The High Cost of Childcare and Finding Affordable Solutions

Where to Live Doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tq9rY1TCs49XHckWtzOowYz_xHXFnRpOZq8r0lE5JSQ

Should you have more kids? We discuss the REAL costs of additional children and why it gets dramatically cheaper after the first few. We also cover why private school, travel, restaurants, etc. are overrated for kids. Having a big family forces you to live more reasonably!

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] The incremental cost of each additional kid.

Cause I think people might be really surprised. There was a study done on this and it shows, I think it's like after four, every additional kid costs on average about a thousand dollars a year. So not a lot.

In an article called The Marginal Cost of Children in the New York Times Archive. . By the time you get to kid three, you have fallen from a cost of. around 15, 000 a year for one kid to, well under 3, 000 a year.

And so you can see how you get down to like 1, 000 extra a year, or 800 extra a year when you get like four, kid number five, the costs just drop really dramatically.

Malcolm Collins: And, and the waste that you have when you're having a few kids, keep in mind, you still need to buy all the s**t, you know, whether or not you're having a ton of kids or a few kids.

So, you know, the next time you have a kid, it's no baby toys, it's, it's no, you know, no, no, no toddler toys.

Simone Collins: No new swings, or highchairs, or bibs, or plates, [00:01:00]

Malcolm Collins: or bottles, or sippers, or Every time we buy something for one of our kids, that's being used by like a huge chain of kids after them

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Anyway. Hello, Simone! It is wonderful to talk to you today! So, we did this video on dinks, right? And we're like, dinks are actually good, right? Because They are we don't want these people having kids, they're not going to be good parents, probably not good for the gene pool so, let's march them into their sweet good night all by themselves.

Now, this But we got some

Simone Collins: interesting, we got some interesting comments on that video, and, and one I wanted to do a conversation about.

Malcolm Collins: Well, and I see this with other people, right? Like, the core point we made in the Dink video, or one of the points that we made, Is that you know, while we pity dinks, the people we pity more than dinks is people with only one or two kids, because it's all of the cost of kids and none of the real benefits of kids.

Well, you get some, I mean, you get like the, the shallow masturbatory feeling of I have a kid that the dinks don't get and like, you get to experience them and spend time with them, which is nice, but you don't [00:02:00] get like the genetic or cultural effects, right? You know, you're not really. contributing to a solution in a big way.

And, and it's actually harder. We argue like, like, and for us, it's very obviously harder. It is, it is much harder to have fewer kids than more kids.

Simone Collins: Totally. And we're stressful and

Malcolm Collins: way more stressful. And we need to talk about why this is the case. And in many ways, you know, we immediately saw it in the question that they're asking us about this.

It's like, well, I have two kids, but like, I don't know how I'm going to afford.

Simone Collins: I'll read the comments. There were, there were two comments. It sort of inspired this. So one person said, I have two kids, but I think I need to make more money before I go for number three. My mother in law is already very against her daughter having another.

So I was waiting to my economic situation changed to go for, for three. But should I, I know I want three because that's above replacement level. But what are the economics of kid numbers at three, four, five and crazy numbers like 10 and then someone else also answered, I want. More of this conversation to currently have to, but would love for, but don't want to reduce the quality of life for the children.

I [00:03:00] have IE vacations, private school, et cetera. It's just a very interesting conversation. That's the

Malcolm Collins: answer there. And this is, this is why higher numbers of kids become much easier because when you get to the higher number of kids. You realize that a lot of these things that you thought was necessary for your kids quality of life was really more about your own personal vanity than the kids actual Or societal

Simone Collins: decoupling.

Yeah, I think this understanding that private school, for example, is really good for your kids or necessary for your kids, or that, like, vacations where you fly somewhere are good for your kids or necessary for your kids. Like, I remember this, like, your Like you had relatives who were making this huge deal about flying their sons to Italy and how they were going to expose them to so much culture.

And this was going to be so formative for them. And they were all young teens at that age. They were like, yeah, you know, they're old enough to really appreciate it culturally. And they went and like, all they wanted to do [00:04:00] was eat at the hard rock cafe. Yeah. Every freaking day. They're just like, please just let me eat at the hard rock cafe.

Like, I don't really want to be here. Like they were not enjoying it. They didn't get anything out of it. And so this idea to us that like, Oh, well air travel and like really expensive.

Malcolm Collins: Well I think what is important to remember is, was travel is travel became associated with status for a period of time.

