Throughout my research, I learnt that the expenses associated with parenthood is much higher than I expected. I knew that it was expensive but I didn't expect it to be upwards of $293, 000.

This topic is interesting to me as I grew up with divorced parents and my mom was a single mother for many years. Seeing these costs have made me realize how hard my mom had to work to afford to take care of her kids.

I think the most important thing to pass on would be how to budget to have a kid. It is important to be financially stable and setting up and budget to save money is a great start to building a family.

I chose this website because it explains costs and factors of having children. From this website, I found it useful to read about the rising costs from a child remaining at home in their young adult years. This relates to my family as we are entering the young adult years and still living at home due to the costs of living.

I chose this article because the break down of different years of the child's life provides rough cost estimates and could be useful to a family. A piece of information I found useful was the costs and planning before a baby arrives. A good tip the website suggests is to buy used items that are still in good shape, instead of buying everything brand new.

I selected this article because it can encourage families to think sooner about education rather than later. Something I learnt from this article is the importance of investing in an RESP. Investing early allows a growth in the amount of money you contribute to the RESP as the government matches 20% annually. It is stressful to think about paying off your child's student loans while paying off your own loans at the same time.

I enjoyed reading this article as it sheds light on two main factors that I haven't seen in my other articles and videos. Housing and transportation aren't always considered as families think of direct costs such as food, clothing, toys, etc. I learnt that there are more costs associated with having children than you think and managing finances is very important.

Some information that I found useful for my research was the fact that, if a child chooses to stay home till the age of 22 then low income households spend more then $300,000 per child. In our minds we think it is saving money for us to stay home for post-secondary studies but in certain cases it can be more expensive to remain at home.

Despite this video being based on the UK, I still selected it to showcase that it is not only a struggle in Canada but rather in many places around the world. In this video I learnt that women are ending pregnancies because they cannot access the childcare system. This is absolutely gut retching to hear and it is useful to understand the deeper thoughts of those trying to have a family, in order to further understand what these families are going through.

I chose this video because it is useful to listen to parents discuss their experiences and opinions. A piece of information that was useful for me was how from the age of 14-18 for boys it costs roughly $311 monthly for food where as for girls it only costs $223 monthly. This puts families of girls at an advantage as they save roughly $100/month which adds up to $1200 a year of savings.

I chose this video because the study on financial reasons was conducted from 2014-2017 and since then all we've seen is an increase in prices. Also the expectation on parents has changed and they experience more pressure from society to enroll children in programs whereas many years ago they didn't have programs so therefore it lessens the cost of providing for kids.