Jeremy sends me an article from the Times that suggests that the world-wide dropoff in fertility rates has more to do with a lack of housing, rather than other variables such as women’s employment or lifestyle issues.
But at a time when no cocktail conversation is complete without a discussion of real estate, the boomlet raises a question that has long interested social scientists: What is the relationship between fertility and real estate?
In the wide-open mortgage climate early this decade, creative loan products allowed more people than ever to buy homes, often a precursor to having children. In 2006, the babies arrived — a reminder, perhaps, that if you build it, they will toddle.
I would describe this as the Goldfish argument. The bigger the tank, the bigger the fish.
I have to admit that when we moved to the suburbs, we did toss around the idea of making another. When we lived in a cramped apartment with the four floor walk up, it was physically impossible to lug another kid up the stairs. Also, there was no place to store the kid in the apartment. Maybe if the third kid slept in the bathtub, we could have managed. The lack of kid storage space and the stairs hike capped our kid quotient to two, and there was really no discussion about it.
We moved to the suburbs with a novelties like a driveway and a dishwasher. Suddenly, spawning again was an option. Steve and I tossed the idea around for a while. But the negatives outweighed the positives. I started calculating how old I would be at my kid’s high school graduation and at the kid’s wedding. I hadn’t had a teaching job in a couple of years and was antsy to get out of the house. Ian was also going through a really tough time. He was two and he screamed all day in frustration, because he couldn’t talk. I was afraid. I’m not sure if we made the right decision or not, but that ship has sailed.
So, I’m not sure I buy the goldfish argument. In our case, making more babies involved a series of variables — space being one.
Jeremy asks what I tell people who ask if we’re going to have more kids.
I haven’t gotten that question in a while. I choose to believe that it is because my youngest is now five, and people assume that we’re done. I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I look old, old, old. My usual answer, a few years back, was to simulate self-embowelment with a sword.
Apt. 11d 
“In the wide-open mortgage climate early this decade, creative loan products allowed more people than ever to buy homes, often a precursor to having children.”
I totally disagree with this, since the availability of “creative” financing went hand-in-hand with an explosion in the cost of real estate.
Even though it’s a dark hole with a weird floorplan, has foundation issues, and is scheduled to be bulldozed in about ten years, I LOVE our 2000 sq. ft. rental house, which is the biggest house I’ve ever lived in. There are four of us, and we haven’t finished unpacking, but there’s still lots of storage, and both the kids’ rooms have two closets and are large enough that we could theoretically add an extra kid to each room. Plus, we’ve got a garage. Having a place to store bulky baby items is a very big deal. I have a love-hate relationship with the yard. On the one hand, it’s great the kids can go outside and run around and make a lot of noise outdoors, but on the other hand, there’s the @#$$%^& grass and the !@#$%^& trees that dump leaves, acorns, and branches everywhere (8 or so trees and 40 leaf bags this fall). I read a lot of design books, and my ideal family home would be between 2000 and 2200 square feet with lots of closets, bookcases, built-in cabinetry, and a really good mudroom.
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Couldn’t the desire for a family be *inspiring* the moves? Lots of people move into a house right before they start a family, knowing (rightly so) that they’ll never have the energy or cash for it once the kids arrive.
I was just talking today with a colleague from the Philippines who was questioning the Anglo belief that every kid should have their own room. Is this mostly an Anglo thing?
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“Couldn’t the desire for a family be *inspiring* the moves? Lots of people move into a house right before they start a family, knowing (rightly so) that they’ll never have the energy or cash for it once the kids arrive.”
I think home-size probably is an important factor in limiting family-size in developed countries, but you’re right that it is a chicken-and-the-egg problem.
Moving with kids is terible, but rare these days is a family that does all of their child-rearing in a single home. I think the desire to have a stable home for children may motivate the purchase of a biggish home, but in the real world, that family is likely to discover that the school district isn’t tip-top, the floor plan is unworkable, and there’s a job change and the new commute is too long for a family, so they wind up moving again, maybe more than once. I think there’s a lot to be said against youthful home purchasing, since you know so little about what you need in a house when you are a childless 20-something.
