It's official: Only rich people can afford to have lots of kids.

A pair of buttercup yellow baby socks and a monogrammed crib blanket heralded the arrival of the third heir to the Snapchat throne, with supermodel Miranda Kerr and her husband, Snapchat chief executive Evan Spiegel welcoming another baby boy, the couple’s third child together. 40-year-old Kerr, who also shares 13-year-old son Flynn with ex-husband Orlando Bloom, took to the social platform to share the news. 

"We are overjoyed by the arrival of our little ray of sunshine, Pierre Kerr Spiegel," she captioned the image.

"We couldn't be more excited to welcome our fourth son into our family. Feeling so very blessed."

If you look up ‘very blessed’ in the dictionary, you’ll likely find a picture of Miranda Kerr’s glass-smooth complexion; as well as having four healthy, gorgeous children with an evidently loving partner, she has an enviably harmonious co-parenting relationship with her firstborn’s dad, an organic beauty and skincare empire and of course, the aforementioned tech billions (as of March 2023, Speigel’s net worth was sitting around USD2.3 billion).

Watch: Childcare in Australia needs to change. Post continues after video.

It’s increasingly rare these days to hear about families with four or more kids - and while nobody is begrudging the Kerr-Spiegels their newborn bliss, it does beg the question: do you need to be rich to have a big family in 2024?

In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis that has brought many Aussie families to their knees, it seems the option of having more than one or two kids (at least without it becoming a crippling financial stress) is reserved exclusively for the ‘very blessed’ (read: rich) among us.

Read: We owe it to Alec Baldwin for letting us know big families are expensive.

The data adds weight to the theory: Australia’s birth rate has been declining since the sixties, with the total fertility rate for 2024 sitting at 1.779 births per woman, a 0.28 per cent decline from 2023.

More significantly, recent research points to the fact that many Australians are choosing not to have children - or at least delaying it - based on financial pressure.

A 2023 survey found one in five of us have decided having kids altogether is too expensive, a figure that increases when you adjust for the younger generations. 28 per cent of Millennials and 42 per cent of Gen Z cite financial stress as a reason for not having or delaying having children. 

"I was all set to have a big family," reveals one friend who is mum to a 17-month-old, "but I severely underestimated the cost of childcare. We’re barely managing with him in care three days a week now, having to pay double or triple that again for more kids would sink us."

"The world feels a lot less stable at the moment," says a mum-of-two who admits she and her husband were 'on the fence' about adding a third to their brood.

"Interest rates and the ridiculous cost of groceries and fuel have us paying about $2500 per month more than we were this time two years ago. It’s just not fiscally responsible to add another kid to the equation right now, and I’m 39 - realistically, now is the time to do it if we were going to!"

For many in the older generation (my beloved Granny loves to encourage all young families to have 'one for you, one for him and one for the country!') this financial reluctance to have a big family seems like a conceit of the have-it-all generation.

"I wonder if it’s not so much that people can’t afford to have kids these days," pondered a friend’s mother recently, "but more that they don’t want to change their lifestyles to suit having a big family?"

And sure - perhaps there is some truth in the idea that when we say we can’t afford to have more kids, what we mean is that we can’t afford to have kids and give them the opportunities and lifestyles we’d hoped for. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that the average Australian family spends up to a sixth of their income on childcare, according to the second interim report from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) childcare inquiry - a report that also found prices here are “less affordable for households than in most other OECD countries”.

Nor does it change the reality that financial stress - specifically related to the increasing cost of living - is one of the biggest contributors to poor mental health in Australian women. Australian non-profit organisation Liptember’s 2023 Women’s Mental Health Research found that 35 per cent of respondents listed financial stress and cost of living as a trigger for depression, while 36 per cent said it triggered anxiety.

The decision to bring a child into the world in 2024 is one too complex to quantify in numbers, with the climate, global instability and approximately eight zillion personal factors all tossed into the equation. 

But one immovable part of that equation remains: the ability to make the decision in the first place is increasingly elusive to those earning low to middle incomes. And it would be a damn shame if - like in so many other arenas - the right to choose how many kids to welcome into your family was dictated solely by your tax bracket. 

Feature image: Instagram/@hilariabaldwin.