To think all of these people can afford children they just don't want them

[Surgicalprecison]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g7x5kl5l8o

These articles on the BBC lately show me people's priorities in life have shifted, they don't want children enough to compromise on their current lifestyles.

So i take it that that is the profession you will be encouraging your kids into

Do you mean travel as in commuting and other essential travel - or holidays and leisure trips? If the latter, I guess you'd just instinctively drop or massively scale back on these if you had young children.

Apart from anything else, the excitement of a couple of adults booking a last-minute getaway and having a fantastic whistlestop visit very much loses its allure when you have to factor in all the tasks, responsibilities, limitations, stuff and added costs of having kids with you!

A lot of the budgeting in the 'can we afford kids?' scenarios seem to be people weighing up non-essentials that they currently enjoy with the costs of having potential children - which is very wise and good. It's just that, often, you can have either the luxuries OR children, and you just have to weigh it up and decide which is more important to you. Either choice is equally valid, but you very often simply cannot have both.

It's not just money, but time as well. You might be passionate about free or very cheap hobbies and spend all weekend and every free weekend doing them. Bring children into the mix, and they're largely gone (or at least heavily reduced) in the blink of an eye!

Exactly

'Affording children' is a relative term.

My parents had six children. We all survived so in that sense, they could 'afford' us, but childhood was a grim, cold, miserable experience as a result.

Affording children and providing them with a decent standard of living, is a completely different matter.

I waited until my 40s to have a child because I wasn't willing to inflict such a miserable experience on anyone else.

The average income in London is much higher though. £53k would be hard. I only manage on that sort of income because I bought nearly 20 years ago, and am long past the nursery years.

Exactly. I grew up poor, in insecure housing, not always food for the family, always the odd one out at school as couldn’t afford things the other children took for granted. I did not want that for my children. I was desperate for a second child, but the mortgage and bills were £1,600 a month, nursery was nearly £2,000 a month, for a 2 bed flat in a not great part of London. Then my partner left and I was left with those costs of £3,600 a month plus food and nappies etc, on a take home of less than half that. I lost the flat and went PT + benefits whilst sofa surfing with a toddler. I got back on my feet, and back on the property ladder a few years later once DD was at school and I could afford to go back to FT work, but being homeless with a toddler was awful, so damned right my decision to stick at one was financially motivated! I was lucky that the equity I had was enough, combined with money from my grandparents (basically their entire life savings) to get back on the ladder after the nursery years, but it was hell.

I bet a lot of the people saying if people ‘really wanted’ children they would do it, move somewhere cheaper etc, would be squawking in outrage if large numbers of people actually did just that, left their jobs and support networks to go to poorer areas and rely on benefits! It’s like they haven’t realised that moving away from jobs might mean people having to claim unemployment benefit…

Your kids will be old too one day tho, at least the childfree are not creating future old people who will need care. So it evens out really, plus having kids is terrible for the planet.

completely valid point.
The people saying we need future generations to care for the elderly, are they talking from experience, have they or their grown up children cared for other people’s elderly parents or their own.From personal experience, it’s poorly paid, unsociable hours, standard.Expectations, pressures of doing more overtime, on top of full time hours, due to understaffing.Huge responsibilities (administration of all medication, record keeping, personal care, liaising with GP’s, social workers etc)And as a job, it’s not valued in society, even though carers, are NVQ level 3/4 qualified and have to do other in-house training to be up to date with all policies etc, yet are still classed as unskilled workers.
It is a vocation, you have to have the qualities, empathy to be able to do this role, so why is working in a residential home or caring in the community, so undervalued.
Apologies for the long post, we have got a growing population of elderly people, so this is relevant for future generations.

We are adopters too and for so many families it becomes necessary to drop to one income.
So avoiding the childcare years might not mean being financially better off!

But the main point -we do need more children to be born in society to both care for us in old age and to do our jobs when we retire.
We can't keep importing care staff either as the countries they come from also have low birth rates.

@drspouse Did you read the above post?
why would the younger generation choose to look after the elderly as a career, when the role is so undervalued, poorly paid.And that’s why there are more people from different countries, for economic reasons, who are use to being poorly paid, working in the health care system in the UK.

While my husband and I could afford to have children, we've never wanted them largely because, as you say, we 'don't want to compromise our lifestyle'.

We have a fantastic life, so why on earth would we want to do that? I also fail to see why it's anyone else's business. 🤷‍♀️

And?

Everyone’s idea of affording children is different, some people will be happy to bring up children in rented accommodation, sharing a bedroom, not having much space, not being able to save for their future etc and others will want much more.

If prople feel they can’t afford it based on the lifestyle they would want for themselves and their children, then they can’t afford it. It’s not really for anyone else to say.

