Kids Can Be Costly Long After They Turn 18

Having just added our fourth child to our family, this WSJ article about the costs of raising child beyond age 18 was very eye catching to me.

Parent reader, be warned the numbers below may scare you.

• "The real costs of raising a child for a moderate-income family"—including forgone income, college for those who attend, and the so-called opportunity cost of not investing the money—"would be closer to $900,000 to age 22 than the reported $300,000 expenditures to age 18," says John Ward, an economist and the president of John Ward Economics, based in Prairie Village, Kan., which consults on legal disputes for plaintiffs and defendants.
• Nancy Folbre, an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, argued in her 2008 book "Valuing Children" that forgone wages should be included in the cost of raising children. She found that parents' time cost is larger, on average, than direct spending, at least until children reach age 12. The best explanation of why time cost hasn't been included, she says, is that "we still don't have the data we need to provide really accurate estimates."
• Lest this all sound like a dismal accounting of child-rearing by the dismal science, Prof. Berger says the cost approach excludes the many benefits of having children, not all of them quantifiable, such as happiness and personal satisfaction. Cost estimates such as the USDA's exclude "any intrinsic benefit that parents realize from child rearing, which would be extremely difficult to monetize," Prof. Berger says.