CNNMoney Mobile: Assessing the net value of children

This article was sent from CNNMoney's mobile app. To download the FREE
CNNMoney iPhone or Blackberry application, click here: http://mobileapp.cnnmoney.com

Assessing the net value of children
The U.S. birth rate is falling. One explanation: a diminishing return
on investment.
By Ben Stein, contributor
September 1, 2009: 01:47 PM
(Fortune Magazine) -- What is the value of a child in modern Western
industrial society? More specifically, what is the value of a middle-
class or upper-middle-class or upper-class child in America? And does
this have anything to do with the fact that the birth rate among
American women has been falling for decades and that the age of first
childbirth among educated women is far higher than among less-well-
educated women?

Start with economics. People in a free society will choose to have
more of something if its return exceeds its cost. On the other hand,
people in a free society will choose to have less of a good or service
if its value is less than its cost.

Now, what is a modern child? Obviously, not a good or service, but
something more and also something less. Long ago, as we all know,
humans had children because they liked having sex and because children
had some value as assistant hunters and gatherers and keepers of the
hearth.

Then, as society became more organized, families chose to have
children because the parents (we assume) still liked having sex and
the resulting children were helpful on the farm or the ranch or in the
village smithy. The kids did not require much -- just food and shelter
and occasional loving and cuffing about to keep them in line.

Now we can have sex without having children. That is a major factor in
life, but by itself it does not explain why people do not necessarily
want to have kids.

Maybe the reason is largely because raising modern children is such a
major pain in the neck. For one thing, thanks to a variety of factors,
often parents have to struggle like galley slaves to get their
offspring into private schools and pay for them.

The private school parent also has to pony up for every kind of lesson
-- ballet, horse, and music lessons, math tutoring, and chess club.
The parent also has to drive the little ones to all of these events as
well as to the "play dates" that lurk like unanesthetized
colonoscopies in modern life. Then there is the most horrible event a
healthy upper-middle-class American can have: social engagements with
the parents of Junior's classmates.

In other words, we are talking about child rearing as part unpaid
chauffeur, part torture.

Then there is college and a real course in horrors getting the darling
in somewhere that won't embarrass you in front of your pals at the
club. That's before paying for the school, which is a stunning slap in
the face. Total college costs at a "prestige" school can easily touch
$70,000 a year, real money for most people.

And after graduation day, what do you get for having the system
holding you by your ankles and shaking all the money out of your
pockets? You might have a son with a law degree who cannot get a job,
a daughter with a film-school degree who works as a masseuse, or a
musician who keeps you up all night with his drums.

You are very likely to have one who cannot spell "gratitude" and has a
sense of entitlement that would make Marie Antoinette blush. How many
of each kind have you observed with your own eyes? I might add that by
pure luck, my wife and I do have a dutiful, helpful son and daughter-
in-law. How this happened I am not quite sure.

But my son is an aberration, as far as I can tell. Look around you.
The costs and benefits of having children in affluent America are
wildly off kilter. Too much cost, too little reward. Often the cost-
benefit analysis of children prints out "Get a German shorthaired
pointer instead."

Many people are doing that, and the birth rate is collapsing. But if
we stop having enough children, because their value is so low relative
to their cost, the society grinds down. It's happening right now. The
native-born upper middle class barely replace themselves in America,
if they do at all. In a way we are committing suicide as a class,
possibly in part because of the burdens of child rearing in modern life.

What is the net present value of a child in modern America? Often,
it's difficult to find much, and thereby hangs a question mark over
our future as a nation, at least as we have known it.

Ben Stein is an actor, lawyer, writer, and economist who also appears
in commercials as a spokesman for various companies.

--------

Sent from my iPhone.