Whatever it is today, I’m sure they will change their minds later on. One of my husband’s niece had her first kid at 38, and her second kid at 40, so that will most likely be their model. My oldest brother’s daughter just got married last year, I’ve heard plan of a first child this year, so possibly first kid at around 33-34, this is after years of training as a specialist after getting her M.D.
When the men returned from the horrors of WWII, the first thing they wanted to do was marry their sweethearts, buy a house and raise kids. Hence the baby boom. That generation realized that children are a joy and much more meaningful to a fulfilled life than any job or career advancement.
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Not sure if my kids will have kids - I think because they are boys they haven’t thought much about it. Today, they’d probably say no (messy, loud, costly etc) but it isn’t a well thought out or firm position. Like many of their compatriots, however, they do worry/think about climate change, and, more recently, things in Ukraine. They have the sense that it will be very challenging for them to attain the same lifestyle they have enjoyed with us - that, unfortunately, is probably true. On the flip side they aren’t obsessed with material things and want to do meaningful (to them) work of some kind as opposed to chasing the Almighty $$. Looking at these issues more globally, child bearing has been on the decline for a while - the US is finally following in the footsteps of Western Europe (and some Asian countries) in this regard. There probably isn’t one reason for it but a mixture of factors. Now that women are under less pressure to have kids, many are opting out (as some would have done in the past had that been an acceptable path).
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Millennial here. I wouldn’t say I’m especially pessimistic about the future, but I do take a keen interest in foreign affairs. Each year I do a few months of fieldwork in a somewhat unstable part of the Middle East, so the recent wars and unrest in the region have shaped my career and research projects.
My boyfriend and I probably fall into this category. We’re academics making a decent amount of money, but we’re in no rush to raise kids or even get married although we’ve been dating for about 7 years. I suppose we might decide we want kids one day, but neither of us feels pressured to have them or that we need them to feel fulfilled. My recently married sister is much more eager to have kids, much to the relief of my parents.
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My kids have not talked to me about having kids. Will have to see what they decide to do. One of the cousins close in age to them recently had a baby—may motivate S. Another cousin near their age is getting married in November—original wedding had been scheduled for spring 2020.
S has been in serious relationship for many many years now (I’m not even sure how long). If the wedding happens as scheduled, they should be invited and D will finally meet GF.
I don’t think it’s about having kids or not. More of a glass half full or glass half empty.
I was talking to my oldest about Covid and saying how it has been so hard on all the kids. Took up most of high school and was a rough ride. My kid without missing a beat said, you know what it has made people more appreciative for what they have. They are happy to be out in nature, appreciate seeing friends and even realize that classes can be fun. THey also want to travel and no one cares about things that they used to.
OK, well that sure did make me feel better. My kids don’t internalize politics the way most of my friends do. They aren’t trying to change minds and getting angry when others have a different opinion. They like to listen. They have grown up in a world where people are crazy 7x24 on social media etc. Nothing shocks them. No lie surprises them. They laugh a lot about it all. Honestly, I have a lot of faith in this generation. I do hope my kids will realize that the most important things are intangible.
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I don’t think life is tougher for young people, but they literally feel the planet is dying and are concerned what possible children might face. At least the ones I know. I am sure that COVID enhanced that catastrophic mood, and maybe the Ukraine situation as well if nukes are threatened.
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Optimism versus pessimism may be due to the expected change of conditions in the future, rather than the current condition or changes in the past. For example, someone in a comfortable position now looking at decline in the future will have a pessimistic mood, while someone in a poor position now but looking at improving conditions in the future will have an optimistic mood.
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Had a conversation with DD today regarding this subject. From her experience with friends…
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Those that don’t want kids don’t want them because they like their life, their life style and don’t want the burden.
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Some are worried about cost in our area. Kids are still an option, but finances concern them.
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Some are fence sitters…if a future partner has real strong feelings one way or the other they could go either way.
No one, according to DD, is in a panic about the geo political situation - at least not in relation to having or not having kids. She doesn’t know anyone who is not having kids due to a moral sense of obligation to the environment or the planet.
She lives in a very liberal, environmentally conscious area.
