Birth rate plummets

[Anonymous]

I don’t understand why you must own a house to have kids. We rented when my kids were little because we foresaw the 2008 crisis. We ended up buying at the trough of the dip after the crash. But all of that is irrelevant! We still had kids. We lived in the rental for almost 7 years with kids.

[Anonymous]

So much melodrama... birth rate "plummets" in title, cost of living "skyrockets" in first reply.

Meanwhile, the birth rate dropped 0.1% year over year. The only thing potentially describable as "plummeting" was back in 1958-1978 when it fell by about 40% over the span of those 20 years.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/birth-rate

The CPI was abnormally high mid-2021 to mid-2023 by a few percentage points (annualized) but has since dropped back to something only slightly elevated from recent history. Yes, it's still high, and those two years we experienced were rough and folks are still feeling the effects of it, buy skyrocketing hardly seems apt, especially when increase in average wage/income was likewise higher during that recent period.