Why Diapers?
When my wife and I were preparing for the birth of our first child, our son Joey, my students in my Advanced Speech class were preparing to purchase a class fish. The students collected money, worked out a plan for who was going to change the water and when, researched fish bowls, etc. (Advanced Speech was not the most challenging class offered at my school) while Carah and I worked on building Ikea furniture and cramming the What to Expect… books. Both my son Joey and the class fish, a betta who ended up with the unlikely name of Gas Station, arrived at around the same time. A few months later, one of the students complained loudly in class, “It’s stupid that we had to raise money to get this fish and all it does is swim back and forth in the bowl, but Mr. Kennedy got to have a baby and that didn’t cost anything and Joey is way cuter and more interesting than the fish.” She had, one might say, an incomplete grasp of the economics of the situation.
Having children has in fact been the single biggest financial stress of our lives. We were only able to have our boys because of the miraculous but incredibly costly process of IVF. Little kids demand frequent doctor visits, including the occasional trip to the ER, and we soon became familiar with our insurance plan’s deductible in ways we hadn’t been before.; Since both of our son’s were born premature, we had to spend money on the most expensive versions of formula every month. And there are the standard baby expenses of things like diapers. We had some help from our parents with childcare, but both boys were in daycare within six months of them being born, and, with our boys spaced three years apart, we have been making daycare payments equivalent to two monthly car payments every month for the last six years.
The wonderful thing for us is that we have been able to meet those expenses. That is partly because we have worked hard for our college degrees and careers and have money to pay for things like formula and diapers, but it is also because we have had robust support from friends and family. We would not have been able to afford IVF, and literally would not have children right now, if not for the financial help provided by Carah’s family. We were able to navigate many of the financial realities of childcare because our kids were fortuitously born between the various financial and social crises of the last ten years. And we have had frequent, often unsolicited, purchases of things like diapers by helpful family members. We have been able to raise our kids comfortably because of a variety of factors largely outside of our control, and, despite everything I just listed, being able to pay for childcare in all its forms remains my single biggest source of financial worry and a consistent source or stress and anxiety in our family. I can’t imagine dealing with all of those expenses without the help of our family and social support network.
That’s why I chose the National Diaper Bank Network as the charity I want to raise money for in this project. Most of the people who helped us out with our kids will never ask for any kind of repayment and, frankly, don’t need it. So I want to try to pay that love and support forward to others who aren’t as lucky as we are. Because of the financial realities I described above, I’m not going to be in the position to make a huge donation to a charity like this any time soon. But what I can do is organize a project like this, publicize it, and ask for help. So that’s what I’m doing now. Please consider donating to this project to help families in need. Raising a child is considerably more expensive than raising a betta fish, but that doesn’t mean any family should be deprived of the opportunity.
