Can we afford to be parents?

One · What happened

Fewer babies, and a bigger bill for the ones who come

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released the final count for 2025 on 9 April. 3,606,400 babies were born in the US that year, down 1% from 2024. The general fertility rate, meaning births per 1,000 women of childbearing age, fell to 53.1, down from 53.8. That is the lowest number on record since the government started keeping this particular count in 1909, and it sits about 23% below where the rate stood at its last real peak, back in 2007.

Ten weeks before that release, the child care platform Care.com had already published a piece of the explanation. Its 2026 Cost of Care Report surveyed 3,000 parents who currently pay for professional child care, and the numbers it came back with were not gentle. A nanny now runs $870 a week on average, and a daycare spot averages $332. A family care center runs $323. Even a babysitter, which used to mean pocket money for a Saturday night, averages $175 a week now.

A separate West Health and Gallup survey, published in March, asked adults what they had put off because of health care costs specifically, and 6% said they had postponed having or adopting a child. That question was about medical bills, so it’s a second survey landing on the same kind of decision from a different side.

Two · What it is doing

The spreadsheet that never quite closes

Most of this argument happens at kitchen tables and in cars, and it doesn’t get easier just because a couple has been married a while. They want children eventually, and eventually keeps getting pushed back a year. Somebody runs the math again, on a phone, after the other one has fallen asleep, and the math never quite closes the way it’s supposed to.

Somebody remembers a parent or a grandparent who managed it on one income and a smaller house, and privately decides the problem must be their own money management. The other possibility, that the arithmetic itself has changed for everybody, is a much harder thing to sit with.

There is a shame that attaches to the waiting itself, and you can get it from either side. Wait too long and somebody will say you are chasing a career. Have a child while things still feel financially unsettled and somebody else calls it reckless. A couple can absorb both accusations in the same week, from people who love them, and neither one moves the actual number in the actual bank account by a dollar.

Behind the shame is a much plainer fear. What if we have this child and we cannot provide for them. Child care costs what the survey says it costs, and a family can be spending 20% of what it earns on it before the child is old enough for kindergarten, so nobody should call that fear irrational. What I want to ask is what the fear is demanding a couple have before they’re allowed to have a child, and whether anybody has ever actually reached that number.

Three · Where the ground is

The jar that didn’t run dry until it was supposed to

There’s a widow in 1 Kings 17, in the middle of a famine, out gathering sticks for what she believes is the last meal she and her son will ever eat. She tells Elijah so plainly. A handful of flour in a jar, a little oil in a jug, and then starvation. He asks her to feed him first anyway, and promises that the jar of flour and the jug of oil will hold out until the drought ends. She does it, and Scripture says the flour didn’t run out and the oil didn’t run dry for as long as the famine lasted.

She wasn’t given a harvest or a reserve big enough to stop counting. She got enough, refilled at the pace she used it, and never a day earlier than she needed it. I would have found a stockpile a lot easier to trust, and honestly so would she, and the jar is what she got.

Nowhere in Scripture is financial readiness set up as a gate a couple has to clear before children are permitted to them. People in the Bible had children in captivity, in famine, under foreign occupation, in houses smaller than the one you’re worried is too small. None of that means money doesn’t matter or that planning is unspiritual. It does mean there is no safe number that responsible people wait for, because nobody has ever hit it. The couples who look settled from the outside are running their own version of your math, quietly, on their own phone, after their own kids are asleep.

Counting the cost

Keep the budget. A family really can overextend itself, and a couple that has no idea what child care costs in their own city hasn’t gotten around to looking it up, and that is not the same thing as faith. Scripture won’t back the belief behind the caution, though, the one insisting that peace has to arrive before the child does. In my experience the peace shows up afterward, learned in the actual doing of the thing, the way Paul says in Philippians 4 that he learned contentment.

Four · Today

Five things, and none of them are “stay informed”

Most of what makes this decision feel impossible is that nobody in the house has actually written the real numbers down.

1. 01

   Get 3 real child care quotes this week.

   Actual prices from actual places within 20 minutes of your house, and skip the national averages. A bad real number is still easier to plan around than a feeling.

2. 02

   Ask one couple who is 2 years ahead of you.

   An actual person you know, and no forums. Ask what it really costs them monthly and what they wish somebody had told them before they decided.

3. 03

   Check what you’re already owed.

   A dependent care FSA through work, a state pre-K program, a child tax credit you haven’t looked into. Most people are leaving money on the table out of not asking.

4. 04

   Put an actual date on the calendar.

   A real date, 6 months out, to sit down and revisit the decision with real numbers in hand, because someday has been on the calendar for a while now and it hasn’t come.

5. 05

   Bring God the actual figure.

   Tell God the actual figure that scares you, once, with the dollar sign on it, and leave “bless our family someday” for another night.