Mark Woods: On balance, the cost’s not what counts

The figure arrived at in this particular piece of research was £51,000 per child, not including the basics of feeding and housing the poor mites. The single biggest wedge within that total was the £15k reckoned to be spent on sports clubs, groups and after-school activity over an entire childhood.

Which sounds ridiculous until I remember the extortionate amount of money I’ve just paid for one of my sons to lie on the floor pretending to be a sleeping bunny during what was advertised as toddlers’ Saturday morning football.

The findings go on to reveal school uniforms, sports kits, shoes and accessories – by which they could well mean face paint, given there’s practically an outlet on every street corner now – all on average set the parental purse back more than £400 a year too. Books, toys, games and DVDs and gadgets – at £360-a-year are cheap at the half the price, although one imagines if they’d have included the blessed magazines in supermarkets, garages and newsagents which lure youngsters in with front page giveaways of increasingly impressive stature, it surely would have been many times greater.

Giving your children money to go out and socialise with friends sets you back £258 every 12 months and the petrol to get them there adds on £262. Christmas and birthdays wade in next taking around £350-a-year out of the joint account with pocket money, that old chestnut, rounding off the spendathon, being dished out to the tune of £189 a year – although what’s left to buy with it after being catered for so thoroughly in all areas is something of a mystery. All of which averages out at £2,774-a-year for years and years and years and is, despite its eye-watering nature, a wildly underestimated estimate for many a family too.

But despite it all, despite the sacrifice required and the worry of impending fiscal doom generated by starting a family, a wise man once said to me that no-one ever utters on their death bed that they only wish they’d had fewer children – and I think he was right. Skint, but right.

Twitter @mark_r_woods