“I was just talking today with a colleague from the Philippines who was questioning the Anglo belief that every kid should have their own room. Is this mostly an Anglo thing?”
Let’s say you have a girl, and then a boy. They will eventually need separate rooms, so why not start now? Maybe you have another baby. Baby starts out with a crib in mom and dad’s bedroom, but when it’s time to move him out, you realize that he and his older brother will sleep more soundly separately. Eventually, sleep is no longer such a big issue, but baby has already had a separate bedroom for a while and older siblings are feeling territorial. And that’s how you wind up needing four bedrooms. (If we were to have a third bundle of joy, we would probably keep him in our bedroom for several months, move his crib to my husband’s office until his sleeping was satisfactory and he wouldn’t be easily injured by a sibling (handed a block to choke on, for instance), and then move him into an older sibling’s room around three years of age. If this operation misfired, my husband might lose his office.)
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I think it’s car size (and car seats), as anyone who has tried to load multiple children and their car seats into a car knows.
I think the fertility rate would go up if we abandoned the car seat laws :-).
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The Council on Contemporary Families published some data that noted, among other things, the “baby boomlet” of larger families (four kids) was mostly confined to the ultra-rich, the top 1% of earners. The commonest family size is still two.
Anecdotally, the people I’ve known who go for a third child tend to be ones who have two children of one sex and want to try for a boy or girl. Increasingly, the option for those who know they want a girl is to go to China. (No such surefire options for those who want a boy, alas! Countries with a surplus of boy babies to adopt – Cambodia, Eastern Europe – often have much tighter adoption laws.)
People have smaller families now for a couple of reasons: first, you don’t need to have six or seven children to ensure that three or four reach adulthood. Second, it’s a lot harder to raise a family than it was during the era of the baby boom. In the 50’s, one modest income was a living wage, and Mom could stay home and be a full-time mom. And there wasn’t the endless rounds of soccer and ballet and science camp and all those extracurriculars that eat up time, either. Raising kids is so much more time-intensive than it was, it makes more sense to stop at two, even if you have a McMansion.
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It’s not just house size; it’s location. Once you’ve moved way out into the suburbs, the idea of both parents commuting every day starts to seem overwhelming. And then once you have a stay at home parent, the marginal cost of having another child goes way down.
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“Second, it’s a lot harder to raise a family than it was during the era of the baby boom.”
We’ve been over this ground a lot, but I really have to disagree that this is true across the board. To begin with, having two cars was a very big deal 50 years ago(according to the joke, that was supposed to mean that you were Republican), so far more mothers would have been carless on weekdays (hence all those old remarks about women drivers). Plus, look at the scary baby equipment advertised in Lileks’ “Mommy Knows Worst,” or consider the relative availability of preprepared foods. 1950s American mothers did not have baby slings or car seats that would actually keep a child from squirming out. And let’s not even talk about diapers (they used to BOIL dirty cloth diapers to get them clean). Even today, the double stroller is still a work in progress, technologically speaking. I was googling the history of the double stroller and not turning up anything, but I can’t even imagine what a 1950s double stroller looked like, or if there was such a thing in common use. It would have been the sort of piece of garbage that you can get nowadays for $50 that moves like a sofa on a dolly.
I’m open to correction on historical particulars. I do think it’s quite safe to say that basic custodial care is a lot simpler now (and housekeeping standards are more forgiving), but educational and recreational demands on middle-class mothers are a lot more challenging.
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Three more points:
1. Ironing (My grandma irons like crazy, my mom brought me up to iron jeans, but I have not lifted an iron since approximately 2001, and my ironing board is currently parked in the garage.)
2. Raising and lowering hems on children’s clothing. I finished reading Shirley Jackson’s Life among the Savages recently, and I’ve been meaning to pull out some quotes for a blog that I started at the end of January (and then left), but one passage that jumped out at me was one where she is in the middle of laboriously hemming clothes for her three children, which was apparently something you’d do every time your children jumped a size. That’s something I bet none of us ever do, except maybe for a super special occasion. Even good quality clothes are just so dirt cheap nowadays that we don’t “stretch” clothing items as far as we could by buying pants long and then adjusting the length as the kids grow.
