Raising hell: how the punishing costs of childbearing imperil us all.

• Author: Longman, Phillip

This year's presidential race underscores a curious truth about American politics today: Elected officials love to talk about "family values" and "investing in our kids," but shy away from proposing anything big or new that would actually help them. The only item in President Bush's new budget directed at parents is a call for making his temporary increase in the child tax credit (from $600 to $1,000) permanent. His Democratic challengers have offered a few modest ideas, such as universal after-school programs ($4 billion a year). Compare these budget-conscious proposals to the bidding war now underway for the senior vote. President Bush recently signed a Medicare prescription-drug benefit that will cost $400 billion--oops, make that $534 billion--over the next 10 years. Preliminary estimates of the programs long-term cost in current dollars range up to $8 trillion, or more than four times the entire federal budget. Democrats complain the benefits are far too skimpy and should be yet hundreds of billions of dollars higher.

What explains the relative parsimony towards those who nurture children? Not voting power. According to the 2000 presidential election exit polls, parents with children under 18 accounted for 39 percent of all votes cast. By comparison, persons over 65 accounted for only 14 percent. If we presume that politicians know how to count votes and read polls, the only explanation seems to be that most voters--probably even most parents--don't think that those who nurture the next generation are unfairly burdened. Indeed, many voters have something like the opposite sense. "Don't we all pay" school taxes to support their kids?" they say. "If they can't afford children, they shouldn't have them." Some go even further. In her book The Baby Boon, Elinor Burkett charges that "handing out goodies to parents just because they are parents is affirmative action--the preferential treatment of one group designed to correct real or perceived discrimination or inequality--based on reproductive choice."

What is behind these attitudes? By tradition, of course, parents have been responsible for the cost of their own children. Moreover, in recent times, widespread fear of and resentment at population growth has fostered the perception that parents are just another kind of selfish consumer, and that we would be better off with fewer of them--particularly if they are of another race or ethnic group. Thus, it seems to maW people that any assistance parents receive in raising their children--public schools, tax credits, family allowances--is a form of subsidy. As the economist Nancy Folbre has lamented, the common notion is that children are like pets. "Parents acquire them because they provide companionship and love. Therefore, they should either take full responsibility for them, or drop them of fat the pound? The analogy, goes further in the popular mind. Just as dog owners are expected to use pooper scoopers, observe leash laws, and not ask for subsidies, parents are expected to potty-train their children, keep them quiet and well behaved, and let the joys of parenting be their own reward.

The problem with these attitudes is that they fail to account for the deepening dependency all people have On both the quantity and quality of other people's children. We live, to begin with, in an aging society. In this society, we have largely socialized the cost of aging through programs like Social Security and Medicare. The financing of these programs depends critically on each new generation being larger and better educated than the last. The American Social Security system, for instance, assumes that the number of workers paying into the system will increase by 30 percent over the next 80 years. And it assumes that our children and grandchildren will be enormously more productive than today's workers.

Yet we still leave it to individuals to bear (in both direct expenses and foregone wages) nearly all of the growing cost of raising the children who sustain the system, while allowing those individuals to retain a dwindling share of the value they create. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, a typical middle-class family will spend over $200,000 in direct expenses to raise a child born this year--not including the cost of college. Then there is the growing opportunity cost of raising children. A mother (or father) who stays at home or accepts a family-friendly, part-time job to be with the kids often sacrifices substantial income. Even for families with modest earning potential, the opportunity cost of raising a single child through age 18 can easily exceed $1 million.

All of us benefit hugely from such parental investment. What could you buy with your Social Security check, or your I.R.A.s for that matter, if everyone else in your generation had simply forgotten to have children or had failed to invest in them? Yet parents do not receive any greater pensions than non-parents for the sacrifices they make to raise and educate the future workers upon whom we will all depend in old age.

We also live in an increasingly knowledge-based economy in which the formation of human capital becomes increasingly essential to all sectors. Yet again, we leave the cost of amassing this human capital primarily in the hands of individual parents and low-paid caregivers and educators, nearly all of whom could vastly increase their incomes simply by getting out of the "nurturing business." Many are, as attested to by the high divorce rate, the growing shortage of caregivers and qualified teachers, and above all by the dwindling fertility of the American people. Birthrates among native-born Americans fire now well below the levels needed to replace the population and are dropping precipitously among immigrants as well.

These two trends--the mounting costs of caring for a growing elderly population and the increasing importance of human capital to the economy--have fundamentally altered the economics of family life. To put it bluntly, childrearing is fast becoming a sucker's game. Though the psychic rewards remain, the economic returns to individual parents have largely disappeared, while the cost of parenthood is soaring. To those raised on fears of overpopulation, this may seem like a good thing. But a society that is consuming more human capital than it produces is clearly living beyond its means. Not only do the high costs and low rewards of parenthood imperil the future of Social Security, Medicare, and other entitlement programs, but they also undermine the very foundations of our economic system.

Where do doctors come from?

A hospital is a good place to start considering bow this is so. More so than steel mills, hospitals require a high concentration of responsible workers and highly trained specialists. They require doctors whose formal education extends into their 30s. They require highly trained, multi-tasking nurses with adept social skills. They require administrators and bureaucrats who are masters of law, regulation, and data management. Even the low-skilled workers who distribute the hospital meals and disinfect the bedpans must be highly trustworthy, for if they do their job wrong, patients will die.

What is true of hospitals is also increasingly true for the workplace as a whole. The clear tendency of economic development is towards a more knowledge-based, networked economy in which decision-making and responsibility are increasingly necessary at lower levels. In such economies, children often remain economically dependent on their parents well into their own childbearing years because it takes that long to acquire the panoply of technical skills, credentials, social understanding, and personal maturity that more and more jobs now require. Conversely, the rising demand for higher education means that more and more people are not even done with school before their own fertility (or their partners')...