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This is why it doesn't matter how much you make. When you're not living a healthy lifestyle, all of that wealth is being drained to expensive insurance and co-pay.
It pays to have healthy lifestyle so health insurance is there for injuries and major ailments. So many children today have so many health issues because their parents are not giving them healthy habits. No snacks or sugary breakfast. No extra sides of junk food.
This is why it doesn't matter how much you make. When you're not living a healthy lifestyle, all of that wealth is being drained to expensive insurance and co-pay.
It pays to have healthy lifestyle so health insurance is there for injuries and major ailments. So many children today have so many health issues because their parents are not giving them healthy habits. No snacks or sugary breakfast. No extra sides of junk food.
People don't put enough emphasis on a healthy lifestyle, largely because they don't understand the impacts which won't be seen until 30-50 years down the road -- when it's too late to do much about it. But the damage done by sugars is widespread and seen even in young children.
Evidence continues to mount that sugar's long-term effects on the brain is a probable cause of Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia later in life. I've been reading several books lately on this topic, including one very informative book, "Outlive" by Dr. Peter Attia, who goes into detail on how the sugar-brain connections work. A key takeaway from his book is that healthy eating choices need to start at the earliest possible age and continue throughout the life cycle. Dr. Attia warns that bad choices (ultra refined foods) being pushed on us by massive corporations will make our last decade of life a decade of decline.
Other doctors I've read discuss how High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) in soft drinks and sports drinks is causing near-epidemic levels of Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) in children even in middle school. This is the same fatty liver disease that alcoholics develop which leads to cirrhosis of the liver and death. From HFCS and alcohol. Alcohols and sugars should be viewed as poisons.
MKTwet is correct to highly restrict sugars to children. Crappy HFCS is even in infant formula, many of those products are essentially a milkshake sugar bomb that gets infants on the road to sugar problems. Mother's milk is vastly superior and passes many immunities from mother to child. There is growing concern that the shape of baby bottle nipples and pacifiers leads to malformation of mouth and throat structures that causes breathing problems like sleep apnea, even in children.
My digression gets at the point that raising children in the healthiest manner possible is not easy, and finding child care offering excellent nutrition will be both hard to find and costly. It must be done to assure long-term vibrancy rather than a lifetime of increasing decrepitude. Child care, to include all years through high school graduation, are the time to nourish children to achieve long-term health. The route to a vibrant life includes a serious approach to dietary habits and making the right choices certainly takes time, effort and costs more than a life-style of sugary junk. Being a parent is hard enough but the effort taken to assure a child eats healthy is worth the effort, especially in the long-term. It's crazy that some school systems are feeding students crap like "lunchables" and other junk, with soda pop machines to push even more sugars. Too many school boards have succumbed to the pressures of the food giants and serve crap to kids. If I were a parent I'd consider home-schooling to get my kids on a healthy diet, as well as avoid the other perils in huge middle and high schools. I'd focus more on what foods are in school meals rather than other topics that have been in the news lately.
Some books to consider, in order of merit.
- Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine
- Genius Foods: Become Smarter, Happier, and More Productive While Protecting Your Brain
Recommended video: On YouTube, search for "Sugar: The Bitter Truth" by Dr. Robert Lustig. Way worth the 1.25 hours to understand how the body metabolizes sugars and their impact on the liver. Towards the end of the video he shows a photo of a 9-year-old boy who looks like the michelin man because he's bloated beyond belief by HFCS in soda pops.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 11-01-2023 at 09:02 AM..
Thank you, it pains me to see children suffer because their parents debated with me that their doctors tell them that "occasionally" eating processed junk food like donuts is ok. The problem with that is we do not know what is consider "occasionally" anymore. It seems like every 2-3 days is now consider "occasionally."
It’s really amazing to me how many people(who I am guessing are older)are out of touch. Younger people who are getting situated in their adult lives, and just about to start families, are facing a major housing crisis with sky high rents and highly inflated mortgages, student loans with insane interest rates, grocery bills going up, healthcare bills which could potentially bankrupt them, all while wages are not going up anywhere near as fast as cost of living. It’s real easy for people the same age as my parents to bring up “keeping up with the Joneses” as a reason why families need two working parents when they got established in a time when cost of living was more proportional to wages.
I get what you are saying. I'm one of those older people and I do understand how financially difficult it is now, for one most of those things affect me as well, rising interest rates on my mortgage, grocery bills, health care (insurance premiums and co-pays, meds) and second, my kids and grands are facing it too. As well I have had to help them here and there.
One thing I have noticed between my generation and this one (and even my parent's generation and mine) is that each expects they should have more starting out. I guess that could be keeping up with the Joneses. My parents (and their peers) rented basically a one room flat, with shared bathrooms, and had little furniture (or things) buying one piece at a time and had one car, no phone, for years. There was no wifi, internet, cable or streaming. My generation was very similar. We started out with near nothing, renting our dwelling, bought used furniture, etc. (I know, blah, blah, blah). We rarely went out to eat or took vacations and trips.
I have seen young couples starting out for decades. Most have bought a house within a year, all new furniture, two new cars, new cell phones, computers, wifi, big screen TVs, 100000000 stations. Any many are already far in debt. The expectations seem to increase with each decade.
I think it is a combination of ridiculous cost of living and a mentality that we deserve it all.