3. Non-recreational vegetable gardening and canning.
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Well, we had five bedrooms. And we had three kids, stopped when we ran into age and 2-job constraints. Friends of ours with smaller houses stopped when they ran into bedroom constraints. So I’ll go with the goldfish scenario, but there are other constraints which can kick in, too.
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I dunno about all these space arguments.
I think it’s more likely that the ability to buy a bigger house is indicative of resources in general, and that people with more resources are more likely to have more kids. I’ve never known anyone who truly, deeply wanted another kid to let go of that dream based on bedroom availability.
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Another thing about houses and space is that, in my observations, there’s a lot more demand for home-office space than there was even 20 years ago. Case in point: the house next door to my mom’s, a nice 4-bedroom two-bathroom house, was sold a few years ago because the family – mom, dad, two kids – “needed a bigger house.”
What? The four-bedroom, 1800-square-feet house was PLENTY big…except for the fact that mom and dad each had a home office. Master bedroom + two kid’s bedrooms + two home offices + guest room = they needed five bedrooms.
Lots of us have home offices these days – I’m clearing out my spare bedroom to serve as one, and I’m not technically running my own business, but I do a LOT of work from home.
And I think BJ is spot-on with the car seat issue. Growing up in the 70’s, I remember field trips, Brownies, etc. where moms carpooled and would cram as many kids as they could in the back seats. And for one family, you just needed one station wagon or good-sized sedan to tote around three or four kids. Not anymore – with car seats, you can fit in two, max. Elizabeth Warren writes that this is one reason so many families have SUV’s and minvans – how else can you fit in three car seats?
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“I’ve never known anyone who truly, deeply wanted another kid to let go of that dream based on bedroom availability.”
But if your home has a yard, a garage, more than one bathroom, good storage, and a convenient floorplan, the thought of an extra child may not feel so overwhelming. Housing conditions will affect how well you manage the number of kids you have currently, which will affect how you feel about the prospect of a larger family. I expect that at some point, the house and yard get too big–they start demanding so much care and maintenance that you begin to be actually less interested in a larger family. Likewise, pets may use up energy and resources that might have supported another child.
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There’s a great book called “More Work for Mother” that shows how the introduction of so-called time-saving devices that were supposed to lighten the burden of the housewife actually made that burden heavier because it raised standards. When washing clothes meant a washtub or mangle, no one thought you should wear a piece of clothing once and then wash it. And when women were making their families’ clothes, there was not the expectation that each member of the family would have the sheer amount of clothing we have today. Vegetable growing and canning seems like a lot of work to us, but it also meant nowhere near as many shopping trips, and a refrigerator was not a necessity to keep that produce fresh.
I agree on the car-seat issue also– a third kid necessitates a minivan, unless you’ve spaced them out over a larger period of years. I would also argue that it was much more acceptable to have kids share rooms in previous decades, and the idea of a home office is also a recent one, supplanting the den or library many upper-middle-class families had.
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“Vegetable growing and canning seems like a lot of work to us, but it also meant nowhere near as many shopping trips, and a refrigerator was not a necessity to keep that produce fresh.”
“More Work for Mother” is correct up to a certain point about the impact of rising standards of housekeeping, but is it really even debatable that household tasks took a lot less physically out of 1950s and 1960s women? There’s a really vivid depiction of home canning in the classic “The Egg and I,” and I’m not buying that vegetable gardening and canning would be less burdensome than frequent shopping trips. The kids and I were just out today planting some gladioli and phlox in a small flower bed, and it requires genuine toil to remove winter debris, cultivate the soil, pull weeds, dig holes, and plant the flowers. Fortunately, our survival doesn’t depend on my vegetable growing skills. (The kids loved it, by the way.)
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I think you have to pull the lens out a little farther to really get the impact. Needing to go to the grocery store regularly for fruit and vegetables may be the reason those women had to learn to drive and own cars, which is more burdensome than growing green beans. You’d also have to make sure you lived closer to a store. The more food you have to pay for, the more income you have to have coming in. Also, on the flower tip, that’s physical activity, which might eliminate the need for gyms, power-walking, home gyms, etc.
