How much did 'Calvin and Hobbes' destruction cost Calvin's parents?
$15,955.50, or roughly $1,850 per year, study shows
Raising a child is expensive. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, parents can expect to spend about $241,000 to raise a child through age 17.
And if that is child is like Calvin from "Calvin and Hobbes," the popular syndicated comic strip that was published from 1985 to 1995, they can expect to spend even more on top of that, just to cover the mayhem.
How much more? Matt J. Michel, a former NASA scientist, recently set out to calculate exactly how much Calvin's chicanery cost his parents, documenting the findings in the Proceedings of the Natural Institute of Science, a pseudoscientific journal Michel edits.
His conclusion: $15,955.50, or roughly $1,850 per year.
Michel used regional labor and material costs from "Calvin and Hobbes" creator Bill Watterson's hometown of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, to calculate the cost of repairing property damage caused by the 6-year-old's shenanigans. To estimate the cost of damaged goods, Michel used Amazon.com.
According to Michel, costs ranged from $2 for a broken glass jar to $4,798.83 to repair a flooded house.
Calvin’s destructive behavior, Michel notes, "decreased steadily over the course of the comic strip. In fact, over half (56.4% to be more exact) of the total damage incurred by Calvin occurred within the first year of the strip’s existence. This might indicate that a troublesome child may become less destructive over time."
"If your little bundle of joy grows up to be a Tasmanian devil of terror, you can expect to pay almost two grand extra per year just in replacing or repairing items," he concludes. "Now, this figure isn’t expected to dissuade prospective parents [from] having children. ... In parenting, you have to take the bad with the good. With a kid like Calvin, it’s probably mostly bad. But even raising a Calvin has its good moments, which are well worth the extra $1,850 a year."
