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Kids Are too Expensive, Here and in China
Consider two data points. The first is from China, which recently “relaxed” its One Child Only policy. For years, the official government position on families was, the smaller the better. This led to a large and ugly number of infanticides, mostly of infant girls. But relaxing the policy doesn’t mean there’s a baby boom on the way. In China, kids are expensive. From Shanghai Daily:
THE changes to China’s family planning regulations are unlikely to result in a baby boom in Shanghai, a local expert said yesterday. Zhang Zhen, a professor at Fudan University who specializes in demographics, said that based on his research, “most couples simply haven’t thought about having a second child.” As well as the financial implications, they worry about the broader social issues associated with expanding their families, he said.
“Many people are also concerned about the state of the social security system,” he said, adding that if the policy change “is not effective (in boosting the birth rate), the government must consider introducing measures to alleviate those concerns.”
Local woman Gao Shanshan, 32, who has a 4-year-old son, said she and her husband are not planning to have a second child any time soon.
“I’m worried about money. I would love to spend time with two children at home, but I can’t afford not to work, as that would put too much financial pressure on my husband,” she said.
Second data point is from the United States. From Fusion.net:
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, birth rates among women between the ages of 20 and 24 dropped by 2% between 2012 and 2013. The birth rate among 25- to 29-year-olds has dropped 1% every year since 2008. A recent Fusion survey also found that 15% of respondents with student debt said that it had caused them to put off having kids.
And concerns about the cost of supporting a family are strongly reflected in young voters’ priorities heading into 2016. A survey conducted by the Make It Work campaign found that 84% of the “rising American electorate” — young people, people of color, and single women — support policies to expand access to childcare, establish a paid family leave program, and raise the minimum wage. That’s 9 percentage points higher than the overall electorate.
So much that’s irritating in the quote above, especially the phrase “rising American electorate,” which really bugs me for some reason. Or reasons.
Still, it’s slightly worrying that young people in the United States aren’t having children because, essentially, the government isn’t making it easy for them to. Since when has that ever been a criterion — let alone a deciding factor — in the raising of a family? Or am I missing something?
Children, since the earth was lava, have been seen as the pathway to wealth, not the net-worth-killers they are now. But that was because children worked — in the fields, on the fishing boats, in the shops and workshops. Even now: walk into any Asian-owned convenience store, or take a look at the shrimp boats on the Gulf of Mexico, and you see kids helping out with the family business. Unpaid. After school (we hope). But still working.
What we’re really talking about, I think, is the reluctance of city dwellers in both the US and China to have children:
… for the people I talked to—all of whom live in or around big U.S. cities, are in the age group of 18 to 40, and want to expand their families by having kids—things like uncertain job prospects, student debt, and a lack of access to childcare and paid time off were a big part of their hesitancy.
Which suggests two possible solutions, neither of which requires government handouts: 1) move out of the city; and 2) don’t get a stupidly expensive and utterly useless college degree.
I guess there’s a third one: start a small business and make those little brats work. Try this for a family motto: everyone earns.
Published in Culture
Yeah, but the parents of children pay those taxes too – and the childless benefit disproportionately at the back end from being able to take advantage of the investment which seems to “cost” everybody the same, but really, the lion’s share of the costs are borne by the parents of children.
I live in Israel. There are lots of children here (3 per woman), and lots of city dwellers (92%). So the model doesn’t hold everywhere.
Why is it different? Sure, some of the most prolific are religious – but the secular also have many more children than in other places.
A theory: I think the people here see themselves as part of another organism – a culture. That culture has evolved to survive and it passes down – even through non-religious means – the idea that something about it is worth preserving. And as a culture, not just as individuals, children are how you accomplish that.
China has separated from its past – other than hurt pride and a shallow nationalism, they aren’t preserving anything. Europe’s massive spasms of war may well have killed the cultures that existed before – replacing them with squishy universalism – with no drive for survival.
And, of course, a culture is not a state. When you replace one with the other (e.g. Russia, China), the dynamic changes. While a state also wants to preserve itself, it lacks the tools – namely the maintenance of individual values through personal example – that a culture relies on.
