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Comment by bigtunacan | Hacker News Reader

There is no way around it; kids ARE expensive. The bulk cost of raising kids is not all of the unnecessary things, even with all of the crap kids have today compared to prior generations, that is all incidental costs.

The real costs of kids are the necessities. Child care, clothing, food, medical & dental expenses.

I live in the midwest and send/sent my children to a daycare that is extremely price conscious even for this area. It cost me over $7000 per year per child. So when I had 3 kids in day care at the same time; I was paying $21,000 a year just for daycare. For some people that is not sustainable; it is as much or more than they earn.

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This is what confuses me, when I was growing up there was poor kids childcare that I went to that was dirt cheap. Don't they exist anymore? Our (lower income) city offered free summer camp and I went to a variety of after school programs. Sure you can't do that with babies though (I don't think).

The vast majority of my clothes were hand-me-downs or thrift store or sometimes sales rack stuff. My mom and her sisters and brothers passed around garbage bags full of their kids' old clothes for the smaller kids and clothes were passed on to coworkers and friends. Several kids all wore clothes until they fell apart. I was allowed to have one pair of shoes (only from Payless) and I wore them either until they didn't fit or until the next schoolyear came. My parents didn't spend hardly anything at all on clothes.

Medical costs obviously are high (unless you are in the military)

I never even felt deprived or anything either. Not being able to pick out my clothes wasn't even a big issue for me.

What state/city? I'm assuming you live in the US. I live in Canada and I've never heard of a poor kids childcare of free summer camp paid for by the city even here.

People talking about saving money by not spending money on clothes and toys really don't know what they're talking about. Brand new clothes and toys today are super cheap compared to what they were when I was a kid. For example, I just bought some brand new baby shoes and shirts on sale for $2 at the grocery store. If I was poor it would cost me more in bus fare to get to the used clothing store than I would have saved had I just bought stuff new at the grocery store. The biggest cost for me _by_far_ is childcare and summer camps.

Maybe you gotta live in a low income area. I went to the YMCA, YWCA, Boys and Girls Club, some place that is run by a couple nuns and sponsored by a charity... I think we may have gotten subsidies from somewhere though? Honestly I am not sure, I just know that they were cheap and that's where all the poor kids went (including me).

These places were pretty friggin boring though, just a bunch of sitting around doing not much of anything except playing with yarn with minimal supervision.

The "free camp" (as we called it) was especially boring.

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