Understanding the true price of parenting is impossible without considering its short- and long-term payoffs. Indeed, it’s hard to evaluate whether the cost of any given good is “high” or “low” without considering the full context of what the money is paying for. An example: when my husband and I were searching for our first house, our real estate agent urged us to think about whether we could see ourselves eating Thanksgiving dinner there. We didn’t decide solely based on cost; after all, a house is also a home.
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a series called “The Price of Parenting,” detailing many of the costs facing American parents raising young children. I highly recommend the series for its detailed look at how parents struggle to afford daycare, college, surrogacy, and summer camp, with touching and meaningful stories; including about a lower-income family with five children and a middle-class family trying to decide between different college options.
However, a young man or woman considering children might review the Wall Street Journal series and come away feeling that parenting is mostly about choosing between expense and greater expense with a side of stress. But that’s like thinking about Thanksgiving dinner based only on the ingredient costs and the stress of food prep, without considering the joy of eating the dinner and the lifelong memories of spending time with family and friends.
So, what are the benefits of parenting? The most obvious are the emotional ones. These are hard to quantify, of course, but are certainly detectable in polling.
A new survey by the Institute for Family Studies, for example, found that mothers, particularly married mothers, are more likely than non-parents to report that they are “very happy.” Both married moms and unmarried moms were much more likely than women without children to report that their life has a “clear sense of purpose.” The survey’s authors concluded: “Despite the challenges associated with family life for women—including more stress and less time for oneself—there is no question that marriage and motherhood are linked to greater female flourishing on many other fronts.” Similarly, the regret rate for having children is remarkably low; very few people with children would not have had kids if they had the chance to do things over again. As psychologist Paul Bloom writes, “[t]he love we usually have toward our children means that our choice to have them has value above and beyond whatever effect they have on our happiness and meaning.”
It is important to note that not all forms—or stages—of parenting are the same. Single mothers report significantly more psychological distress than married moms. As Melissa Kearney describes in depth in her book The Two Parent Privilege, single moms often do a great job raising their kids, but these moms are also usually the first to admit that it is incredibly stressful to parent alone. Per Kearney, “the absence of a second parent, often a dad from the household, puts a lot of burden on the single moms who are doing this by themselves, and it disadvantages kids.”
Parents’ average happiness levels also vary quite a lot depending on the age of their first child. Becoming a parent is often accompanied by a detectable drop in happiness levels, as young moms and dads struggle to transition from a life of relative independence to waking up overnight with a baby, struggling with colic, and changing diapers. However, this trend reverses as parents age.
According to one study of 200,000 men and women in 86 countries, “mothers and fathers over 50 are generally happier than their childless peers, no matter how numerous their offspring.” In other words, children may be a long-term investment in happiness. Putting in the work to nurture a young baby pays off in middle and old age, as proud parents watch their adult children launch careers, have children of their own, and reunite around the family table for Thanksgiving.
At the margins, parenting can come with truly tremendous costs. In the book Better than OK: Finding Joy as a Special Needs Parent, Kelly Mantoan writes about the challenges of homeschooling five children, two of whom have a severe degenerative disorder that requires around-the-clock, hands-on care. Yet Mantoan writes that, through accepting her children’s diagnoses, “I am a stronger, more humble, sacrificial, and faith-filled person than I was before I started this journey.”
There are pragmatic benefits to having children as well. The most obvious is that adult children often play a key role in caring for aging parents. While not all children are involved in their parents’ care, and some parents do not need care before death, it is indisputable that adult children are an important source of support for many of our elderly.
One study found that, “the older you get, the greater the advantage of having adult children.” Adult children are especially important for those who live to age 80 or longer. The “oldest old” may no longer have living spouses or healthy friends to rely upon, and instead turn to their adult kids for “everything from navigating the health care system to providing companionship and shouldering stress.”
The most significant pragmatic impact of having kids is that often someone—usually mom—has to take a step back from work, resulting in decreased wages and stymied career advancement. This is called the “motherhood penalty.” However, in two-parent families, it may be partially counterbalanced by a fatherhood bonus, in which some men receive a pay bump after becoming a dad. The motherhood penalty is a real phenomenon deserving of serious consideration. As Vox reporter Rachel Cohen Booth has written, it is also often more complex than is reported in major news media. Booth writes that data demonstrate a motherhood penalty in the early years, but the long-term picture is much fuzzier, and it’s an open question whether moms face a long-term disadvantage in the workplace at all.
Even for moms who have to step back, however, many find that the additional time spent with their children is an advantage. As one of the moms in the Wall Street Journal series reported, although she had to leave her job to care for her kids, “she has no regrets about how it’s all turned out. Spending so much time with her kids has been a gift.”
This is one of the most powerful paradoxes of parenting: the costs and the benefits are two sides of the same coin. As American Compass’s Oren Cass observed when discussing the series, “the cost of raising a child is mostly the time required to care for a child.” Children do require lots of time and parental attention. Sometimes one or both parents have to make significant concessions with regard to work, either dialing back from a demanding job, having one parent drop out of the workforce, or some other solution.
Simultaneously, the time and attention parents lavish on their children is often the whole point of having kids in the first place. It gives life meaning and may ultimately provide an important safety net for the parent. Parents who heavily invest in their children can hope to see the rewards in a relationship that stretches their entire lifespan, (though please note: people without children can also live meaningful lives with rich relationships into old age!).
The Wall Street Journal urges readers to consider that parenting “takes a helluva lot of money.” As a mother of four children myself, I certainly agree: kids are expensive along multiple dimensions, including your cash, attention, and bandwidth. However, it’s impossible to fully consider the question without also considering the joys. As one mother interviewed in the series points out, “Your heart grows three sizes.” What price can you put on that?
 | A guest post by
|