A state can be a wonderful medium for culture, but it is no sort of replacement.
The parents of children are getting something from their tax money. Their children are getting educated and others are paying a portion of it. The childless get nothing for their money.
I do not understand your whole childless benefit disproportionately investment point. You are going to have to untwist the logic of that one for me.
Economist Bryan Caplan wrote an interesting book that addressed this. Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He explained that these expensive, superfluous extracurriculars that parents feel pressure to provide actually do very little to improve the lives of their kids in the long run. His message to parents: cut yourself some slack, stop breaking your back and emptying your wallet to try to make a perfect kid. Nature (the child’s genetics), not nurture, is the deciding factor in a person’s life. Accept this fact and you’ll enjoy your kids and the process of raising them much more.
Pfft. What about the millions of 26 yr-olds still allowed to participate in their parents insurance plan, the unemployment rate of Millennials who resent starting from the bottom and working their butts off to climb up the ladder and finally, the average 6 figure college debt taxpayers are funding on which many students are defaulting.
Raised in the traditional manner- parents should have kids they can afford and support- seems to be a thing of the past.
It’s pretty simple – the amount of “benefit” derived by a person who didn’t have children (in the form of future payments from social welfare programs like Medicare and Social Security which are hand-to-mouth and paid for by future generations – i.e., the children that the childless people chose not to have) dwarfs the amount of “benefit” that a parent receives for the “free” education that their child receives – which they paid for equally. The parents also had to foot the financial and opportunity costs of rearing the children, which have a real price tag that the childless don’t bear.
If you were to invest an amount of money equivalent the cost of child-rearing in an IRA over the course of an entire working career, it would end up as a massive nest-egg.
Some of us parents (I have six tadpoles) don’t even take advantage of public education, choosing to educate our own.
Talk about financially foolish decisions!
Ironically, the people who seem to have the most kids are the poorest, most uneducated and most welfare-dependant. That’s at least what I perceive.
@majestyk#36: you make my point for me. With no kids all people can invest their money and have massive nest eggs at the end of their working careers. Making Medicare and Social Security unnecessary.
But instead, some can’t keep it in their pants and have children they can not afford, so all are made to pay. But that is not enough, now some want to tax the childless even more and to add insult to injury expect the childless to be grateful to pay for those irresponsible enough to have children they can not afford.
People who choose to not have kids are giving up on the future of mankind.
@demaratus#40: So? It us not like I will be around for this future thing anyway. Besides there are 7 billion of us on the planet. Humanity is not in any danger of dying out anytime soon. The only danger is to flawed government economic finance models that are based on exponential population growth instead of a stead state model.
Cultures that are under constant existential threat by their enemies are more likely to reproduce. They have to.
Cultures that don’t reproduce are those who don’t recognize that they are under threat … or don’t care because they don’t recognize their own value.
A culture that’s been convinced that it is the problem has little incentive to further its own existence.
To be fair, I’m playing devil’s advocate here… slightly.
I am serious about the fact that the childless are essentially leaving behind nothing. Who cleans up and turns out the lights in these childless people’s homes and lives after they’ve shuffled off the mortal coil? Their children obviously aren’t there to do it – so it falls to the rest of society. It’s kind of a mess.
If nobody’s havign kids, who’s gonna buy the investments these childless people socked away when they get old enough to want to liquidate and use the proceeds to live on?
This exactly. It’s hard to save for retirement, because I want to vacation in France now. So too, it is hard to have a lot of kids, because they are tiring, expensive (less so than you might think if you don’t spoil them), and time-consuming when young. But ask a senior citizen with a large pack of kids and grandkids whether their “investment” was worth it.
Of course, I’d also argue that they pay it all back in hugs and happiness even now, but my kids are exceptionally cute and talented. Your mileage may vary.
I get to pay twice. Once in taxes for a system I don’t use, then again in private school tuition so that my kids are getting inculcated with MY values, not those of secular, left-wing education professors.