Let’s look at minimal-stuff parenting and do the math.

If this is your first baby (which it wasn’t for the couple on Suze Orman, but I want to start here to be thorough and to lay a little ground work for discussing the costs of subsequent babies), you will have a few start-up costs. You have to have a car seat. You can spend over $200 easily, but if you go with a basic model, like this convertible car seat (saves money because you won’t need a bigger one for an older child), you can pay just about $55.

Car Seat Total: $55

Your baby also needs a place to sleep. The absolute cheapest option is co-sleeping (provided you and your husband can sleep that way and you research safety issues). If you decide to go the crib route, this is going to be your big ticket item, but not necessarily awful if you can find one second hand (be sure to check for safety recalls) or from a basic bargain store like Walmart–for example this crib for just $89, paired with an inexpensive mattress for around $40. You will also need bedding for a crib. They sell all kinds of fabulous, impressive sets for well over $100, but you could also just buy some sheets like these for $5. Whether you co-sleep or use a crib, you’ll probably want a waterproof mattress pad to go under baby, like this ultra basic model for $7.

Sleeping Total for Co-Sleeping: $7
Sleeping Total for Crib: $141

Now, just three things remain as genuine must-haves: clothes, blankets, and diapers. Clothes for babies can be ridiculously expensive, but that is why there are thrift stores and garage sales. Your baby doesn’t really need more than about 6 little gowns or sleepers and maybe 6 or so onesies for layering. Add in a couple of baby hats for the early days or cold weather, and you’re good to go. At the Salvation Army or a similar boutique, this should all run around $30. In the winter, you will need a snowsuit type thing, so you can add in another $10 for posh second-hand snuggliness. Blankets, I haven’t seen second-hand much. Garage sales would be a great option, or worst-case scenario, you could get one little multi-pak of receiving blankets like this package of four for $6.

Clothing and Blanket Total for Summer: $36
Clothing and Blanket Total for Winter: $46

Diapers are a big deal. Even Suze Orman came up with them, while the rest of baby care was relegated to “this and that.” Diapers are where the major ongoing monthly expense comes from (unless you’re formula-feeding, which also comes with a hefty price tag). This makes cloth diapering the ultimate in both green and money-saving parenting. It also shifts diapers from a mainly monthly cost to a mainly start-up cost. There is a dizzying array of high-tech, fancy-pants diapers out there, but good old-fashioned Chinese prefolds work just fine. I find I can do nicely with three dozen. I found these for just $18/dozen, roughly the price of one jumbo box of generic brand disposable diapers (good for about four weeks of continuous use). You’ll need something to cover them with. I love my Thirsties, but you can go super-frugal with plain plastic pants like these at three for $4. You’ll probably need to buy a couple packs. And since these won’t hold your diapers together for you, you’ll also need pins like these at 10 for $1.50.

Cloth Diapering Total: $63.50

Personally, I would have a really hard time without a nursing cover and a soft baby carrier. But technically, a receiving blanket will work as a cover (or you can make one for around $5 by sewing velcro onto the top two corners of a 42 inch finished square of fabric), and you can make your own no-sew baby carrier following the directions here. You’ll need five yards of fabric, which you ought to be able to get for under $15 with a coupon. The fabric gets split down the middle three ways, so you’ll end up with three carriers, which mean you could share the cost with a couple of frugal friends ($5 for each of you) if you wanted to.

Super Useful Extras Total: $10

You don’t need a changing table (just lay a diaper on the floor for a changing pad) or burp rags (cloth diapers double for these). Diaper bags are adorable, but any backpack or tote bag you already have will work just as well. Diaper pails are nice and convenient, but a tall kitchen trash bag with a drawstring will also do the job. For wipes you can cut up an old cotton t-shirt or two into conveniently sized squares, wet them with warm water, wipe off your baby’s bottom, and wash the cloths with your diapers. Old hand towels make great bibs when held on with clothes pins. Swings can be a life saver if your baby likes them, but they certainly aren’t worth keeping an outside-the-home job for. Ditto for strollers, especially if you have a soft baby carrier. And you can wash your baby in the sink and dry him with a towel you already have and skip the baby bath and cute hooded towel. (Thanks to my blog readers for pointing this out to me in the comments here.) Books can come free from the library, and kitchen utensils make wonderful toys (as long as you use common sense– I’m talking about spatulas and plastic spoons, not forks, knives, and vegetable peelers).

Let’s recap:

Start-up Cost:
Co-Sleeping Baby Born in Summer: $171.50
Co-Sleeping Baby Born in Winter: $181.50
Crib-Sleeping Baby Born in Summer:$305.50
Crib-Sleeping Baby Born in Winter:$315.50

This is a lot of money, especially for a struggling family, BUT first-time parents are usually given baby showers, or at least baby gifts, and if you can register for things like a car seat and cloth diapers, your cost will go way, way down. AND if you can register for gift cards to the local children’s resale shop, you can help alleviate some of the upcoming first-year costs as well.

