The lifestyle expectations of the typical working- and middle-class American are driven by a one-way ratchet that only goes up. What we treat as the minimum for a “normal,” well-provisioned life looks like what only aristocrats could expect or achieve until very recently.
From conversations about the “necessity” of daycare to the desire for one car for every driver in a household to the notion of the “starter home,” what ordinary Americans think is the baseline outstrips what even the wealthiest of their ancestors could afford.
A recent viral post on X asked:
[W]hy don’t more people use their own parents/kid’s grandparents for childcare as opposed to daycare/preschool/nannies (which seem more common)?
With some 1.4 million views and 4,000 comments, as of this writing, the post naturally generated discussion, bickering, and complaints. But what’s more interesting than the answers people gave are the assumptions behind the question. What we describe today as “child care” used to be called “mothering.” It is taken for granted today that modern families “need” professional, outside child care, that it’s normal and causes no problems for children when Mom and Dad outsource their duties to paid professional strangers, and that it’s a burden or an oppression that the average working family can’t afford “carers.”
This is lifestyle expectation inflation, and it’s not limited to the topic of daycare. Unlike the parents of Generation X, many modern parents think every child needs his own bedroom, every driver needs his own car, and that buying a “starter home” with plans to trade up to a McMansion is just “the basics.”
Daycare
Fifty years ago, the average American would say professional daycare or preschool might be a necessity for some families but that sending the kids off to a “center” was a regrettable, second-best option. Today, you’re likely to be accused of being out of touch with real people’s needs if you suggest it’s not normal, desirable, or aspirational to aim for both parents to work full-time while the kids are at daycare.
It’s true that getting by on a single income is harder for many families today than in the 1950s. It is true that both parents in many families have to work. But it is not true that all of them have to. Millions of American families don’t need affordable daycare the way they claim they do. They could manage just fine on one income, but they don’t want to because their lifestyle expectations are grand in comparison to those of their parents or grandparents.
Congresswoman Brittany Pettersen’s recent on-camera moments are examples of the conceptual sleight of hand. Pettersen seems to use her small child as a prop before the cameras and on the House floor to suggest how hard it is to be a working mother. In a YouTube video, she claims:
I’m a mom of two boys, and, like so many families, I know how hard it is to find safe and affordable child care. As soon as I knew I was pregnant with Sam, we got on a wait list, and it still took us over 13 months before he had a place to go. And we’re one of the lucky ones.
Strange, considering that the U.S. House has had a full-day child care center for representatives since 1987.
Is America ready to have a back-to-basics discussion about how “child care” is what we used to call “parenting,” and that it used to be done by parents? Maybe, but that would require parents to put the developmental needs of children before adult desires for both parents to have full-time careers and the goodies a double income can bring.
Starter Homes
The term “starter home” itself sounds odd to many in middle and old age. Anyone born in the ’50s through the ’70s remembers a world in which most families bought a house and stayed put. Brothers shared bedrooms, sisters shared bedrooms, and the bunk beds on The Brady Bunch (a solidly middle-class family) were not seen as deprivation but as normal.
While the idea of the “starter home” goes back at least to the post-war boom of the 1950s, the goal of trading up to ever bigger homes over a family’s life was not universally shared. It certainly wasn’t considered a basic right. You wouldn’t know that from the tone of recent articles on high mortgage interest rates.
This piece from December 2025 on Rocket Mortgage is typical. “Today’s starter home is the new forever home for many people, transforming the home buying journey into an investment for the long term,” author Meena Thiruvengadam wrote.
Only a millennial or younger could write “home buying journey” with a straight face or propose that buying a modest “forever home” was a new idea. This is lifestyle creep par excellence.
On the other hand, there are serious structural problems in the housing market today that are making first-time homebuying unaffordable or flatly unrealistic for younger buyers who do have reasonable expectations. Some younger people would be happy to put their money down on a small or modest home if only they existed.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings in January on why there are so few affordable homes. Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute pointed to increasingly picayune land use and zoning restrictions written by the tens of thousands of cities and towns across the country. “That’s how many [33,000-plus state and local jurisdictions] have zoning and land use power. This leads to unaffordability and a dearth of starter homes on smaller lots,” Pinto said.
The chairman of the National Association of Homebuilders said restrictive federal and local environmental and zoning regulations raise the prices of homes and the cost of rent. According to Buddy Hughes, adding just $1,000 to the price of an existing home means that “an additional 116,000 households are priced out of the market.”
At Least Two Cars in Every Drive
Some of you will remember a now-quaint term: “the family car.” Note that it is singular — the family car. For millions of Americans born before the end of the 20th century, families had one car, and only the more comfortable had one for Mom and one for Dad. In those days, teenagers champed at the bit to get their driver’s license on their 16th birthday, a desire that’s foreign to members of Generation Z.
The lack of youth zeal for the freedom of driving is due in part to increasing reliance on rideshare companies such as Uber. But it’s probably also attributable to the sheltered way modern children have been raised by helicopter parents who don’t want to let kids out of their sight until they’re nearly chronological adults.
Yet more Americans expect to be able to afford a car for every driver in the household. It’s difficult to find hard data on consumer sentiment about the perceived need for more than one car per family unit, but it does seem that expectations for car ownership are higher than they used to be.
The X account “Alicia, Courtyard Urbanist,” for example, claims that large numbers of cars per household are a necessity. “In suburbs, every adult and even teenagers need a car. In walkable urban neighborhoods you can easily get away with one car per household,” she wrote.
Is that really true? Or could it be that modern expectations eschew old-school solutions like family and neighborhood carpooling and taking city buses or trains? Many Gen Xers grew up in the suburbs and got to their jobs at the mall by hitching rides with friends and coworkers, or having dad pick them up if they missed the last bus.
More than one thing can be true at once. It is true that housing is often unaffordable compared to a few decades ago, and it’s true that recent college grads are swimming in student loan debt they can’t pay because the jobs they thought they were training for don’t exist.
At the same time, our baseline expectations for what constitutes a decent middle-class life are far higher than they’ve ever been. It may be time for a renaissance of the old-fashioned American values of moderate expectations, frugality, and making do.