Cause of course, you know, if you can afford to travel, you're wealthier, you're higher status. And so people. Use it to affirm for their self, their high status was, I think, out really reflecting on whether or not it's this great beneficial thing to them. We talk about is, and I think that there are specific life stages where travel brings you a great deal of satisfaction.

And unfortunately, these are also your formative stages of life. So they're also when you're likely to be. Yeah, you know, I'd say like late teens through college and then like two years out of college, like that range is when you are in, you know, from an evolutionary standpoint, that's when you're leaving [00:05:00] your family, of course, you're going to be biologically rewarded for engaging in exploratory behavior that is most expanding your, your concept of the world, but also going out and surveying new lands and everything like that, because this is, You know, people who had this instinct to go out and do this during that period of their life would have spread further and had more offspring ultimately than people who didn't.

So it makes sense. This is a hard coded segment of our life. But the problem is that it's also around the age when many people are solidifying their identity. So in the same way that during that age, often people will think that kids are gross. Like when they're a teenager, they have this, like, biological instinct.

Young kids are gross because they're biologically hard coded to as a teenager, not be interested in young kids. You know, they're trying to find a partner and start having kids, right? So they see the young kids is gross and they don't want to be overly involved in child care. That makes perfect sense, right?

But they're building their identity then, and so then they, they work into their identity young kids are growing without realizing that that's like a cycling pre coded genetic thing for [00:06:00] that specific age range. And it's the same with traveling, you know, and travel during that time, you know, like your gap year, you know, after your, your young education, before you start fully working, or.

You know, taking a period then to be a digital nomad. I think that makes a lot of sense. It is something I'd encourage our kids to do early

Simone Collins: in their life. Also, there are many financially sustainable ways to do that. If mommy and daddy can't pay for it, for example, you can get a job abroad. You can get an internship abroad.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I did ultra low cost backpacking and everyone I knew doing it was you know, lots of hitchhiking. I hitchhiked around South America, hitchhiked around Europe.

Simone Collins: Yeah, when I was 13, I stayed in a hostel and worked. Volunteered for an environmental center and they're like, you know, they, I, I didn't have a food stipend or anything, but I spent under 10 a day for sure on like all my expenses, including like having my laundry done for me.

It was very luxurious

Malcolm Collins: you know, what a trip like that cost was kids, right? You go to the same area, you're not going to be able to spend, like, even for your kids, you [00:07:00] can't spend 10 a day only because then you have to get the types of foods that they like and stuff like that. Well, no, yeah, no,

Simone Collins: no, no, no.

If you're doing this as a family, it's ridiculous. But I think that, you know, that's the thing is, you know, there are lots of, there are lots of things that when you have zero, one or two kids, you assume you have to do for each child and they're inherently unsustainable and they're things also that families never really do.

Did in history and now it's like kind of ridiculous that they did. I mean, okay. So for example wealthy landed gentry. would send sons to travel, but not like every summer, they would maybe send them on a world tour as like a big thing. And by the

Malcolm Collins: way, these kids, ultra wealthy landed gentry, which I think today is very similar to a gap year, which most people can find a way to make work for their kids.

Exactly. And

Simone Collins: so that is, but that is one trip. And what most people I think have in mind is like, well, every year or every other year, we're all going to fly to Italy. Or we're going to fly to [00:08:00] Florida and like stay at a resort or something like that. And that's, it's just one, it doesn't really help anyone.

And two, it's not really sustainable. Also, you and I. You're explaining

Malcolm Collins: to like your future kid. Well,

Simone Collins: you and I have traveled extensively. In, in both very, very rough and also very, very luxurious formats. We've seen families travel, we've seen individuals travel. No one's having that much fun, but this is also just not, it's not, people do it definitely as you're saying.

And I think this needs to be emphasized for a self perception thing, for a social class signaling thing. And I also think also what we're seeing as, as people who own a business in the travel industry we're seeing a shift in the travel industry where it's very clear that people can't really afford to travel anymore.

Like the unit economics aren't working out. Like I think for a while travel was more heavily subsidized and people were able to go on what seemed like very luxurious travel trips for low costs. And those [00:09:00] days have come to an end post pandemic. Flights cost a lot more and people are now still trying to make this vision work, but they're getting on less and less comfortable flights.

They're suffering more and more on their trips because they're getting worse services. They can't afford as much. And then they're just getting really super disappointed. And we're seeing this throughout the travel industry.

Malcolm Collins: And this comes to this point that we're just going to keep emphasizing in this is the thing that you realize as you have more kids, the thing that makes it so easier.

