According to a new book entitled Parenting, Inc., it now costs $1m to raise a child from birth to the age of 18 in a city such as Los Angeles. My first reaction to this statistic was exactly what you would expect: “only a million dollars?” My son cost me $35,000 during his first 24 hours - most of it covered by medical insurance - and he continues to burn through cash at the rate of a medium-sized space programme.

Still, Parenting, Inc. got me worried. Why had I bought that $1,200 Norwegian-designed pushchair when I could have picked up a more basic model for $120? More to the point, why hadn't I put my Y-chromosome to work and built the damn pushchair myself using old beer bottles and sticky tape?

And so, with grim determination, I put a strict child-rearing budget in place. I refused to enrol in “baby sign language” classes. I stood firm against infant swimming lessons. As a result, my son is now the only seven-month-old in LA unable to discuss World Bank policy by sticking a spoon up his nose while doing the backstroke. But there was one expense that couldn't be spared: my wife's “Mommy & Me” yoga classes, held at the Golden Bridge “spiritual village” in Hollywood and presided over by Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, guru to Madonna, among other celebrities.

Alas, “Mommy & Me” isn't the full title of Gurmukh's classes. The full title is “Mommy & Me (and Daddies too!)”. You can probably guess where this is going. Having denied our son the benefit of least a dozen Hollywood fads, how could I possibly say no when my wife invited me to a $15 yoga session? How could I disclose to her my prejudice about yogic hippies being more uptight and fascist than the Concerned Women for America and the National Rifle Association combined?

And then the strangest thing happened. Just before Easter, my wife visited a Korean spa and bumped into Gurmukh in the locker room. My wife told Gurmukh that she had been moved to tears by her classes. Gurmukh is supposed to love this kind of thing: on her website, she says that following the progress of her mothers “warms her heart the most”. Apparently not. A few days later, Gurmukh posted a video message online complaining of being mobbed by “everyone” at her local spa, who had ruined her Easter Equinox celebration.

“God just flipped the whole thing on me, to see where my equanimity was, to see where my balance was,” she moaned, as though recounting a tale of being mugged by a crack addict. “Would I want to repeat it? No.”

By all rights my wife should feel privileged to have been flamed by a yogic guru via video-blog, but she refuses to return to “Mommy & Me”. Secretly, of course, I'm delighted: yoga is one less needless child-rearing expense to worry about. And who knows, perhaps Parenting, Inc. is wrong.

Perhaps it is possible to avoid raising a million-dollar baby in LA, after all.

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