The thing about raising children is that the sky is the limit when it comes to spending money, time, and resources on them. It's not hard to find stories about people who spend their entire incomes on child raising. The catch is that these stories can be seen at every level of income, from $30K to $300K or more. Expenses can and will balloon to exorbitant amounts if you're not careful.

It helps to know parents with more traditional income levels to see how they function. If you're only surrounded by people spending $80K/year on their kids, it starts to feel like spending that much is the only option. It's not.

School alone is ~$20K. Babysitter costs vary based on hours, but it's never less than $1K/month. So those two make up ~35K/year. Add food, toys, camps, etc and it gets to 40K.

I’m assuming this means private school? Considering only 10% of K-12 students attend private school, it already skews the numbers.

If you talk about how expensive it is to own a 6k sq.ft. home, that can be true as well but both seem to speak towards lifestyle inflation rather than the norm.

Yes, private school. Because public schools around here aren't so great. That's the cheapest private school in the area, everything else is way more expensive.

The irony is that if I could afford a 3Ksqft home (forget 6Ksqft, I can't imagine anyone other than a few CEOs could afford that) I could live in an upscale area where the public schools are great.