price of motherhood

There are a billion trillion articles these days about women attempting to juggle careers and families, and most of them are depressing.

I read this one for the first time about three years ago. It discusses a study that claims "...a woman in her 20s will increase her lifetime earnings by 10 percent if she delays the birth of her first child by a year...for college-educated women, the effects are even bigger. For professional women, the effects are bigger yet."

So, women who have children in their 20s not only end up spending lots of money on child-related expenses (and lose compounded interest on that money), they also have reduced income for the rest of their professional lives. On the bright side, there is a much smaller effect for women in their 30s. Yay for procrastination!