Would awesome employer benefits persuade you to have another child?

October 7, 2018 12:14 AM

I don't know how people actually "decide" to have another child. It's so hard to make that conscious choice IMO. So I'm wondering if really great employment benefits factored into anyone decision to have another one and how it all worked out in the end?

My spouse landed a sort of "golden handcuffs" job where the benefits are pretty fantastic. He'd get 4 months paid paternity leave and extra money. And our family health insurance premiums are super low. I'm sort of leaning toward having another because our child has no cousins, aunts, or uncles because my spouse and I are only children. And our first has been a dream baby mostly. I guess I just don't know how people decide and what counts as a valid reason. My hunch is that people must have either very bad birth control or a very strong drive to have more children if they don't have good benefits? I don't know if I sort of want another baby because I miss my current baby's earlier months (yes I do but I also know the second baby won't feel the same because it won't be my first) or because I have this idea that a slightly bigger family will be better.

posted by KatNips to Human Relations (17 answers total)

This is one of those questions that’s impossible to answer for anyone else. For me, 4 months of paid parental leave is not going to address the huge change it will mean for all of you for many many years.
I’ll paraphrase something a relative said to me when I was 18 (it was about ha big kids in general, but I feel like for me it especially applies to the +1 decision):

“Don’t do it unless you REALLY have to.”

Or at least, be fully committed so you won’t regret it and will just be able to roll with whatever happens.
posted by 8k at 2:09 AM on October 7, 2018 [5 favorites]

Well, lack of these things certainly factors into people choosing either not to have any or not to have more. These things factored into our decision to live in Australia (my husband's country) to have our child rather than the US.

You described the job as golden handcuffs and mentioned some of the Golden parts - the benefits. What are the handcuffs?
posted by jrobin276 at 2:25 AM on October 7, 2018

Jrobin275, I can't speak for the OP but when I got my job (which has amazing benefits) they also kind of felt like handcuffs because I knew I'd be an idiot to give it up but I also wasn't ready to settle down. I was used to having crappy jobs where you could quit knowing something better was out there. I ranted quite a bit about having golden handcuffs before I gave in and enjoyed it.

To answer your question, my employer has amazing parental leave benefits and we have plenty of babies. But no one seems to be choosing extra kids because of it. They are just lucky to be not stressed about income while on leave; I'm not seeing families larger than two, maybe three kids. And that's the size of families I know in less generous places ( I'm in Australia though so all round I think it's easier here).
posted by kitten magic at 2:37 AM on October 7, 2018

How did you decide to have a first child?

Is there hesitancy because you don't have the personal experience of siblings?

Can you afford a second child for 18+ years?

Are you looking for the internet's permission to have another baby?

"A slightly bigger family will be better" = it will be different. Not better, not worse.

Benefits are nice, but I think their presence isn't as heavy on the 'yes' side as their absence would be on the 'no' side.
posted by freethefeet at 3:03 AM on October 7, 2018 [3 favorites]

Having decent benefits factored into our decision to have a second child (or at least the timing of it), but it ended up being a wash. These benefits helped cover the excessive costs of prenatal care, childbirth, and maternity leave, but were a drop in the bucket compared to daycare costs.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 4:45 AM on October 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Sociologically speaking, on national levels policies that provide significant leave and assistance for children to encourage a higher birth rate when otherwise child rearing is prohibitively expensive .

So yes, people do absolutely factor in economic child-rearing costs when having kids. The US is wierd (compared to the rest of the developed world basically) in that we legally provide a tiny minimum at the federal level and employers dictate benefits, so we don't see the same sort of population trends.

Ultimately this is personal preference. Many people chose to have kids in less than ideal situations, just because they want too. Most parents figure it out, even if it's hard. I believe that because I surround myself with a great community of people, that no matter what it will be okay. Im a pretty opimistic person overall.
posted by AlexiaSky at 5:10 AM on October 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

Good health insurance certainly affected our decision to have a second, especially because we knew that I would be at high risk again. But it wouldn't have been the deciding factor in any case. For me to have a second child felt like a phone ringing -- I had to answer it. At this point no matter how good the benefits, I wouldn't have another child. And we now have paid parental leave for the first time since we had any kids at all.
posted by peanut_mcgillicuty at 5:54 AM on October 7, 2018

I think the most important thing is the drive to have more children. The marginal case I could see for benefits in particular helping would be a situation where the household is temporarily making less money due to grad school or something, but benefits would cancel out a temporary lack of funds that the parent(s) would normally consider a prerequisite to having more children. In a related way it could influence the timing, e.g. let’s have a baby now while the benefits are good.

