Parenting & Family Quote by Suze Orman

“I think they’ve been baby bummers” is classic Suze Orman: a blunt, almost goofy phrase doing serious work. Orman built her brand by translating money shame into plainspoken scolding, and “baby bummers” is a deliberately disarming euphemism. It’s not policy language; it’s kitchen-table language with a sting. The intent is to puncture the rosy, sentimental script around having children and replace it with a colder ledger: costs, tradeoffs, opportunity loss. She’s not merely saying babies are expensive. She’s saying the cultural story that babies are an automatic blessing can function like a financial trap when it overrides planning.

The subtext is moral as much as monetary. Orman’s ethos has always been that adulthood means facing uncomfortable numbers, and the phrase positions parents (or would-be parents) as people who may be indulging an emotional narrative at the expense of stability. “They’ve been” hints at accumulation: not one cute splurge, but years of incremental derailment - daycare, lost income, the bigger house, the creeping debt that doesn’t feel like debt because it’s wrapped in love.

Context matters because Orman’s audience is largely middle-class strivers who feel they did everything “right” and still can’t get ahead. A cute insult like “baby bummers” gives permission to articulate a taboo thought - that family choices can collide with financial reality - without sounding cruel. It’s a soundbite engineered for television: memorable, quotable, and just provocative enough to spark argument, which is also how Orman keeps the lesson in circulation.