Once you get well above two kids is you. Except that, oh, I don't need to do all those things I thought I needed to do it, it, it forces you to there's this thing in fighting games, actually, so we're talking about like, like, okay, so there's these fighting game communities, right, like for like street fighters or something like that, where they'll play games against each other, and there's these moves that you can learn.

Like, Honda doing that. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, thing just over and over and over again, where you're [00:10:00] spamming a certain move. And this can work really well up to a certain level of of opponent or difficulty. But as soon as you get to an opponent that knows how to beat this, like a certain level of difficulty opponent, people who were overly spamming these simplistic moves to win end up not being able to develop as players because there is such a huge gap between where they are right at that moment.

And the, the, the opponent who they were facing. was, right? Like, like when they get out of this difficulty trap. So they're now way below everyone who's at like a similar ELO rating to them, which is like a, the difficulty rating. This is kind of similar with kids. You need to reach one. Either you reach a point in which you're kicked out of this, you know, stupid way of having kids that our society does it today.

And you're like, Oh, this is unsustainable. I need to find a different cultural way of relating to kids. But when you go into kids, and this is what's really interesting, you know, like, [00:11:00] while kid number one was hard for us, kid number two is actually fairly easy. Kid number three was fairly easy. And I think that if we had incrementally been adapting with every kid we would have been like the guy who was spamming that simple move just because we had the money to afford it at the time.

Where instead we're like, okay, you like starting with kid number 2, every kid we're going to be raising as if we were raising 7 kids. Like, how do we economically make this work if we're raising 7 kids? And so we make very, very, very different economic decisions around everything we're doing with kids.

And these economic decisions and, and social decisions in terms of how we're interacting with them and everything like that, like, how do I make this economically viable is, is where we're getting these, these big advantages in terms of it being very, very, very much easier. And so. The, the core thing that you keep seeing is how do I have kids without sacrificing X or Y or Z or D?

And it's like, well, you should have sacrificed those things long ago. They don't matter as much as you think they matter. Like

Simone Collins: [00:12:00] really. Or they're harmful. Like private school, for example, that in another example given in the comment. Some of the

Malcolm Collins: events to hate you, like send them to private school. If you're a rich person,

Simone Collins: we've heard multiple parents who are well resourced to send their kids to private school because they were able to, you know, they had the privilege of doing it and often they only had one kid.

Though many of them, you know, also had many kids and they just have more like the money to pay for it. They now hate private school. They think it was, you know, Alienated their children from them and, and, and robbed them of their culture and made their kids hate them, like private school's. Not necessarily this really good solution for your kids.

I, I don't know. So I went public school and it was great. It was, it was, you know, I, I would not have done any better in a private school.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I don't know, I, I, you know, I went to private school. I went to boarding school. It doesn't add that much. I, I, I don't know a single person. In the last five years that I've met, like I know some older parents who would have say, yeah, private school is great for my kids.

I don't know anyone recently who said the private school is good for their kids. I [00:13:00] know a lot of people complaining about private school. I've heard a lot of horror stories about what's happened to people's kids at private schools recently. But if you are sending your kids to private school, you, you need to like recontextualize what you're really sending them to.

Well, no. So I,

Simone Collins: I do think that a lot of people, especially in this community are thinking about like sending their kids to classical schools because they don't want them to go to a progressive school. So they're sending them to private schools that are Catholic schools or like there's some form of classical education.

They're

Malcolm Collins: sending them to Catholic schools that they don't know. They haven't talked to people whose kids have gone to Catholic schools recently. These are just as progressive as everywhere else.

Simone Collins: There are some genuinely religiously conservative schools and they can be pricey, but I mean, I think we also make the argument that like a good homeschooling program, and we're also designing one for our own kids that, you know, hopefully will be made available to other families this year too.

You can, yeah, super cheap. You can have elite affordable education. You just have to, you know, be resourceful. And I think a lot of the, again, it's, it's, it's, it's, [00:14:00] it's about normalizing. No, of course, you know, you're not going to send your kid to private school because. One, you don't need to. And what you can do at home as a family is better.

No, you're not going to fly to travel, but you can take car trips. You can, you know, you can absolutely travel places as a family. And that's very normal. And like the point I was making earlier about like a world tour, is it like. Yeah, but these, even these super, super wealthy kids at that time weren't traveling every single year.

You know, that even the wealthiest did not normalize things like this. They didn't, There

Malcolm Collins: are ways that you can make travel work for your family. Even today, if you want to travel every year, you get in your. Car or your van or your converted bus, depending on how many kids you have. And you go to the woods, you go to local things and, and this matter.