I guess what I’m saying is that in the absence of an extreme lifelong employer benefit like free childcare for life, birth benefits are far too little to really affect the child affordability calculation.
posted by permiechickie at 5:55 AM on October 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

And to your larger question of how do you decide, generational family size has absolutely made an impact on our desire to have more children. My sisters will almost certainly never have children, and my husbands siblings and cousins are not on track to have many. We didn’t want our son to be basically alone in his entire familial generation so we are hoping to have 2-3 more kids.
posted by permiechickie at 5:59 AM on October 7, 2018

If you want one person’s anecdotal personal reasons, I’m one-and-done because raising a kid is exhausting and we just generally don’t have the bandwidth in any dimension (including things like living space, mental and physical health, logistics of getting two kids to different daycares/schools/extracurriculars) for another. If circumstances were different, maybe we’d have another, but they’d have to be different in more than one way.

Parental leave/benefits alone would not affect our decision - in fact, one of us has a job with an amazing parental leave policy and we’re not going to benefit from that. If employer benefits were to factor into our decision, they would have to be excellent and long-term - things like the ability to work fewer than 40 hours without losing insurance or opportunities for advancement, help with childcare/school costs, etc. And it would have to be a job that I/my spouse liked, with a non-sucky commute, with low risk of layoffs/the company going under. Four months of paid leave is nice, but it’s not much in the grand scheme of raising a kid.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:05 AM on October 7, 2018 [7 favorites]

My 2 cents--if you weren't talking about/trying to figure out how to make a second child workable before your husband got the great job with higher pay/better benefits, then the new job shouldn't tip the scale. If you guys really did want a second child all along but were hesitant because of finances etc. then that's another story and it certainly could be a major deciding factor to go ahead with it. I don't believe that most people who have a second child despite mediocre benefits either "have very bad birth control" or a "strong drive" to have more children. More like, for a lot of people, 2-3 child families were what they grew up with and that's their vision of what a complete family looks like (and that's not a judgment, just an observation on norms among working- and middle-class families in the U.S.).

Looking back on your previous post about a second child, I'd say continue to talk about this with your spouse and try to figure out what kind of family you want to have for yourselves and your existing child. I do think your concerns about being such a reduced family due to being only children yourself are quite valid.
posted by drlith at 7:05 AM on October 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

For us it’s as relevant as asking if better benefits would mean buying a Hummer. I’m uninterested at any price. But there are folks for whom the financial pinch is the main deciding factor in family size.

I wouldn’t say that you should have another kid purely *because* of the benefits, because the real cost is the mental and emotional energy it takes to raise a functional adult. You aren’t leaving money on the table if you forgo the parental leave.
posted by tchemgrrl at 7:22 AM on October 7, 2018 [1 favorite]

Kids are a time and a money sink no matter the math, and personality wise it’s a crap shoot (heh) any way. So just check with your heart, whether you want another person or does your family feel complete right now.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 9:00 AM on October 7, 2018 [4 favorites]

I don't think good employer benefits would have inspired me to have a child, but absence of good employer benefits might dissuade me from having a child I would otherwise want.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 9:19 AM on October 7, 2018 [2 favorites]

Good benefits right now are one thing, but you will support this child for decades to come. Is the employer just giving you a month of parental leave, or guaranteeing free college?

My wife and I both had access to great benefits when we started having kids, and so that didn't discourage us from having more. But we also had very good support from her parents (mine are far away), which mattered just as much in the long term, which is a benefit that we could enjoy for years.

As tchemgirl says, above, the costs are a calculation to make after you decide whether you actually want another kid. First figure out if you can do it, then figure out how to do it (i.e., the costs versus your benefits). It seems cold-hearted to frame it that way, but as much as we love 'em, the little suckers aren't cheap.

ObDisc: we have four kids. *shrug* What can I say, we love them...and we can also just afford them. Knowing what I know now, it seems kind of financially foolhardy to have more than a couple, but they're the best things in my life.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:59 AM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

“Golden Handcuffs” is a single phrase. It doesn’t mean “some stuff is golden, other stuff is the handcuffs”. It refers to the fact that a job will throw so many benefits at an employee (usually in the form of deferred compensation) that an employee will think that they cannot leave a job (that they might be ready to move from) since $xxxxxx amount of stock will vest in x years and I no have zero health insurance costs for my family and 4 weeks vacation, etc. etc.
posted by sideshow at 8:58 AM on October 8, 2018 [2 favorites]

I did this a little in reverse. I had always thought I would have two or three children. My first was exhausting and challenging but pregnancy and new baby were overall very rewarding so when he got a little more independent around 2 1/2, it wasn't hard to decide to try for a second.

But when my second reached that age when it seemed time to think about a third, it was much harder. Three things were the deciding factors against: (i) my husband felt no strong urge towards a third (but happy to go along with it), (ii) my husband was now working longer hours and I could see much more of the parenting load falling on me, (iii) I could see value in having another child in the mix in the long term but I wasn't feeling excited about doing the pregnancy and new baby thing again. I spend a year or two thinking about it and then decided the window had passed anyway.

It was not a rigorously logical decision but in hindsight, the decision to have a second was clearly right and the decision to not have a third was probably right (I have a little regret at not having another person in our family mix but balanced by the sense that the strain of one more would not have been good for us.)
posted by metahawk at 7:12 PM on October 8, 2018