Reply to Tim Carney in the Post: The Ideal Number of Kids is Four (at a minimum)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The whole article and 6 pages of comments and still no discussion of the cost of raising 6 kids. In dc?  That’s at least $24k/year for daycare. No. [/quote]

Several people have mentioned this! It's an obvious issue Carney doesn't even mention except to say there are certain activities like travel sports his family doesn't do because of the size of the family.

Though I will note that no family with 6 kids is going to do daycare. They either have a SAHM or a nanny (potentially both). Still expensive and in a high COL area like DC, not accessible to the vast majority of families. But it is at least efficient -- none of these families are putting 6 kids in daycare.

To me the cost issues aren't even about the early childhood childcare costs, but more the compounding costs of having this many kids that will just add up and up and up. Yes, you will be able to get some efficiencies out of it with handmedowns and toys the kids share. You can have kids share bedrooms too, this was very normal up until only recently so I really don't have an issue with that. But what about other costs that cannot be split among kids. I hope your kids have good teeth because 6 sets of braces is going to be expensive and time consuming. Heck, even just having kids with cavities is going to really add up with that many. Your food costs are going to be high and just go waaaaay up as those kids become teens, even if you never eat out (which is also no prohibitively expensive -- you aren't getting out of a Chipotley for less than $150 with a family of 8). Even if you eschew more expensive activities like travel sports, are any of your kids going to do very normal things like learn an instrument? Participate in model UN? Girl Scouts? These are not bespoke activities only embraced by progressive helicopter parents, many people view these as formative experiences.

How do you allocate college costs among all these kids? Sometimes parents have to have tough conversations with kids about what they can afford in terms of college, but the degree to which individuals in a family like this are going to have to sacrifice for the "greater good" is extreme. And how do you balance the fact that kids are different, have different goals, different willingness to work, different abilities. What if you have a kid who works incredibly hard to earn a spot at a pricier school, and you know they would do great there, but if you send them you will have too little for younger kids to have that opportunity? How do you decide? How do you explain that? What if you have a kid who needs special therapy or treatment, and those costs or the time dedicated to those needs mean other kids have to go without in other areas, as well as without extra time with their parents?

Huge families made sense when it was common for families to lose children to childhood illness, when no one went to college, when families needed all the hands they could get to take care of the house and the land. They made sense when there was a good likelihood that your oldest kids would be heading off to war and might not come back. Now, they really don't make sense unless you have a lot of resources that most people don't have, and an unusual will to live a different sort of life than most people live these days. I don't begrudge people who want and have large families, but to advocate for it as though it's desirable or even possible for most people? You just sound stupid.[/quote]

Very smart post[/quote]

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