A REPORT out this week found that parents could expect to spend £3,500 on providing for their first child in its first year.

This figure includes spending on such things as a cot, a pram, clothing and everyday supplies like baby wipes and nappies.

For example, according to the research for American Express, you might expect to spend:

£610 on formula milk

£360 on baby food

£550 on disposable nappies

£346 on clothes

£150 on toys and accessories.

In short, that sweet little thing sitting dribbling is into you for a lot of dough.

You might be reading these figures and thinking £3,500 is a lot of money - enough to buy you a decent second hand car.

But here's the killer line: The figures do not include childcare or loss of parental earnings.

In other words, they don't actually count the biggest cost of raising a child.

By my reckoning, a year of full-time childcare is going to cost you something like £6,000 - maybe much more. Alternatively, a year without pay is probably going to set you back even further.

For a lot of parents, this raises once more a question we have already asked ourselves.

Were we wealthy before we had children, if only we'd realised it? Why weren't we driving luxury cars and going on several foreign holidays a year?

Well, as Joni Mitchell put it so succinctly, you don't know what you've got till it's gone.

You never imagined you were affluent before, but looking back on your childless days, maybe you were, relatively.

It's not just about money. It's the same with time. You may have thought your life was pretty busy before you had kids. But that was before you tried getting up at 5.30am, getting children ready for school or childminder, putting in a full day's work, eating with the kids, putting them to bed, dealing with the debris they leave in their wake, doing assorted other household chores and then flopping into bed a few short hours before it's time to do it all over again.

I'm not complaining about all this. It just reads like I am.

My point is that clearly nobody quite realises how much life is going to change when they have children - and it's a good job too, because otherwise nobody would do it.

The American Express research into the costs children was published in the same week that a government minister was quoted as exhorting people to have babies - in order that there will be somebody to take care of tomorrow's elderly people and pay their pensions.

Patricia Hewitt, it was reported, thinks it's nothing short of your patriotic duty to have babies.

Well, I'm not so sure that you should have kids unless you're reasonably sure you can tackle the loss in income, the sacrifices in your daily life and the kind of nappies that will put you off gravy for life.

And as for doing your patriotic duty, I'm starting to wonder whether a spell in the Royal Navy would have been a better idea.

First published: September 29