More Americans are choosing to put off having children—or not having them at all. The Ivys are an exception. ‘It is hard. But it’s not impossible.’

Brittany Ivy didn’t have much money in the bank. She and her new husband, Michael Ivy, had just paid for their wedding, and they had less than $1,000 in savings left.

But they also hoped for a big family, and wanted to get started. Sure, Brittany was making $10 an hour working a retail job at Home Depot. But Michael’s union construction job paid more than triple that, and he’d owned his own home, a modest two-bedroom outside Cincinnati, for more than a decade.

So the two took the plunge, and in 2012, they welcomed their first baby. Brittany was 20; her husband, 34. The birth was difficult. Her son’s umbilical cord was wrapped around his head, and he had to be extracted from her birth canal, fracturing her pelvis. Still, she was smitten. “Your heart grows three sizes,” she recalls. “I couldn’t stop looking at him.”

The Ivys now have five children, ages 3 to 12. They know they aren’t the norm.

More Americans than ever are putting off having children—or not having them at all. The U.S. total fertility rate is around an all-time low, and far below the rate needed to keep the population stable. The average age of women giving birth in the U.S. has risen to nearly 30 years old, up from 27 years old in 2000, according to government data.

Those trends have become a flashpoint in American life today. Many advocates and politicians—including prominent voices inside the Trump administration—have suggested that the falling birthrate in the U.S. represents a looming crisis for society.

It’s a sharp turnaround from the 1990s, when high teen pregnancy rates pushed the U.S. to launch a national campaign to try to reduce them, one that emphasized the importance of waiting for the right partner and being able to support a family.

“We shamed people for years to not have kids too early,” says Karen Benjamin Guzzo, who directs the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “We told them to wait until you had enough money and a partner and could afford it.”

That standard is increasingly out of reach. Costs for basics such as housing, child care and education have soared. More families are finding that they can’t make life work with just one parent working. That’s especially the case given how standards of parenting have risen, making many middle-class parents feel obliged to adopt a more enrichment-heavy—and costly—form of child rearing.

Many people are having fewer kids than they’d like to, unsure that they’ll be able to pay for “the things we think of kids needing to get ahead,” Guzzo says.

But Brittany didn’t see it that way. She hadn’t always wanted to have kids so young, but her husband was older, and so she was eager to start their family. That way, she thought, they’d both get to enjoy more years with their kids, and perhaps grandkids.

Growing up as the daughter of a nurse and a stay-at-home dad, she and her two siblings lived near their cousins, and together they made a gang of five, roaming the neighborhood, buying corner-store slushies and biking around. As adults, they remained close, and she hoped to give the same relationships to her own kids. Michael also came from a large family and loved the idea of creating one of his own.

She knew the cost of kids could be daunting. A 2022 analysis by the Brookings Institution found that it now costs more than $300,000 to raise a child through age 17. That estimate doesn’t count the cost of college.

But Brittany figured her kids didn’t need college to be happy. Michael, after all, had managed to earn enough as a construction worker to buy his first house by age 20. And if they did want to go, they could always take out loans.

Besides, so far, the costs for her first son had felt manageable. “A baby doesn’t need much,” Brittany says. “I always breast-fed, so we weren’t buying formula, it was diapers and clothes and that was pretty much all a baby needs.”

When the two welcomed their second son in 2014, they celebrated. And between help from neighbors and family, plus her husband pitching in when his shifts ended in the afternoon, they were both able to keep working.

By then, Brittany had made strides toward her dream career. She’d gotten an associate degree in interior design, taking out around $40,000 in loans to cover its cost. She’d earned a promotion at Home Depot and was making $12 an hour selling new kitchens and baths to customers, and won a regional vice presidential award for her sales record. In one year, she says, she hit nearly $750,000 in sales.

Then, when her eldest was 3, he started having asthma attacks that regularly landed him in the hospital. At work, Brittany had to drop down to part-time to manage his care. Still, she assumed that was just a bump in her career path.

Soon, the family notched another milestone: Brittany was pregnant, this time with both a boy and a girl.

The twins came in 2018. They were more than 2½ months early, born via emergency C-section and requiring months in the neonatal intensive-care unit.

After their birth, Brittany ended up getting eight weeks of leave and shuttled to the hospital every day, an hour each way, pumping in the car to try to build up enough milk supply for two. When that time was up, Brittany says, she asked her boss for a few more weeks of leave, unpaid, so she could spend time at the hospital, but was denied.

