I agree with what your comment, but perhaps a better solution (instead of having children earlier) would be to freeze eggs and sperm and use them when you are ready. The only problem then would be whether an older mother's body would be more likely to experience problems, and if it is, whether the cost to hire a surrogate would be less than the cost of earlier parenthood.
Surrogacy on top of actual harvesting is very expensive and time-consuming and painful if even possible without donor sperm/eggs. I doubt most people are able to make up the $100k+ needed with earning potential differences in the 10-15 years of waiting that you are talking about. Maybe couples in tech and other fields making six figures could save that up, but that's JUST a basic pregnancy, forget any parenting costs, and most people are not making six figures. A lot of folks start considering adoption before they'll do surrogacy with or without donors just due to sheer cost.
Even if a couple decides to go at it with IVF that's easily $10-20k/cycle (and older = more likely to want PGD etc. adding to costs) and a lot of emotional/physical hardship and time sunk into the effort. After a point there is just no luck on your side either no matter how much money you throw at it... I have cried with too many friends over their failed cycles. And some of them discover this in their 20s, not even 40+.
If you want to have kids, it's going to cost money and time _somewhere_. If you want to have bio kids, it's likely to be far less painful and far better (in terms of cost, maternal outcome, child outcome, etc.) to do it while younger if possible. Maybe there are tradeoffs - and as a pregnant 20something woman in tech that struggled with infertility treatments but thankfully not all the way to the pain that is IVF and beyond, I'm acutely aware of them - but that's a personal decision to make. I also had older parents that were not as lucky as yours and find it to be a hardship I refuse to put my own children through.
It is not necessarily a crazy or bad idea to have children earlier if you can and want to.
> freeze eggs and sperm and use them when you are ready. (...) cost to hire a surrogate (...)
Sorry if I am reading too much into your comment (or the sibling comment about not being able to start a family in the 20's due to excessive loans), but when I start seeing this line of thinking is where I see how out of touch is this "progressive" mentality of the millennials. Excuse in advance for my little rant.
It's so focused on the self and so eager to "have it all", that they never get to exercise the simple task of knowing to establish priorities in life. It has associated so much the idea that "you are what you consume" that it simply does not even consider the possibility of "not going to pay 200k for a stupid degree", or "not be running the corporate treadmill". Women are so self-conscious about not appearing "strong and independent" that the perfectly acceptable choice of "I want to focus on the family and supporting my husband, let him be the breadwinner" looks like things only a loser would do.
Not to mention this überization of everything. Would you really like to live in a world where people routinely assess the idea of getting a surrogate to have their kids for them? It is not enough to have kids nowadays being raised by nannies instead of their parents, the parents should also now delegate even the incubation? How much of parent are these parents, after all? What is next? Brave New World-style in-vitro cloning?
/rant.
Listen to the advice. If you want kids, have them as soon as possible. You will never "be ready" until you have them.
Oh, we have our priorities alright. We want to be financially comfortable and secure before bring children into this world, and if that means "running the corporate treadmill", freelancing, what have you, so be it. Due to how precarious incomes are today, single-earner households are often too fragile to raise kids, so "focusing on the family and support my spouse" (not necessarily husband, mind you...if single-earner households are the solution men should take it more often) is an unfeasible choice for many. "Having it all" is not a decadent luxury--it is a necessity in order for children to have a stable family life. It's not selfish, and I resent progressive-haters more and more for saying it is. We're not out of touch (except to a 20th century society that no longer exists); we're in touch with the challenges of life and parenthood today.
> Would you really like to live in a world where people routinely assess the idea of getting a surrogate to have their kids for them?
I would love to live in such a world where parents aren't restricted to their own genetic material or gestational capabilities when conceiving a child. I'd much rather delegate the incubation than the raising; I'd gladly ditch the nanny and pay for the surrogate.
I really find it hard to believe most people at the time of your parents or grandparents only thought about family after achieving "financial stability".
The challenges of "life and parenthood" today are not that different from our parents. It's that nowadays everyone gets this anxiety-inducing message that you can only consider yourself "an adult" when you traveled the whole world, achieved some level of education, worked for so-and-so, played in a rock band, got your 15 seconds of Internet fame, slept with a few dozen people... all of these challenges are artificial.
