The magic wall that will prevent demographic changes in the US population is as unrealistic as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. However, the virtual wall created by unAmerican politicians that keeps the population from trusting a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is very real. Fear and ignorance are the tools that politicians use to build walls when they should be using trust and knowledge to build bridges instead.
The stagnant middle-class wages have forced couples to both go to work to pay rent and expenses, deferring having children.
" … According to a recent CDC study, the gap between the number of children American women want to have and the number they’re likely to have “has risen to the highest level in forty years.” The number of women who want a child in the future has only increased since 2002. And the only age group that’s seen a slight uptick in fertility rates are women between forty and forty-four.
Asking women to wait to have kids until they have launched a career and saved up enough money is just the obverse of commanding women to stay at home and make babies for their husbands.
“Americans are improving their ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies far faster than they are improving the ability to achieve desired pregnancy,” as the New York Times put it. With the most expensive health care in the world (and tens of millions still uninsured), decades of stagnant wages, and skyrocketing education and housing costs, having kids has never been so expensive. The Department of Agriculture estimates that it’ll cost an average of $233,000 to raise a child born in 2015 through her seventeenth birthday — and that doesn’t even include college tuition, another uniquely American exorbitance. More and more, bringing a child into the world is a dream many simply can’t afford. …"
The magic wall that will prevent demographic changes in the US population is as unrealistic as the tooth fairy, Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. However, the virtual wall created by unAmerican politicians that keeps the population from trusting a government of the people, by the people, and for the people is very real. Fear and ignorance are the tools that politicians use to build walls when they should be using trust and knowledge to build bridges instead.
The stagnant middle-class wages have forced couples to both go to work to pay rent and expenses, deferring having children.
" … According to a recent CDC study, the gap between the number of children American women want to have and the number they’re likely to have “has risen to the highest level in forty years.” The number of women who want a child in the future has only increased since 2002. And the only age group that’s seen a slight uptick in fertility rates are women between forty and forty-four.
Asking women to wait to have kids until they have launched a career and saved up enough money is just the obverse of commanding women to stay at home and make babies for their husbands.
“Americans are improving their ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies far faster than they are improving the ability to achieve desired pregnancy,” as the New York Times put it. With the most expensive health care in the world (and tens of millions still uninsured), decades of stagnant wages, and skyrocketing education and housing costs, having kids has never been so expensive. The Department of Agriculture estimates that it’ll cost an average of $233,000 to raise a child born in 2015 through her seventeenth birthday — and that doesn’t even include college tuition, another uniquely American exorbitance. More and more, bringing a child into the world is a dream many simply can’t afford. …"
https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/08/28/is-it-getting-harder-for-american-women-to-combine-work-and-family