As anyone with children well knows, raising a child is expensive. What is surprising, however, is just how expensive it truly is. ABC News reports that the US Department of Agriculture has released a report that quantifies the cost of raising a child —from birth to age 18—and the resulting figure is staggering: $234,900.
This is an alarming figure—all the more so because it has risen 3.5 percent in the past year alone. Although some of this increase has been driven by inflation, the main culprits are increasing costs in child care, education, food and especially healthcare, where costs have doubled since 1960. . . .
Clearly, something has to give. Raising children is one of the most fundamental and rewarding experiences of life, and it should not be necessary to be a millionaire to take part in it. And it is not only individuals who will suffer: Europe and Japan’s well-known demographic crises are partially driven by an unwillingness of married adults to have children, and while America has not yet quite reached this point, it is easy to imagine prospective parents already struggling to make a living choosing to forgo children when they take a look at the bill. There are some European traditions worth emulating, but it’s birth rate is certainly not one of them.
What numbers like these tell us is that our society is profoundly dysfunctional. We have organized ourselves so poorly that the most basic and fundamental thing a human society must do — produce the next generation and prepare it for adulthood — is becoming harder and harder with each passing year.
Yes, I’ve written about this in the past, while also noting that the non-economic costs of parenting are also way up. “In these sorts of ways, parenting has become more expensive in non-financial as well as financial terms. It takes up more time and emotional energy than it used to, and there’s less reward in terms of social approbation. This is like a big social tax on parenting and, as we all know, when things are taxed we get less of them. Yes, people still have children, and some people even have big families. But at the margin, which is where change occurs, people are less likely to do things as they grow more expensive and less rewarded.”