Congratulations on your engagement!  Median individual income is about 50k.  That corresponds to a monthly take home pay of about 3k/month.  If you are very careful, you should be able to live on that in most of the country.  I'm in Chicago, and it is doable here, but yes not comfortable.  I know someone who does it with slightly less.

To your point, it was much more comfortable to live on three median individual income 5 years ago, and probably even more so 10 years ago.  Fiat is terrible. 

 median is 50k, average is 37k 

 What do you mean average, if not median?  Mean?  If so, I'm very surprised that it is less than the median.

But yeah, if that is what you mean, I agree that you can't raise kids on 37k.