Millennial parents: Would you rather spend $300,000 raising a kid or $400,000 buying a house?

Nowadays, a married, middle-income household with two kids will likely spend $310,605 these days on that kid born in 2015, according to Brookings’ comments to The Wall Street Journal. That breaks down to on average $18,271 a year. The median household income as of April 2022 is estimated to be $76,563, according to SeekingAlpha. 

Now consider the generation entering parenthood: millennials, many of whom were saddled with an unprecedented debt burden and two recessions before they turned 40 years old, and many of them navigating the notoriously expensive pandemic-era housing market.

With finances tight, they’re a little bit hesitant to start a family. The number of young adults that say they’re not likely or not likely at all to have kids has increased from 37% to 44% from 2018 to 2022, per the Pew Research Center. That’s not a shock when you consider the median home price is only $100,000 more than the cost of filling that house with a kid.

In short, millennials could be stuck choosing between buying Barbie’s dream house or having a mini me. After all, the median sale price for a home is only a bit more than $100,000 more than having a child—sitting at $412,739, according to Redfin.

Pushing back and choosing between life milestones

Ask any billionaire you find on the street and they’ll tell you there’s a population issue. Warren Buffett is on the case by potentially dividing his fortune towards every infant after he dies. And Elon Musk claims he’s fighting the issue by having twins. And while in 2021, the U.S. birth rate fell to its lowest in more than a century, a recent report from the United Nations showed that the global population is showing no signs of slowing.

The great expense of childcare has become even more difficult to find and pay for throughout the ongoing crisis in the industry exacerbated by the pandemic, when the cost of childcare has gone up by 41%, according to data from a LendingTree report in March. This hefty price tag has led to young parents spending on average 20% of their income towards getting their kids younger than five in childcare, per LendingTree.

As the cost of inflation has hit grocery stores, buying necessities for yourself and a tiny little mouth becomes more difficult. And inflation has hit Black, Native American, and Latino families the hardest, as a poll from NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that more than half of Black and Latino households said the rising expenses were causing “serious financial problems.” For Native American respondents that number reached more than two-thirds. 

For wealthier Americans—and for the upper middle class that doesn’t feel wealthy but lives in more expensive coastal cities—$300,000 is probably the minimum they will spend on a child, depending on factors like private school. And neither the USDA nor Brookings even get into the minefield that is college tuition. 

As for buying a house in those competitive coastal markets? The median sale price of a house in the Big Apple these days is $​​825,000, per Redfin, and in 2022, median prices in L.A. ran prospective homeowners $955,000.

But at least prospective parents in New York and California can currently count on their states protecting a woman’s right to choose how and when she will need to start a family. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade, some families don’t even get to make their choices regarding their weighty financial and life milestones.