A TikToker Sparked Outrage For Questioning 'Priorities' Of Working Parents

The birth rate in the United States has shown an overall decline over recent decades. People are choosing to have fewer children, having children later in life and increasingly deciding to remain child free. There are multiple factors contributing to this trend, including access to reproductive healthcare (limited to a much smaller number of states since the fall of Roe) and increasing educational and career opportunities for women.

More and more, Millennials say that they’re choosing not to have kids because they can’t afford it. A Newsweek poll of 1,500 adults from April 2023 that asked, “If the cost of living was lower, would you consider having a child?” found that 30% of respondents overall answered yes. Among respondents ages 18-34, that jumped to over 50%.

A number of Millennials have expressed their hesitations about having children on TikTok, with some citing the U.S. Department of Agriculture estimate that the cost of raising a child born in 2015 would be $233,610 over the first 17 years.

In response, one 22-year-old TikToker (who does not have children) posted a rebuttal of these claims, explaining that, in her view, families paying for childcare were choosing to “prioritize” their careers, as opposed to having one parent stay home to care for the children. If Millennials simply choose instead to prioritize having children, she insinuates, they could do so. She gives the example of her own family. She states her father chose to “grow” his salary in order to support her mother and the 11 children she stayed out of the workforce to raise.

Her video, which she took down and then made public again, has gone viral and the commenters have spared her no mercy in their criticism. Yet the overall tone of her claim ―