I wouldn’t have wanted children in the positions of any of the people in the article. We had our children when we had bought a house and were in a good position financially and career wise, where we could provide the lifestyle we wanted for ourselves and children. For us that was owning our own home with enough bedrooms for the number of children we wanted, enough spare to save for them, help with uni, lots of outdoor space etc. We could have had them sooner and had less, but that wasn’t what we wanted, so we’d have classed it and unaffordable at that time.

Also, some people just don’t want children. Having children shouldn’t be the default, where those that don’t have them are thought of as odd and have to justify it. Hopefully not having kids will be seen as a valid way of life when it becomes more common. I have a friend who doesn’t have kids and she’s always asked why she doesn’t have them, which is fucking bizarre!

don't have children so others' children havw less job competition, uni competition and housing competition. Less people, lower rent❤️ Just thinking of others xx

I think it's pointless nitpicking to debate if someone can "truly" afford something or not.

The majority of the time when people (who aren't living paycheck to paycheck) say they "can't afford" something, it's not completely literal that they absolutely couldn't find the money in any way. It means they can't find the money without sacrificing something else they prioritise (savings, pension, other spending). Yes, deep down, that ultimately means they "just didn't want" to do the thing enough to find the cash. But that's a meaningless distinction really.

We're not having a second child largely because we don't feel we can afford it. We have a relatively high income so of course we could make it happen if we really were determined. But that would mean a quality of life for our children (real and hypothetical) and ourselves that we don't want. After the monthly outgoings that we can't or won't cut down on, we just don't have the money to fund nursery for a second child nevermind all the nice things we want to do for any kids we have. If we won the lottery, we'd probably have another. So it doesn't feel wrong to say it's a problem of being able to afford it.

I think it’s also that people (women) are waking up to having other options and how hard having kids is without the support of local family.
My partner and I are not from money, I earn well now which is a pretty recent thing but because we had to scrape together a 10% deposit (which many people are not lucky enough to be able to do!) our mortgage on a 3 bed house is £3500 a month with current interest rates. That’s in London, but we can’t live further out due to our working hours as we need to pick up our daughter since we have no family around here (we’d likely also spend any savings on travel given how expensive it is).
Our nursery fees are £1700 a month, so if we had another baby that would be total outgoings of £6900 on just mortgage and childcare, not including any bills. Our household income is £7800. So yes, we’d have some left, but frankly for as hard as we both work I’d like to have a bit more than that. Therefore maybe we can “afford” to have more - but why on earth would we?

I'm with you OP. 60 grand in Wakefield and can't afford a kid is bollocks, they must have a huge house or something. Plus the first guy who won't have a kid in rented can piss off, plenty of us had to.

(i.e had to if we wanted a kid at all, which we did.)

@Whatamess23 no-one is saying there is anything wrong with with not wanting kids, why do people keep yelling that on the thread?

There is nothing wrong with not wanting to have kids. It's just weird to say you can't afford them when you can but are not going to anyway. They should just own it.

Exactly.
It seems somebody somewhere is annoyed whatever we do.
I have one child but would never dream about questioning why someone else had more or less than me!

Why can be 'piss off'? He wants to buy which is his choice.

You didn't 'have to'. If it would have been something you weren't willing to do then you could have not.

The man in the article obviously has a lifestyle in mind that makes having children unaffordable to him. It's not about you.

You're right. We're getting a flood of hand-wringing articles about the "fertility crisis", but outright blaming women is a bad look if you're not madly right-wing so mainstream/left outlets have to blame the economy instead. Because if the answer is simply that people prefer a child-free life, even if they could afford children, you can't really do anything about that and you just have to accept a plummeting birth rate.

Not one woman I know who really wanted children has ultimately let financial uncertainty stop her. (I'm not talking about women who popped babies out into destitute lifestyles, I'm talking women who worried about money because of self-employed precarity, or job losses, or uncertainty over where they'd have to live, and had babies anyway.)

On the other hand among my child-free friends, money is sometimes brought up as a factor, but just one of many, and even if the couple were ambivalent rather than actively not wanting kids, they ultimately didn't have a strong enough desire for them.

I know people who had fewer kids than they wanted because of financial worries but I don't know a single person who really wanted kids but then had none because of money.

Tricky one, less children mean less tax take to pay for the public services we all want and the pensions we expect to have OR we tax people more, which judging by the reaction to the Budget we don't want either..... even though ex BOE monetary committee members are saying was absolutely needed to stabilise the public spending.

Hence we are allowing more and more migration but thats a dead end, the migrants will need care too ( leading to more migration) but the vast majority don't pay much tax....

I think we need to bite the bullet, limit migration (a lot) pay more tax and find different ways to care for the elderly.