[quote=skerzz]There’s no way I’d plan on having 3 kids with 5-12 years age gap between them. You’d be looking at a minimum of 28 years of kids in the house. I may be biased given I have 2 under 2, but I’d rather deal with diapers, lack of sleep, etc while I am young. I’ll wait 2 more years before having one more, and my diaper changing days will be over before I turn 35. To each his/her own, but IMO having kids close in age is not an irresponsible act, nor is it something isolated to millennial parents. Perhaps it’s a generalization, that at best, can be applied to a certain street in a certain neighborhood within San Diego county.[/quote]I never stated it was “irresponsible,” skerzz. I stated that deliberately having 2-3 kids one after another (all single births) is a recipe for financial insecurity for the family in this day and age due to one parent usually being out of the workforce for several years so close to graduating from college, while their diploma is still “fresh” (assuming they actually did). I just haven’t in my experience seen any of these SAHP’s ever return to the FT workforce, even after their kids are teens and adults! In all practicality, it never happens. The “long-term SAHP experience” stunts a person’s ability to acquire their needed 40 quarters of SS to be eligible for old-age benefits in their own right while they are still young enough to get hired. They are also unable to participate in so many other workplace benefits, including being in line for promotions, vested into a pension program and participating in a funds-matching retirement program, etc.
It’s not about my street or neighborhood which is predominately senior citizen homeowners (but becoming less so every year). Large families with several minor children can be found everywhere, even in $1M+ areas. Oh, and we have two nearby Mormon Wards if that helps you understand things a little better, skerzz.
These millenial-family tenants are just a function of there being more available rental SFR’s around here now due to “flipper invasion” in recent years. SD County has a pretty thin selection of rental SFRs and the rents are more “affordable” around me because the typical rental house tends to be only 1100-1400 sf and we are not close to tech and biotech job centers.
Yes, no one understands it better than I do (maybe Donald Trump?) how many years (decades) it takes to raise a “spaced apart” family :-0
This is a good argument for why women can’t “have it all” but the truth is that they CAN successfully “have it all” but must be very careful not to have their kids too close together (or just have one child) if they expect to continue working FT without a hitch and not be an “attendance problem” at work after their maternity leaves are over. I DID have a co-worker who had 5 kids all minors living at home but she had SEVERAL relatives living on her street who were providing care for the children.
If a SAHP elects to depend upon other individuals in their lives (partners) to furnish their “retirements” for them, that could prove in the end to be a perilous proposition and I wouldn’t recommend adopting this mindset … especially for the degreed individual :=0
