Alejandra Rojas smiles with her newborn baby.
My mom, who has four children, including me, once told my older sister, "If you wait to have a kid until you can afford it, you'll be waiting forever."
It was less a comment on my sister's personal financial situation and more reflective of the fact that having kids isn't just expensive. To some degree, it's incalculable, even impossible, to accurately plan for.
Short-term, you can get estimates for how much diapers and day care will run you, but there's no telling how your child's needs — or your own — may shift over the years.
And while it's always been costly to have children, prices have skyrocketed for the current generation of new and potential parents. Child-care costs alone have grown exponentially, rising over 260% since 1990 by some estimates. On top of that, prices for crucial big-ticket items that adults used to be able to afford with regular full-time jobs — such as housing, higher education and health care — have become prohibitive for many.
Given these costs and pressures, a growing number of Americans are opting out of parenthood. That makes sense to me: I don't want a baby right now, either. Though I see plenty of pregnancy and birth announcements from my friends and broader communities on my social media feeds, I often wonder how my peers can afford to grow their families — and why they choose to.
Over this spring and summer, when I reported on the reasons more and more Americans aren't having kids, I spoke to a number of women, some I know personally and some I don't, who have excitedly become parents.
Some managed to follow the previously typical trajectory of getting married, buying a house and then having kids when the time felt right. Others have had to take somewhat drastic measures, like moving across the country in search of affordability, or taking advantage of another country's pro-family fiscal policies.
Money Report
Here's a look at the strategies, sacrifices and circumstances that helped three millennial women feel comfortable and confident becoming parents.
Outside of Baltimore, 'having a house really made us feel comfortable having children'
Achieving the major financial milestone of homeownership helped Marie Medina, 28, and her husband, Daniel, feel ready to start having kids. However, they didn't necessarily plan it that way.
The couple got married in 2018, and thought they might move around a bit before putting down roots. But they fell in love with their church and broader community in Columbia, Maryland, and wound up buying a house there in 2019.
"Having a house really made us feel comfortable having children," Medina says. It represented stability to the couple.
They always knew they wanted to have kids: "It was never really a question for either of us of 'if,' it was just a question of 'when,'" she says. They welcomed their first daughter in late 2020 and their second in 2023.
"We didn't really make the decision to buy a house because we wanted to have kids in the next year; we bought the house separate from that decision. But I don't think we would have been like, 'Let's try to have our first kid,' if we didn't already have a house."
Medina runs her own photography business from home while her husband works as an engineer, so they don't need to pay for regular child care. That helps ease the financial burden of raising their two little girls.
Food and other costs have naturally increased as their family has grown. Still, Medina says they had enough room in their pre-children budget that they have been "able to absorb those [added] expenses without having to drastically change our lifestyle in any way."
'I needed to take care of that [debt] before I brought a kid into the world'
Yolanda Cando-Gilleran, 29, is "always thinking about money," she says. She has also always wanted to be a mom.
As an elementary school teacher married to a human resources professional, she knew it would be hard to give kids the life they wanted to in New York City. She and her husband moved from the Bronx to Portland, Oregon, in 2021, in part to make their dream of having kids more financially feasible.
While Cando-Gilleran earned a bit less teaching in Portland, the family's cost of living went down, making it easier to save, live frugally and prioritize getting out of the red. Cando-Gilleran had around $10,000 left in private student loan debt that she wanted to eliminate before she had her first child.
"We could have started [trying for kids] if I didn't have student loans — I would have started earlier," she says. "But I knew, at least for my private loans, because the interest rates were so high, I needed to take care of that before I bought a kid into the world."
Although the process took slightly longer than expected, she was able to finish paying off that debt soon after her daughter was born in March 2023.
Leading up to the birth of their daughter, Cando-Gilleran and her husband made sure to have enough money saved for Cando-Gilleran to take time off. At the time, Oregon didn't have a family medical leave policy; now, however, it is one of several states that do.
"We live frugally enough, but I think that there are so many [costs] that do end up stacking," she says. She ordered numerous takeout meals after giving birth, for example, that felt necessary at the time and yet added up quickly in cost.
"It was very much taking a chance on our abilities to be responsible and frugal, and really just living paycheck to paycheck, to afford having a child," she says.
Government support in Amsterdam put a new mom 'at ease'
Alejandra Rojas, a financial educator who was born in Colombia and now splits time between the Netherlands and Maryland, didn't think she wanted to have kids for much of her life.
"Coming from Colombia, you see a lot of the struggle of families with so many kids that they cannot provide for and so many kids that don't have families," the 29-year-old says. "In the back of your mind, you're thinking, 'If I bring a child [into this world], how am I going to do it? And is it the life that the child deserves?'"
Her pregnancy came as a surprise in 2023, but a "welcome" one, she says. In addition to feeling emotionally ready, she felt comfortable living in her partner's home country of the Netherlands. That further boosted her confidence that she could have the birthing experience she wanted and would be supported by the government after giving birth.
In the Netherlands, parents can receive cash payments of up to about 282 euros per quarter for newborns as well as tax credits to help pay for child care.
New mothers are able to have a nurse come to them for up to 10 days after the delivery, which enabled her to have the at-home birth she wanted. "It just put me at ease because it does something to your mind knowing that you can be at home and you can be OK and that you don't have to go through the hospital," Rojas says.
Having her baby may have been generally more affordable in Amsterdam than back in the States. Still, as a financial educator, Rojas is well aware of how daunting raising children can seem.
Once you commit to having a child, though, the related costs can feel less burdensome, she says, because parenting becomes part of the vision you have for your life. To a degree, you can simply re-allocate your spending to account for your new priorities.
"It always sounds a lot, right? And it is a lot — child-care costs, diapers and all of these things," she says. "But at the end of the day, you're also going to make that money, and you're also going to spend that money on other things."
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