This kind of "we know our priorities" is not really about choosing anything. When the priorities being elected are as abstract as "financial comfort", it is unworkable. It becomes just some illusory target that in the end works just as a rationalization to not settle down and take "grown up" responsibilities.
Or put another way: if you say "We want to be financially comfortable before bringing children", you are stating that you won't think about family before having all of the financial comfort guaranteed. You may succeed at it or not, and even if you do it might be too late to have a family. If on the other hand you establish that having a family is important to you, you can work for it right now and then start thinking about how to secure yourselves financially. The main difference is that if you already have a good family, you already get a bigger support network.
> I'd gladly ditch the nanny and pay for the surrogate.
First, take a look at silencio's reply. It is currently illogical for the financial point of view.
Second, it is not about money! You are proposing a world where some privileged "elite" gets to postpone their fertile years and make more money at the expense of poorer women who will nothing but breeders for you, and that in the end might not even be able to have kids of their own. Is this really the kind of dystopia you'd like to live in?
First of all, having children and having a family are two different if related things. You can have children without having a family, and you can have family without having children. Having children alone does not give you any stronger a support network than you otherwise would have.
Second, if we prioritize being financially secure over having kids early, that /is/ a priority, and criticize that priority all you want, but it is a consciously made and valid choice, and one that does not take away from being "grown up", whatever that means. Settling down and being responsible does not require having children, and as we too often see, the reverse is also true.
Egg harvesting + IVF + surrogate is certainly very expensive. However I doubt it is more expensive than having a nanny for a few years, especially if nothing is done under the table, so for those who have enough money to pay for a full-time nanny, trading the nanny for a surrogate is not necessarily financially illogical.
> You are proposing a world where some privileged "elite" gets to postpone their fertile years and make more money at the expense of poorer women who will nothing but breeders for you, and that in the end might not even be able to have kids of their own.
It's better than a world where the "elite" have to choose between having children early and forgoing earnings (and non-childraising contributions to the world) or not having kids at all and the poor often lack resources to raise children to prevailing standards. If that's a dystopia, then that's one I'd rather live in than the world we have right now.
> if we prioritize being financially secure over having kids early, that /is/ a priority, and criticize that priority all you want, but it is a consciously made and valid choice.
Not quite. It would be a priority if people said "I prefer financial stability for myself over a family", and it would be perfectly acceptable. What I do not get is the amount of people (especially women) who say they want a family, but that there are other things they need to have "first", or that "they are not yet ready" and so on.
It is not "financially secure/healthy kids later" vs "financial uncertainty/healthy kids earlier". It is more "slight less uncertain financial/uncertain kids and family later" vs "financial uncertainty/certain kids and family earlier".
To ignore biology is the part that I don't get. It seems that these people are playing poker with their fertile years and justifying it as an "investment".
> the poor often lack resources to raise children to prevailing standards.
Which prevailing standards?
If you are surrounded by people living in big coastal cities from the USA, then you'd probably be expected to be providing things such as having your kids going to expensive private kindergarten schools, extra-curricular activities, pay for all the doctors for all the treatments and special care required due to having a late pregnancy, spending lots of money so they can have the gadgets and clothes and everyone else in their school have, etc... And what does this game of keeping with the Joneses give you? Some networking and good connections, so that maybe you have an influence where your children will go to university and grow up to be as neurotic and anxious as everyone else?
It doesn't have to be this way. This "prevailing standard" is sick to the core. It is fueled by consumerism, it benefits only the status quo and sucks the soul out of everyone. I'd never argue against looking for ways to give the best education possible to your child. But education is not something that you buy, and that the more expensive the better.
The best thing one could do would be to not have their kids living like this. Which doesn't mean that getting out of the city and moving to the suburbs is the solution.
The millennials are without a doubt among the richest, most educated and with the whole world at their fingertips. They could take all this power and do some actual change, break away from this broken system. Yet it seems that the more they want to prove they can be better than their parents' generation, the more they commit the same mistakes.
