White House $5K 'baby bonus' would do little to offset cost of raising a kid in Minnesota

There was a point, after the birth of her second child, when it didn't make sense for Linnae Nelson-Seys to keep working.

Her pay no longer kept up with child care costs, so she left her Metro Transit operations job in early 2022 to instead stay home with her kids.

"There's a little bit of wistfulness and sadness to me that I'm not a stay-at-home mom by this deep, abiding desire to," said Minneapolis resident Nelson-Seys, now 42 and a mother of three children, ages 7, 4 and 2. "It's just, the math doesn't work to not be."

The hefty cost of child care is just one of the financial pressures families face. On average — accounting for just the basics — it costs between about $200,000 and $300,000 to raise a child in Minnesota.

And it's only getting more expensive. A March LendingTree study found the annual costs associated with raising a child have risen nearly 36% nationally since 2023. Minnesota was among states with the biggest cost increases through the two-year span, a nearly 30% jump.

New global tariffs President Donald Trump imposed in recent months are already raising prices for children's products including car seats, strollers, cribs, clothing and toys, most of which are imported.

At the same time, the White House under Trump — who has said he'll "be known as the fertilization president" — is exploring ways to encourage women to have babies amid a broader pro-natalist movement.

Proponents of the increasingly mainstream movement, which warns of an apocalyptic future if birthrates don't rise, include Vice President JD Vance and presidential adviser Elon Musk, who has reportedly fathered 13 children with four women.

The administration plans to award federal transportation funding to communities based on birth and marriage rates, and officials are also considering personal incentives: reserving a percentage of Fulbright scholarships for applicants who are married or have children; providing menstrual cycle education so women can better understand their fertility; and paying new mothers $5,000 for each baby they have.

Births have been falling globally for decades, raising alarms about workforce shortages, diminished tax bases and fewer people paying into entitlement programs.

U.S. births have consistently been below population replacement level — 2.1 babies per woman of childbearing age — since 2007. In Minnesota, fewer than 60 babies were born per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2023, the most recent year of available data. In 1960, around the peak of the baby boom, that number was 136.

Anxiety about birthrates, and government incentives encouraging people to have more children, aren't new. In Nazi Germany, families with four or more children were eligible for financial incentives and a military-style medal. After the first and second World Wars, the French government used family allowances to kick-start population growth.

Recently, countries including Greece, Italy, Russia and Hungary have implemented fertility incentives such as cash payments and tax breaks.

Success has been limited. In South Korea, which has the world's lowest birthrate, monthly payments, housing subsidies, free health care and military service exemptions for fathers haven't moved the needle.

Research shows while one-time payments might affect when people decide to have children, policies with longer-term impacts on families are more likely to increase the number of children they have.

"If you want sustained policy that really changes how people make these decisions, it's probably better to pull on levers like paid family leave time, bringing down child care costs, subsidizing those very real costs that are incurred not just at one point in time but over many years of a child's upbringing," said Kristine West, an economics professor at St. Catherine University.

The Minnesota Star Tribune calculated the average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 using analysis from the LendingTree study, health care cost estimates, U.S. Census data and child care tuition numbers from the nonprofit Child Care Aware of Minnesota.

The total includes maternal care and delivery, parental leave, child care, food, clothing, transportation and health care. These are the bare essentials and do not include common additional expenses before and after birth.

One round of in vitro fertilization (IVF) costs an average $15,000 to $20,000 and often is not covered by insurance. If a baby is born prematurely, without any other complications, a stay in the neonatal intensive care unit can run well into six figures.

Once a child is older, activities such as music lessons and sports add up fast. More than 60% of Minnesota children participated in sports in 2023 according to the Aspen Institute, which reported in 2022 the average youth sports parent spent $883 on one child's main sport each season.

Of the basic costs, the largest by far is child care. Minnesota child care centers charge on average $387.80 a week for infant care, while family providers charge $187.87. Care tends to be more expensive in the Twin Cities metro and less expensive outstate.

Toddler and preschool care are less expensive by week. But children stay in toddler care for about a year and in preschool until kindergarten, making the overall cost more expensive than infant care.

New Hope resident Ally Christensen is mother to a 1-year-old son whose child care center tuition costs nearly as much as her family's mortgage.

Christensen would like another child, and at 36, she worries about waiting too long. But she and her husband aren't sure they can afford day care for two kids at once.

"While we are certainly tightening the budget now, to have two in child care, that would be a significant budget tightener," Christensen said. "You're doing rice and beans for dinner."

Liv Holloway, 32, left her job in higher education after having her second child. She freelanced for a while but said "the mental and emotional cost of trying to fit in some sort of a career [during] nap times and nighttimes was just exhausting."

When Holloway was pregnant with her third child, she decided to focus solely on the work of raising her kids, now 5, 3 and 10 weeks.

The decision brought a lot of guilt, she said, and financial stress as her husband faced two job losses in two years. The family is on public assistance — and unsure how they'd get by without it, Holloway said — and has racked up credit card debt and delayed needed updates to their New Brighton home.

Even if they wanted another child, it wouldn't be possible.

"We have to be done. There are so many parts to that decision, but financial is certainly part of it," Holloway said. "We're already stretched so thin.

"It's a really happy, hard life right now."