Between the two of them it will cost Wendy and I over $400,000 according to the Christian Science Monitor
The setting is their spacious three-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot suburban home in a neighborhood chosen for the good schools (median home price: $379,000). The kitchen is sizzling as Samantha Gianulis cooks up a comparatively costly meal, both in price but also in the time she devotes to it: steamed green beans (organic, $1.60 a pound, about 50 percent more than regular beans), whole wheat pasta shells ($2.50 a bag versus the 50-cent special on store-brand pasta), and tomato sauce she makes from scratch (organic tomatoes for $2.10 a pound and extra virgin olive oil, the good stuff at $12 a bottle); time invested is about 10 times that of opening a can of SpaghettiOs. Her oldest, son Alex, age 11 – just in from baseball practice (team fees: $1,000 a year) – watches TV with Dad – Pete – who is resting up from a weekend injury he got while coaching all three of his kids’ soccer teams (fees for three kids: $600 a year, plus about 50 hours of Dad’s time). On the floor is Alex’s baseball mitt (somewhere between $30 and $150); he hopes that Christmas will bring him a much-coveted big barrel bat ($300).
Everyone knows having children ups life’s financial ante, and while parents may not figure it out to the dollar, the US Department of Agriculture does: By the time Alex turns 18, Mr. and Mrs. Giulianis will have spent somewhere around $222,360. That’s the cost the USDA figures for the average middle-income couple raising a child from birth through age 17. And it’s 22 percent more, in real dollars, than parents spent in 1960 – in the thick of the baby boom – when the USDA started counting such things and when kids shared bedrooms, had one pair of shoes, ate TV dinners and Wonder bread sandwiches, did homework with encyclopedias, didn’t go to the doctor – let alone medical specialists – for much more than vaccinations or a broken arm, and went out to play unsupervised.
