Wherever parents congregate, you hear the same thing. The refrain can be heard at school pickup lines, church basements, birthday parties, and at youth sports games.
When it comes to the finances of raising kids, doing everything “right” no longer feels sustainable.
The numbers explain why.
According to recent cost estimates, it now costs roughly $32,000 per year to raise a child in Pennsylvania. That figure includes housing, food, transportation, health care, child care and other basic expenses.
It does not include college or inflation shocks. It’s simply the annual cost of keeping a child housed, fed, cared for, and safe.
Pennsylvania sits in uncomfortable middle ground. The Keystone State is not as expensive as Massachusetts or Connecticut, where annual child-rearing costs push past $40,000. But we are meaningfully more expensive than much of the Midwest and the South, where the same costs run closer to $21,000-$24,000.
The problem is Pennsylvania wages, particularly outside a handful of metro areas, do not consistently reflect that higher cost structure. We have Northeast-level family expenses layered on top of Rust Belt-level income growth.
That gap is where resentment takes root.
For decades, the implicit social contract was clear: Work hard, stay employed, buy a modest home, raise a family and you would be OK. Not rich, but stable.
Today, many Pennsylvanians are still holding up their end of that bargain, only to discover that the math is not adding up. For far too many, a second child no longer feels like a joyful life decision but a budgetary risk assessment.
Housing is the biggest accelerant. Even in traditionally affordable counties, the cost of larger homes has surged like those with an extra bedroom, a yard, or proximity to decent schools. The median Pennsylvania home sale price is $306,000, which is 36% higher than just five years ago.
Add property taxes that creep up each year, and the cost of “space for a family” becomes one of the largest stressors on household balance sheets. For renters, the situation is worse. A two-bedroom apartment is now treated like a luxury unit in many markets.
Child care is the second pressure point, and perhaps the most demoralizing.
For working parents, especially households with two incomes out of necessity rather than choice, child care costs function like a second mortgage. The average cost of day care in Pennsylvania is $27,500, or roughly equivalent of a mortgage payment or monthly payment on an FHA mortgage for a $306,000 home.
When the child ages out of day care, those costs get replaced with before- and after-school care, summer programs and more transportation costs. Many families discover modest raises are effectively canceled out by rising child care bills.
With Silver Obamacare Plans having annual premiums of over $20,000, health care adds another layer of quiet resentment. Employer-provided insurance premiums rise. Deductibles creep upward. Pediatric visits, therapies and prescriptions accumulate. No single bill is catastrophic, but together they form a steady drip that erodes confidence.
In fact, 85,000 Pennsylvanians dropped out of Obamacare entirely this year while another 33,000 lowered their coverage citing unaffordability of the so-called Affordable Care Act.
What emerges from all of this is not outright despair, but something subtler and unsettling: resignation.
Parents begin to feel the system is indifferent to the strain they are under. It also shows up in politics, where voters grow skeptical of leaders who celebrate “affordability” while ignoring the lived reality of family budgets.
People stop expecting things to improve. They make smaller plans. They take fewer risks. Over time, that mindset becomes an economic headwind of its own.
None of this is inevitable.
Addressing it requires honesty about where the costs are regarding housing supply constraints, child care availability, health care pricing and a tax structure that often penalizes growth rather than supporting it.
Family affordability cannot be solved with slogans or one-off credits. It requires a sustained focus on lowering the cost of living in real, measurable ways.
Pennsylvania still sells itself as a good place to raise a family. If only the numbers backed up the claim, instead of undermining it.
Athan Koutsiouroumbas is a managing director at Long Nyquist and Associates and a former congressional chief of staff.
