Sorry, I cannot divulge the cost or any statistics behind this headline, because I just made it up. But someone ought to write that story. After all, reports about the (insert fear-mongering adverb of choice here) high cost of parenthood are so numerous, frequent and ubiquitous, that they would be boring if they didn’t make me so irate.
Well, here is one more: “Beyond the scary Christmas list: the full parenting price tag”. I stumbled across this story on Yahoo news the other day, and when I re-Googled it a day or two later to work on this post, there were so many corresponding hits, I didn’t know which site to link to. This version will do:
In the equation of life, few parents ever really do the math on the actual dollars-and-cents cost of a child. […] few parents would guess that the average American child costs more than US$200,000, and that’s before college even starts.
“Cost of a child”? Are we talking about acquiring a fashion accessory, or the welcoming into our family of a unique individual with inherent human dignity?
As a mother of seven, stuff like this makes me crazy, and for numerous reasons. For starters, I find these cost-estimates, for all their pretended scientific ‘accuracy’, extremely misleading. For middle and upper class earners, life is as expensive as you want to make it, whether you have children or not. My husband and I are raising our family on his very average income, and have never suffered. We live a satisfied and comfortable life, though it might seem frugal and deprived to some (books and music lessons, yes; designer clothing and trips to Disneyland, no). To those less fortunate, especially in developing nations, our lifestyle might seem luxurious. It’s all relative.
Most families in the United States spend about US$450 per child for Christmas, according to market research firm NPD. Mrs Gianulis is budgeting about $400 for each of hers – for one big gift and several smaller ones.
Oh my. Am I a bad parent to admit that my husband and I probably don’t spend that much on all seven of our children put together? And yet they always seem to be happy with their gifts.
When it comes to money, I find, as a general rule (cases of utter destitution aside), most people, even the working poor (and non-working poor) seem to be able to afford their priorities. I know low-income families who manage to keep their families fed and clothed, and still find the resources to be able to enjoy art, culture, music, sport and so forth. I know low-income families who can afford alcohol, tobacco, gambling, iPods and satellite television, but not groceries.
“We think travel is hugely valuable for our kids,” says Ms Steck, a real estate agent. […] “We want [our kids] to grow up interested in the world and not ethnocentric.”
The cost for that? About US$10,000 a year.
Oh my, oh my. I am clearly not in the same tax bracket as these folks, but as I said before, it’s all relative.
Secondly, I abhor the general anti-child bias that underpins these kinds of studies.
They itemise and enumerate the costs of raising children: food, housing, clothing, education, medical, dental, lessons, sports, hobbies, toys, vacations, yadda yadda yadda.
Don’t single people and childless couples have many of these expenses too? And many of them live extravagantly at that, even those who can’t really afford it – look at any stats on rising personal debt, bankruptcy and so forth. Why doesn’t anyone write a shocking article about the appalling cost of a materialistic, self-centred, childless lifestyle?
Because for some strange reason, in western culture, there’s nothing scandalous, horrible or scary about spending great gobs of money on yourself, only on your dependents.
Am I the only one to find this odd? When it comes to pampering yourself, “I’m worth it,” as the L’Oreal ads opine, but when it comes to raising children, we need to be forewarned, if not terrified into, thinking twice before attempting.
Prophets of doom from Paul Ehrlich (with his “population bomb” theory—rather well-named, that) to current day Eco-crusaders who cling to the overpopulation myth have been telling us that the only hope for the future of humanity is to stop having children. (No, Virginia, they don’t teach logic in school any more.)
Given how expensive it is to raise a child, it would make sense for families to be having fewer, especially during a recession. […] And a Pew Research Centre survey last year found that 14 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds said they postponed having a child because of the recession.
A Guttmacher Institute study in 2009 found that 44 per cent of women wanted to either reduce or delay childbearing because of the economy.
Now here we are, more than half a century after the post-war Baby Boom: populations ageing, schools closing, small towns dying, tax bases shrinking, welfare states going bankrupt, western economies imploding right and left. And the answer is to stop having children. Go figure.
In short, children aren’t expensive; obsessive-compulsive consumerism is. Children are not a financial liability; they are (if you must speak of them in monetary terms) an investment (perhaps the only one truly worth making) in the future.
Former head of America’s Focus on the Family organisation Dr James Dobson famously maintained that “parenting isn’t for cowards”. Nor is it for those whose sole concern is the bottom line.
Yes, raising children costs money. But selfishness and focusing entirely on material concerns, especially in terms of what it does to your soul and/or humanity, costs far more.
This is a blog post that first appeared on Mercatornet.com. Printed with permission.