Thanksgiving 2024

"Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather's house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow."
     Lydia Maria Childs, "Over the River and Through the Woods," 1844

This Thanksgiving we have two sons in the house, age 43 and age 33, both single. No grandchildren.

My wife and I are part of a boomer phenomenon --  people in their seventies with children but not grandchildren.

The two sons home for Thanksgiving aren't unusual in being childless well into adulthood. About 25% of American men over 40 are childless. Women are delaying childbearing, choosing education or career as a first priority. An increasing number of women don't want children. At 1.66 children per woman, the U.S. is well below replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman. Some women get around to it as their fertility clock runs low; some don't. At age 35-39, 22% of women are childless.

There are a lot of reasons for not having children. Children are expensive. They disrupt an education/career path. Household formation starts later, when people pair up and buy a home. Expectations and norms have changed, so childlessness is normalized. And contraception made childbearing a choice.

My grandmother is one of 10, the little girl toward the right, standing beside her mother holding the infant. There are eight children in the photo. Two more are still to come. The oldest two men at either end are in their 20s. Children were assets who could help with farm chores. My great-grandfather was 40 when he married his 16-year old bride. 

Housing has gotten expensive relative to earnings. Between 1950 and the present, the general rate of inflation raised prices just over 13 times. It takes $13.10 to buy what a dollar bought in 1950, at the height of the baby boom.

Housing inflated faster than general inflation.

1950 housing advertisement 

Those houses would have been small -- about 1,000 square feet. One bath. No dishwasher. No air conditioning. No garage. They would not have been to current code on insulation. There would not have been a city requirement of curbs and gutters and capture of rain water into a storm drain system. But at the general inflation rate of 13.1, the larger of the two homes, plus some closing costs, would have cost less than $110,000 in today's dollars.

My parents had three children. In 1955 they moved from a small rental into a Medford subdivision. The subdivision consisted of homes of about 1,100 to 1,300 square feet. They had one or one-and-a-half bathrooms and a one-car garage. They were bought up by families similar to mine: a husband, a wife, and two or three children. My parents' house in my elementary and junior high years was at 401 Oregon Terrace in Medford, Oregon. It isn't an apples-to-apples comparison to the houses in the newspaper ad because it has been added onto. 

Google Maps photo

But this house in the photo, next door at 407 Oregon Terrace, is roughly comparable, with three bedrooms, one bath, and 1,183 square feet of space, according to Zillow. It has a one-car garage. Zillow estimates a current price of $324,500. This isn't a perfect comp, but both 407 Oregon Terrace and the ones in the ads are what realtors might call "starter homes." The price of the current home in Medford is three times the calculated $110,000 value of the houses in the ad, had those houses inflated at the general inflation multiple.  

No single factor explains the fertility rate, and therefore the paucity of grandchildren, but the cost of housing affects choices young adults make. Young adults face a much higher hurdle for creating new households and the physical and psychological "nest" into which a new baby, or a second or third, fit.

Thanksgivings are smaller now. And grandchildren don't arrive by horse-drawn sled, if they arrive at all.

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