Less Workers are having kids...

Quote
cfuter
"Parents make up a smaller share of the U.S. labor force now than at any other time in at least a century...But it’s not because parents aren’t working. It’s because workers aren’t becoming parents."


https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/26/working-parents-are-an-endangered-species-thats-why-democrats-are-talking-child-care/?utm_term=.52c12d6a1f48


Democrats’ child-care proposals, such as the plan put forward by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last week, target an increasingly rare breed: the working parent.

Parents make up a smaller share of the U.S. labor force now than at any other time in at least a century, according to our analysis of Census Bureau and Labor Department data. But it’s not because parents aren’t working. It’s because workers aren’t becoming parents.

[Sen. Elizabeth Warren proposes universal child care, paid for by tax on ultra-millionaires]

In that way, Warren’s plan to provide care for all children up to age 5, free for low-income families and discounted for others, reaches beyond today’s working parents. It even reaches beyond all those who stay home because they can’t afford child care.

Democratic presidential candidates are targeting the substantial group of Americans who avoid having children because they can’t afford the estimated $233,610 it would take to raise a child to age 18. (That number doesn’t include lost earnings.)

We focused on parents with children age 5 and under, but working parents are vanishing across the age spectrum. About 41 percent of workers between the ages of 20 and 54 have a child at home, down from 62 percent in 1968.

The number of working parents isn’t falling just because parents have decided to stay home. The share of parents of children under age 5 who are working or looking for work has remained steady, between 77 and 79 percent, since the late 1990s. Through March 2018, the most recent month for which comparable data is available, it’s at 78 percent.

Instead, it’s likely that working Americans are having fewer children or avoiding parenthood altogether. Birth rates and fertility rates, which account for the number of women of childbearing age, are at their lowest levels on record, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. The record extends from 1909 to 2016, the most recent year for which we have data.

(More in the article link above)

Quote
kittehpeoples
Sounds like they're assuming it's a financial decision across the board and making no allow allowance for the possibility that more people are choosing to be CF.

Quote
craftyzits

Quote
kittehpeoples
Sounds like they're assuming it's a financial decision across the board and making no allow allowance for the possibility that more people are choosing to be CF.

For most, it is a financial decision, for many it is both financial and CF, and for a minority it's CF. Most of the census people are breeders and disregard the growing CF movement. To me it matters not if they regard or disregard.