Baby Bust: 5 Charts Show How Expensive it is to Have Kids in the US Today | Intellectual Takeout

Baby Bust: 5 Charts Show How Expensive it is to Have Kids in the US Today | Intellectual Takeout: "Today, roughly one in five women in the U.S. doesn’t have children.
 Thanks in part to this decline in birthrate, for the first time in U.S. history, there may soon be more elderly people than children.
Based on trends in costs, it’s evident why many families are choosing to have fewer children – or in some cases, no children at all.
The cost of having children in the U.S. has grown exponentially since the 1960s, when the government first started collecting data on childhood expenditures.
 Between 2000 and 2010, the cost shot up by 40 percent.
As of 2015, American parents spend, on average, US $233,610 on child costs from birth until the age of 17, not including college. 
...This spike costs has broad implications, affecting everything from demographic trends and human capital to family consumption...

• Cost of children...

In 2015, a typical middle-income American family spent $12,980 annually per child.

Housing

28%

Food

18%

Childcare

16%

Transportation

15%

Health care

9%

Misc.

7%

Clothes

6%

Chart: The Conversation, CC-BY-ND  Source: U.S. Department of Agriculture  Get the data