Baby May Indeed Be Joy, but It’s a Bundle Too

Renee Bellerive knew that bringing up baby would cost a bundle. But $149,820?

“Wow!” the 29-year-old city maintenance worker said Wednesday from her room at Menorah Medical Center in Overland Park, Kan. Fourteen hours earlier, she gave birth to son Cade Werner. “I knew it would cost a lot, but wow!”

That’s the average cost, according to the Department of Agriculture, for rearing a first child to age 17.

The survey, taken in 1996, covers 12,850 two-parent households and 3,395 single-parent households.

According to the research, it costs about $8,300 a year, or $694 a month, to raise one child in a two-child, two-parent middle-income family.

Of the costs, housing took the biggest chunk--33%, or $49,710. Food was No. 2, at $26,130. Transportation, clothing and child care came next.

In earlier times, however, several expenses such as child care were not a factor. In 1960, the first year the department conducted the survey, the cost of rearing was $25,229.

Now, because of housing costs, West Coast cities are the most expensive places in the country to rear a child, the study found. East Coast cities come next, then the South. Midwestern cities and rural areas are the least expensive.

If small families are so expensive, what about large ones? And what about the Thompsons of Washington, D.C., who will be rearing their five surviving sextuplets?

Large families do cost more, no question. But the Thompsons’ celebrity has brought them donations that will go a long way toward defraying the costs of rearing their children.

For Renee Bellerive and her fiance, Kipp Masingale, 31, the figures seem overwhelming.

They earn an average salary--between $34,700 and $58,300--and live among the least-expensive regions of the country. But Bellerive said thinking of the overwhelming cost will prompt changes in their lives.

Her fiance, she figures, will need to be promoted in his uncle’s excavation company to make ends meet. And she plans to go back to college to become a teacher.

“It gets scary when people actually tell you what it costs,” she said.

To some who bore children in 1996, $149,000 sounds about right.

Linda Mitchell of Manassas, Va., sounded almost relieved.

“That’s it?” asked Mitchell, mother of Kelly, 17 months, and Peter, 3. “It just seems like so much goes out--for food and clothes and every little birthday party.”

Her husband, Bill, 36, a civil engineer, had already bought their home when the two were married seven years ago, and Mitchell is a stay-at-home mom.

Her advice: Budget carefully and “buy everything in bulk.”