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118 points blondie9x | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.304s | source
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TriangleEdge ◴[] No.43673589[source]
I live in Seattle now, am married, and have an infant. I find Seattle not friendly towards families at all. The going rate for a daycare here is 3.5k per month for an infant. My wife and I are both ~7%ers? individually and we can barely afford our home (a tall skinny townhouse with no yard) and the cost of 1 baby. Having a family is hard here... Also, I don't find Seattle safe for infants and toddlers, or anybody really..

What big tech wants are people who are willing to give up everything for the dream of making money, and that's what they got.

Edit: Our life is pretty good in any case. I would never let my kid go outside and play unsupervised in Seattle even tho I myself did this as a kid in my home town (the safety I was mentioning).

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fifilura ◴[] No.43673830[source]
As a comparison, full time daycare in Sweden is $100/month for everyone.

I think this is one important reason that marriage is not as common, since the society is aligned towards that is should be possible to manage on your own if you absolutely need to.

I can't find a proper number but anecdotally I think maybe 50% of first time parents are married in Sweden.

And yes obviously this is paid by higher taxes, but seen an an investment to keep the demography (reasonably) sane.

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nradov ◴[] No.43674006[source]
The birth rate in Sweden is low and falling. Whatever they're doing to keep demography sane doesn't seem to be working. Like most developed Western countries, their current approach relies more on high levels of immigration. Essentially they have outsourced the hassle and expense of having children.

https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/why-ar...

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1. piva00 ◴[] No.43674334[source]
Relatively to the rest of Europe is still on the upper echelons so some of the policies do work.

The issue is: without hope for the future there's not much the State can do to push people into having kids. We live in an age of hopelessness, I don't have my parents optimism from the 80s, I'm starting to approach 40 and every 5 years something happen to chip away on the little hope I still have.