OK, so now that you are all set for baby’s arrival, the monthly cost begins.

First of all, a baby has to eat. Breastfeeding is obviously the cheapest and best food for your baby. The only cost is going to be the cost of getting the extra 300-500 calories/day your body needs to produce milk (an additional 200 calories/day comes from your fat stores–BONUS!). This is going to vary wildly depending on what you eat, but let’s say you get your extra calories from a glass of whole milk (2 cups gives you 292 calories) and a medium banana (105 calories), which gets you to 397 calories, right in the middle of the range. Over the course of a month, that’s 30 bananas and 60 cups of milk, or just under four gallons. At $3/gal, that brings a monthly milk total to $12. Thirty bananas at 7 oz/banana is 210 oz, or just over 13 pounds. At 59 cents/pound, the monthly banana total comes to just under $8.

Monthly Extra Food for Mom Total: $20

The next monthly cost is the extra laundry a baby brings. I figure this is at least two loads/week of diapers, and maybe another load per week of clothes for both you and baby. (Your clothes will get spit up and diaper blowouts on them occasionally.) According to the kind soul here who factored in electricity, detergent, fabric softener (which you should not use on diapers, but it was only 10 cents anyway), water, and appliance depreciation, washing came out to 65 cents per load, and drying came out to 45 cents per load. Together, that’s $1.10, and for three loads, that’s $3.30. At four and a half weeks per month, the total cost of extra laundry is just under $15.

Monthly Extra Laundry: $15

You’ll probably also need to buy some pharmacy items now and then: fever reducer, baby shampoo, diaper rash ointment. You could ask for this for your shower if this is your first baby, but you’ll be on your own for subsequent babies. If you buy your local grocery store brand of one thing per month, you’ll probably never go over $5/month.

Monthly Pharmacy Purchases: $5

If this is your first baby, at some point during the first year, you’ll probably need to go up a size in diapers. That will come to $62 (assuming your ten pack of diaper pins is still useable). If you spread this cost out over twelve months, you get about $5/month.

Next Size Diaper Investment: $5

And if this is your first baby, or your first one of a given gender, you’ll have to head back to the thrift store roughly three more times in the first year to get bigger baby clothes. One of those visits will probably include a winter coat, so let’s say you have two $30 visits, and one $40 visit. That comes to a total of $100, or just over $8/month.

Monthly Clothing Investment: $8

And now to recap the monthly cost:

Monthly Cost for a Baby with Same-Sex Older Sibling: $40
Monthly Cost for a Baby with Opposite Sex Older Sibling: $48
Monthly Cost for a First Baby: $53

The wild card here is going to be medical costs, which vary so greatly that it’s impossible to estimate them for everyone. It all depends on your insurance whether everything will be covered or whether you’ll have co-pays or some percentage that you’ll have to contribute. But when it comes to “diapers” and “this and that,” if you parent with minimal stuff, even for a first baby, an entire year’s worth of parenting costs ($636), PLUS start-up costs, including a crib ($315), for a grand total of $951 squeaks in just under Suze Orman’s estimate of the MONTHLY cost of a SECOND baby. And a second baby of the same sex as the first would only cost $480 for a whole year, roughly half of Suze Orman’s monthly estimate. Granted, this is a severely austere plan, but if it’s a question of doing without material extras like bouncy seats and exersaucers and doing without Mommy, I think the casualty should be the exersaucers. Maybe the viral outrage really ought to be directed at our silly consumerism that keeps mommies at work when they really want to be home.

When the demands of your children seem to suck you dry, remember that jar of oil that never ran dry. Is it possible that the little bit you seem to have left will be multiplied when you offer it up and pour out what seems to be every last drop?

Each time you catch yourself thinking “I can’t do this.” “I don’t have anything else to give” or “I wish I could just be left alone for five minutes” or other similar thoughts, stop yourself. Then remind yourself of the widow and quote this scripture.

Make the choice in your mind to reject the natural way of thinking and then choose to act counter-intuitively. Ask, “What would it look like to pick up the jar of oil and pour it out?”

Then do it!

Read the rest here.

I don’t want that for my children.

And so I listen. I try to figure out what happened in those families. One big problem, as many of the ex-legalists describe it, was that they were sheltered, kept away from the “normal” world (or, depending on who is writing the testimony, that they tried to shelter their kids). “My parents wouldn’t let us watch TV.” “We had to wear frumpy homemade dresses and look like freaks.” “I never got to go to slumber parties.” And I always think, hmm, sounds a lot like my house, only I buy most of my frumpy dresses online.

