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Lars
May 23, 2007 2:56 PM
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The baby myth piece is all well and good, but it turns out that daycare is the largest expense one will encounter. That can be $1,000/month for quality day care. Use all the cloth diapers you'd like, but that is a significant chunk of income for a lot of people.

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etinterrapax
May 23, 2007 4:00 PM
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Lars got there first. The baby crap is the least of it. If you have only one income, any expense is going to roil your budget, and though they start out cheap, they get progressively more expensive. And even if you have two incomes, you have to count on lost income from the child-caring parent during maternity leave, the possibility that the mom's career will be stalled for a variety of reasons, and the extremely large additional expense of day care. I know someone in DC who pays $500 a week. Even at my level of education, I have a hard time finding work that would pay enough to justify the expense of child care. There's also the additional cost of health insurance for a family, which many people work the second job to afford, and things you never thought of before having a baby, like life insurance, preschool, and saving for college.

This did not hit me on a day when I'm feeling the love where parenting is concerned. I'm not saying that only the wealthy should have children; I'm angry that we're living in a society where it is increasingly only possible for the wealthy to have children in any degree of comfort and security. That isn't right.

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CyGuy
May 25, 2007 5:00 AM
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Here's why I don't this article. I you have ANY concerns about how much a baby is going to cost - you aren't ready to have a baby. So go ahead and dispel some of the myths about the costs associated with the first few months of having a child to care for. But then you still have the reality of the costs of 9 months of pregnancy and parenthood for the REST OF YOUR LIFE!

(and this isn't even considering the costs to planet of adding another consumer to create CO2 and other pollutants and further deplete the earth's natural resources.)


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