As costs increase, families downsize
Middle children becoming rarer — especially to moms inside the Loop
Julie Lairson and her husband Ross are leaving on vacation in an hour. Their newly remodeled kitchen is covered in Post-it notes, chronicling instructions for their parents to follow while taking care of the couple’s children for the next 10 days. Bath rituals. Naps. Milk schedule.
Julie was up until past 1 a.m., writing these precise notes and sticking them all over their Woodland Heights home. All of this for two kids. Imagine if they had three.
Sometimes, Julie does imagine that. But she’s not sure if her family can handle three kids. She thinks about the amount of space in their bungalow, the everescalating cost of raising kids, and her own mother’s experience growing up as the second of three children.
“Could I make her a mid-
child?” she asks, looking at her 13-month-old daughter, Annie.
Middle children are increasingly rare these days across the U.S., as families shrink in size.
In 1976, 65 percent of mothers had given birth to three or more kids by their mid-40s, according to the Pew Research Center. But 40 years later, that figure has decreased to 38 percent, while the remaining 62 percent of moms have had one or two kids. And data from the Texas Department of State Health Services show the share of moms having three or more kids is even smaller in Houston’s urban core.
In Rice Military’s 77007 ZIP code, for instance, only 5 percent of moms who gave birth in 2015 (the most recent year for which data was available), were giving birth to their third, fourth, fifth, or — you get the point — child. The numbers were similar in other parts of the city’s innermost neighborhoods, meaning that “middle child syndrome,” that classic cultural cliché about the overlooked Jan Bradies and Stephanie Tanners is fading away.
But head outside the most concentrated parts of Houston, and the numbers start to look a little more like the national figures. In Cinco Ranch’s 77450 ZIP code, the share was 26.2 percent. Farther west, in Sealy’s 77474 ZIP code, it reached 36.8 percent. The high cost of kids
No surprise there, says Leslie Frankel, a professor of family studies at the University of Houston.
“Look at car sizes. Look at houses in the Loop. They’re small, or they’re townhomes, or they’re really expensive,” Frankel says. “I think it’s probably about house size. And an unfortunate statistic I always tell my students in class is that the USDA says children cost over $200,000 from birth to age 17. That’s for housing, child care, all those things. And I think housing is like 30 percent of that cost, so if your housing inside the Loop is more money, that’s a bigger percentage of the added cost for having a child.”
For many families, the decision about how many kids to have is likely a financial one, she posits.
“When kids are little, child care costs so much money,” she says. “For us, it costs more than our mortgage.”
According to Pew, the cost of child care rose more than 70 percent between 1985 and 2011, from $87 to $148 a week. And it has certainly continued to increase since, with families in the Loop regularly shelling out more than $1,000 per child each month.
Right now, the Lairsons aren’t paying for child care. After years working in commercial real estate, Julie took an extended maternity leave following the birth of their son, Hank, two-and-a-half years ago.
“When my son turned 10 months old, we had the conversation about how I really missed my career. Staying home has been a blessing, but I needed something more. And a week later, we found out we were pregnant,” she says.
She decided to stay home through her pregnancy with Annie.
“I just passed the three-year marker of being out of work. And that struck me: The three-year gap on the résumé is easy to explain, with having babies and getting to a point where they can enter school and day care. And now it’s time for me to get back to it.”
She’s looking into child care options. And it’s been a rude awakening.
“The cost is pretty outrageous, and it’s competitive. The wait lists are so long,” she says. “These wait lists are over a year long — they’re 18 months long!”
It’s enough to make some of the families in the Lairsons’ social circle re-evaluate the location, location, location that drove them to choose adorable homes in the Heights in the first place.
“There are about 12 of us mommies that each have two children, and we get together at least weekly. Most of the moms are saying they want a third,” Julie says. “And three moms have moved outside the Loop within the last six months.”
That is, of course, part of the natural life cycle of urban dwellers, who often move to the suburbs in their 30s or 40s, says Gretchen Livingston, a senior researcher at Pew.
“People in urban areas are more likely to be younger on average than people in other areas, and that in and of itself could be a factor,” she says. “Because in a really simplistic way, the younger you are, the less time you’ve had to have three kids.”
The trend of waiting until later in life to have a first child syncs up well with the demographics of urban areas, too, Livingston notes. In cities, you’re more likely to find women with higher levels of education, and that generally correlates with putting off marriage and childbearing. Fertility rates are down
But there’s more at play here than just timing.
“The general fertility rate in the U.S. is at an all-time low,” says Livingston, who specializes in fertility. “That number looks at the number of births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, and it’s continued to tick down since the recession.”
In 2016, the U.S. recorded 62 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, roughly half the rate it had been around 1960. In addition, experts like Livingston use a metric called the “Total Fertility Rate” to track the number of children born to women over the course of their lives.
The replacement level — or the number of children couples would need to have to keep the population steady one generation to the next — is 2.1 children. America hit the all-time fertility low on this measure back in 1976, when women had an average of 1.74 children over their lifespans. We’re currently at about 1.8, according to Livingston.
And this could have far greater implications than something as simple as the eradication of “middle child syndrome,” which Frankel insists doesn’t actually exist anyway, according to all the research she’s read in her role as a family studies professor.
“There’s a lot of debate about what this means. On the one hand, some people really wring their hands about these declines, and worry about what it means in the long term for the U.S. in terms of economic development, and having the resources to sustain older people as they age out of the labor force,” Livingston says.
That’s a real concern. Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that elderly people will outnumber children by the year 2035, in what the bureau dedle scribed as “an important demographic turning point in U.S. history.”
But while Houstonians may not be able to depend on a baby boom inside the Loop, there are plenty of families in the greater Houston area opting for suburban four-bedroom homes to stuff full of large families.
“I feel like the number of kids out here is pretty expected. It’s at least that 2.1 replacement rate, if not higher,” says Dr. Quynh-Thu “Gigi” Doan, an OBGYN at Houston Methodist West Hospital in Katy.
“Of course, I have patients who are like, ‘After two kids I’m done,’ but it’s not unusual for me to have patients who want to have the third and the fourth — I see that pretty frequently,” says Doan, who gave up her townhome in the Loop “with a yard the size of a postage stamp” to move out to Katy around the same time she welcomed her first child. Room to play
In her eight years of practicing in Katy, Doan has worked with many families who purposely sought out the growing suburban area west of Houston for its reputation as a family-friendly place. That’s what brought her patient, Kathy Seweger, and her family to Cypress when they moved to Texas from Pennsylvania just before the birth of Seweger’s fifth child.
Seweger always had wanted a large family. And she knew that would mean a big house, one they wouldn’t be able to afford inside the Loop. They’ve equipped one of their four bedrooms with a tripledecker bunk bed for their three girls, while another bedroom is set up for their two boys, leaving a master suite for the adults, and a multipurpose room Seweger uses for home-school lessons.
“I asked my kids what they like about where we live, and my 9year-old said, ‘We have room to play and room to be ourselves,’ ” Seweger says one morning as she drove her brood to drop off library books and attend band practice in a nearby park. “Isn’t that exactly what you want to hear your children say?”
At Julie Lairson’s house, she thinks about space. There is a spare bedroom right now, in which her mother stays when she visits from West Texas. She thinks about money. About added time away from work. About the adults being outnumbered by children. About all the time and energy expended in extra-curricular activities as children grow up.
And then she thinks about a loud and messy dinner table.
And she says doesn’t yet know what her family ultimately will decide.