Missing from nearly all discussions of “why aren’t millennials having babies” is the fact that the thick, local, extended family—which *drastically* reduces the financial and emotional cost of having children—has almost completely collapsed in the West, particularly among whites.
Capitalism/liberalism destroys the extended family by requiring people to move apart for work and destroying any sense of unchosen obligations one might have towards one’s kin.
If you’re white and wealthy, you can use money to “replace” what the extended used to provide. You can pay other people (often women of color) to watch your children, cook your food, teach you parenting skills, listen to you complain, make your clothes and toys, etc.
If you’re white and poor...well...you’re out of luck. Poverty need not lead to despair if the extended family is intact. If three generations live under one roof, one person can lose their job and not get ruined. You can have babies and let your retired parents watch them.
My wife and I were born and raised in Charleston. My parents live here. Her parents and grandparents and sisters live here. We calculated that if we moved to LA we would need an extra $300,000 a year to replace all of that, which still wouldn’t help with the loneliness.
I’m blessed to have my career take off without having to move. I hope to live the rest of my life in Charleston and die and be buried next to my family. Maybe that means I don’t get as famous as I would have? Who knows? But I’ll have more kids.
What doesn’t help is making fun of women for having dogs and telling them to just have more kids. “Suck it up and grow your nuclear family!” But without the extended family, the nuclear family cannot survive. Welfare and money can help but will never truly replace it.
So how do we help rebuild the extended family? Beyond developing a stronger sense of unchosen obligations (your parents and your children have a *right* to see each other), I would love to see every racist zoning law changed to allow for multiple generation households.
We also need to get away from this garbage idea that everyone should move out at 18 and it’s a sign of failure if you live with your parents or still live in the town you were born. That’s just brainwashing by people trying to make a profit.
I have a million other things to say about this but I truly believe the collapse of the extended family in the West is the most catastrophic social development in our time, and what makes it worse is we all think this is just the way it’s supposed to be. The End.
