Recently married and thinking about kids soon. One of use would love to stay home. However, the risk of putting all earning power in one person seems too great, and neither of us have a deep interest in paying for childcare. So no kids for now.
It's a pity that you can't enjoy a good social health system where there is parental leave and all that. I just got a baby with being basically (university) student in Germany and it didn't ruin me. And Germans still look up to countries where the social system is even better, such as the Scandinavian countries.
Or they could make grandma and grandpa do some baby sitting here and there which is traditionally how this problem has been handled. Not everything needs to be solved by the state.
They pay out the ass for child care if they're rich or they find the one mother in the neighborhood who runs an under the table daycare for everyone's kids if they're poor, same as it's always been.
My wife is a public school teacher with a masters degree, the pay is so low and cost of child care so high, that we would have almost broken even having her go back to work.
I agree it is higher risk having only one wage earner, but sometimes it makes financial sense, and it definitely can have developmental benefits (e.g. 1:1 ratio instead of 1:6 or 1:8).
I would suggest that if anyone does do stay-at-home, that when the kid has all of their shots, you send them to a play group or preschool so they can learn to socialize.
PS - We also had kids fairly late, so got all our student loans paid off, and saved a little money which has helped as a buffer.
>the pay is so low and cost of child care so high, that we would have almost broken even having her go back to work.
Wage growth compounds, so you have to take that into consideration. If your employer has a modest retirement contribution that you can take advantage of, that alone makes employment "worth it" from a purely financial prescriptive.
And the cost of commuting to work, classroom supplies, unpaid leave when the kids get sick (3 sick leave days a year), and the fact teachers do countless hours of unpaid overtime, have a high stress job, and that spending time with your own children has a value all itself.
So even if matching retirement contributions technically tipped the scales, it would still be nowhere close to worth while.
There are two risks: death of the wage earner, and job loss. The impact of death can be mitigated with insurance, job loss can be mitigated with savings.
But it also probably means living a less robust lifestyle to keep expenses reasonable for a one-income household. The trap many DINKs fall into (not accusing you, just riffing on my observations) is living a lifestyle that's on the edge of affordability for two earners, and thus feeling like they HAVE to have two earners indefinitely.
Not to mention that daycare in cities where people who tend to be dual earner make big incomes tend to live can often cost at least half of the gross of the lower earning parent. Meaning working is something people do for a net contribution of less than minimum wage, even as a high income earner.
IMO the best strategies for people who aren't in the top 1% are extreme strategies. Our strategy is: single income, live in a neighborhood with bad schools for cheaper housing, then homeschool the kids.
This is not a strategy I would ever choose, but considering you probably live in the US, this is a very smart optimization of your local conditions and it must not have been easy to go against some of the default assumptions about school and family life. We live in an age where people absolutely need to get creative like this and think about the ways they may be able to get the things that truly matter.
This last comment is very true. I remember when my wife and I were looking for a house to purchase, we did the math based on my single salary, not hers at the time. We knew we wanted kids soon, and she had already decided she wanted to stay home. The bank obviously approved us for a huge mortgage but we stuck to our calculations and we've been doing just fine since then.
I know a few couples who didn't take the loss of 1 income into account and they are really struggling.
