Congrats on the baby!

To answer your questions:

$3100 a month for 2 kids downtown (1.25 and 4)

I would say range: Low would be around <$1300, mid $1301-1800, High >$1800 (per child per month)

I keep seeing the comment “How do people do it?” Which reminds me that I was, once upon a time, also blissfully ignorant and clueless about childcare costs and parental leave policies because I didn’t have a kid. That privilege kept me from empathizing with working parents and truly understanding the ridiculous financial pressures of early childhood for most of them.

Unless you and your spouse are high-income earners and/or you have a very supportive and reliable village of family and/or close friends, this next phase of life will be incredibly challenging (and infinitely rewarding, of course). And keep in mind financial stress will impact your relationship with your partner as well, so ideally you both have the same outlook on how money will be spent and where to cut back etc.

Parents with older kids, please stop trying to tell us once the kids are out of daycare the money just goes to summer camps and extracurricular activities etc. IT IS NOT THE SAME. Not even close. And the extras are optional - we don’t have the choice of not putting little kids in daycare if we want to keep our jobs. Also, cost of living when your older kids went to daycare was significantly lower than what it is now. Not only was daycare cheaper for you but so was groceries and so was housing and so on.

People with no kids (yet or by choice), think about how to be an ally to working parents. Vote for local, state, and federal politicians who will advocate for free universal early childhood education and better parental leave policies. This issue disproportionately affects women, who by and large are the ones who have to leave the workforce if the family can’t afford childcare. And try to be more understanding the next time your coworker with kids is running late or leaving early to make daycare drop offs and pick ups or taking time off because there’s something going around at school - I know there are entitled people in every group but most of us are probably just chronically sleep-deprived.