A sea of toddlers threw around colorful blocks and balls at an indoor play center in Cheyenne, Wyo. Twenty-one-year-old Grace Moreno was there with her 11-month-old, who was dressed in pajamas with little firetrucks on them.
“It's the only free place, so it's worth it,” she said.
Finances are tight for Moreno and her husband. They moved to Wyoming from Texas, while pregnant, so her husband could work a higher-paying electrician job. But now that they are parents, paychecks seem to disappear.
“Our rent in Texas was like $800,” Moreno said. “Here, it's like $1,775.”
Rent is their biggest cost.They spend $300 a week on groceries and $100 on formula. The couple also has car payments, and they’re paying the bill for their son’s delivery.
“I remember sitting there looking at a stack of mail, probably like maybe three inches tall…hospital bills, ER bills,” Moreno recalled. ”And I looked at my husband. I was like, ‘I don't ever wanna do this again.’”
Months earlier, she thought she’d have multiple kids. But just six weeks after giving birth, Moreno decided to have her tubes tied.
“I was kind of like, ‘Oh my gosh, my mom was right. This is too expensive.’”
Only having one kid means Moreno’s family can save a couple hundred dollars a month for a mortgage, so their son can someday have a backyard.
At the moment though, interest rates are still relatively high.
“Not only are homes more expensive, but then add, you know, a 7% rate on top of that,” said Emily Harris, senior demographer at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah.
She said the rate at which women are having babies in Wyoming is just above the national average, but still too low to replace the state’s population. The same is true for all other states in the Mountain West, which have seen some of the largest drops in fertility rates nationwide in the past two decades.
Meanwhile, the region’s population is still growing. A lot of people are moving here to escape bigger cities and for an outdoor lifestyle, which is driving up home costs.
Harris said things like childcare costs and generational values also play into peoples’ childbearing decisions and that they’re definitely changing.
“We have this idea of like the nuclear family,” Harris said. “You need to get married, and then you buy a home and then you have children… and really over the last decade or two, that kind of timeline has been halted and kind of rearranged.”
Some states are passing laws aimed at easing housing costs for young families. But not Wyoming.
“The biggest barrier to addressing this housing crisis is really convincing my colleagues that the government has a role to play,” said Rep. Trey Sherwood (D-Laramie), a member of the Democratic minority.
Progressives have pushed for a state fund to help build more affordable housing. But members of the Republican supermajority, like Sen. Bob Ide (R-Casper), say the government should stay out of it.
“Fiddling with housing, you know, it gums up the wheels of the free market,” Ide said.
He added that laws the Wyoming legislature passed to restrict abortion access, allow nannies to care for more children and ease property taxes are family-friendly policies.
But Wyoming couples like Reesie Lane and Sean Thornton said it’s still just too expensive to have kids now.
“Sean and I started dating and he said, ‘I don't know, I think I wanna have like six or seven kids,’” Lane said, as Thornton laughed.
“[But] as we went through more and more financial struggles I guess,” Thornton added, “eventually it came to like, ‘yeah, I think we can have like one or two.’”
Lane and Thornton work in the state university system and both are musicians. They spent their 20s struggling to pay rent in tiny apartments, and then around age 30, they finally bought a house.
“I think that's when we started to realize it might be too late,” said Lane, who also has an ovarian syndrome which makes it hard to conceive. “ I'm not sure that we're gonna be able to have children.”
For now, they’re content with their fur babies, a Pomeranian and a Shih tzu mix, who were dressed in matching bandanas with fall leaves.
“They're a hundred percent little babies,” Lane said, holding up the well-dressed pups, Huckleberry and Finn. “They’re so spoiled.”
Lane said it’s heartbreaking to not have enough money to give even one kid a full life but also freeing.
“At least I can have room for other things in my life,” she said, “like my pets and like my band.”
The band, Phryne, in which Lane and Thornton are both members, was downstairs in the studio getting ready for practice. The couple headed down to join the rest of the band but before beginning to play, Lane attempted to put headphones over the dogs ears.
“ You gotta wear these when the drums are playing,” Lane told Huckleberry. “You have very sensitive hearing ‘cause you’re a dog.”
Sitting behind the drums, Thornton counted down, and Lane started singing.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