Simone Collins: You created, we should link to this in the description, your where to live document, where you create a document on an optimal, like optimal places to live. If you live in the United States [00:15:00] and you want to have a large family. And one of the big things that you factored in there was. Where are places where you can live where in a car with your family, because obviously flying is really expensive when you have a lot of kids.

Would you be able to travel to the most meaningful, cool destinations? So, you know, it's, it's affordable to take trips that still feel really special where you go to major cities or major sites or theme parks or whatever it might be. So I think that's also an important factor.

Malcolm Collins: After you secure a partner.

So obviously we think that cities are a high utility for securing partners. They are. After you secure a partner and you're looking to settle down, you start having kids, do check out this document and then move to rural Pennsylvania because it is the best. I can easily from where we are here, go take a trip to D.

C. Go take, you know, see the nation's capital, see all the museums, go take a trip to Manhattan, see all of that, go to Boston, see where the, Tea party happened, everything like that. Or, or go to the beach. I can go to Jersey shore. I can go gambling in Atlantic city. I can, you know, I, I can see most of America's [00:16:00] like major cultural centers.

Very, very easily. Oh, I want to go to another country. Just drive up to Canada, you know? And I want to go to a theme park, a Horseshoe park, you know? And we

Simone Collins: find this uniquely notable because you grew up in Texas, at least when you were pretty young. And I grew up in California and like. You can't really drive to that many places when you live in.

Malcolm Collins: You can't do anything. Yeah. It's terrible. I, I did not enjoy it at all. I remember, you know, when I was at boarding school in New England, we'd be driving for a little bit and people were like, Oh, we crossed the state border. And I'd be like, you did what? You got to understand you a Texan saying you cross the state border.

It's like saying we just entered like deep space. Like what?

Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and Californians know, I don't care to hear that. you drove to Vegas or Tahoe. Like, no, that, that doesn't impress me when like we have to drive at much, much shorter distances to get to either gambling or resorts [00:17:00] or amazing camping and, and nature and wildlife.

Malcolm Collins: Let me tell you what, sorry, how did this video come on? Shitting on everywhere of a Pennsylvania, but yeah, big sir, people in San Francisco, you got no animals there. Like it's weird. Like, when I go to Big Sur, it feels like I have, I have entered an area that has just undergone some sort of, like, ecological catastrophe, where, like, somehow all of the insects and birds and animals died, because it is weirdly quiet.

I like

Simone Collins: it. I like it. I know you really like buggy rainforests. That's not really my thing. I'm, I'm a fan of Big Sur. I grew up around it, but, like, anyway, just in

Malcolm Collins: terms of variety. Like the ecological diversity you have here just the birds like around our house. Like it's nothing on this in California. I don't know.

I don't understand. My guess is what's happening in California is the trees have some sort of defense mechanism that's like uniquely good. I think it might be the Redwood forest against yeah, it could be a Redwoods thing. And because you don't have insects, you don't have birds and because You know, [00:18:00] you don't have that.

You don't have like anything else that you would have in a normal, large ecosystem. But it is, it is like a uniquely sad eco, like growing up in Texas. Like I get to California and I'm like, where are they animals? Like this is the woods. It's trees and deer. Like where's everything else? But anyway you know, and I do think that there's some other places, you know, obviously we stand where we live because we're, we're happy with the place and you're running for office here.

So you got to talk about how great it is.

Simone Collins: But there are other really, I think, common things that, you know, a lot of people expect they have to do as parents. It would be insanely expensive if you did. And one thing that did come up in the comments too was childcare. Like, childcare is just so expensive.

And when I was watching A video recently on why dink couples didn't have kids, one of the women interviewed said, Oh yeah, you know, I have this friend who just bemoaned the fact that she realized that the amount she takes home and take home pay from her job equals the amount that she would be paying in childcare if she had a kid.

And yeah, childcare is unsustainably [00:19:00] expensive. And after a certain number of kids, like we, we, we used childcare when we had two kids because. You know, kind of we could, and it was like much easier to not have to work that out. And then after three and having three in childcare for like six months, like all of our savings were gone.

So

Malcolm Collins: we're like, yeah, we're figuring out another solution. And that's the thing with more kids, right? More kids force you to find other actually sustainable solutions. Yeah, now we have found a solution that costs us maybe half what we were paying in child care before for the three kids. Is infinitely better for our kids.

Because it's a friendly neighbor who we help with stuff and, and, and help a bit financially and then who takes care of the kids and who the kids like more, right? Like yeah. We had built this horrible situation where we were treating childcare as either a school or an individual financial thing where it's like, we're paying you for X many hours, and now we're treating it in the way people historically treated it as a community solution [00:20:00] because more kids forces you to find these more out of the box solutions that are actually much closer to the way people historically did things.

