Julie Yang and Daniel Thao only live a block away from their neighborhood playground in St. Paul Park, Minnesota, but they drove the minivan to get here because it’s easier with all the kids. They park and the little ones toddle out, Happy Meals in tow. There’s Ostin, Tatum, Isla, Harvey and Asher — five kids, ages one to eight. And soon there will be a sixth, a baby boy due in June.

“So we tried for my daughter, to get her a sister. So maybe one day when she hears this, she'll know that, hey, we really did try, but [it] just wasn't in the cards for us, I guess,” laughed Thao.

As you can imagine, these parents have a lot going on. Both around 40 years old, Yang is a nurse at a children’s hospital. Thao is training to become an electrician, and is in year one of a five-year apprenticeship. And the kids have a lot of extracurriculars, like swimming, jujitsu and dance. 

“Shuffling our kids back and forth from school to afterschool programs and back home to make dinner and getting them ready for bed and getting back up the next day to do it all over again,” said Thao. “So it gets busy. Every single day is busy.”

Eight-year-old Asher shows off a breakdancing move — a pose where he freezes on his head. Meanwhile, Yang and Thao trade off on playground duty. They’re in five places at once, running over here to help Isla down the slide and running over there to make sure Tatum is holding on tight to the swings.

It’s getting harder to keep up with the kids, and with the finances. The average annual cost of raising a small child has jumped about 35% in the last two years, according to a Lending Tree analysis of federal data. And remember, these two have a sixth kid on the way. 

“When we just had the one or two we were doing pretty good,” said Yang. “And now we’ve gotta budget a little more, tell the kids no probably more often.”

Like, ‘No, we can’t buy that new toy right now. No, each kid can’t demand a different meal at dinner.’

“Everybody's like, ‘Well, I wanted this. I wanted that,’“ said Yang. “And then you cook it and sometimes they're like, ‘Oh, I changed my mind.’ So it's like, now we wasted food and that's money.”

Isla doesn’t like meat; Asher doesn’t like vegetables. And everyone is eating more as they grow, especially the boys.

“They're drinking so much milk that, you know, even though we go to Costco to get it, it's like $24, $25 a week,” said Yang.

The $25 weekly milk budget is about what Yang and Thao each make an hour. Their income and the size of their family means they qualify for some childcare and food assistance. They rent a four-bedroom house from Daniel’s sister for $1,600 a month. But with a sixth kid on the way, they’d like more space, plus an eight-person van that can fit the whole family. That’s going to cost nearly $50,000.

“I was like oh my god, it’s like paying a mortgage if we get a brand new one,” said Yang.

The two didn’t worry so much about the financial side of raising kids when they started their family because that was nearly a decade ago, when the world was different. Between COVID and inflation, the economy they knew before is not like the economy that exists now. 

“Like, the cost of living just keeps going up,” said Yang.

Of course she knew expenses would increase, but she never thought they’d skyrocket quite so much between kid number one and kid number six. In the last decade prices have gone up nearly 30%, according to the personal consumption expenditures index.

“I feel like, the more I think about it, the more depressing it gets,” said Yang. “I'm just going day by day right now.”