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Millennial chiming in!
Although I agree that at the grand scale the average human is better off now than in any other time in human history, American millennials are, on average, materially worse off than their parents.
It’s important to keep in mind that the parents on here are generally better off financially and also more invested in their kids than typical American parents. So if we’re looking at the sample of CC kids, we’re probably getting a very optimistic and unrepresentative sample of millennials, their prospects, and their viewpoints about the future.
Objectively, housing is more expensive and most are stuck renting. Typical wages are much lower. A college education is appreciably more expensive and overall less effective at helping young people attain a middle class lifestyle. Many if not most millennials are leaving college with substantial debt (which they were encouraged to take on by well-meaning adults in their lives) that they can’t pay off with stagnant wages/limited prospects (even those with degrees in STEM). Our generation is finding the basic standard of living that we were taught to expect as a baseline (a modest single family home with a car and maybe a couple of kids) is not only mostly out of reach on the timeline we expected (our 20s) but possibly completely unattainable in our lifetimes.
On another hand, perhaps that expectation was always unsustainable and unreasonable (most in the world don’t live this way), but as a millennial I feel like I’ve spent my entire lifetime feeling a day late and a dollar short. I’ve managed to make a decent life for myself (not struggling and able to save) with hard work some luck. That said, as my husband and I finally find ourselves in the financial position to look at houses, the market is exploding and normal folks like us are getting priced out by the massively wealthy further building on that wealth. I worked hard, I kept my debt minimal, got a PhD with highly sought-after technical skills and got into “the sexiest job of the 21st century” and I still feel like I can’t “make it.” And I’m materially better off than most of my same age peers!
On the topic of kids, my husband and I fall into the “want kids but probably only one” camp (though unfortunately making that a reality has been an unexpected struggle for us). A lot of my friends cite climate change as a reason for not having kids. Some are just not into the lifestyle. Most don’t really think too much about it because it’s economically not feasible for them to consider. In most cases, I don’t think it’s a “I’m lazy and it’s too much work” thing so much as many in my generation are stuck in the rise-and-grind, side-hustle zeitgeist and the idea of raising kids between two adults who work 60+ hour weeks is, again, not feasible.
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That’s an affliction not limited to millennials! But I take your point on the economics from your excellent post and agree with it.
More generally, to the question posed by the OP, I think all times have their issues. However, climate change and the pandemic are real issues facing our young folks (and old).
The Ukraine war is not great, but we’ve sadly had several of those episodes: USSR-Afghanistan; Iranian hostages from the US Embassy; First Gulf War; 9/11; Second Gulf War; Russia-Chechnya; Russia-Georgia; Russia-Crimea. While the situation is currently very bad, we as a country and a world have been through things like this before. Granted, it’s a nuclear superpower doing the bad stuff, but we’ve been through that several times. I am trying to teach my family that there are things you can change, and things you can’t.
But, as your circle of influence grows, your ability to effectuate change also grows.
Wall Street investors are buying up “starter” homes and turning them into rentals. Seems that turning entrants into the housing market into permanent renters of homes (by removing homes from the supply that can be bought by individuals and families, forcing them to rent what they would otherwise have bought) may be more long term profitable for Wall Street than having them temporarily (over 15-30 years) rent the money to buy the homes. Of course, limiting people’s financial choices accelerates the already increasing income and wealth inequality.
I was in Munich for Chernoblyl and had my first kid there a few years later.
My childhood was marked by assassinations and the Vietnam War, the 1968 Czechoslovakia , but we pulled out of Vietnam spring of my senior year and I always felt like things were getting better.
My kids were marked by being in the NYC area for 9/11, and the followup neverending war. My younger son, especially, who majored in International Relations, wrote half his college papers about nuclear arms control and who is now in the Navy told me in all seriousness that he was reconciled to the fact that somehow he had ended up in “the bad timeline”. It sure feels like that lately.
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Both of my millennial kids should be able to buy at starter home with somebody, may not be the home they want but it’s a starter home with their own money, I’ve been checking the real estate market of their current areas. They are in much better shape than my husband and I at that age. I bought my starter home at the age of 28, my husband at age 30.
