1146-The True Cost of Children Is the Opportunity Cost, Not the Direct Cost

Now, you might be surprised that I am not here referring to the stories that we get just about every year, wherein we r- find out the official government calculations of exactly how much it costs to have children.

I looked those up in preparation for the show.

Here is a CBS News article from April twenty twenty-six.

Headline: Raising a Child Now Costs Over Three Hundred Thousand Dollars in the United States, Study Finds.

See how your state compares.

A new estimate from LendingTree puts the price tag at three hundred and three thousand four hundred and eighteen dollars for twenty twenty-six, or an average of sixteen thousand eight hundred and fifty-seven dollars per year.

It's the first time the figure topped three hundred thousand dollars since LendingTree began the analysis in twenty twenty-three and is up from about two percent from a year earlier.

So of course, these are just studies that companies make in order to be able to release a press release.

Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, who knows? The US Department of Agriculture, uh, uh, keeps track of some of these numbers, and they have estimated that the cost of raising a children is also a couple hundred thousand dollars.

The latest, uh, article I see on this, well, one of the latest in twenty seventeen on the USDA website, uh, we see that the cost of raising a child is two hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars.

And we see those about every year, and frankly, I think a lot of this is just antenatal propaganda.

Uh, I don't know if it's true, if it's not true, but I, I think it's a lot of it is antenatal propaganda.

I don't like it.

I don't like to, to, to share it, uh, for that reason.

However, honesty does require that we discuss the costs of having children.