By Rick Newman, Daily Ticker
Remember when children were an economic asset?
Kids economically worthless. Photo from Yahoo!
No, you probably don’t, because that was back in the 1800s, when kids labored on farms and in factories and kicked in a few pennies to help cover the family expenses. “The more [children] you had, the better off you were,” Jennifer Senior, author of the new book All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood, explains. Since most kids produced a positive financial return for their parents, there was a natural incentive to have more.
The financial implications of having kids have completely changed, needless to say. The average middle-class family these days will spend about $295,000 to raise a typical kid, one reason the average mother now gives birth to just two children, down from three in the 1970s and more before that. With fewer kids, parents tend to dote on them more. Children, Senior writes, have become “economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”
Most parents are okay with that, since child labor is now illegal, after all, and a lot of parents have bigger ambitions for their kids than field worker or factory sweeper. Yet something else is wrong. “The moment children stopped working for adults,” Senior writes, “everybody became confused about who was in charge.”
Read the full article by Rick Newman from Daily Ticker.
