The Wall Street Journal has published a piece asking four older parents what it is like to have kids in America after 40, and the piece is a 2,500-word confession that the publication’s own editorial-page apparatus has spent forty years building the conditions these parents are now describing as surprising. The piece is called “Here’s What It’s Like to Have Kids in America After Age 40.” It is the most damning document the Journal has published in a decade, and it does not seem to know it.
The story’s four families are doing the math the Journal’s editorial page has spent two generations insisting no one needs to do. Ed Myrick left a banking career to care for aging parents, couldn’t re-enter the industry, and now estimates his retirement savings will support his family for seven years. He is 58, with a 10-year-old son, and his Social Security payout at 62 will be less than the taxes and insurance on the house. Laura Orrico spent more than a decade and over $100,000 on fertility treatments, lost her husband to brain cancer, and runs a PR firm alone because there is no maternity leave from the business she built. Lisa Kalodner spent $80,000 on three rounds of IVF, $45,000 of it out of pocket because Pennsylvania doesn’t require insurers to cover fertility treatment, and now spends every day calculating what stepping back from her senior pharmaceutical-sales role would cost in lifetime income. The Journal’s reporter frames each of these as the financial calculus of older parenthood. The framing is built to make the reader think the problem is the age.
The problem is not the age. The problem is that the United States has built a family-formation economy in which the cost of having children is a private debt instrument and the only people who can afford the instrument are the people who have already spent two decades accumulating the capital to service it. The average first-time mother was 27.5 years old in 2023, a record high. The Journal presents this as a lifestyle trend. It is not a lifestyle trend. It is what happens when the median renter household in America has $310 left each month after paying rent and utilities, and the median cost of infant center-based childcare in Pennsylvania is $1,100 a month, and the federal government has never met the 40% funding promise it made for special education under IDEA, leaving school districts to fill an annual gap measured in tens of billions of dollars, and the Pell Grant that once covered 80% of the cost of attending a four-year public university now covers 25%. The Journal knows this. The Journal’s own news pages have reported every piece of this. The piece just does not let the recognition land.
The cultural shorthand for this structural abandonment has already been written: “You’re on your own, kid,” which names not a coming-of-age romance but the explicit policy vacuum of the modern family-formation economy. The safety net never arrives. The paid leave never arrives. The childcare subsidy never arrives. The employer-sponsored retirement plan that survives a career change to care for aging parents never arrives. The insurance policy that covers IVF in Pennsylvania never arrives. The structural support that would make the age of the parent irrelevant to the cost of the child never arrives. The Journal’s piece is a catalogue of kisses that never arrived, and the framing treats the absence as a personal-finance planning error.
The kitchen-table version of the Myrick family’s situation is that a 50-year-old man with a newborn put $75,000 into a 529 plan and then tore a bicep moving a toy car and priced himself out of life insurance. The Journal presents this as a cautionary tale about starting late. The structural version is that the United States is the only rich country in the world where a man’s retirement savings can be destroyed by a trampoline-park accident because the only backstop between his family and medical bankruptcy is his wife’s employer-sponsored health insurance and his own capacity to sell the house. The Myricks’ house is worth $1.2 million with a $200,000 mortgage at 2.5%. Ed Myrick’s plan if the medical bills outpace his wife’s income is to sell it, buy something smaller for cash, and get a job at Lowe’s. The Journal frames this as a plan. The word for a plan that involves selling your house and working at Lowe’s at 62 because the medical system has extracted your retirement savings is not a plan.
The Orrico story is the one that should have broken the Journal’s framing apparatus entirely. Laura Orrico’s husband was diagnosed with brain cancer. Before chemotherapy, he froze his sperm. She spent a decade paying to store it. She spent $70,000 to $80,000 on fertility treatments, out of pocket. She lost her husband’s health coverage. She bought a private insurance policy at $625 a month with a $10,000 deductible. She spent $20,000 to $25,000 on the IVF cycle that produced her daughter, born this February. The hospital bill was just over $10,000, and she is on a payment plan. The total is more than $100,000 over more than a decade. The Journal frames this as the cost of choosing to have a child later in life. The woman’s husband died of brain cancer. The age at which she had the child is not the analytical engine of this story.