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I have an elderly aunt and several elderly cousins (in their 90’s) and when I have a bad day I call them for perspective.
There’s nothing like hearing about sleeping in a tube station in London during the blitz (like many citizens of Ukraine are doing tonight) and not knowing if the boarding house you live in is going to be standing when you emerge in the morning for some perspective.
Nothing like hearing about the refugee experience- living in a DP camp waiting to hear if ANY country on earth will take you in (and you can’t go back to Poland- where you escaped the gas chambers by luck and the skin of your teeth) for some perspective.
Etc. I don’t need to lecture you all on history. But I don’t think the geopolitical angst of today is meaningfully more terrifying than that of recent history. You likely live in the same community as people who fled Viet Nam, Somalia, Uganda, or are Holocaust survivors. Seek them out if you don’t have family members who can teach you. There are for sure terrifying things going on, but to assume that young adults in the USA today have it “worse” because they don’t know if they can afford to buy a home is the literal meaning of insanity. There are kids their age around the world who don’t know if they can buy cooking oil or afford a $2 antibiotic).
Some perspective helps the doldrums for sure. And just to set the record straight- it wasn’t that long ago, that getting married and buying a house before you turned 35 was NOT the societal norm in this country. It was very common (certainly in immigrant families) for young marrieds to live with one set of parents for years while everyone diligently worked and put aside enough money for the younger generation to be able to move out. My grandparents described what sounded horrible to me as a kid hearing their stories- three and sometimes four generations tripled up in tiny apartments or houses. They told the stories with gusto and love-- and certainly, nobody worried about childcare when the parents left for work since there was always a random unemployed cousin or aunt hanging around happy to pitch in.
It isn’t “new” that it takes two incomes to enter (or in our own generation- maintain) a middle class lifestyle. What’s new is that economists and sociologists were happy to ignore the families where the women (mothers, single women, grandmothers) were already working in order to put food on the table.
Brief blip of the 50’s and 60’s where the ideal was a full time mom at home. Brief- and heavily romanticized by the newly created TV sitcom. But farm wives always worked, what about them? The industrial age in this country was fueled by immigrant women working in factories and sweatshops. And once the men quit their jobs to put on a uniform during both wars… the women took their places on assembly lines.
I had a working mom during a time when many women in town did not work. But by and large they were affluent white women married to professionals. Black women worked. Latina women worked. Every other ethnic/refugee/immigrant group’s women worked.
We can’t extrapolate and romanticize from one subset of society (it didn’t take two incomes to afford a house and a car) when that was not the norm overall.
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What @blossom said times 1000.
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This hasn’t actually changed. Many many immigrants still live like this.
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Of course, that’s my point. Those of us who are lucky enough to have a different reality (and perhaps have kids who assume that EVERYONE lives in a home they own, with just their nuclear family) don’t have to look very far (a generation ago in their own family, or to their neighbors) to see that it is NOT always the norm!
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Your passage reminds me of many things. I wish you and your husband all the best. As someone born right after the boomers, I was always 5 years away from the many economic booms yet hurt by the demographics of that boom.
We had kids late and both of us worked those 70-80 hour a week jobs, for many years both of us traveled, often internationally. Paid great but it was exhausting. We eventually went to a single income family with me working part-time from home. It just wasn’t possible to have both of us traveling internationally and raising kids.
I do think generation matters. Both my spouse and I made a great income that increased quickly in the 1990’s (being in a great field helps). I only had a graduate degree but that was not common in the early 1990’s. I also believe that incomes seem to have really stagnated for the last 20 years. I paid college graduates with English/humanities degrees 50-55K in 1997-9. We couldn’t find people due to the .com boom. Wages haven’t moved. Prices for houses have almost tripled.
Today, our nieces and nephews make 60-65k out of college and have 100K of undergrad debt. Many don’t work for companies but have more of a freelance thing going. No healthcare/401K, or insurance. Their debt is crippling. They can’t buy a house or even a Condo and they often don’t settle down. I hope things change. So far, with our large family no one under 30 has hit the trifecta of college graduation, owning a house and having a kid. Most have just graduated. It’s tough.
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Excellent realistic post.
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