How much does it cost to raise a child?  According to the Associated Press:

For $235,000, you could indulge in a shiny new Ferrari — or raise a child for 17 years. A government report released Thursday found that a middle-income family with a child born last year will spend about that much in child-related expenses from birth through age 17. That’s a 3.5 percent increase from 2010.

This immense amount of money required to raise a child has serious ramifications.

At this time, though, I would merely like to note that there are (assuming a child sleeps 8 hours a day) a child is awake almost 100,000 hours over 17 years (17 years x 365 days x 16 hours waking time per day). That means that it costs parents about $2.35 for each of their children’s waking hours.

But parents don’t necessarily get to enjoy the company of their children during every one of their child’s waking hours. I’m going to make a great leap and guess that parents only spend about 4 hours per day in the company of each of their children each day over a period of 17 years. Therefore, parents spend about 24,820 hours in the company of their children over 17 years. Therefore, it costs parents ($235,000/24,820) $9.47 for each hour that they actually get to spend with each of their children during the first 17 years.

Quite often, this can be a great bargain, at least in my experience.