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this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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that and no one can afford kids
No one has ever been able to afford kids. Kids are fucking expensive!!!
That’s not true. Kids used to pay for themselves. My grandmother had 14 siblings. Many of them started working right after grade 8 and handed over their pay to their parents to help support the family!
child labor, my favorite 😋😋😋
That's why I let my kids play Roblox.
/s
Ok....sure...my grandpas siblings quit school at that age - their mom sent them to work instead because they could earn a quarter a day. I'm not sure that was really paying for themselves.
They also worked on the farm and helped in but kitchen. Life was very different back then. Medical care wasn’t nearly as advanced, accessible, and expensive as it is today. School was brief and free, not an enormous expense like it is today. Food was cheap, just labour-intensive because you had to grow it yourself. Housing was cheap too: you largely built it yourself and you didn’t need 15 bedrooms for 15 kids: 3-4 would suffice.
IIRC one kid totals an average of 250k in expenses over 18 years, for simplicity we'll say 240k and 20 years,
One kid costs about $1k a month right now.
What adds insult to injury is how those costs can be subsidized, free school meals alone would SIGNIFICANTLY lighten the load on lower class families, improve educational outcomes, improve child nutritional outcomes through regulation of what's on the menu, and even improve sociability since kids now have additional settings to encounter their friends in where their parents and teachers are supervising to correct bad behavior.
Plus it adds an incentive for rich kids to mingle too since being the one person who's not at school dinner because their parents can practically hire a private wait staff and meal planner is immediately going to single you out and there is NOTHING that hurts a kid more socially than sticking out for something like being a rich kid.
Good point.