Has it become too expensive to have kids?

I think it's around $300,000 it costs to raise a kid today. So Jeff and I are going to discuss this. Andrew Bagley had a great video that I think unpacked the problem brilliantly, but does not actually get into the solution. So listen to every part of how he describes the problem. Jeff and I are going to dive into this, but then we're going to look at how can we think about this totally differently. So check this out. Children didn't get expensive. They got unnecessary. And that should terrify you. Here's a comparison that sounds insulting until you sit with it. Children are like horses. In the early 1900s, major cities were drowning in horses. They powered transportation, hauled goods, made economies move. People didn't keep horses because they loved horses. They kept them because they needed them. Then Henry Ford

dropped the Model T. Within a few years, the need collapsed. Not because horses got more expensive,

but because cars did the job better. Today, the only people who keep horses are the ones who

genuinely love them, despite the cost, the mess,

and the work. An economist named Catherine Pakaluk argues children are going through the

same transition and the data backs her up. For most of human history, children met three

needs nobody had to consciously think about. They worked in the fields, in the family business,

and in the household economy. They provided security. If something happened to you, older children

kept things running, and they were your retirement plan, not metaphorically, literally.

Then machines replaced the labor, insurance and dual income replaced the security,

and Social Security replaced the retirement math. The need didn't fade slowly. It got systematically

outsourced. Program by program, technology by technology until one day,

children were just optional. But here's the part that should actually unsettle you. Your grandparents

didn't decide to have kids. That's just what you did. The default. You're the first generation

that has to actively choose it, against a culture that models the good life as optimized, unencumbered,

and free. Behavioral science is unambiguous about

what happens when something shifts from default to deliberate opt-in. Participation collapses. No subsidy

fixes a default shift. Japan tried bonuses, incentives, paid parental leave for years. Birth rates kept

falling because you can subsidize diapers, you can't subsidize desire. The fertility crisis isn't just an economic problem. It's a meaning problem.

Ask almost any parent who genuinely loves their kids whether they'd wish they'd had fewer.

Almost none of them say yes.

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