Yeah, I

Simone Collins: think I want to get to the question of. What is your life going to be about? Like, is your life going to be about conforming with mainstream societal ideals of like, this is how you do these certain rituals or is your life going to be about your family and raising a successful family? You know, and even when it comes to kid development, I also, I think that it's underrated the.

If, if we could put a dollar amount on the value that a child gets by having siblings, that they get to play a role in raising the responsibility that gives them the maturity that gives them you know, I feel like that is on its own is worth at least 25 percent of the cost of an elite private school every single year in terms of the.

The maturity and responsibility that it gives to a kid in a positive and constructive [00:21:00] context to and keep

Malcolm Collins: in mind You know another advantage you have when you have a lot of kids is you know When we're at eight nine kids or something like that Then you're getting to a situation where we don't even need the neighbors to help take care of the kids, you know Then the kids are playing the daycare role as well, you know So if they want to

Simone Collins: we want to make it we were discussing this yesterday.

We want to make this totally like often, like we would, we would pay them for tutoring and childcare services if they wanted to do it. And if they didn't, we wouldn't force it. We don't believe in forced parentification. I think it's also like a great I believe

Malcolm Collins: in forced parentification. I think that you don't want that for our kids.

And I understand why we wouldn't do that with our kids, but I don't think it's like a bad thing. Well, I, yeah, I

Simone Collins: mean, I don't believe in coercion and I don't think you really can coerce it. But. I know you

Malcolm Collins: don't want to force a kid into a role like that that doesn't want to be in a role like that. But if you raise the kid well, and you have parental instincts, your kids will have parental instincts.

Our kids are very nice to each other. Like we're surprised by it. So, so I totally get that. And another thing that somebody [00:22:00] mentioned in one of these that I, that I want to bring up, and I'm not, I'm not going to look this up. I'll look this up afterwards and then add it when I'm doing the editing. Is the incremental cost of each additional kid.

Cause I think people might be really surprised. There was a study done on this and it shows, I think it's like after four, every additional kid costs on average about a thousand dollars a year. So not a lot.

Sadly, I was not able to find this study I was thinking of. I know it was done at one time and it was around a thousand a year once you get up to four. And it makes sense when I looked at another study I found which found the numbers for, , kid One was 14,460 a year. Kid two was 8,540 a year, and Kid three was 2,880 a year.

, and this was in an article called The Marginal Cost of Children in the New York Times Archive. So this is even, you know, a fairly progressive publication, which is admitting this. By the time you get to kid three, you have fallen from a cost of. around 15, 000 a year for one [00:23:00] kid to, well under 3, 000 a year.

And so you can see how you get down to like 1, 000 extra a year, or 800 extra a year when you get like four, kid number five, the costs just drop really dramatically.

Malcolm Collins: And, and the waste that you have when you're having a few kids, keep in mind, you still need to buy all the s**t, you know, whether or not you're having a ton of kids or a few kids.

So, you know, the next time you have a kid, it's no baby toys, it's, it's no, you know, no, no, no toddler toys.

Simone Collins: No new swings, or highchairs, or bibs, or plates,

Malcolm Collins: or bottles, or sippers, or Every time we buy something for one of our kids, that's being used by like a huge chain of kids after them. Like, the wastefulness of buying a bottle or a shoe for a toddler that they can literally only wear until they What?

What? When we

Simone Collins: really work on buying, like, forever toys. Like, we we now take inspiration from [00:24:00] And this is I think this is I'm so excited to have learned this school like not school on public libraries often have like toy sections for kids. And those toy sections are usually populated with the most durable, but also popular toys that can survive many, many, many children constantly playing with them and totally abusing them.

For many years. So that's where we got the idea of like wooden toy sets and all these other things that like clearly are durable, clearly have staying power. Our kids love playing with them and you can always have the kids play test them at a public library and know if they like them. So like, yeah, we don't have to buy.

Now we don't have to buy that again for our kids, which is

Malcolm Collins: amazing. Yeah. Well, it feels so wasteful when you, when you get something like this and it's for one kid or two kids, right? Like you, you are. Like these toys interesting for how long, like literally, I don't know, like not that long for a lot of toys, but if they're interesting, five kids, six kids, you know, you get this feeling like, Oh, that was a really worthwhile economic investment for my family.[00:25:00]

Simone Collins: Totally. Yeah. And no, it's, it's, it's, and I think what are, what are other crazy things? Oh, like when we go out to eat and we see parents ordering kids meals for their kids, which they subsequently do not eat that. Why would you do

Malcolm Collins: that? Why would you ever take your kids to a restaurant? Like I don't get it.

