Money money money

I have this irrational throw-caution-to-the-wind attitude when I start to conceive of what it would be like to have a large family. It comes in part from my Mom, who is one of my most frugal people I know, but has told me on numerous occasions that she and my Dad didn't worry about the cost of raising children, nor the expenses of college, when they started making babies in the 1950s. My Dad had gotten his undergraduate degree courtesy of the GI bill and my Mom had decided that nursing and teaching weren't for her and taken an office job after a year in college, so neither of them accrued much, if any, debt at the hands of higher education. They were young, and perhaps they were naive, but things worked out for them and their family. My Dad found success in his career and my Mom raised five children who now hold a combined 12 higher degrees. Am I wishing on a star expecting that the same good fortune could bless my growing family?

For today's entry I am going to select three "cost of raising a child" calculators on the internet, fill in a kid count of one, and share the results below in an attempt to get some perspective on what impact kid count has on your pocketbook:

The first calculator I used was called "Cost of Raising Your Child" on Babycenter.com, a site that I perused with some regularity during my first pregnancy, and found to be generally unbiased and informative. The site asks five questions, including the year your child will be born, where you live, your income, type of household, and intended college, before it hits you with the damage. For us, the total for our second baby, poised to be born any day now, came to:
$418,702.

Using the "Cost of Raising Children Calculator," provided by ABC News, I inputed my household type, income range, and age of child, and I came up with a slightly lower number, $308,847, but this only accounted for expenses up to age 18, meaning that college was excluded. The calculator allowed you to input the ages of multiple children, though only up to three (what is the message here? if you have time to calculate cost of children on the web there is a high probability that you don't have more than three kids?), so I gave it a whirl, assuming I had kids aged 1, 3, and 5, and the number I came up with was: $539,708.

The "Baby Cost Calculator" on the Babyzone.com site allowed me to tailor to my own situation a little more. For example, I could input how long I intended to have my child in daycare rather than assuming the costs would continue past kindergarten. The number they gave me was slightly more tame: $164,278 (again, excluding college tuition).

As you can see, the numbers varied significantly, though no matter how you read them, they are big six digit bundles and when you start multiplying them for increased brood size, they only grow (and here I demonstrate some of my exceptional math skills). The college question still puzzles me. Recall my conversation, highlighted in my long initial post on the origins of my kid count fixation, when I visited the helpful representative at T Rowe Price. Her tally for a four-year private college in 2024, when Ben would be packing off for school, was $339,824.

So, I'm left a little stumped, and also a little curious, about who uses these calculators and how accurate they actually are? I need to find some parents with larger families, and gauge their awareness and/or concern about the impending and current costs of family life. The reality is, however, that I don't actually know that many people my age with more than two children, or plans to have more than a couple. I'm going to work on finding some good interview candidates, though, and get some more insight on this topic up here in the next few months. Stay tuned.

Counterintuitive kid count findings

After feverishly fighting my viral battle, Ben caught the dreaded bug, and then Kristen, our nanny, succumbed to something similar, and so, for three weeks, I have been low on blog time, and with my baby due in less than a week, I don't imagine the window of opportunity is going to be flung open again anytime soon -- so here I am, writing long-winded run-on sentences in an attempt to get out at least a few of the ideas I've been pondering during my offline time. I'll start where I left off in my last post: the "Childless Europe" article that appeared in the June 29 issue of the New York Times magazine.

What I found most intriguing from this article, as related to my kid count obsession, is that sociologists have found that women who's better halves are actually close to better and share in the responsibilities of managing a family household -- who drop the kids at daycare, change the dirty diapers, do the dishes, and make a game out of bath time -- are more likely to want to have another child than women who do more than 75 percent of the housework and childcare. As a result, families in seemingly family-friendly countries like Italy, Greece, and Spain, have the lowest fertility rates in the world. Simply put, in these places it is more common for women to stay home and deal with the kids day in and day out without the aid of a husband and these women are, thus, less inclined to have more kids. On first read, at least for me, it was counterintuitive. I expected, perhaps naively, that the more traditional old-school family structure = more children. But, honestly, when I think a little harder about the three weekdays I spend at home alone with my one son, who I adore, it's not difficult to see how these mothers who spend the majority of their lives glued to their children, without the useful assistance of their husbands, get a little turned off at the idea of mass production. 

On the flip side, the article highlights how women in the Netherlands, and other northern European countries with greater gender equality, have among the highest fertility rates on the continent. When women are working and husbands are helping out on the home front, the urge to procreate is convincingly stronger. These studies don't translate perfectly to American society, which doesn't offer the same parental benefits (termed "generosity" in the article) as its European brethren, but it does offer, according to the article, more flexibility for women, who can leave their jobs for a handful of years and then return to the workforce sometime down the road. (I'm not 100 percent sure I will see this born out among my friends who have passed up their careers to stay at home, but the article does claim that America is more flexible in this regard than most European countries).

This leaves me pondering what the ideal situation for having a higher than average kid count is. Would the recipe for prospering (and I use this word with purpose) with a kid count of four be two working parents in a household where chores and childcare responsibilities are divided equally between husband and wife? And, if so, at what cost? In my next post, I think it's high time I take a closer look at the financial realities of raising a larger than average family.

Virus adds new spin to kid count

How do they do it? How do parents with multiple children survive when the primary caregiver falls ill -- like so ill that they can't swing their legs out of bed, they haven't the energy to pull the sticky piece of adhesive tape off a diaper, they can't open the refrigerator without feeling winded? I've had an especially bad ten days of battling what I now think was two separate viruses, and just as I was emerging from my sickie cocoon earlier this week, Ben came down with his own fever and sore throat.

I can't tell you the number of times I've thought about my post glorifying the Cheaper by the Dozen family's fight against whooping cough over the past week and half and wanted to de-post it stat (but, let's be honest, I was too exhausted and achy to figure out the technology of it, much less use my fingers to do anything besides take my temperature for the 14 millionth time or help roll my pregnant body over to sleeping position option #2 (the final option) on my other side).

Now, really, this isn't going to be a post of complaints. I'm better now and thankful for that. And I think my sickness has given my rosy colored glasses an even less flowery tint than before when it comes to my own family's potential kid count, which could certainly influence the direction of this blog. I don't know what I would have done if I'd had more than one child, a husband who couldn't take time off work, and a nanny who didn't come twice a week. I sound spoiled rotten just writing it. For a bad situation, I was in a good situation. I wonder if I'm really cut out for caring for a brood of kids. I'm having doubts, that's for sure.

What I really wanted to post about last week was not a daily dose of my health statistics. In the NYTimes magazine the week following Virginia Heffernan's media post on big family television programs, there was a front page feature article on how kid count (aka birthrate in this case) is falling in Europe -- and how this is something to be concerned about, perhaps not just across the pond, but on the homefront as well (despite the fact our healthy "replacement rate" for children in the US remains a steady 2.1).

There were many fascinating insights in the article, which was titled No Babies? Declining Population in Europe. The problem is, it's now been well over a week since I read and digested the article (and a rough week at that), so I'm no longer prepared to pull the related gems from the piece and discuss them here. My goal, however, is to reread the story this evening and pontificate on the journalistic findings in my post tomorrow (that is, if Ben decides he is going to nap again -- the other disturbing thing that happened this week is that my son went on a nap strike, leaving his mother little time to blog (horrors!), or to do much of anything, save reconsider what a reasonable kid count is for our little family).

More soon.