Oh, the Places They’ll Go If You Let Go

MY 7-YEAR-OLD SON asked me recently if I remembered a camping trip we took years ago. I felt guilty, realizing that I hadn’t taken him since. “I know, buddy,” I said. “We should do that again this year.”

Then he said, “Can we have that chicken again?”

I asked what he meant. He explained: “The chicken in a paper bucket.”

I laughed as I realized that the highlight of the trip for him had been eating KFC by the fire. My guilt had me ready to spend hundreds of dollars and hours in the car on another trip to the mountains. With just a few dollars and a couple of hours, we could relive the memory in our backyard.

Kids are a lot of work. But often, especially for those of us who read books and articles on parenting, we make much of that work for ourselves. We spend hours reading to our children, supervising their homework, setting play dates, enrolling them in organized sports and pay-to-play hobbies. And then we spend nearly as much time dressing them and driving them to and from these obligations that we made for them and ourselves.

We also spend a great deal of money. According to the Department of Agriculture, the average middle-income family shells out more than $233,000 per child before age 18, without counting costs for college. Roughly half of that (47 percent) is food and housing, with child care, education, and transportation adding up to another third (31 percent).

These numbers are intimidating for couples contemplating their first child. But while children do require food, housing, care, and transportation, the total cost of raising any given child is mostly determined by how much her parents choose to spend. And most parents—and most kids—would be just as well off spending much less. Indeed, many parents are putting needless stress on themselves and their families by emphasizing organized activities over unstructured play and simple family time—time spent watching a movie, say, or eating fried chicken on the patio.

CUT YOURSELF SOME SLACK

LESS EFFORT DOES not mean zero effort. Zero effort would harm your children. Near-zero effort would harm your children. Genuinely neglected kids can wind