It is not hard to have a bunch of kids and give them a good life

American women are “having fewer babies,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Specifically the U.S. fertility rate is considerably low the “replacement” level required for a stable population. That is in part because if “life circumstances” that are “impeding” husbands and wives “from having the children that they desire.” What are these “life circumstances?” Well:

“People aren’t able to have the kids that they want,” said [sociologists Karen Benjamin] Guzzo. “There’s a growing feeling that if you were to have kids, you really need to provide something for them. You have to do all these things to give your kids advantages because the world is really tough right now. In a world where social mobility is limited and there’s a weak social safety net, I think a lot of people look around and say, ‘Well, maybe not.’”

This all feels pretty silly, doesn’t it? This idea that people are less able to “provide something for [their kids]” in the modern world—look, never in human history has it been more possible to provide children with a stable, healthy, rich, meaningful, rewarding upbringing. It is really not difficult. I understand that, in the U.S. at least, we tend to romanticize the midcentury years—maybe from about 1946-1969 or so—as this kind of Golden Era for raising children, when a single breadwinner could earn enough to support his wife and two or three kids and still have enough money left over to buy a Craftsman house and a Mercury. We are led to believe that those years are over and aren’t coming back. But in fact they’re still here. It’s more than doable for a family to structure itself that way; in some ways it’s even easier than it was for our parents.

There are lots of good jobs out there; there are lots of upper-level management positions in those jobs that pay well, and they are increasingly going unfilled. Go to work, work hard, be a good employee, and you will rise up the ladder and be paid well. Even lower-level positions can offer a serious income if you’re willing to work hard: The skilled trades, the plumbers and HVAC techs and welders, can out-earn most workers with even minimal effort. If someone picks a field and puts in even a modest amount of work to be a good, reliable employee, he can earn a lot of money in relatively short order.

Nobody really seems to want to admit this or discuss it. There’s this weird disaffection thing going around where lots of people, mostly young men, like to complain that there’s just no way for them to earn a decent living to support a family. You see this a lot in Internet discourse, which is always going to be disproportionately whiny and grumpy, but it’s bled over into the real world as well. And it’s just all so silly. Of course you can provide a good life for your kids; you can provide a better one for them than your parents did for you if you give it even half a shot. It’s not really that hard, honestly.

At bottom, of course, the issue isn’t “social mobility” and “safety nets,” it’s that a growing number of people just don’t want to have kids. The cultural priorities have shifted. This isn’t a mystery. Many people don’t want to deal with what they see as the hassle of having kids. They want to get off work, come home, drink, watch Netflix, eat dinner at 9pm and stay up until 2:30 am watching more Netflix. You can’t do that when you have kids, not sustainably anyway, so people have to make a choice between the two. And the cultural incentives are impelling them to choose the Netflix instead.

A contributing factor, of course, is that there’s no longer any pressure to have kids—from parents, from friends, from institutions, from churches, from doctors. The onetime-common civic factors that normalized the conception and rearing of children have all mostly stopped urging young people to do it. Everybody seems kind of embarrassed and unwilling to talk about it—about the joys of having children, the endless rewards, the deep and fulfilling gratification of it all, the minimal difficulties relative to the maximal benefits. In years past older people would see younger adults without kids and say, “When are you going to start a family!” Now they say, “Eh, there’s a weak social safety net. Don’t do it.” So of course we shouldn’t be surprised when more and more of them don’t.

The moral of the story is that, if you want, you and your spouse can have several kids and still provide for them and give them a good life. Don’t be hoodwinked into believing otherwise. Make a big family, get a good job, and have a good life. It’ll all be fine.