The piece’s most revealing moment is the Moran family’s stillborn son at 36 weeks. Anali Moran was 44. Her doctor blamed her age. The family chose cremation over a full burial and service, which could have run $10,000 to $20,000. A nonprofit covered roughly 90% of the $5,000 bill. The 529 account opened for the child they lost still holds almost $3,000. They haven’t decided what to do with it. This is the paragraph the Journal’s framing cannot absorb. A family lost a child, and the financial story is that a nonprofit covered the cremation because the alternative was a month of living expenses. The Journal’s framing needs this to be a story about the risks of waiting. The actual story is that the American family-formation economy is so stripped of public support that a late-pregnancy loss is a financial catastrophe before it is a grief.
The Kalodner story is the one that names the mechanism the Journal’s editorial page has spent forty years insisting is not a mechanism. Lisa Kalodner is a senior pharmaceutical sales representative. She had her first child at 40. She is now weighing whether to step back at work, and each step down, she figures, could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime income, and she doesn’t trust she could return to her current level. “These are all the struggles I think about every stinking day,” she said. Her husband, Dave, had hoped to retire between 60 and 65, but having children later might push him toward the back of that range. “I don’t want to work until I’m 90,” he said. The Journal presents this as the trade-off of older parenthood. The structural story is that the American workplace is organized around the assumption of an at-home spouse, and the at-home spouse was eliminated by the wage-stagnation-and-housing-cost regime the Journal’s editorial page has spent forty years defending, and the woman who has to make the trade-off is the one the frame blames for the timing.
The same evasions run through the numbers the Journal omits. The Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that half of all U.S. renters are cost-burdened, and the fastest-growing burden cohort is middle-income renters making $45,000 to $75,000. The Center for American Progress reports that the Build Back Better childcare provisions would have saved a typical family in 32 states more than $5,000 a year, and Congress walked away from it. The Pell Grant’s decline from 80% to 25% of the cost of attending a public university is the difference between the world the Journal’s older parents were promised and the world they are financing. The piece does not mention any of this.
The piece does mention that older parents tend to be more educated, and that research has found their children score higher on early assessments, a result of the education, income, and stability those parents tend to bring. This is the Journal’s editorial-page frame in microcosm: the people who can afford the trap are doing fine inside the trap, so the trap is not the problem. The people who cannot afford the trap are not in the piece. The people who wanted children at 27 but couldn’t afford the daycare bill and the mortgage and the student-loan payment and the health-insurance deductible are not in the piece. The people who delayed childbearing because the structural conditions made it impossible to do earlier are reframed as people who chose to delay childbearing because they wanted more education and stability. The frame erases the coercion.
The Journal has published a companion piece, “Things to know if you’re thinking of pregnancy later in life,” and the framing is the same: information for the individual consumer navigating a system whose structural features are treated as given. The information is accurate. The information is also the second half of a two-step in which the first step is the Journal’s editorial page making the structural features worse, and the second step is the Journal’s personal-finance desk explaining how to budget around them. The reader who follows both steps is doing the math at the kitchen table and finding the math does not add up, and the publication that built the math is the one telling her she should have started saving more, sooner.
The quote that should have been the piece’s lede is from Noel Keomanila, Ed Myrick’s wife, who got pregnant naturally at 43 after two rounds of failed IVF. If she could give advice to her younger self, she said, “start saving a lot more, a lot sooner.” The advice is the advice the Journal’s personal-finance desk always gives. The advice is also the advice of a woman who did everything the system told her to do—steady job, 21 years at the same telecom-security company, employer-sponsored health insurance, the household’s anchor income—and is now watching her husband’s medical bills eat the retirement savings she was supposed to be saving more of, sooner. The advice is not wrong. The advice is the only advice the frame permits. The advice does not ask why a woman with a steady job and a 21-year career at the same company is supposed to have been saving more, sooner, when the cost of having a child later in life is a function of the system’s design, not her timing.