And sheltering is bad, the story goes, because it is based on fear, fear of God’s displeasure, and most of all, fear of the negative influences of the world. But, as the ex-legalists who still love God are quick to point out, “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). The solution they offer, the way back to God and His grace, is to quit running from all those things the sheltering crowd is afraid of. You know, watch a few vampire movies, buy some cute jeans, maybe send your kid to public school, or at least find a church with a youth group. Get free. Heal. Stop being afraid that if you put on a tank top or read a romance novel that God won’t like you anymore. I always think hard when I hear stuff like this. I really do. Because I’m a big-time shelterer, and having children is a huge responsibility. These are human beings, real people, and I could seriously mess them up. How could the stakes be any higher than another person’s life?

It’s just . . . I grew up wearing cute jeans, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the path to God. Actually, wearing frumpy dresses isn’t the path to God, either. (Although, if you want to have a little fun, pair a cape dress with a white headcovering, go out in public, and watch everyone fall all over themselves with respect and God-bless-you’s. You’d be tempted to think you were Mother Theresa or something until your kids started bickering and you found yourself announcing to them that you were about to scream. Not that I have any personal experience with that or anything.) Where was I? Right. Frumpy dresses are not the path to God. But I actually have some reasons for wearing them, and in fact, I have reasons for nearly all of the “sheltering” I do with my children. So when I read these genuinely sad stories of people who claim to have been scarred by the very things I’m doing in my own family, I have to ask myself, is sheltering dangerous? Is stuff like not watching TV or not frequenting public pools inherently harmful? Are those things in and of themselves what hurt these people, and in some cases even drove them away from God? Or was it something else? What does the backlash really mean?

Here’s what I’ve come to so far.

First of all, everyone shelters. It’s the nature of parenting. We love our children. We want to surround them with good and limit evil as much as possible, and so we shelter them. We shelter from crack cocaine, from kitchen knives and chain saws, from walking home alone at night. Some of us shelter from pesticides, rBST, and artificial colors. Others shelter from stupid cartoons and poorly written literature. And even the parents of the kids at the hippie school my husband’s family used as their legal umbrella for homeschooling back in the days before HSLDA, the parents who let their kids sit in the middle of the street for school and “experience” the yellow line, even they were sheltering their kids from the mind-numbing, soul-crushing sameness of a life constrained by the social norms embraced by the public schools.

Second, the problem with sheltering can’t just be the fear. Consider this: No one is terribly concerned about whether we fear crack or chain saws. Very few people are quoting 1 John 4:18 to parents who don’t want their third graders walking the streets alone after dark. Carefully reasoned avoidance of danger is always prudent. It’s when the herd doesn’t think there’s a danger that the accusations come out, and the seriousness of the accusations is directly proportional to the number of herd-members who don’t see the danger. The mom who won’t let her kid play with a chain saw because she’s “afraid” he may saw off a limb is wise and reasonable. The mom who who won’t let her kid eat conventionally grown strawberries because she’s “afraid” of pesticides is a little loopy. And the mom who doesn’t let her kids watch TV because she’s “afraid” of exposing them to sex and violence is downright oppressive and needs to understand grace. So really, “you’re just afraid,” might better be stated as “you’re just different.”

I’m pretty sure that simply being different does not wound souls, that having a higher threshold for what you believe is safest in life does not automatically scar children. But what’s the real problem? What actually caused the suffering in these lives? I believe that it’s something you don’t hear about a lot in the sheltering debates because the debates are almost always focused on externals. Should kids be allowed to go out with their friends? Is it wise to have a TV? Is homeschooling better for children? And we tend to put people into two categories based solely on superficial checklists. Ankle dress? Stand here, please. Look like a mannequin from the mall? You’re over here. Desired family size greater than five? You belong with these people. Less than five? You go with this other group. Want to join our group? Get yourself a handbook and a uniform, and you’re in. But looking the same on the outside doesn’t actually say anything about who you are on the inside. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Anybody can put on a modest dress, toss out their birth control, and buy a used edition of Saxon math. Anybody. Even people who don’t look very much like Jesus. There really are two kinds of people in this world: those who are walking with the Lord and those who aren’t. A given practice may be more or less prudent all other things being equal. But if all other things aren’t equal, all bets are off.

The real problem is that some conservatives are fake. They say they love Jesus, but they’re living for themselves. They’re brazenly unrepentant about being angry, power-hungry, obsessed with appearances, or addicted to lust. And all the long skirts and homemade bread in the universe can’t keep them from hurting their children because selfishness always hurts other people.

Sheltering fails when it is empty, like a wall with nothing inside. We may admire our friends’ stately stone walls around their castles, but constructing an identical wall around a vacant lot still leaves our families exposed to the rain and cold, with nothing but weeds to eat. But we’re OK, we tell our shivering children, because we have a pretty wall. Can we blame cold and hungry people if they run away and tell the world that walls are bad? But really it wasn’t the wall. It was the vacant lot.

Those of us who are sheltering more than the herd really should be concerned when we read about people who have fled big families, or homeschooling, or anything else we’re doing with our families that we truly believe are best for them. But their pain should not send us all running to the Gap for cute jeans. It should cause us to examine our hearts and make very sure there’s a passionate surrender to God inside that impressive stone wall.