Simone Collins: One, you don't need to pay for your kids and two, you don't need to pay for Ozempic because you just give your kids a little bit off your plate. And then, you know,

Malcolm Collins: one, okay, guys, so if you're going to a restaurant, you can have your kids eat off your plate or something like that. But it's like, do these people not know like YouTube exists?

Like if you have a decent quality spouse, like myself or my wife, you know, we always take the time to, you know, we go to a restaurant. The only reason I go to restaurants today is to learn new dishes. And when I mean learn a new dish, and I look at the dish they made, and if I like it, then I learn to make it myself, and then I make it for myself.

There is no reason to, as an adult, be going to restau What are you doing? Like, you can go to YouTube, learn to make the [00:26:00] dish that was made at the restaurant, right? And then, tweak it to your personal taste, and make it with all high quality ingredients, without cutting all the corners that restaurants are always cutting.

And you're gonna get a Dramatically cheaper, dramatically higher quality food. Like, what are you doing? And this is the type of thing where it's like, you know, historically, before kids, we would go out to eat pretty frequently, right? You know, and, and kids force you to learn to make these decisions when you have a big family that end up being much more economically nicer, much more, even hedonistically nicer.

Like, the food I'm eating now is better than the food I was eating when I would go to restaurants all the time. yEah, I, I, you know, and you keep seeing this is that our society has trapped us. And what I call easy hedonism. And the problem is, is that easy hedonism sucks so much more than hard hedonism.

Simone Collins: Well, and I think the other thing is that people need to recognize just how completely out [00:27:00] of touch with reality, most standard expectations around children really are. Like, even when you look at movies from, from pastime periods, like, I was just watching 16 candles last night and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is a family of four and they are financially reasonable about what they do with their lives.

Like, they, there's a wedding that takes place in the movie for one of the older siblings in a family and all the grandparents come to town, but they're like literally sleeping in the kids bedrooms of the family house. They're not like putting them up in hotels or anything because they are financially reasonable.

Home alone, you know, there's, there's not a nanny for every child, like moving about the house. They don't have au pairs or anyone helping them out. This is, you know, a, this is a family that is literally traveling with what, how many kids, like 10, 14. It was some, some insane number of kids. And

Malcolm Collins: Oh, you can't travel with that many kids without an au pair.

What are you [00:28:00] doing? 15 kids, no au

Simone Collins: pair. Although they were, they were clearly, I mean, when you look at their house, they're like insanely wealthy and they also were flying to like Paris and then in like the second movie, Miami with all those kids are insane. But yeah, I mean, it just, even when you look in the past, you see little things of like, yeah, no.

Yeah, kids don't, kids don't need this much stuff and we, we're, we're not being reasonable. So I think that the question to ask yourself, if you want more kids, here's the thing, do not have more kids. If financially it is going to put you in a dangerous situation where you cannot maintain housing or food or your job, you know, like do not put yourself in a situation where you are.

mentally going to, you know, suffer a ton because of the stress and the, you know, like you're going to lose your health insurance or things like that. Like we're like, literally you're being destabilized. Although I should say that most states have resources for parents. who find themselves in a low income level.

Talk about our resource list. Yes. So [00:29:00] on, on pranatalist. org, pronatalist. org, if you go to our services section, then scroll down a little bit, it links to a parent resources page where we list at least for the United States to start. If you want us to try to do your nation. But let me know and we can, you know, hire yourself and we'll add it to the list for other parents.

Totally. But we have a guide to federal resources for parents in the United States, as well as state based resources for parents in the United States. The vast majority of them are based on income limits. But if you are low income. It is amazing what the state will provide. I mean, everything from, you know, healthcare to food assistance, to housing assistance, to all sorts of other things you know, even access.

There, there are more education savings accounts programs for low income families now than there are just for general families. So there, there's a lot that you can get for support. But I, I still like, I don't want to encourage people to have kids if they like, can't afford to pay for them all by themselves.

So like, I feel like. If that's, if that's the problem, like

Malcolm Collins: the person who's like, how do I pay for [00:30:00] private school for all my kids? It's like,

Simone Collins: right. And that's, yeah, you just don't, just don't. Yeah. So no, you're not going to fly.

Malcolm Collins: We're building our education system specifically because we do not plan to send our kids to college.

