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Maybe we should reconsider this whole "child" thing...
Tuesday saw the release of a government report on the cost of raising a child up through high school--according to an ABC affiliate, the number's $221,000, while Reuters puts it at $291,570 (apparently, the difference is whether inflation is factored in or not. In any case, it's freakin' expensive! And it doesn't even count paying for college!
According to the Reuters article,
Housing accounts for one-third of expenditures on children. Food accounts for 16 percent, the same as child care and education, said the Expenditures on Children by Families report.
...
Annual spending for child-rearing ranges from $11,610 to $13,480 for a middle-income, two-parent family, the USDA said. Families with lower incomes will spend less and families with higher incomes spend more. Expenses are highest in cities in the U.S. Northeast, followed by urban areas of the West and Midwest. They are lowest in rural America and cities in the South.
I assume the intent here is to calculate what people are actually paying to raise children, which isn't quite the same as "what it costs to raise a child." You see what I mean? One looks at what is necessary while the other looks at what is "normal." With that in mind, I'd like to know a bit more about these numbers. First and foremost, how is housing--the biggest expense--calculated? We adults, after all, have to have a place for ourselves. Is this the additional money we spend on a larger place than we could get by with just two of us? The news report suggests the variations between people who have more to spend and those who have less, and I'm sure education is a big piece of that: a public school education with no frills is pretty radically different from a private school education that starts in pre-school and continues for 12 more years. Add on SAT prep classes, tutoring, summer enrichment programs.... I imagine "childcare" has a similar flexibility: those who can't afford it make other arrangements (family, neighbors, leaving alone with a television and cell phone at 6 months) while those who can afford not to rely on others might have a live-in nanny.
There is another way to look at the "cost" of raising a child in America, and that's the environmental cost, which the figures cited might in some crude way point to as well. As we probably all know by now, Americans make up 5% of the world population while accounting for 25% of the energy (almost exclusively non-renewable at the point), to say nothing of other resources. While other parts of the world are doing their damnedest to catch up, the fact remains that we Americans are very hard on the planet.
But it needn't be so. I'm reminded here of an interesting blog post by Sharon Astyk back in April, "Blessing or Burden: Population, Reproduction, and the Demographic Imagination." (Incidentally, there's a fair bit more to Sharon's ideas than just what I'm going to pull from it.) The first point I want to borrow from Sharon is that it's not inevitable: American children don't have to be the great consumers that their parents and peers have been, but it takes conscious work to realize that aim. Perhaps more important is the insight that our affluent culture has a marked--and kind of peculiar--tendency to see children simply as burdens, whether we're talking about the hundreds of thousands of dollars they will cost us over a couple decades or whether we're talking about population issues and urging reproductive restraint. In many cultures and historic periods, children have been an asset (obviously I'm focusing here on the microeconomic aspect). People had--and in some places still have--children as a hedge against old age or misfortune. But as Sharon points out
I observed that in Nigeria, I’d read that the average child begins to contribute more to the household than she eats by the age of 6. I wondered at what age most American children contribute more to the households they live in than they consume? For many blue collar households, I’d imagine it is 16-18. For the most affluent families, who subsidize graduate education, it might well be nearly 30 - or later.
Whoa. Is that startling to anyone else? I'm not saying that children need to be sent out to sweatshops as soon as they can change a bobbin, why do we tend to coddle our children so thoroughly? In part, of course, it's because we can, but at what cost? I don't even mean the $291k plus college--I'm talking about the cost to moral development here. It's the paradox of parenting that we work so hard to protect our children from difficulty while at the same time difficulties are one of the stronger forces pushing children toward maturity and strength of character. Who's better off, the child who's been given an allowance just for existing, or the one who's given an allowance for chores helping out around the house, or the one who's gotten a job and earned his or her own spending money--or even started his or her own business to earn money? Of course parents need to protect their children, but only to an extent, and from all the evidence I've seen, usually that extent is not as great as parents tend to think--they'll (soon we'll) tend to err on the side of being overprotective--and, along with this, over-consumptive. But just because we can doesn't mean we must or should.