There’s more to think about, but I don’t think comparisons on a task-by-task level get the full picture.
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I don’t believe we’ve talked about it before, but I think routinely driving must have been a huge step forward for American women. (I say that as a somewhat phobic non-driver planning to finally get my license this summer.)
I certainly get your point about the value of gardening as physical exercize.
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Oops, “exercise.” My spelling has never recovered from the combination of a few terms of Polish, coupled with a couple decades of anglophilia. Nothing looks right anymore.
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Betty MacDonald (also author of the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books) devotes a whole chapter of The Egg and I (1945) to “That Infernal Machine, the Pressure Cooker.” Here are some short samples:
“…the canning season was on. How I dreaded it!”
“…the pressure cooker blew up. It was the happiest day of my life, though I might have been killed.”
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Don’t really buy it, either. In Israel, people tend to have more kids than in the US (not just the religious) and we have less living space, not more.
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In Israel, isn’t there the added twist that having kids is your patriotic duty? If every Jewish family were going to have just 1 kid (like people do in Italy), you might as well just hand over the keys and move to Brooklyn right now.
Aside from that, I suspect a warmer climate is less taxing on parents. You need fewer clothes for the kids and every outdoor expeditions doesn’t require bulky snow suits and boots. A winter (heck, a long winter weekend) in a small apartment with small children bouncing off the wall can jeopardize your sanity. Even if it’s really hot (like it is here in Texas), there’s always the morning or evening.
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We wouldn’t have been able to have our last kid if we didn’t move into our house. There really was not enough room for him in the apartment.
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We wouldn’t have been able to have our last kid if we didn’t move into our house. There really was not enough room for him in the apartment.
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Bailey suggests that people aren’t having very many kids because they don’t like them very well: http://www.reason.com/news/show/125163.html
If that’s it, more bedrooms won’t help…
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A few more late thoughts, inspired by dave s.’s comment:
1. I just learned that some DC friends (who the last I heard were living in a small one-bedroom condo) just had their third child.
2. My 86-year-old grandpa just got home after an unexpectedly complicated hip-replacement surgery. Grandma is 82 and energetic for her age, but has lost a lot of vision, and is physically more frail than she used to be. Grandpa’s looking at probably a 3-month convalescence, and won’t be able to drive for a while. While he was in the hospital, grandma stayed with her sister in Seattle, and was assisted by two granddaughters, a daughter, and a nephew. They’re getting home health visits from a nurse and I believe a different nephew is taking care of the 20 cows and 20 baby calves. A consortium of my dad, sister, and a different aunt and uncle (who all live within 30 minutes) are dealing with groceries, casserole delivery, and installation of grab bars. I’m a couple thousand miles away, but I call every few days, and have appointed myself in charge of entertainment, which can be done remotely. At a conservative estimate, that’s 9.5 relatives (counting myself as .5) who are helping out grandma and grandpa, who have three children and nine grandchildren. I don’t think that arithmetic works out very well if you have either one or no children, unless you have an amazing relationship with your nieces and nephews (but somebody better be cranking out the nieces and nephews or you’re up a creek). Theoretically you could buy all of these services, but I really don’t think my grandparents would, even if they were much richer than they are. Plus, my grandma would hate having a bunch of strangers waltzing into her home. Elsewhere in the family, one of my cousins spent the fall dealing with the health issues of her grandma with dementia, who was being swindled by a home caregiver. This was at least the second thieving caretaker that had been taking care of this one elderly woman. Even if relatives aren’t giving care themselves, there does need to be family oversight over purchased care.
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Here are two helpful hints to help make your sunset years as enjoyable as possible:
1. make sure at least one child is a health care professional
2. make sure to be on good terms with your daughters-in-law
I know that at least one person is thinking “but-can’t-you-create-a-circle-of-friends-that-functions-as-a-surrogate-family?” but I’d question how well that works in practice for the elderly, especially those so ornery or demented that their companionship is not particularly rewarding. Your friends will be mostly the same age as you, and will be getting old and fragile at basically the same rate. The beauty of children is that they are always younger than you.
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