Children aren’t cheap, and your Facebook feed isn’t helping matters. A new survey says most moms are worried about the nearly $13,000 it costs to raise each child per year, and social media might be adding to that cost.
Babycenter.com released its annual Cost of Raising a Child report and surveyed 1,100 moms to see how they are coping with the hefty expense of raising a child. Two out of three moms report worrying about having enough money to raise their kids. According to a report from the federal government, it takes $245,000 to raise a child born in 2013 to age 18, CNN reported.
The stress over money is affecting family sizes — 58 percent of mothers surveyed are planning on keeping their families small because they say they can’t afford any more children. However, if money were no object, 81 percent said they would have more.
The most timely section of the report focused on how social media affects parents’ financial decisions. Nearly 60 percent of moms said they feel pressured to appear “well-off” on social media and they report feeling envious of the lives they see on Facebook and Instagram.
“Everyone is doing fun things and posting them on Facebook, and I want to do those things too,” one mom from the survey told babycenter.com. “It’s embarrassing for people to know that we are struggling,” another mom said.
Moms under the age of 30 feel this pressure the most: one in four say they feel “significant pressure to look well-off on social media,” while only one in seven moms who are 40 or older report feeling any pressure.
“We’re living in a socially transparent time where everything we do, eat, buy or like is visible immediately,” BabyCenter’s Editor in Chief Linda Murray told Today.com. “The implied judgment of social media puts a lot of pressure on moms to not only make themselves and their families look good, but appear prosperous, too.”
Children are also picking up their parents' bad spending habits as six out of 10 moms say their kids don’t know the value of a dollar. But it might not totally be the parents' fault, said BabyCenter financial expert Carmen Rita Wong.
“We so rarely handle cash these days,” Wong told babycenter.com. “Our kids see us swiping a plastic card to buy something, so it's no surprise they’re unclear how money works, and the limits that exist.”
To read the rest of the results, visit babycenter.com.