A Home Depot spokeswoman says the company’s current policy provides six weeks of paid leave for all eligible parents, and an additional six to eight weeks for birth mothers.

But back when her twins were born, Brittany was left feeling frustrated and angry. She wanted to stay. “I’d been with the company for over six years,” she says. “It’s not like I was a slacker or somebody who didn’t work hard.”

She quit the job and focused on the twins, as well as care for her two other children. She planned to find work once her babies’ health stabilized—something she was eager to do.

“I’m a very social person, and it was really hard for me to adjust to just being around my kids all day,” she says. “Adult conversation is something you miss a lot.”

When her twins were finally discharged, she started perusing job openings, including at a local grocery store, which paid well and offered decent benefits. But when she crunched the numbers, she found that all of her pay would be eaten up by child care. The math was a disappointment.

“I hated that it didn’t make sense,” she says. “I like working.”

Every month, at least 1.2 million workers have to miss work or are working only part-time because of child-care issues, an analysis of government data by KPMG shows. In most parts of the U.S., including in Ohio, it costs more to send a baby full-time to daycare than it does to pay for in-state tuition at a public college. Compared with many parts of the developed world, the U.S. offers little in the way of help for working parents with young children.

Months passed, then years. Before Brittany knew it, her twins were 3, and she and her husband began contemplating whether to have more children. Sure, some days she’d felt bored, but most days, she loved being a mother, just as she thought she would: family trips to the local park, movie nights with all the kids piled into her bed, their delight in coloring books from the dollar store.

Time was moving so fast. Their eldest was already in third grade, taking gifted classes at their local public school. Their second-oldest was getting into Minecraft and making music on his computer. Already she missed the softness of a baby’s hair, the way an infant snuggled against her neck.

One last one, she and her husband thought. They were elated to find out they were pregnant with a fifth child, a girl.

By the time the baby arrived in 2022, the family had been pitched into a crisis: Michael was out of work. Years doing roofing had taken its toll on his back. A flare-up from wear and tear on his spine had left him in so much pain that for months, he was barely able to walk to the car.

Since the twins’ birth, the family had qualified for Medicaid, partly because of their income and because one of the twins had needed a feeding tube. They petitioned Medicaid to pay for an MRI for Michael, but were repeatedly denied, they say.

Desperate, the duo wound up paying cash themselves. They sold his truck to pay for the bill, which cost $750. After Michael’s MRI, they say, Medicaid agreed to pay for the surgery he needed.

That fall, with their baby girl taking her first steps, Michael got a job making about $34,000 doing maintenance and janitorial work for the local school district. It was a lot less money than he’d earned in construction, but it came all year-round, and Brittany preferred it that way. “Before that we’d save all summer to be able to pay the bills over winter,” she says. “At least here, it’s a steady paycheck.”

These days, the Ivys support themselves on Michael’s salary, along with around $4,200 a year in rental income from the modest two-bedroom home next to theirs. They bought it a decade ago and rent to her sister-in-law.

When something breaks, they do their best to fix it. They buy their clothes at thrift shops: $1 for a shirt, $2-$3 for a pair of pants. The only things Brittany buys new for the kids are items like shoes, underwear and backpacks.

She has no regrets about how it’s all turned out. Spending so much time with her kids has been a gift.

“I get to see every moment of their babydom,” she says. “Being able to comfort my daughter when she scrapes her knee and be there all the time—what else would I rather be doing?”

Brittany says she wishes more people were able to make the choices she has. She feels lucky her husband bought a home so young. Housing prices have surged since then, and the job market is tightening up, and so she understands why some people might feel it’s impossible to have a family—much less one as large as her own.

“I don’t blame anyone for choosing not to have kids,” she says. “Because it is hard. But it’s not impossible.”

They still live in the two-bedroom. The twins share a room, their youngest sleeps with them in the other, and the boys share a set of bunk beds in the living room. Michael has gotten multiple raises and now makes about $41,000, but it’s still less than he earned in construction.

At this point, the oldest four are in school. For a time, with remote work now being so widespread, Brittany thought she might try landing a job like that. But with all her kids, she’s at the bus stop four times a day, dropping them off or retrieving them, and sometimes spending 30 minutes loitering there if the bus is late. “It just doesn’t seem realistic,” she says.

Her youngest will start kindergarten in two years. But it is only a half-day program.

Still, when first grade begins, Brittany figures she’ll get her chance to go back to work. Something to put her interior design training to use, she hopes, but really, she’s open to anything.

In 2028, she plans to start looking.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5763716&forum_id=2:#49194793)