Tag Archives: commercialisation

Why does it cost so much to raise a child?

How much, on average, does it cost to raise a child?

It topped £225 000 in 2014, for the first 21 years of a child’s (/kidult’s) life, including university tuition fees. (No prizes for spotting the middle class bias in this analysis). The costs break down as follows:

  • £86 K – Childcare
  • £74K – Education (includes university fees)
  • £20K – Food
  • £17K – Holidays
  • £11K – Clothes
  • £10K – Hobbies
  • £7K – Leisure
  • £5K – Pocket Money

How does this compare historically?

To be honest, I spent several minutes digging around the net and couldn’t find anything specifically focussed on this relating to the UK, but I did find this infographic from the US…..

rising costs of kids USA

From my own experience in the UK, if I think back to my own childhood/ kidulthood (’73 -’94) the cost of raising moi would have been nowhere near £225K. The combined cost of childcare and education would have been precisely £0, I couldn’t comment on food, but the cost of everything else would have been about half of what it is in 2014. Then again I am proper working class roots, so I would have had below the average amount spent on me (and it never did me no harm!)

Why are parents spending more money on children today?

In this article Christopher Carr points out that we need to look at what exactly parents are spending more money on – He points out that relative expenditure on basic needs such as food and housing have decreased since the 1960s, and most of the increase is being spent on caring for children’s emotional and psychological needs – With the biggest areas of increased expenditure being on child care, education, and (in the US) health care, and to a lesser extent hobbies and leisure.

He interprets this as a positive trend – simply indicative of the average family being wealthier now than they were in the 1960s, able to invest money in their children’s well-being. He does, however, point out that poorer families still struggle to meet their children’s needs on low incomes and some of the health-care expenditure is being spent on managing new health problems amongst kids such as obesiety and range of emotional disorders, so this is good for most but certainly not for all.

Personally I don’t see this as a positive trend at all. This analysis misses out a number of underlying ‘structural’ changes which effect the cost of raising a child….

(1) Given that the largest expdenditure item is on childcare, the single most obvious trend which lies behind this is that today both parents work which means they have little option but to spend £86K on childcare.

(2) The changing nature of childhood – children grow up later, and parents increasingly think its normal to assist their children financially into their 20s, by paying for some of their children’s university tuition fees for example (of course the introduction of these fees is something which has itself raised the cost of raising a ‘child’).

Behind this second factor lie a number of other factors (which I’m not going into here) – Such as greater gender equality, social policies (or lack of them), rising norms of consumption, probably house-ownership, probably also the ageing population.

(3) Originally I thought this would be more signficant, but advertising to children and pester-power also contribute –  as parents feel the need to give into their children’s demands for unnecessary crap. However, given that the major expenditure areas are on childcare and education, and only a measly £30K on leisure etc., this only makes up a relatively small part of overall expenditure on children. However, for lower income families, this kind of figure will serve to ‘lock them in’ to the system for a couple more years at least.

(4) Finally, you might like to consider whether the colonisation of the lifeworld of today’s love-struck couples have anything to do with the rising costs of childcare – It could be that today’s 20 somethings have been socialised into a historically unusual high-consumption norm – so they spend a fortune on keeping their relationship going (holidays/ home-decor/ 2 cars/ shopping trips/ gifts/ days out) during their 20s, which pushes them into a situation where they have a relatively small deposit for their first house,  and so require a large mortgage, with the attendant massive interest payments over 25 years, and it is this in turn that causes number one above – both partners needing to work – in order to maintain this high-consumption lifestyle which they then go on to socialise their children into.

In Conclusion…

If you’re a parent reading this I suggest that you grow up yourself (in the spiritual sense of the word) and stop buying crap you don’t need. If you’re a child, ditto. Instead, try and find ways of being happy/ constructing an identity (if you must do this) which are not rooted in uncessary consumption, ultimately you’ll end up being much less shallow and much more interesting.

Finally – Here’s a nice alternative parenting style – which avoids spending shed loads of money on them. Or you could just not have kids, and save yourself £225K, not to mention the planet.