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bargain. But they were wrong in another regard. Signing on to have children is quite different from buying “a high-priced consumer item,” with or without warranty. If having children were like buying, say, a Mercedes Benz, with a preset price tag that could be clearly accounted for, then prospective parents could make the usual set of financial choices posed by the typical economics textbook. They could choose among several options—the Mercedes, the BMW, or the pleasure of a tiny new person. Reasonable people could make informed choices, depending on their preferences, and they could abandon (or resell) their purchases if the costs got out of hand.

But the cost of a child is not so neatly packaged. It is not possible to calculate the eighteen-year (or twenty-two-year) price tag of an individual person, with her unique talents and needs, before she is even conceived. Nor does it matter that a prospective parent did not budget for the baby-with-asthma package or the costly diploma at a private college for the kid who was denied admission to State U. Parents make the commitment to meet their children’s needs long before they know the full price. And that commitment will color the parents’ financial prospects for the rest of their lives.

For a growing number of Americans, childlessness has become a serious option. Much has been made of the possibility of a looming shortfall in America’s birth rate.14 Over the past twenty years, the proportion of childless women has doubled, and demographers predict that as many as a quarter of today’s young women will never have children.15 If the word gets out that families with children are nearly three times more likely to collapse into bankruptcy, will even more women decide not to have children? And what about the children who grow up today watching mom and dad work hard all day, only to weep in frustration when bill collectors call them ugly names or repo men circle the family car? Will these children have any interest in becoming parents themselves?

Our crystal ball is cloudy, and it is quite possible that the biological drive to pass on our genes will continue to win out over seemingly more rational financial calculations. We certainly hope so. Not just for sentimental reasons, but also for economic ones. Many view parenthood as nothing more than another “lifestyle choice,” not so different from joining a commune or developing a passion for windsurfing.16 And that may be true from the perspective of an individual choosing whether or not to have a child, but it isn’t true for society at large. What happens to a nation that rewards the childless and penalizes the parents? If middle-class men and women stop making that parental lifestyle choice, who will care for them in their old age? Who will pay taxes, build infrastructure, and keep the economy afloat? And most important, who will populate the great middle class of America’s future?

We wish we could offer some clever advice that would tell everyone how to sidestep the financial land mines associated with parenthood, but we can’t. The financial fire drill can help curb at least a few of the dangers of modern economic life, but it cannot negate the fundamental fact that having children has become an enormously risky undertaking. Nor can the financial fire drill protect an individual parent from the vagaries of the marketplace. So long as the only way parents can guarantee a decent education for their children is to buy an overpriced home in the suburbs, families will continue to take on ruinous mortgages. So long as the costs of preschool remain a family’s responsibility rather than a public duty, parents will continue to struggle. So long as colleges can get away with doubling tuition every generation to pay for sports teams and armies of new administrators, families will be stretched even further. And so long as Congress refuses to impose some basic interest rate regulations, credit card companies and mortgage lenders will continue to drain tens of billions of dollars out of the pockets of middle-class American families each year.