings up the next point…
Number 3: Society constantly tells you to not have kids
Now, I won’t begrudge people their hobbies, just like I don’t begrudge people that make more money than me. Everyone makes choices, and having more kids is a choice. But I’d be a rich man if I had a nickel everytime someone offered me advice along the lines of “You know how birth control works right” ***insert snicker here***.
A more salty friend of mine once, in a group conversation, replied with “I do, and I know your wife does too!”, which was the most alpha-male verbal throat chop I’d seen in a while. But I digress.
It’s already hard enough to find alone time with your spouse as a Catholic who follows the Marquette Method. It sucks having doctors push birth control on you every. single. visit. It’s even more fun to have them tell you that NFP doesn’t work and that you’re stupid for doing it (their words, not mine). And it’s rare to have anyone respond to “I have five living kids” with “Wow, what a beautiful family,” when the more common response is one of disdain. Speaking of disdain…
Number 2: Companies making having kids hard
Car seats used to be thin. Now they are thrones. And you can’t fit three across without making a sacrifice to the car seat goddess. It’s so bad that it is a form of birth control. And before you chime in about “safety ratings,” I looked up the safety ratings of these thrones, and I found the changes between seats to be similar to how professors change chapters in a book to force students to buy new books. The ratings are getting a whole lot better compared to the real estate they consume.
Unless you can explain how adding 5 pounds of side force to an already high rating significantly affects the safety rating, I’m going to always say that car seat manufacturers hate large families. I’ve done the math, it doesn’t add up.
Try eating out now…even McDonalds (which I don’t visit) is expensive. Now multiply it by 7. Try finding a home with enough bedrooms and fighting off investors to buy it, and definitely don’t tell your friends that your kids have to share a bedroom, because you’ll get looked at like some sort of monster. Or try fighting the little old lady HOA President that drives around your neighborhood and issues you tickets for your kids bikes in the front lawn.
Screw that lady…so glad I don’t live in a HOA…
Companies in general appeal to DINKs (Dual Income, No Kids), and if they do appeal to kids, they like you to have two. Anymore and you better be loaded. Which brings me to the last point…
Number 1: Society values work, not your family
If you say “I’m a homemaker” as a woman, you get looked down upon. Even if you manage five kids, which involves feeding them, balancing a checkbook, driving them everywhere, answering school emails and helping out on homework…somehow that isn’t “real work.” But you could sit in an office, drink coffee, chit chat with your office mates, and put in a whole 3 hours of work a day, and that’s “real work.”
Don’t worry though, like the Bobs, work will value you up to the point you are told your services are no longer required!
Face it, we stopped valuing stay-at-home parents a while back. We think they are lesser for picking their family over full-time paid employment.
And that’s the rub right there. When you create a toxic environment for people that have or want large families, you will get smaller families. The societal pressure permeates everything, far more than any financial incentive. Even if you got paid $20,000 a year per child, you’d be called a welfare rat for taking the money. It goes farther than even children, because when the point of getting married isn’t to raise kids, it makes it easy to simply “shack up,” which is why the current marriage rate is less than half that in 1976.
Until our society treats raising kids as a noble goal and worthy of the respect it deserves, we will continue to have declining birth rates among the majority of people that feel societal pressure.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
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