The frame’s deepest failure is the one that would require the Journal to name itself. The Journal’s editorial page has spent decades arguing that the structural conditions these families are navigating are not structural conditions but market outcomes, and that market outcomes are not problems to be solved but realities to be budgeted around. The families in the piece are budgeting. Ed Myrick is budgeting around a torn bicep and two neck surgeries. Laura Orrico is budgeting around her husband’s death and a decade of fertility treatments. Anali Moran is budgeting around a stillbirth and a cremation. Lisa Kalodner is budgeting around the impossibility of stepping back from a career she built precisely because the system told her to build it first and have children later. The budgeting is the evidence. The budgeting is the proof that the frame is a lie.
What the piece calls budgeting, Catholic social teaching has consistently named a reversal of proper economic order. Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical, held that the worker is entitled to a just wage adequate for the worker’s family, and that the ordering of the economy must serve the family rather than the family serving the economy. The families in the Journal’s piece are serving the economy. They are serving it by delaying childbearing until the economy has extracted enough capital from them to fund the childbearing the economy will not fund. They are serving it by pricing out the life insurance they need. They are serving it by calculating the cost of stepping back from peak earning years. They are serving it by describing their own financial situations as the consequence of their own timing choices, because the frame has no other language. The encyclical is 135 years old. The Journal’s editorial page has been in print for 137 years. The encyclical has been right the whole time.
The Corporal Works of Mercy were parish-level risk pooling before the term mutual aid existed. When a family experienced a medical crisis or a pregnancy loss, the community absorbed the shock. Today, that same demographic family is taking on a five-thousand-dollar cremation bill for a stillbirth, partially covered by a charitable nonprofit, while the mother takes out student loans to get a master’s degree so she can counsel other women through the same loss. The mutual aid has been monetized, the shock has been privatized, and the family is left holding the debt. The fertility-industrial complex is the latest proof of a principle the American policy apparatus prefers to keep unspoken: poverty and precarity are deliberate, not accidental. A family’s inability to afford a twenty-five-thousand-dollar retrieval, transfer, and testing cycle is not a character flaw. It is a deliberate feature of a system that treats reproduction as a luxury service rather than a common good.
Anne Helen Petersen warned that burnout is not a personal failing, and it is certainly not a personal failing to be asked to pay one hundred seventy dollars a month for three hundred thousand dollars of term life insurance instead of the million-dollar policy you wanted because your body has aged into a risk category the insurers no longer like. The line item that does not show up in the personal-finance framing is the exhaustion of being asked to solve a structural abandonment with a spreadsheet. The structural abandonment is not a cultural phenomenon; it is the systematic transfer of the reproductive burden onto the private balance sheet of households that lack the leverage to refuse it.
The affirmative position of a real pro-family policy is not a press release about tax credits or a talking point about traditional values. It is the structural guarantee that the cost of reproduction does not force a 58-year-old father to sell his house to pay for his son’s childhood. It is the national paid-leave mandate that does not require a widow to buy a private insurance policy to use her late husband’s frozen sperm. It is the federal mandate that fertility treatments are not subject to a state-by-state patchwork, leaving a Pennsylvania family to pay $45,000 out of pocket while a family in another state gets coverage. It is a society that prices families out of having children making an explicit choice about its own future, and the bill is coming due.
The piece’s closing image is Lisa Kalodner’s regret. She wishes she had frozen her eggs at 32, when a doctor first raised the option. Younger eggs, she said, would likely have improved her IVF odds, potentially shortening the years it took to have her children, and reducing costs. “I wish I had known,” she said. The regret is real. The regret is also the frame’s final move. The woman who did everything the system told her to do—build the career, reach the senior role, earn the income that would make having children possible—is framed as the woman who should have known at 32 that the system would not deliver what it was promising. The system is still promising. The system is still not delivering. The Journal’s piece is a record of what the not-delivering looks like at the kitchen table. The frame just cannot bring itself to say so.
You’re on your own, kid. The friendship bracelets are the other mothers in the group text, the nonprofit that covered 90% of the cremation, the employer that covered $35,000 of the IVF costs, the wife with the 21-year career at the same telecom-security company. The friendship bracelets are real. The friendship bracelets are not a policy. The friendship bracelets cannot replace the structural support that the Journal’s editorial page has spent forty years arguing is unnecessary. The only receipt this country can honor is a structural guarantee that the cost of reproduction will not bankrupt the household—a permanent, tax-funded insurance against a risk Congress and insurers created, and the math is the accusation against every institution that pretends the risk is a personal miscalculation.