“To breed, or not to breed: that is the question”.
Q: Are children expensive? And if so, are they worth it?
We feel like having children, but don’t yet know how we would buy them clothes or diapers?
How do people afford children???
I don’t understand.
I guess you just buy less stuff for your houses, cars, self, others…right? All for baby?
Tell me how it works!!
RJR
A: RJR,
This is the most important decision you will face in your entire life. You are already way ahead of the game by asking the questions before you are pregnant. Good job.
Children are expensive in nearly the same way that cigarette smoking is expensive. You will prioritize them above all other expenses without even realizing you are doing so. Rather than adding to your total bill, you will find that you have stopped buying soy mocha lattes and that you are still as broke as you remember being before baby was born. On the plus side, you will not actually be smoking cigarettes, which is really a pretty silly thing to do, and smokes are not half as fun to twirl around in circles as little boys.
The good news is that you will have a human life to fill up with all of the good things your parents gave you, as well as whatever wisdom you can scrounge from your own meager twenty-some years of experience on this planet. You will be able to rear a child who is capable of critical thinking during a time when critical thinking will be more critical than we seem to think.
Apparently.
The down side is that you are taking an enormous risk by bringing life into a chaotic world, in which you cannot look your infant in the proportionally large eye and say “I will not let you down.”
Lukas
P.S. RJR - may I use this question and answer for my column?
Posted 2 months, 4 weeks ago by Lukas Brandon
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Comments
1 month, 3 weeks ago Amanda Roo said
I heard this somewhere, “If everyone waited until they could ‘afford’ to have kids, the human race would die out.”
There does seem to be another side to this coin. Is it okay to purposefully reproduce no matter what your circumstance? Is it okay to count on government programs such as wic and welfare to supplement your income and help support your family? I know quite a few families that receive some kind of help to make ends meet. Is it wrong for them to continue to have more children when others are helping to pay for the ones they have? A single mother from my parents generation said she raised her daughter all by herself and was completely financially independent. I’ve often tried to put the pieces together as to how she did this. Her husband had died….did she receive a large settlement? Was her income from being an insurance dealer really that adequate? Did she just live meagerly enough to stretch her income? And then I wonder about my own situation. If I were to have a baby now I would almost certainly qualify for programs that would lend me a “hand” and I certainly would not turn down this help. Is that wrong? I mean, since I am a fairly intelligent, hard working adult, should I find a way to earn more money on my own- worm my way into a more lucrative career- just to become a mother? Should I do whatever it takes, no matter how much I despise it, to work for my own living? This is the way people used to do it, because they had no other choice. And I wonder what the ethical/moral implications are…of these new choices we have.
1 month, 2 weeks ago ralph1125 said
Most of these comments concern how having a child would affect the would be parent’s life. Maybe the question should be how would having a child affect the world. We all go on and on about riding the bus, buying a hybrid, recycle, reduce and reuse, but the single greatest help we each could make to the environment is to simply not to have any children.
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