The Underestimated “Price of Parenting”
In 2022, economists at the Brookings Institution took the USDA estimates for children in two-parent married middle-income families with two children in which the youngest child was born in 2015 and applied a realistic estimate of the rate of inflation to project an estimate of $310,605 for ... In 2022, economists at the Brookings Institution took the USDA estimates for children in two-parent married middle-income families with two children in which the youngest child was born in 2015 and applied a realistic estimate of the rate of inflation to project an estimate of $310,605 for total parental expenses up to age 18 for a child born in 2015.Even a low-ball estimate of the cost of time shows just how misleading an estimate based only on money expenditures really is.Between 1995 and 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) used data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey to issue annual reports on parental expenditures on children up to age 18, for low- and middle-income families with specific characteristics such as number of children.Reports of spending on child-specific items like toys and school supplies were combined with estimates of the impact of children on household expenditures like housing and food costs. The resulting averages conceal big differences across income categories and are most relevant for families we think of as the middle class (other research confirms the rather obvious finding that rich families spend far more