And I wanted something better. I mean,

Simone Collins: specifically because we do not plan to pay. To send our kids to college. If they want to go to college, they have to find a way to either through their own businesses or through scholarships or grants pay their own way through college. And we plan to set them up to have that be an easy option for them if they want it.

But yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, is no, you will not be going out. No, you will not be flying internationally with your children. No, you will not

Malcolm Collins: be probably build for our foundation is one of those things that can help a kid. What, what's the word where they become separated from their parents?

Simone Collins: Oh to become emancipated.

Malcolm Collins: Cause that can really help with college loans and

Simone Collins: stuff like that. If you're part of a large with financial aid. Okay. That's a, yeah, that's a good project for us to work on. But, but You know, I, I do remember before we [00:31:00] had kids thinking it was going to be a lot worse and that like, Oh man, this is going to be so tough.

And like also expecting that we were going to need those things. We know we were going to need like a bunch of nannies and night nurses. And like, remember after the, my, my first attempt to get overnight care when we had a newborn, I was like, wait. This is really stupid. No, I, and I do all of the overnight care.

I do all of the daycare for, for newborns because that's really easy for me. And then you take care of all the toddlers and everyone older. And it's just, it's seamless. Like there's a lot of things that you think you need that you really, really, really don't. And I, I will, I will admit there are some luxuries I've been exposed to and ever being, ever since being exposed to them, living without them sucks.

Like, There is

Malcolm Collins: one. First class flights. Yes. You cannot afford, is there any other?

Simone Collins: No. And see, that's it. Like, there's nothing else where I'm like, Oh man, my life is so much worse now. And the only

Malcolm Collins: reason we would need to take you on a first class flight is because of the freaking conferences we speak at because of

Simone Collins: [00:32:00] the pronatalism.

Yeah, and I would rather not travel at all. So like really, it's not even something I should be regretting because I really don't want to travel in the first place. So like, my life really isn't worse at all. And I love when

Malcolm Collins: people are like, well, what about my friends? Like, I'm not gonna get to see my friends anymore.

It's like, do you not understand? Friends are pretty shitty. Like, kids, so much better than friends. Like, like, the parents stop interacting with you when they have kids, not because they don't have time, always. Some of the time, it's because they realize That the, the, these, these veneers of relationships they had formed with other people were so much less deep than the relationships that actually matter in life.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And this is, you know, it is something that we constantly struggle with that like everyone's like, yeah, but what about love and the deep bonds that I form with my friends? And we're just like, and this is not to say that there are people that we really care about a lot that, [00:33:00] you know, like to, to us, they are family.

And they're not related to us by blood. You know, these are just people that we care deeply about and we will vouch for them and we'll put our names on the line for them and whatever. Right. Like, but I don't

Malcolm Collins: know, like, Myself caring about them all the time and seeing them and visiting them and going out for drinks.

I don't understand how bar Santa is. I want to be honest. Like we live in a rural area and this is something I often talk about. You have to go to these bars, you have to drive to them. Like, how are you doing that?

Simone Collins: Yes. Suburban bars do not make sense. Suburban and rural bars are very strange. It

Malcolm Collins: is. What in the drinks costs like eight times.

If you just anyway. I love you, Simone. Have a wonderful day. And I hope this video has been, to some extent, freeing to some people, but other people just be like, no, I can't do it. I won't give up anything. And it's like, okay, well then you shouldn't have more kids because.

Simone Collins: But don't think of it as giving things up.

Think of it as recontextualizing [00:34:00] life and embracing. Frankly more, this is why

Malcolm Collins: you're running for office,

Simone Collins: but also like, it's so odd because you and I are so materialistic and you know, everything we're, we're, you know, we do is, is very much driven by like capitalist philosophy and it rubs many people the wrong way, but we're also like.

You know, like the money stuff doesn't matter. The luxury stuff really isn't what we're in this for. So I don't know. Like I would say that even as very materialistic capitalist friendly people, like this is just not something that's worth it. Like you're not going to, you're not going to be happier living this luxurious life.

And, and we see this as people who've experienced both extremes in different contexts,

Malcolm Collins: extreme, extreme luxury in my life and people who live life in extreme, extreme luxury. are not happy people, generally. They're really not. They are really not happy people. And, and, and, when I see ultra wealthy people who have a lot of kids, they are not forced to [00:35:00] make these changes to the way they raise their kids, which leads to them being actually, in my experience, much less happy than, than lower income people who have a lot of kids.

Because those are the people who are like, how do I actually figure out child care? How do

Simone Collins: I would say, like, we'll say roughly middle income kids like families that are large have the best kid outcomes. And I, if anything, both, I mean, okay, so I would say, yeah, like low income kids have the worst headwinds, like the worst, but then second after them is super wealthy kids because of just all the messed up stuff that they're dealing with.

