Every time I read something about the cost of having kids I'm looking for some idea of where these people live.
The single largest expense for kids is day care and that's only necessary if you have 2 working parents...and if one of those parents income doesn't more than justify the cost of daycare it's usually a better idea to have a stay at home.
People seriously take for granted the financial value that a stay at home parent brings to a home in overall cost savings. Expenses go up based on lack of time, more so than anything else. It affects your shopping, cooking, home maintenance, yard maintenance, eating out, fuel costs and long term child care costs (after school activities, day care, summer day camps, etc) that you have to worry about when you keep needing to free up time so that you can get to work.
And all of those expenses are higher in densely populate areas where there's more demand for all of the "good" activities.
But it often comes down to a matter of pride to have a stay at home parent.
Current income justifying day care is a short term and fallacious comparison. You need to look at long term potential. Leaving the labor force does more than just set you back the years you were gone.
You do of course...but you also have to determine long term cost potential of all of the other expenses and savings besides day care.
It compounds in both directions and gets amplified by the continued lack of time due to balancing home and work commitments. Usually it takes a couple of years of exhaustion before people come face to face with the realization that things would be much easier of one person was a stay at home.
The formula is trickiest in the middle. At the higher end, a lot of couples will hire a nanny that can provide many of the same benefits as a stay at home. At the lower end, the decision is fairly easy.
It's in the middle where it's toughest to come to grips with it.
Also really depends what you are chasing, both as an individual and a family unit. It's an optimization problem where there are more variables than income.
Edit:
Personally, I think the whole financial independence movement is pretty interesting, and sometimes I get myself through the day by viewing it as my wife being financially independent. Which is halfway there as far as things go.
Every time I read something about the cost of having kids I'm looking for some idea of where these people live.
The single largest expense for kids is day care and that's only necessary if you have 2 working parents...and if one of those parents income doesn't more than justify the cost of daycare it's usually a better idea to have a stay at home.
People seriously take for granted the financial value that a stay at home parent brings to a home in overall cost savings. Expenses go up based on lack of time, more so than anything else. It affects your shopping, cooking, home maintenance, yard maintenance, eating out, fuel costs and long term child care costs (after school activities, day care, summer day camps, etc) that you have to worry about when you keep needing to free up time so that you can get to work.
And all of those expenses are higher in densely populate areas where there's more demand for all of the "good" activities.
But it often comes down to a matter of pride to have a stay at home parent.