12 Weeks: Costing August

A Reuters article picked up by Yahoo reports that middle-income families can expect to pay $204,060 to raise a 2007 baby from birth to age 18 (in today's dollars, according to a new Dept. of Agriculture study).

If only! I've been using a number closer to 5X that figure as a conservative estimate. Hope not, but I won't be surprised.

One of the inside jokes in my family has been my dad's legendary "top drawer" lists. If he ever needed to fabricate hard facts, Dad would assert that he had "a type-written list, in the top drawer of the desk in my office, of the past 5 times you've come home after your curfew", or "...of 7 times you failed to take out the trash last month", or whatever the infraction was.

Of course these lists didn't exist... not that there wasn't material to create such lists, and plenty damning ones! One of the more amusing images of my childhood was to envision my dad in his office, seething with anger, composing hand-written lists on legal pads, then handing them off to his secretary periodically to be typed-up!

It's possible Dad only ever actually tried the "type-written list" gambit twice or three times—maybe even just once!—but it was so preposterous to us, the kids, that it became an instant classic.

For me, the phrase isn't a "I've got a type-written list", it's "I've got a spreadsheet on that". Of course, I actually do have spreadsheets I use to keep track of tons of different collections of data. I have personal financial records going back to the early 90's. I have records on the scores of tennis matches with opponents I haven't played in more than 10 years. I have a spreadsheet going for tracking August's growth and weight development, which I've used as the source for nifty charts in previous posts.

Given that, you know it crossed my mind to keep track of what it's costing us to raise August. Collecting and recording data is like an instinctive reflex for me at this point. But I knew that such an effort had one, enormous problem. I don't mean the logistical problem (it's a cost-accounting nightmare!), or the labor challenge (imagine having to keep track of every little, or even every major item). The big problem is that it doesn't mesh with the spirit of parenthood to track such a collection of data.

It might be very entertaining, on his 18th birthday, to present your son with an invoice and know that it's something close to accurate. But in reality, I don't want to measure my son in terms of dollars. This guy is the most important thing in my life now. He's what money is for. So if he ends up costing 5X the national middle-income average, I say he's welcome to it.