Start Your Family by Candice Watters

Author:Candice Watters
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781575673127
Publisher: Moody Publishers

The Growing Season

“My wife and I are encouraging our kids to wait longer before starting a family,” said some friends of ours during a dinner party. “We were so young. We should have waited until we were more mature and had more money,” they said. It’s a sentiment we’ve heard repeated by other couples that started their families in their early twenties. Parents with this mind-set often accept the new conventional wisdom that says their children should take a few years to get to know each other in marriage, to get careers launched, and to get in good shape financially before starting a family.

Across the table, however, another couple that also had their kids while they were still young explained why they were encouraging their kids to buck conventional wisdom and follow their lead. “Those early years were definitely hungry years for us,” they said, “but those were some of the best years of our lives. We grew up and grew our wealth right along with our kids.”

Without question, it can be challenging to grow household wealth and a family all at the same time, but previous generations don’t often fully grasp the benefits they gained in doing it that way. In fact, couples who say they wish they had started their family later often assume that the kids they did have and the benefits they gained as early parents would still have come to pass even if they’d followed a later timeline.

The promise of growing a bank account before growing a family is that it will make the parenting enterprise much easier. There’s something to that thinking. Obviously, a couple has to have a basic financial foundation in place to cover the costs of children. The problem in our day is that our context for getting established has grown out of whack. The baby industry, for instance, plays on the fears and desires of new moms with gear, gadgets, videos, and more, promising safety, comfort, cuteness, and a leg up on the other less pampered babies. It can be easy to think that much of that stuff is essential for a new baby, even though most of us turned out okay with a fraction of those things.

One consumer report showed another dynamic tied to “getting established.” “While would-be parents in their 30s are likely to be more financially stable, in fact they appear to be more concerned about the potential impact of a child on their lifestyle than their 20-something peers,” said the Lever Faberage Family Report. “Their response is ‘consumption smoothing’, meaning they seek to ensure enough income to minimize the impact of children on their consumption patterns.”10

While wealth might lessen the impact, growing accustomed to the nicer things makes the sacrifice children require seem even more intense. That was the message of a recent article headlined, “Fine furniture, high-design homes at the mercy of young kids.” The author interviewed several couples in their thirties and forties who grudgingly ceded their designer homes to the needs of the children they eventually had.

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