Are children worth the cost? Businessweek.com poses this not entirely new question in a recent article.
After itemizing the ballooning costs of raising children, the writer--a new parent, herself--suggests that these expenses are leading to declining birth rates around the world (except the U.S., whose birth rates have remained steady, thanks to immigrants with larger families.)
An excerpt:

As more young folks like Zaker delay or don't have children, birth rates in Japan, Russia, South Korea, all of Europe, and parts of Asia have fallen below the 2.1 children per woman needed for population growth. Many industrialized countries such as France have introduced or increased economic incentives such as tax breaks, longer maternity leaves, and cash bonuses to get women to have children.

These programs have had mixed results. One reason they may not work comes from Phillip Longman in his book The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What to Do About It (Perseus Books Group, 2004). Now that "children no longer provide any economic benefit to their parents, but are rather costly impediments to material success, people well adapted to this new environment will tend not to reproduce," Longman writes. "And many others who are not so successful will imitate them, and for good reason." Families might choose to have only one child so they can afford to splurge on one while maintaining their own comforts of living...

Yes, expenses keep rising and probably help influence people's decisions (especially about how many kids to have), but it seems that this BW piece ignores a constellation of factors that also are at work.

The women's movement, for example. Women no longer feel obligated to marry (check the rates of unmarried women in Spain and Italy, both countries with low birth rates). They also are becoming more economically independent and career-minded. In fact, France, which offers family friend benefits for mothers, is also enjoying one of the highest birth rates in Europe.

By the way, I am familiar with Longman's work. A few years ago, I was at a Brandeis University work-family conference where his work was presented and dissected; I'm just repeating the analysis that was given there.

Labels: birth rate

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