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Another day, another blue check wondering why things Americans used to take for granted seem to be out of reach, even as they promote the very changes in cultural norms and values that have led to rising costs for families and fewer babies being born. Writer for The Atlantic Olga Khazan recently tweeted in wonder, “how women are supposed to have kids before they’re 35 if they make $40,000 before they’re 35 and childcare is $40,000.”
Conservatives have a very simple answer to this question: be married to someone with a steady income. Finding such a spouse is not always easy, of course, yet her follow-up tweet skirts around the obvious truth that if you stay home with your children you don’t have to pay the equivalent of a full-time income at $20 an hour.
Khazan says staying home to “save money” (notice she did not say “to nurture your children”) “just seems like a high-stakes decision to make when you’re like 32.” Staying home to raise your own children at 32 is a “high stakes” decision, according to the blue check Atlantic writer, while delaying family formation later and later while a woman’s fertility dwindles is what? Empowerment? “The norm?”
New Norms
Norms around family formation have certainly changed in a way that makes having children more difficult. The average age of marriage in 2019 was 30 for men and 28 for women, compared to about 20 and 22 in 1960, leaving less time for women to have more than one or two kids after marriage, the most stable financial environment for child-rearing. Not only has the annual marriage rate hit a new low of 6.1 marriages per 1,000, but the proportion of first-time mothers who are married has declined from 63 percent in 1990 to just 24 percent, while 35 percent of mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree don’t start having babies till they are 30, far more than mothers with lower education attainment.
These trends aren’t the result of chance, but significant cultural shifts. Feminists led more women into higher education and the workforce and to see careers, not marriage and children, as a priority. Birth control and abortion allowed many to stay child-free until their careers were “established” (ever a goal of millennials these days, to not have children or even marry until careers are “established”). Now that this career, this “baby” of sorts, is thriving, women worry that having actual babies will be burdensome both financially and to their careers. If she puts her baby in someone else’s full-time care, the financial burden will be heavy. If she stays home with her babies for the first few years of their lives or drastically …….
Source: https://thefederalist.com/2022/06/23/women-dont-need-to-make-a-lot-of-money-to-start-a-family/
