Oh, no, I don’t mean to say that this stuff doesn’t cost anything, but that the impulse to put a specific dollar value on it is doomed. If the single biggest line item in the whole calculation is dodgy, I don’t have a great impulse to put faith in the rest of it.
Or: what doreen said. Cutting all shared costs in thirds/quarters/whatever doesn’t actually tell you how much extra you paid for the third/fourth/etc person.
If you think about it, you could run this exact same methodology on other groups in society. Single people, say. You could add up all the money single folks spend on their housing/clothes/food/holidays, and then when you were done you could write a big report saying "we’ve just discovered that it costs an average of X thousand dollars to support a single person in this country. " At which point everyone else would say “well, duh, that’s about the average after-tax income for a single person, all this means is that people tend to spend the money that they have, whatever that amount happens to be”
If there was a sudden boom decade, and everyone’s incomes went up by 20%, you’d find the “cost of having children” suddenly went up too. But it would just mean that if people have more money, they’ll spend more money - and in the case of families, obviously some of that would be on the kids.
Five kids. We’ve never made $150k, and first ten years, we were lucky to make 40~50k. We live a comfortable lifestyle with multiple trips, three seasons of sports, private schools, and a nice house.
How do we do it?
Midwest
Rural
Self employed
Never had daycare.
No car payment
Aldi/garage sales/goodwill
Economies of scale/sharing~ each kid doesn’t need 50 matchbox cars.
That’s the thing with averages, innit? You’re averaging all low-middle/middle/high-middle class households, with all families that have zero income, whether from being extremely poor or being extremely rich. This gives you a perfectly inaccurate picture of what the normative – or most common – situation is on the ground. In the same way, the majority of Americans have more than the average number of legs.
Day care costs are a wildcard that vary widely by region, urban/rural and a lot of other factors. My brother pays 40k a year in childcare costs (2 kids, fulltime daycare in one of America’s most expensive cities), but he’s moving next year to a medium sized southern city and his costs will be halved. At the other extreme, some people have a grandparent, cousin or whatever, to watch kids and their costs are zero. Ironically, people in poor and economically stagnant communities are more likely to have family nearby to assist.
Finally, low-income/poverty has a strong correlation with child abuse and neglect. So part of the answer is that when children are born to very low income families and it seems there’s no way they can get by, some portion can’t.