This advice is likely economically bad though. Capital now is better than capital later. I would think money made early and saved by not having children and invested will end up being much more then what will be spent on a fertility clinic later.
If your only goal is to accumulate capital over your lifespan, then you won't have children at all, since they're tremendously expensive and have no dollar return.
They're a great way to add some diversity to your retirement portfolio. Young able bodies that can get a job and provide you with food and shelter in your old age are the original inflation proof investment. Also, kids are awesome.
Children have massive potentials for dollar return. Not least because you can't buy the type of care your child might give you in old age for any price. But also because if they succeed, then you have access to their networks, which can also be worth quite a lot.
You won't be able to calculate a precise number, but the saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" shows the dollar price of networks is very high.
Unfortunately, that is the other side of the coin. Most people who have children at young ages tend to be less well off financially for the rest of their lives than people who wait until late to have children. That is simply because time and principle are the only factors that really matter in building wealth.
This difference can also be taken to absurd extremes though. I honestly wonder why single people without children in my line of work aren't millionaires just based upon the compensation of their day jobs. After having 5 military deployments I can live in a cardboard box and would require only the cheapest of cars to commute to work. I don't spend money very often.
> I honestly wonder why single people without children in my line of work aren't millionaires just based upon the compensation of their day jobs.
I'm not sure that people who never have children necessarily end up with more wealth than people who do have children, due to psychological impacts.
Having a kid can inspire parents to get their shit together and succeed financially and think about the future, compared to a single person just spending on their hobbies and playing video games.
Minor nit, this article is mostly about how teenage mothers result in worse outcomes, and talks about the many advantages older mothers have up to over 35 when complications dominate the better resources older mothers tend to have.
It's certainly economically worse, sure, but on the other hand you might be optimizing for other things. I for one would like to know my grandkids, and if I have my first kid at 40, and my kid has their first kid at 40, I'll have likely died of old age before my first grandkid reaches high school. Plus, I really like the idea of my kids being out of the house before my 60s. Factor those in with the studies about the relationship between the health of children and the age of the parents, and I'm willing to trade some potential income for those considerations (although that has limits, and having kids early can have quite substantial economic downsides, especially if you're a woman, and doubly especially if you end up out of the workforce entirely to raise them).
The chances of having a kid with a serious disorder go up dramatically for older mothers (and recent research shows this is true for fathers too). Even if we decide only to care about economics and not the kids health, health issues are expensive.
Another alternative is to design your startup around a very low burn rate and change nothing else in your life. I mean, if it is going to take 5-10 years as the blogger claims, what's 8-12 years if you get to tick all the other boxes in life?
8-12 years of child rearing is very expensive. That's without even taking into compounding returns from working longer hours, seniority, experience, and investments.
The blog post starts with your same premise: pull out all the stops on working hard. It's just a choice. Why not have a startup that takes longer to grow?
To make the point clear: children raised by young and growing parents and different from children raised by old and established parents. Slow startups are different from fast startups. No judgement, they are just different. But the premise that a fast startup is the only way to do a startup is false. It's just choices for different outcomes.
I am the child of two young parents who had to drop out of college to raise me and my siblings, eventually on my father's "lifestyle business" when working multiple jobs didn't balance the books, so I am well aware of the tradeoffs. In my experience though it's not a question of just adjusting your lifestyle for many people, it's a question of financial survival.
My parents have not come close to being financially recovered relative to later-parents a decade after we've all left the house. The delay you are talking about compounds to absolutely massive differences in my experience. Trying to multi-task both the other "life" check boxes and your work is going to have large hidden costs on work because of these compounding advantages.
If you have very good health insurance then the main cost for having children is going to be the increased cost of housing, which can be a capital investment. In addition to mortgage deduction, families also get deductions for children so there really isn't much to be saved by not having children until later in life.
It's almost as if human social norms solved this dilemma by division of labor: men bear the brunt of earning capital, while women are freed up to have and raise children.
The women's "empowerment" movement in this context can be seen as a cynical ploy by capital to convince women their "power" is tied to earning wages and having a career instead of having a family and they must pursue economic independence over over strategic "dependence" on a husband to help them realize commons goals.
At the end of the day women, and men, will ultimately want what they want. The argument here is that in the grand scheme of things they want a family, and will regret early choices that threaten this goal long term. Whether they are distracted away from this goal by capitalist propaganda to increase the labor supply, or they combine forces to achieve it is the challenge.
People will argue "men and women should make their own choices and determine this for themselves". Yes, but what is the default cultural message nowadays? What is promoted as the norm? What is the institutional and political rhetoric around this question? Western liberal democratic, capitalist nations stand firmly on the side of promoting careerism for women over early motherhood and marriage.
They also promote careerism for men, a notion that doesn't ever seem to come into question. It's true that only women can gestate and breast feed, but after that fatherhood and motherhood are very similar callings. Men could opt out of the capitalist summons to the labor supply just as easily as women, and it shouldn't have to fall entirely on women to choose between "careerism" and "motherhood".
If we shifted the norms to allow that, women would be able to make their decisions freely and fairly, rather than just accepting that the lion's share of of parenting should be up to them. Rhetoric that shifts solely to ending careerism for women, but not for men, does indeed disempower women.
Ultimately you're arguing for reality to change to fit your utopian whims. I'm saying, for the average couple, we should lean into reality.
Would it be great if we could all have it all? Of course. I'm more concerned with the actual happiness and fulfillment of people who really will regret not having started a family early, and instead wasted their efforts following the neo-liberal careerist path.
Someone's got to have the children and raise them. Someone's got to put in the time at work. Because of the time, effort and physical realities of women bearing children, for most couples the division of labor falls most efficiently on men putting in most of the time rising up the corporate ladder.
People that recognize this happy path and want to go their own way are welcome to it. But we shouldn't lie to people. We should be honest with men and women from a young age what reality is.
time is worth more than money. I'm glad I spent some time in my 20s raising little tikes so I can have more time with them.
Having kids late in life is like a deathbed confessional. people just want to cross "birth children" off their list, but don't really think about being a mother/father for the rest of their life.
If you value career over family thats cool, but you wont get returns on "family-as-an-asset" if you invest late in life. Invest early for greater returns.
