The cost of raising a child isn't £210,000
Posted by Christie Malry on February 24, 2011 at 10:41 am
"The cost of raising a child is now £210,000," shrieks the Daily Mail, a cost that has apparently doubled in eight years. But, dig beneath the surface and a different picture emerges.
In arriving at their figure they've looked at the amounts parents actually spend and then added up the amounts that look like they're child related. This is silly.
If they want to do it properly, they should work out what you need to spend on essentials. So this would include food for the kid, some clothing, incremental heating and water costs. You would deliberately exclude discretionary outgoings, such as holidays. And while little Johnnie might want an Xbox or Camilla might demand a pony, these aren't a cost of having a child. They're a cost of being a crap, spineless parent.
To the Mail's cost you need to add things that society demands but which parents don't directly pay for. Yep, education and healthcare, because we don't like children dying of treatable ailments or growing up thick. These are direct costs of raising a child, even though those costs are usually borne by central or local taxation, not the parents themselves. I wouldn't lump university costs in here, because they're more discretionary.
And then, having worked out the costs in each of the (approximately) 20 years of childhood, you need to discount them to the present day. This is because you don't have to find all the money now, and money now is worth more than in the future.
The discounted essential outgoings, even with schools and health thrown in, is likely to come to a lot less than the Mail's figure.
There's an interesting aside too. If we truly believe that each child "costs" £200,000, at what point do we say to a family with no current wage earner, "we think you've got enough children already"? After 4 kids (committing taxpayers to £800,000 in Mail money)? Or shall the benefits cheque be permanently blank?
Written on my Android mobile phone. Article may be edited later.
so that would be more than £10k a year, then? i could happily (though, of course, not luxuriously) live as an independent adult with £10k a year.. and, indeed, i know plenty of people on relatively low incomes who do just that.. it is, after all, broadly equivalent to a salary of £12-£14k, which is the going rate for many of the lowly admin-jobs that are so popular amongst our graduates.
A citizens income set at £10,000 would use up almost the entire national budget
I'm confident the figures are fantasy; these kinds of surveys always are. But the cost of something isn't necessarily the bare bones minimum. The cost of owning a car isn't the cost of owning a car if you never drive it anywhere. I think they're trying to suggest how much these things cost - a bit like saying the cost of your weekly food budget is £x, rather than what it would be if you only ate leftovers thrown out by restaurants.
I agree with your car analogy up to a point. But just because "the average car" costs £x, you can't then claim that it costs £x to own a car. It's not really the same thing at all.
This new Churnalism thing is fun, isn't it? Guardian readers are really putting the boot into their version of this press release... http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/feb/24/cost-...
[...] Partly for the reasons listed here. [...]
Of course any good accountant knows that playing around with the basis used for calculating cost you can get practically anything you want - marginal costs, overhead costs, LIFO, FIFO (interesting how this might be applied to Children) etc. and just wait until you get onto the cost of marriage. All this really demonstrates is the old adage about accountants knowing the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Surely children belong in the category of life, love and happiness - which is why we exist, and the cost of which is nothing compared with the cost of doing without.