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The cost of raising a child
Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios It will cost $26,000 more to raise a child through high school today than it did just two years ago, a Brookings Institution estimate has found. Driving the news: A married, middle-income couple with two children is likely to spend $310,605 — an average of $18,271 a year — to raise their youngest child born in 2015, per Brookings, which first shared the estimates to .That's 9% more than what was estimated based on the inflation rate two years ago. "It's useful to remind people how much it's going to cost to raise a child. It's not exactly trivial," Brookings senior fellow Isabel Sawhill told Axios."And [parents] are going to either have to work harder or make other sacrifices in terms of what they consume." Zoom out: Rising prices are likely to have disproportionate impacts on lower-income families that have already been cutting costs — and there's "nothing left to cut out," Muffy Mendoza, Pittsburgh mother of three, told the Journal. "We’re cutting off the cable today because we can’t afford it," she said. State of play: Inflation is cooling slightly, but , housing, and other daily expenses remain high.That's on top of higher costs for .The Brookings estimate is an inflation-era adjustment based on USDA figures from 2017. Between the lines: The estimate — which doesn’t include college education or private education costs — assumes that the U.S. has entered a period of higher inflation, similar to 1980 to 1997. The bottom line: "I think this is not going to be a major determinant of whether people have children or not, but I think it’s going to have an influence," Sawhill said. Go deeper...