The Economics of Feeding a Teenage Boy
Well, it started off with a joke after Gibble (GLBLguy) and I posted about teaching teenagers about money. I made the remark: “We forgot about the cost of FEEDING a teenage boy in those articles!” Folks, if y’all have a young boy in the house, you will NEED to become debt free before he hits the teenage years…just so you can afford to feed him! If you have more than one that will be teens at the same time, it becomes even more imperative.
My son is only 14, and already eats enough to feed a small village in an emerging market. No, I don’t think I am exaggerating here. He goes through a 2 pound bag of cereal every 4-5 days, plus a gallon of milk quicker than that unless we keep an eye on him. Let’s not forget that he can take down an entire regular sized box of macaroni and cheese in one sitting. Gibble says his 13 year old boy ate two double cheeseburgers by himself last night.
I saw my mom go through this with my younger brother. At his worst, my brother would go through one pound of peanut butter, one large jar of grape jelly, and THREE loaves of bread…PER WEEK! And that was just his “snacks” since he would also cook up two boxes of mac n cheese at a time for his dinner. The irony is, to this day my brother is rail-thin. My mother claims I was an eating machine from age 12 to 15, during my growth spurt, but that still didn’t prepare her for my brother’s eating years.
Hubby says he was the same way as a teenager. If it couldn’t run away from him fast enough…he ate it. His brother, two years younger, was also the same way, and my in-laws had two of these teenage bottomless eating machines in the house for more than three years. For the record, hubby can still take down an impressive amount of food for dinner!
One would think with me being a bit of a math nerd, I could provide numbers for this food phenomenom. But, I started a budget last year…after my son had already hit those dreaded teen years. I can’t say for sure feeding a teenager will increase your food budget by XX% because I wasn’t tracking expenses before my son hit that stage. But I can assure you, and Gibble can assure you, your pantry will take a hit when that cute little boy gets abducted by aliens and replaced by a pod person known as a teenager. It’s kind of like feeding an infant again: they want to eat about every two hours…but the volume of food to satisfy them is much larger.
Just yesterday, my son came home from school at 3:30 and raided the pantry for a snack. By 4:30 he was staring into the refrigerator looking for yet another snack. At 5:30 we had supper, and he of course sat down and ate a regular sized portion of that. Around 7:30 he was browsing the pantry shelves again…and this was a NORMAL evening!
As another example: Today for lunch the boy came home from his half-day of school, immediately poured himself a bowl of cereal, then half an hour later warmed up a generous portion of pasta bake which he ate while hubby and I fixed hot dogs and french fries for lunch. When hubby and I sat down to eat lunch about 10 minutes after son was done inhaling his lunch, my son came back to the table expecting some of the french fries! Be afraid…be VERY afraid!
