Colleen Nguyen always thought she would have two children. Then she had her first.
She loves her son, Zach, a giggly 5-year-old with a penchant for sea creatures and Hot Wheels, and would love to give him a sibling. But the price tag of parenthood has far exceeded her expectations. These days, Zach’s nursery school and day care eat up anywhere from about $2,000 to $2,200 every month — not far from what she and her husband pay for the rent on their two-bedroom in Newton.
Between those bills and the copays on Zach’s health care — he has autism and a vision disorder — the thought of adding another child to the picture feels “practically impossible,” she said — especially if they were to ever try to afford to buy a house that could accommodate a growing family.
“It took me handing over the day care bills to my parents for them to understand,” Nguyen said. “They would just be like, ‘Oh, well, you can just have another one. It all works out. You can’t really just plan for them.’ And I‘m like, ‘No. Look at these numbers.’”
The Trump administration has made it clear it wants women to have more children, with aides reportedly evaluating policy recommendations aimed at incentivizing higher fertility rates, from a $5,000 “baby bonus” when a woman gives birth to a “National Medal of Motherhood” for mothers with six or more kids. There are plenty of women in Massachusetts who would love to welcome the babies the White House covets — if only they could afford it.
The Globe spoke with more than 20 women who harbor an interest in starting or expanding their families but feel they’ve been priced out of parenthood by the region’s sky-high cost of living — a stark financial reality they believe the "pronatalist" policy recommendations flooding the White House are ill-equipped to handle.
“I would love to have a small baseball team of children,” said Tierney Elison, 38, a Winthrop mom of two and a midwife who thinks she wouldn’t be able to afford the third child she and her husband envisioned. “I love being pregnant. I love giving birth. I love the newborn stage. I love watching the kids grow. But it is such a slog trying to make all of this work.”
“No amount of baby fever can overcome economic anxiety right now,” she added.
While parenthood, here and elsewhere, has long been a notoriously expensive endeavor, it has now become something of a microcosm of the region’s affordability problems. The median-priced single-family home in Greater Boston is inching toward $1 million. Child care prices here are among the highest in the country. The expense of fertility treatments sometimes crucial to conceiving a child and health care costs over the course of a child’s life can be crushing.
Some people have unplanned pregnancies or embark on parenthood regardless of money. But for women in Massachusetts who would otherwise be on relatively strong financial footing, the decision to add a child into their budget can feel like taking on a line item that is increasingly reserved for the well-to-do — and the bar just keeps on rising.
“It feels like I‘m doing something financially indulgent,” said Mariah Maines, 38, a Quincy mother of two who works as a financial adviser. She and her husband make good money — about $300,000 between them — and yet feel like their plan to have a third child will put them in the position of living “paycheck to paycheck.”
“If I was a financial adviser to myself, I would say, ‘Don’t have this third child,’” she added. “But I‘m still doing it, despite the facts.”
Those facts might help explain why the fertility rate in Massachusetts is one of the lowest in the country — and falling. “Fertility overall kind of fell off during the Great Recession, around 2008, and then people were kind of waiting for it to rebound,” said Susan Strate, senior program manager at the UMass Donahue Institute. “But it never did.”
According to a Pew Research Center survey from last year, 36 percent of women ages 18-49 who said they were unlikely to have children reported that their inability to afford it was a major reason. (Other reasons included just not wanting to, a desire to focus on other things, and concerns about the state of the world.) A recent report from the City of Boston Office of Early Childhood said, “The high cost of formal child care is likely one of the factors behind why families are moving out of Boston or have fewer children or no children.”
That was the case for Tania Del Rio, a 39-year-old living with her husband and two children, 9 and 5, in East Boston. The cost of child care played a big part in her family planning: She and her husband spaced out their kids in age more than they would have liked to avoid an overlap in day care costs, which clocked in between $1,200 and $2,000 a month. By the time her youngest was in public school, she felt it was “not time to have kids anymore,” though she would have loved to have another.
“What you hear in conversations is, ‘OK, when you have kids, save up for college,’” Del Rio said. “No one ever tells you, really, that you should save up for child care.”
It’s a daunting prospect before there’s even a sonogram to fawn over. Linnea Mayfield, 30, is getting married this summer and would love to have three children, just as her parents had done in Estonia, where she grew up.
But unlike that Baltic country, which has a generous paid leave policy for new parents, the United States offers no such assurances on a federal level. Massachusetts’ 12-week paid family medical leave policy isn’t enough for the Dorchester resident to feel comfortable taking the plunge into motherhood, she said, but she also doesn’t feel she would be able to afford additional unpaid time off from her $70,000-a-year job in the tourism industry.
“It’s a huge decision to make in the first place, and then to add this additional financial pressure that, maybe this isn’t even possible, is just very limiting,” she said.
“It just seems like such a cool adventure, too, like an experience I don’t want to miss, but I might, because I can’t afford it,” she added.
In some cases, that reality leads families to other corners of the country. Massachusetts has long had a problem with domestic outmigration — more people moving out of the state than into it — and the City of Boston report found that from 2017 to 2022, the city’s population of 3- to 5-year-olds declined at a higher rate than those ages birth to 2. That suggests “families with young children are moving out of Boston,” the report said.
And yet for many women, it feels like there’s no other option. Sydney Baughman, 38, and her husband had their first two children in Somerville before moving to New Hampshire in 2022 to get a bigger place. When they felt the pull toward a third child, they knew they needed a more drastic change to afford it, especially if Baughman wanted to continue to take time off work. So last year, they packed up and moved to a five-bedroom house in the Atlanta area with a backyard and a playroom — luxuries that would have been out of the question in New England’s housing market.
“I feel like they’re getting the sort of life that I‘d hoped to be able to provide for my kids with the money we’re making that we weren’t getting in the Massachusetts area,” Baughman said.
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6.