This is completely false. Women have always worked, particularly WOC and poor women. No, women were not all living like June Cleaver throughout history. Women would work fields too, the difference is they had their babies on their backs and their children with them.
Completely false? I don't know about that. My point was that for many families it's not possible to live on just one income today. Times have changed, childcare prices/options have changed. Back in the day people had more options in terms of childcare. Either they didn't need to work or they would leave kids with a family member, a neighbor, or had an older sibling who could watch the kids. These things are almost unheard of these days. People are less generous in terms of watching other people's kids for free or for a small price. They likely have their own jobs and kids to take care of.
People are more afraid of who to live kids with these days and God forbid a kid under 10 or 11 be left home alone for a few hours after school. Bringing a kid to work is almost unheard of. Parenting is not easy today, there's a ton of judgement on what people do with their kids not to mention laws. Can you imagine anyone working in a field today with a baby on their back? DCF would be there in a heartbeat
Story in WaPo today about how child care problems are about to get a whole lot worse. Key culprit is the end of federal funding on 30 Sept 2023.
This link WILL get you in past the paywall. (WaPo allows me ten gift links per month, this is one of them.)
There's a bar chart showing wages of various workers, bottom of the barrel are fast food cooks, day care workers are the next step up, but still 2nd from last.
Still, here are some key excerpts, there's so much more in the article, plus some great comments:
Quote:
When it comes to the infrastructure that keeps the economy going, and that allows people to contribute to their communities and provide for their families, some is physical. It’s obvious: roads, bridges, broadband lines, cell towers. But some is less visible. In particular, the child-care system that enables parents to show up for work.
Americans are about to learn what happens when that “softer” infrastructure crumbles, because the last of several pandemic-related child-care subsidy programs, the Child Care Stabilization Grant passed in 2021, expired Sept. 30.
... the child-care industry nationwide has been operating in the red for two straight years. Now, as programs still stressed by the pandemic lose a major source of public funds, many programs around the country are considering closure. When these businesses do shut down, they can send shock waves throughout their local economies. The shuttered child-care business sheds jobs; parents who relied on that business lose care arrangements for their kids, which in turn disrupts parents’ ability to work; and the employers of those parents must then scramble to adjust for lost workforce hours.
There are off-year elections in some states today, child care is not on any of the ballots. Does it ever stop raining?
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 11-07-2023 at 11:29 AM..
I share this so many times that I feel like a broken record, but I make more money (adjusted for inflation) than my parents ever did even at the top of my dad's corporate consulting career and yet the condo they bought as early 20-somethings in the mid-80s brand new is totally unaffordable to me as a 35 year old middle manager. Condos in that community that haven't been updated in 20+ years would cost $4000+ a month with current interest rates - and it's an hour and a half-2 hour commute each way from the nearest big job center (including my job) and schools have gotten much worse since the 80s when my parents lived there.
I make in the top 15% of household incomes in my state, but rent on my 2 bedroom/1 bath apartment in the suburbs plus daycare for one infant would be most of my take-home income unless I dramatically reduced retirement savings and ESPP contributions, the latter of which I'm relying on for a house downpayment and building up an more robust emergency fund.
If you bought more than 3 years ago, you're living in a different world. If you bought 10+ years ago? An entirely different galaxy. Family members have $1000 mortgages + homeowners insurance on 4 bedroom houses they bought as teachers and postal workers in the early 2000s but the going rate today would be closer to $5000-6000. Incomes certainly haven't increased that quickly!
I bought in 2019, six months before COVID.
I paid ~$100,000 for a 2BR/2BA townhome with a loft that could be used either as an additional bedroom, or office space. With a 4.5% first-time homebuyer loan, and a small down payment, my mortgage is only about $700/month.
Today, my condo is valued at about $180,000. Double the downpayment to get the same LTV. At 7.5%, that same 3% I put down leaves a PITI of a little over $1,500/month.
That spread is the childcare for a lot of families.
I make $85,000 working remotely for a county government. I'm not tight by any means, but I don't know how a typical family in this area with a couple of kids and a typical $50k-$60k HHI do it.
It's hard to understand sometimes why housing has become so expensive. It seems to me that too many people want to live in the same places which has made things the way they are.
It's hard to understand sometimes why housing has become so expensive. It seems to me that too many people want to live in the same places which has made things the way they are.
The "clustering effect" also extends to childcare shortages.
I'm 37. When I was growing up, my hometown had a solid industrial base. With a Fortune 500 chemical company HQ in town, there were quality jobs - engineers, research scientists, etc. There was a pretty decent professional class.
That chemical company is still here, but has maybe half the employees it did. A good bit of the white collar jobs have been shifted to metro Dallas. Many of the people working there are actually contractors that don't have the pay or benefits of company employees.
Basically, quality jobs have consolidated in major metros. Areas like mine don't have much of a professional jobs base - younger people of child-bearing age generally have to move to find decent employment. The population is aging.
There are a lot of people in relatively few locations chasing services like childcare. Prices go up.
The clustering effect thing needs to change IMO. Seems bad for the environment and it's drastically changing COL. I thought things might ease up with WFH but it doesn't seem that they have. People seem more materialistic than ever and living in as posh a zip code as possible seems to have become the American dream...but oh yes childcare...people don't want to pay for it.
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