I'm buying some of that data, but I'd like to know the number of kids per household in relation to reporting financial hardships. Guess what? Kids are really fucking expensive. If you have a household income of less than 150K, maybe it's not smart to have 4 kids. My office does these charity drives twice a year where they pick a couple of low income families each time, and it always appears to be the same story: single mother (or two parents but one can't work), 6 kids, live in a 2 bedroom apartment, car is on its last legs, etc. It's heartbreaking, but I always think "Why in the fuck do you have 6 kids??" Everyone at my office is at least middle class, if not upper, management are 1%ers. Guess how many have more than 3 kids? Fucking zero, because it's piss-poor planning. And the fucking wage gap shit again the article references...yea, because men make it to upper management positions by rolling in at 9 and leaving as soon as the clock strikes 5. Fuck that. Every single person - man or woman - who's even mid management works minimum 50 hours/week. That's going to be extremely challenging with 3 kids, and basically impossible with more than that.
I'm not insensitive to the fact that wages haven't gone up in proportion to the price of housing, services and consumer goods. Something should be done there. But the reality is that too many kids will hold you back, and it's not fair to the kids either. You don't need to have 4, 5 or 6 kids. 2 is plenty to sap all your energy and attention, and if you're really feeling up to it, go for 3. Anything above that, like I said, poor planning.
EDIT: then there's also the fact that there are too many of us already. We don't need more, we need less. If everyone could just understand that, our governments would be forced to take a good hard look at their systems that stop functioning properly once the population levels off - or god forbid - starts to decline.
