Fraser Institute is wrong, there’s no such thing as cheap kids
CalgarySun.com – opinion/columnists
August 23, 2013. By Stephen Lautens
The Fraser Institute published a report this week that says the cost of raising children in Canada has been grossly exaggerated by parents, child welfare advocates and governments.
According to the author – who previously wrote a report that said poverty is not really a problem in this country – parents here only need to spend around $3,000 to $4,500 a year to raise a child. In fact, ‘it has never been easier, financially, to raise children in Canada.’
If you’re an actual Canadian parent like me, that is the point when your morning coffee shoots out your nose.
Most studies and estimates place the annual cost of raising children at between $10,000 and $15,000 a year.
According to the new Fraser Institute Report, parents don’t necessarily need to spend money on things like a bigger house or apartment, so it’s not fair to count that towards child costs.
That is the point when you wonder if anyone at the Fraser Institute has actually met any children.
But it got me thinking. Are there ways to economize to get your annual child care costs down to the conservative think tank’s target of about four grand a year?
Here are some thoughts:
- Encourage your kids to be atheists. That way you won’t have to spend a dime on Christmas presents. If you don’t teach them to read a calendar or let them have any friends, you can also get away with never having to buy a birthday present or throw a party.
- Three words: Free range children. Let’s face it, feeding your kid nutritious food that he’ll eat is a major expense. Big bucks can be saved by letting kids scrounge for their own food in the neighbourhood. Encourages libertarian self-reliance, too.
- Home dentistry will also help keep your annual cost of child rearing under four grand. Last year my son had one perfect check up and one cavity. The cost? About $600. Of course if you cut out professional dental costs altogether you can save additional money on groceries since your kid won’t have any teeth to chew with. Don’t waste money on orthodontics either. A severe overbite can come in useful later in life opening beer bottles or peeling oranges.
- Make your own toys. In the olden days, parents made rocking horses and soapbox racers out of spare lumber and scrounged parts for their kids. You can save a lot of money by building your own Xbox console and programming blockbuster video games in your spare time.
- Encourage your children’s feet not to grow. I don’t know how much money I’ve thrown away on getting my son shoes that fit. Children are just being willful when they grown two sizes in a year and insist on shoes that don’t cause blisters.
- The same with clothes. Instead of buying new clothes, just let them wear your old ones. Nothing helps a kid’s self-esteem more than wearing your old suit to school or a tee shirt from the ’80s that says ‘Where’s The Beef?’
- Instead of costly summer camp, just drop your kids off in the woods for a month with a compass and pocket knife.
- Tell your kids to not need any additional help with their school work. Parents waste hundreds if not thousands of dollars on tutors, just so their children can do things like read or write. Everyone knows struggling with a learning disability builds character, and not understanding something like basic math won’t be a problem later in life.
Maybe it will even lead to a job at the Fraser Institute.
< http://www.calgarysun.com/2013/08/23/fraser-institute-is-wrong-theres-no-such-thing-as-cheap-kids >
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FraserInstitute.org – research-news
August 22, 2013. Chris Sarlo
The annual cost of raising a child is important information-for its own sake and also for public policy purposes. Such estimates can be helpful to parents or prospective parents. It can also inform policies related to child benefits and possible parental child support obligations. This paper reviews prevailing approaches to the measurement of child costs and proposes budget based alternatives. The paper argues that there is no methodology or formula that can determine how much parents need to spend to raise children or, even, how much they actually do spend. What we do know is that parents at all income levels have successfully raised children. The objective of this paper is to find, at least, a base level of annual child costs that would need to be covered for the healthy development of the child.
The cost of raising a child is defined as the cash outlay “marginal” costs that parents spend when they add a child to their household. These costs specifically exclude any costs that were already in place prior to the child and would still be in place if the child leaves the household. The cost of raising a child is usefully distinguished from the costs involved in the decision to “have” a child, which necessarily includes the full opportunity cost of such a decision.
There are two broad strands of estimates of child costs. One strand is that group of estimates produced for popular consumption. The other strand includes estimates produced by academic economists and statisticians. While there is some overlap between the two strands, the former tends to be less technical and less reliant on economic theory. However, at the core, both strands attempt to extract relevant information from actual household expenditure data. This paper critically reviews both strands and finds that both rely heavily on heroic assumptions about how to extract the child’s portion of actual family expenditures.
Prevailing estimates of the cost of a child for Canada and the United States, currently, tend to be in the range of $10,000 to $15,000 per annum. These cost estimates have a distinct middle class bias and do not reflect the reality of raising children in lower income and newer immigrant households. There is a concern that such estimates send a clear message to lower income families that they really cannot afford children and, perhaps, shouldn’t have any.
Examining the basic marginal costs necessary for the healthy development of a child, this paper finds that an annual outlay of $3,000 to $4,500 (depending on the community or region and the age of the child) would be sufficient. These cost estimates exclude any savings strategies such as home gardens, sewing and knitting clothing, couponing and taking advantage of sales, own repair and maintenance work in the home, etc. This cost range is for Canada in 2010 and is drawn from budget standard estimates by social agencies and experts with experience in this area. It can serve as a useful benchmark for child costs. Beyond this basic needs benchmark, however, parents will spend more on their child depending on such factors as after-tax income, perception of economic security, additional obligations, parenting style, marital situation, and time preference.
< http://www.fraserinstitute.org/research-news/display.aspx?id=20274 >
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Tags: child care, poverty, standard of living, youth
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