How much does it cost society to raise a child to adulthood?

I’d say there are a lot of variables here. When you say “any country,” there are countries with a high cost of living and there are places to live where the cost may be little. You can raise a child very cheaply or you can raise a child with private school and steak and caviar. Throw college in to the mix and it costs more, and that all depends on whether it’s a state school or a private college, scholarships, etc.

If children are a cost to society, then we’d all obviously save a lot by not having any chilldren.

@Kropotkin I mean in dollar’s. Not grief.

$283.288,35

@rebbel Can you show a link? Also what country?

Are you including the cost of the time spent by the child’s parents or other caretakers?

Whatever the cost is, it is likely more than made up for when the kid becomes an adult and pays taxes throughout its adult life.

Direct cost? or Net cost? I think that @gondwanalon is correct. It costs money to feed and clothe and educate a kid, but then most kids earn money, pay taxes, and contribute to society.

So if you look at it from the Net Cost point of view, in many cases the child is a net contributor.

All right. I’ll try to answer with more detail.

“To society” depends on the values and needs of that society. Pretty much any human behaviour has some sort of resource cost, because we consume energy and produce waste even when relatively idle. For the most part, we don’t care about that, because we value human activity and even marketise a lot of it, with prices and transactions—and then measure it in terms of GDP.

Generally society keeps having children, because there’s some nebulous notion that we have to keep existing as a species and not die off in a single generation. On a national level, it might be because some arbitrary population growth is valued, and we don’t like to maintain population levels by importing babies from other countries through immigration.

Why population has to be maintained in a single country isn’t really explained. It seems it’s mostly just some nationalistic canard, or some fear about “who will look after the olds!?” The same people who invoke this tend to complain about “overpopulation” everywhere else.

To one or more parents of a child, there are obviously definite price costs to having and maintaining children, since all of that is marketised and involves doing stuff for an income in order to spend on food, housing, and other activities.

Having children is good for GDP, even if it consumes energy and produces waste, though it’ll be a financial burden on parents and make them have to work a lot more than they would otherwise.

The running cost of one or more child is quite flexible. Even very poor parents can have lots of them (and do!), though there will be severe developmental drawbacks for these children.

Seriously. Stop having children. Cats are better. And there’s absolutely nothing special about our species, or any real reason we should keep breeding in the numbers we do.

Roughly about $1000 per child per month .

But remember that parents can apply for the Child Tax Credit which in turn reduces the taxes that they have to pay and results in a refund.

In the end each child brought into this world will become a value to our economy by work, purchasing consumer goods, inventing newer ways of doing things, creating works of art or books written , designing, protecting ( military service, counselling ( health fields) and so on.

Children are our future and some get lost in the shuffle but in the end most turn their lives around to become a better adult.

So when some state that they will not have children ( baring health reasons) they seal their future , unless they make absorbent amounts of money which is a rare and probably very lonely existence.

exorbitant – not absorbent

Try not having kids for 10 years or even 5… see how that pans out.

I think I had read the figure of $250,000 quite a while ago. That was for individual families, not what the government might spend.

@elbanditoroso
correction exorbitant
Thanks