As Cost of Raising a Child Soars to 310k Large Families Are the Solution

While the President of the United States is touting falling gas prices and zero, you heard it right, zero inflation, the left leaning Brookings Institution estimated that it now costs a middle class married couple $310,000 to raise a child from birth through 17.

According to the think tank, the multiyear total is up $26,011, or more than 9%, from a prior estimate two years ago, before inflation hit the economy.

The estimate comes from a 2017 calculation by the US Department of Agriculture and was adjusted to reflect current inflation.

Items such as baby food, haircuts, shoes, clothes, sports equipment, books and toys all went up close to 10%.

The Brookings Institution concludes that many people may want to think twice before having children.

“A lot of people are going to think twice before they have either a first child or a subsequent child because everything is costing more. You also may feel like you have to work more.”

Isabel Sawhill, senior fellow at Brookings.

Failure at the Most Basic Level?

There can be no more basic metric for the success or failure of a nation than whether a majority of its citizens can afford to raise a family.

From a biological level, the survival of the species is the driving force behind the theory of evolution which has defined modern biology. Nations are no different, with nations whose populations are aging at severe economic disadvantages over those with growing populations.

However, a powerful misanthropic worldview holds that future generations of humans (our posterity) are not the goal or the solution, but the problem.

The neo-marxists at the UN and the World Economic Forum regularly imagine a world with fewer people consuming fewer resources. Malthusian thinking is alive an well in the 21st century leftist circles, and although the dire warnings against growing populations and diminishing natural resources has been proven false many times over, the basic misconception that larger populations are unsustainable is the “consensus” at the heart of climate alarmism and radical environmentalism aka sustainable “development.”

Still, for the basic human being, most of their closest interactions come from their family. Most of our time and money is spent with and for our own families.

That many Americans cannot afford to raise a family is the most certain sign of national failure one could imagine. But all is not lost …

A Return to Virtuous Living and Large Families

Without a shadow of a doubt, the best solution to poverty is a stable marriage with a father and a mother in the household. In a study, also by the Brookings Institution, it was found that child poverty would drop by two thirds if single mothers were married.

Although the latest figures on the cost of raising a child deal only with married middle class families, in other words, they exclude most of those currently living in poverty, the rising cost of raising children could be enough to sink some families into poverty.

Many of the rising costs of raising a child can be offset, while others, like the cost of fuel and basic food, are harder to avoid. Yet, large families have always adjusted to changing economic situations and used thrift and economies of scale to navigate tough economic times.

Whether it is using your yard as a vegetable garden instead of a lawn, buying used clothing, limiting extracurricular activities to the essentials, wearing hand-me-downs, learning to cut your children’s hair, eating at home, buying less useless toys and electronic gadgets, and engaging in different forms of homeschooling. Many of the costs associated with raising children can be adjusted.

What cannot be adjusted is a lonely barren society and an old age without descendants.

Grandparents Without Grandchildren

Although the cost of raising a child might appear cost prohibitive with the $310,000 price tag, what happens if people decide to forego having children?

In countries like China and Japan where governments mandates or culture have caused a negative birthrate, the elderly are the most affected. Not only do they lose the warmth of caring children and grandchildren, but the country also becomes increasingly strained with the skyrocketing costs of an inverted demographic pyramid of fewer tax paying workers caring for the aged.

The Roraring 20’s are Over

No matter what President Biden states about the state of the economy and the state of the union in his attempt to keep his party in power past the next elections, the most basic economic indicator is inescapable for most American families.

The most important thing for every single American with children is how to care for his family. The days of plenty are gone. Our nation is riddled with debt, our salaries are stagnant (or gone) and prices are soaring, but the solution is not to limit the size of our families or postpone having children. Instead, the only solution is to forge ahead raising large, loving families, but frugal and ingenious ones.

Nothing in the world even comes close to the ingenuity, inventiveness and creativity of the human mind. We cannot limit our most valuable and productive asset if we are going to survive as a nation. Instead we should return to a life of frugality, hard work, and family values.

The solution from the left is to forego having children by either sterilizing ourselves (permanently or temporarily) or to kill the children through abortion after they are conceived. This type of barbarism will only accelerate the demographic winter and would mark the final nail in the coffin of our American experiment.

Americans must instead return to the virtuous large families of yore, living frugally and working hard. That is the only good way out of this mess, and with a large family by your side, the struggle will be worth it.