We're being told, again and again, that raising kids has become financially impossible. standret - stock.adobe.com When Princess Eugenie announced last week that she’s expecting her third child, she was showered in social-media congratulations — and cattiness.
“Another leech in the oven,” read one response.
“What a way to keep trying to live off public money,” went another.
The gripes were in keeping with the media’s dominant narrative about having children: We’re being told, again and again, that raising kids has become financially impossible.
Eugenie is joining several royal moms, including Catherine, Princess of Wales and Zara Tindall, who are embracing life with three or more kids — well above the average number in both the US and the UK.
And many observers are taking it as evidence that affording a third child demands vast wealth, or at least a spot in a royal line of succession.
Last month a study commissioned by LendingTree calculated that it costs $400,000 a year for a family with two children to feel financially secure in modern America.
News media routinely publish breathless stories about couples delaying or abandoning parenthood because they can’t afford the exorbitant costs — $300,000 from birth through age 18 — that now supposedly accompanies raising kids.
We’re being taught to view family formation not as the norm, but as an extravagant consumer choice reserved for the super-wealthy.
But you don’t need a royal trust fund or a seven-figure income to have three children.
What you need is a willingness to reject the absurd expectations modern parenting culture has imposed on ordinary family life.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped distinguishing between what children actually need and what influencer-parenting culture demands.
Children need food, shelter, love, safety, stability and attention.
They don’t need a $40 personalized Stanley cup in a custom colorway, laser-etched with their name.
They don’t need a travel baseball schedule that requires a second mortgage and three hotel stays a month.
They don’t need an interior designer to create a perfect Montessori playroom.
And most of us know this from personal experience.
The childhoods of most millennials were dramatically simpler, and frankly a lot healthier, than the one we’re being told is necessary today.
We played pickup basketball and neighborhood soccer games without matching uniforms, private coaching or elite camps that cost more than community-college tuition.
Birthday parties happened in backyards with sheet cake from the grocery store, sans balloon arches and designer gift bags.
More than survived, actually: Most of us remember those years fondly.
Today’s parents are being crushed not only by inflation, but by expectations.
Parenting has transformed from raising human beings into managing a never-ending lifestyle brand, and social media pours gasoline on the anxiety.
Every scroll presents another family apparently spending $12,000 a year on enrichment activities for toddlers.
Of course young couples feel overwhelmed at the notion that good parenting now requires professional-level project management and the budget of a Fortune 500 company.
And ironically, many of the things parents are exhausting themselves to provide aren’t even making kids any happier.
The solution to America’s family crisis is not convincing people that they need to earn another $250,000 before having a baby.
Permission to share bedrooms, drive an older car and buy secondhand infant gear.
A generation ago, middle-class families routinely raised three or four children in homes considered minuscule by today’s standards.
And parents didn’t feel compelled to optimize every second of childhood into a résumé-building exercise.
For many standing on the brink of parenthood without taking the leap, the problem isn’t economics — it’s mentality.
Housing is expensive; child care can be crushing; health-care costs are real.
But the media narrative has gone far beyond acknowledging legitimate economic pressures.
It has become something darker: It’s convincing ordinary Americans that family life itself is financially irresponsible.
A society that treats children as burdens will eventually stop having them.
If you look at this nation’s plummeting birth rate, we already have.
A culture that frames family life as elite consumption rather than ordinary human existence will become lonelier, older and more miserable.
The birth rate crisis isn’t really a story about money; it’s a story about mindset.
Children didn’t suddenly become a luxury good — we just started treating them like one.
And until that changes, no amount of income will ever feel like enough.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
