How Much Do Kids Cost?

From columnist Scott Burns:

Let's say that the cost of living for a young married couple without children gets an index number of 100. From there, the revised equivalence scale has an index to represent the cost of living for each size and age of family composition.

A young single person, for instance, would get an index of 71. The arrival of a first child takes the index to 127. The arrival of a second child moves the index to 147.

The index continues to climb as the children age. It reaches 204 when the older child is 6 to 15 years old and peaks at 231 when the older child is 16 to 17. (The index is apparently unaware that some children go to college.) . . . From there the index starts to descend, going down to 186 when only one child is at home (assuming the other isn't at Stanford or Harvard). It reaches a mere 120 when the couple makes ''empty nester" status. It hits 104 when the couple is retired, and bottoms at 57 when a spouse dies.

What does this mean in cold hard dollars? Nothing good - unless you're planning on staying childless:

Between the day we marry (index 100) and the day the index peaks at 231 - a period of about 17 to 19 years - real family income needs to grow at 4.5 percent to 5 percent a year to maintain our standard of living . . . [If] inflation is 2.5 to 3.5 percent, the simple project of marrying and having a family requires income growth of 7 percent to 8.5 percent a year . . . for nearly two decades.

Unfortunately, that rarely happens:

. . . Typical workers can expect a raise of 3.7 percent this year, following an average raise of 3.6 percent in 2004. At best, that's 1 percentage point over the rate of inflation, not the 4.5 to 5 percent a young family will need to avoid a declining standard of living.

That's an average American wage increase, mind you. Since wages have been going up much faster for highly-skilled workers than for the working poor over the last few decades, I think it's safe to say that having children is particularly expensive if you aren't, say, one of Richard Florida's beloved "creatives." And working class parents are also more likely to have large families - so they're really paying through the nose.Burns puts it best:

Many young couples, armed with visceral knowledge of this reality, decide to have fewer children. Some - an increasing number - decide to have none.

What about the others? Are they dumb? No. They are heroes, real everyday heroes.