And then the best off are not even upper, upper middle class, but like middle class were like, they're. There is literally not the option to have many indulgences in life. Like those do the very best because they learn how to handle things for themselves. It's so funny. And Martha Stewart, my hero, my, my patron Saint spent her entire career.

Once she [00:36:00] became famous, trying to hide the fact that she came from a poor Polish family. But the, the, the thing that made her such an amazing. person. And the thing that made her capable of turning homemaking and domesticity into this branded luxury experience was the fact that she actually had to make everything from scratch, that she actually had to sew clothes, that they actually had to have all these, like, you know, they had to fix everything themselves and reupholster furniture.

And Make all their own meals and, and not go out for, for, for dinner and stuff. So like, it's, it is, it is these people who ultimately create amazing outcomes. So just,

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I love you, Simone. And I really enjoyed this conversation and I'm just so fortunate to be married to somebody who's willing to make these changes.

One of the things that I think scares me the most, you know, when I think about our kids and when I look at people out there today, as they marry someone. Who [00:37:00] tells them that they're down for these sacrifices, life changes, and then they do not make them, you know, they, they refuse to actually care for the kids.

You know, they keep like full time live in staff and they say, this is too much for me. You know, and I, I've seen this even was in my own family, you know, and it is repulsive. It is, it is the highest failure, you know, a human who committed to handling this can make.

Simone Collins: And it's really rough because typically it's the women who do this and they have like 100 percent all the control over like whether or not they're going to have kids and a man can't be like, Oh no, pregnancy is not that hard because they, they just, they literally can't do it.

And so they

Malcolm Collins: can't. And then you go to people about this, right? You know, and I wish they could see kids the way we do, you know, the kids exist before they're born, right? And so when a person says, yeah, but if I have another kid, I won't be able to travel every year. It's like, do your trips to like the Caribbean, are they like, if you, your future kid, like two timelines, you have to, in one timeline, explain to your future kid, it.[00:38:00]

That the trips to the Caribbean were just more important than their life. Like, do you actually think you're, like, a decent human being? Like, oh, oh, or, or, or, oh, no it's that I had to take my other kids out of private school, or I couldn't pay for college for all my kids. And, and you go to that future kid and you're like, little Timmy.

I'm sorry, but your life just was not as important as sending these other kids.

Simone Collins: We wouldn't have American heroes like Benjamin Franklin were it not for parental budgetary constraints. So Benjamin Franklin's father wanted to, as he put it, in his biography, tithe him to the church. As, as one of the youngest kids, he was like, okay, finally, I'm, I'm willing to just give away one of my kids to the church.

So he, his plan originally was to pay for Benjamin Franklin's private school so that he could go into, into the clergy and be properly educated to serve God traditionally through the church, ran out of money. And so Benjamin Franklin had to get a [00:39:00] job and it was, it was that point at which his life and career began.

If he had ended up, by

Malcolm Collins: the way, you know, yeah, starting

Simone Collins: at age 12, totally. But like, imagine if his father had enough money to continue paying for private school to send him to the church, Benjamin Franklin may have been, you know, a great church luminary or something like that, but he certainly would not have been the, the philosophical.

In, in invent, venous in, what's the word for someone who invents? Inventor? Invents things. Inventor, yeah. But like someone, an adjective describing someone who is inclined to make inventions.

Malcolm Collins: Ingenious. Inventorious.

Simone Collins: Innovative. Innovative. Innovative. Yes. Yeah. He wouldn't, he wouldn't have become this, this entrepreneurial, innovative, politically influential figure that he was.

I mean, he played a key role in the formation of the early United [00:40:00] States. So again, like, you know, the, Some kind of hardship, some kind of constraint has to be given in order to give someone the opportunity to thrive. So, anyway, I know, I know, we gotta, we gotta get going. Do you wanna do curry bricks tonight?

Malcolm Collins: Curry bricks? Oh, you want me to do the Japanese curry bricks? Yeah, yeah, the Japanese

Simone Collins: curry.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're gonna do that with the slow cooked steak? Yeah. Mmm. Love that idea. And this is the type of thing, you know, when you have a big family, you can use a slow cooker, slow cook a big thing of steak.

You know, you get it at BJ's it, it, it, it stays very well in the fridge after that. So then you, you dole it out. And once you slow cook the steak, there's lots of things you can do to create these really high quality meals. So I am so excited for this, Simone, and I love

Simone Collins: you too, Malcolm.