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comment by snoodog
snoodog  ·  2851 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The families that can't afford summer

    This seems to be a "Uh oh - I had kids and they're really expensive" problem

This is a real problem in the western world. Having a population maintenance number of kids (2 or fewer) should not this darn expensive. The lack of government provided child care services in the US is a real problem that helps create the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Part of the investment in our future comes from investing on our children and not punishing parents for having a normal amount of kids (I do think there should be large financial disincentives for having more than 2).

    - Unreasonable Expectations.

Part of those are are from the person but its also a product of societies expectations. We expect the same levels of acceptable risks from the poor as we do from the well off. 30 years ago you could let your 6 year old ride a bus stay home and play in the neighborhood. These days if you even let your kid of of sight at the playground they call CPS on you. The level of acceptable risk when from low risk like 1E-5 to something crazy low like 1E-7 and costs have increased to match.

Our society expects more and more supervision of kids and is happy to shift the costs onto those who have kids regardless of their ability to actually pay for these services. Its like were trying to intentionally price poor people out of the ability to have kids, but are instead just forcing more parents and kids into perpetual poverty.





illu45  ·  2851 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Another issue worth considering is the frankly terrible sex ed that you find in most American public schools. steve isn't wrong about the issue of choosing to have kids, but I wonder how many of the children in the article described were unplanned.

Yet another issue would be immigration, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.

kleinbl00  ·  2851 days ago  ·  link  ·