Children are priceless

The Brookings Institution is making a media splash with its estimate that it now costs more than $300,000 to raise a child through high school, an estimate first shared with our news colleagues at the Journal. Others are picking up the figure as if it’s a shocker. We don’t dispute the number, but that isn’t the way to look at it.

No doubt it takes money to feed, clothe and educate a family these days, and inflation isn’t helping. But children aren’t merely cost centers. Even ignoring human affection and thinking in the most utilitarian terms, children are assets—to the families who raise them, to the nation in which they are born, and to the world to which they will contribute across their lifetimes.

A bizarre idea we sometimes hear is that young people don’t want to have children for fear of climate change. Have children, or don’t, that’s your choice. But bringing another person into the world isn’t going to matter in the slightest to global temperatures. That is, unless your child becomes the adult who finds a solution to battery storage, or some other technological or business breakthrough that enhances the human condition.