As backup caregivers to some other primary parents are great. As a primary it’s not necessarily reliable.

I don’t know what neighbors you have that will watch two young children for free.

My wife might stay home if her job won’t let her telecommute after we move. But the reason we wanted her working isn’t because we want to have dinners out. It’s because I have bad health and mixed job security, so while I’m doing well now that could change on a dime (I’ve had enough near death hospital stays to be worried about being the sole provider). So if something happens to me we need an income to pay the mortgage, and if nothing happens then our mortgage is like 10% gross income and it gets paid off early.

And we are a lot better off then most. Many of our friends have a combined income equal to my single income. It’s not clear how they would make it work on a single income.

There seems to be this idea that people just waste money willy billy and it’s easy to afford everything if you don’t eat out. Then you find out that what they really mean is cram into a tiny apartment and be one illness away from bankruptcy.

They don’t call it that.

They’ve heard that children are expensive, but it’s FOMO more than that.

Bring your baby on a plane? To the beach and the restaurant? Drink no alcohol at all for several months?

Most normal women definitely want children. Not so clear about men, genetically, but in a healthy society, there is a big support for children.

“Sexual liberation” was to promote those folks, especially men, who wanted lots of free sex without kids. A lot of college students seem to want that; I recall 40 years ago as a college student *I* wanted that. Now I think it was a mistake.

Arnold says:
I still think that replacing means-tested entitlements with a UBI would make low-wage men more attractive as marriage partners.

Any and every low-income gov’t program should be changed to ensure that married folk in that program get as much as two unmarried folk, with any number of kids.

The Liber ideal of (Rand and Heinlein both) “responsible promiscuity” is in conflict with having an optimal society for raising kids, tho it might be optimal for those, like Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, who never raised kids. It’s sub-optimal for society, and very sub-optimal for the raising of kids.

Most folks can live pretty well with a 6+ year old car that runs OK, out of new car warranty. Available for what, $3k-$6k?
Plus some uncertain $1k/year repair expense.

Kids can be similar. Library books instead of new books. Home/ friend/ neighbor care instead of day care.
Or, and here’s a heretical thought, MOTHER care instead of day care – live on one male husband salary, in a smaller house, with the mother doing almost all the cooking and looking after the kids.
Choose that option for first child, and marginal cost of new kids is really really low.

No DINK (double income no kids) lifestyle of lunches and dinners out, tho.

Lifestyle choices dominate in “cost of kids”.

It’s terrible if gov’t programs are pushing against marriage, tho, and many do so. Those policies should be changed so that fathers marrying mothers is always a better gov’t benefit choice.

“People used to squat kids in rice paddies and still have fulfilling family lives. ”

And people used to have 8 kids and hoped 2 survived.

“alcohol as $500 a month on booze alone was an easy transfer”

This is easily a bottle of wine a day. Are you ok?

What employees want with jobs is the ability to keep the comfortable routine going and have a secure stream of income coming in, but always to keep an eye out for something better and to retain the option value of trading up to a superior job the moment the opportunity presents itself. You might call this “Hyper-ergosy”, you might call it. Anything that tends to interfere, impair, or penalize the immediate exercise of this option strikes the typical employee as, well, ‘oppressive’.

On the other side of the coin, the employer faced with employee who just up and quits one day to take a job with a rival firm, and who will have a hard time finding an adequate replacement, feels that this is at least somewhat improper, if not altogether a devastating ‘betrayal’.

Now, there can be little day-to-day operational difference between being actually married and functionally married. But there is a big social difference, which includes this “option value” and which makes it much easier to trade-up.

When people ask about your situation, saying you are “Single and currently living with my girlfriend, but you know, it’s complicated.” (and leaving the matter of kids vague) sounds a lot different than saying “I’m married and my wife and have a kid and live in an apartment up the street.”

The existential-level sexual anxiety about your partner dumping you to trade up, or about not having the ability to dump and trade up, is behind a lot of the traditions we had, and dynamics we currently observe.

I think most people just don’t think about these things very well.

I think this is very true but, after reading Part I on gender in Charles Murray’s “Human Diversity”, I think I’d substitute “most people” with “most men”. Women seem to have the life-balance equation front-and-center. This is why I have hope for the technical fields that currently have low female participation; these firms can improve communication about human interaction in teams and they can de-emphasize unproductive 12-hour-endurance signalling with life-balance oriented incentives.

With kids it’s rather the same. Our analysis of when to have kids hinged on the fact that they will spend the same number of years in our house regardless of when we have them, so it’s mostly a matter of choosing when we want that to be and what parts of life we want to be before and after. For my friends it seemed to almost completely be a matter of, once again, not wanting to be tied down.

I think most people just don’t think about these things very well.