Multiple entries is what I get when I start blogging before I've finished a book.
I'm now in the chapter on child support, and Crittenden is disappointing me by pulling out some very standard numbers about what it costs to have a baby. She writes:
Recently, while looking at the website Hipmama.com, I found an on-line conversation in which people were telling a prospective mother that all she had to worry about was the price of diapers and an occasional baby-sitter. I didn't have the heart to chime in with the naked truth: a baby is ferociously expensive. (165)
She then goes on to cite numbers like "$850 per month in the first year," and "$37,000 per year." I see scare numbers like this all the time, and I always find myself thinking, "It can't possibly actually cost that much to have a child, because most people simply don't have money like that to spend." I'm guessing that the "people" offering advice on Hipmama were actually mothers--and my experience is closer to theirs than to the outrageously high numbers Crittenden cites.
One thing that is often missing from these numbers is a breakdown of where these totals come from. I hoped Crittenden, a conscientious researcher, would offer details, but except for an acknowledgment that the $37,000 per year figure included $3000 per year for a "learning psychologist" and $10,000 for a car for your teenager (166), she doesn't.
Recently, Consumer Reports did a story on the cost of raising children (sorry, I can't find the issue in our over-stuffed magazine basket, though my academic traning impels me to offer a citaiton). Their figure was the usual tens-of-thousands-per-year. They did break down their total, and among other things, they charged a fraction of fixed housing expenses against the baby as soon as it was born. So, if you have a $1200 per month mortgage, that's $400 the baby is costing you, even though your mortgage doesn't actually go up when the baby is born. Techniques like these inflate the actual cost of having children.
I haven't been able to confirm it, but another suspicion I have is that those numbers might include the cost of medical care, even if it's covered by insurance.
I have the same skepticism about college costs. David and I put him through college just a few years ago for a career change, and it didn't set us back anything like $130,000. This is why, although I make a deposit every month into Eric's college fund, I am not the least bit worried about getting him through school. When I see big terrifying numbers, I always want to know what assumptions have gone into creating them: the car for the teenager; how much they assume children's clothes cost, and how many clothes they assume you'll buy; what kind of spending money they think you're going to send to junior at college.
I remember reading a critique of the Consumer Price Index, which tries to estimate the cost of consumer goods by tracking a specific set of prices. The critique pointed out that the CPI tracks specific commodities, such as the price of orange juice and hamburger (I remember orange juice was specifically mentioned). If orange juice and hamburger (and the other commodities in the index) go up 50%, the CPI says it now costs people 50% more to feed their families. What the CPI doesn't take into account is that families make flexible choices. If a bad Florida growing season raises the price of orange juice, people might switch to apple juice or grape juice. Beef goes up? Eat more chicken. So it may not actually cost a family more to eat in that circumstance; they may just be eating differently, and not necessarily with a compromise in nutritional quantity or quality.
There are little hidden things like that in all kinds of statistical models we use all the time. I always want to know what they are. How is this statistic useful? What are its limits? What can't it tell us? Crittenden has been awfully thorough and reliable so far; I wish she'd done a deeper job on what it really costs to have a baby and raise a child. It's not even that I think various costs--like lost wages, or even fixed living expenses--are invalid to consider. Just that it should be clear when scare statistics are including things like that.
Posted by Su Penn at November 13, 2003 08:00 PM | TrackBack