Lorraine Candy worked as a journalist at The Daily Mirror, The Times and The Sun. She also was editor-in-chief for Cosmopolitan UK and ELLE UK. In this article, she dismisses the costs of having kids and explores the value of kids.
By Lorraine Candy —
By the time the youngest of my four children turns 18 in 2029, it seems my husband and I will have spent around £1m of our taxed income raising our off-spring.
The revelation that we have a million-pound family is a surprise for us. It follows a survey out this week by the investment platform MoneyFarm which reveals that the cost of having children is shooting up and it is estimated parents spend £249,000 to raise one child to 18, with expenses peaking in the teenage years. Bizarrely, the research partly attributes this to today’s extravagant cost of teenage grooming routines.
The survey shows that on average we spend £13,830 a year per child, but when they are between the ages of 15 to 18 we fork out £65,016. Spending on health, beauty and personal care items among this age group has doubled since 2023.
Personally, I think the idea we are frittering our cash away on costly TikTok inspired facemasks for our adolescents is a red herring. But what the survey does remind us is that the excessive costs of having children, particularly teenagers, is what may be driving the national birth rate down.
Fertility rates are at an all-time low, and many are delaying having kids because they say they are worried about the increasing expense. The average age of having first children today is 31; the Office of National Statistics predicts that a woman turning 18 now won’t start a family until she is 35.
I had my first at 33 and the last at 43. I feel incredibly grateful to have been successful in getting pregnant and we have worked hard to afford our four, but we didn’t cost the family out at the start. We just believed we would make it work financially, adjusting our lives around their needs as time went by like the generation before us had.
My parents were living in temporary rural accommodation when they first had me. My mum was then pregnant with my sister while my dad was looking for a job. He found work which came with a house, and they made it work because family was an important part of their life plan. But today millennials seem to be more cautious as they grapple with a cost-of-living crisis alongside a precarious job and housing market.
Like my three Gen Z older children, and my Gen Alpha teen, they also worry about how hard raising a child may be; just last week social media was awash with stories of “maternity leave burnout” and emotional debates on the “mental load”.
I think this makes people unnecessarily nervous about having children. Parenting is one long, unpredictable experiment for which no one can prepare you, in my opinion. Like everything that is worth having, it can be grueling, laborious, worrying, boring and depressing at times.
Child-free couples are also telling researchers they’d rather spend what money they have got on experiences. Of course, it goes without saying that not everyone has these choices; but when you put a monetary value on having children you may be depriving yourself of one of life’s most extraordinary experiences.
For me the value of starting a family is emotional not financial. It’s the little, daily experiences that cost nothing that you live for, that make your days feel significant and worthwhile to you.
Perhaps millennials are an overly cautious generation, and it may be they feel deciding not to have kids gives them an element of control which makes them feel safer. But as I hit my late fifties and life takes all sorts of turns for good and bad, I can only advise that none of us has control, and the unpredictability of life is surely the adventure we are here for.
And I think parenting helps teach you to value the ordinary moments in life which ground you happily in the present. This is not a skill to be dismissed for it makes each day easier and more enjoyable.
Originally printed in The i
