Was Having Kids Ever a Paying Venture?

Bryan Caplan asks and answers :

One popular story about the decline in family size over the last two centuries goes like this: Back in the old days, having kids paid. Children started working when they were quite young, and provided for their parents in their old age. Then industrialization and/or the welfare state came along and changed everything. Young children ceased to contribute much economically to their families, and once Social Security, Medicare, and so on were in place, people stopped supporting their aging parents.

It turns out that this story is only half true. Yes, in the modern era, people give little financial assistance to their elders; even in late adulthood, old-to-young transfers remain larger than young-to-old transfers. The flaw in the story is the assumption that things used to be different. In an eye-opening 1996 JEL piece , Ted Bergstrom summarizes evidence showing that even in pre-modern societies, kids did not pay.

Caplan also adds this intriguing question, “If parents in 1850 were willing to support five or six kids with a negative financial return, why aren’t we?”

Sadly, because unlike most people in 1850, we measure the worth of children in financial terms. Theologian Al Mohler noted this a few years ago :

For others [who choose deliberate childlessness], the bottom line is simply financial. One woman asked: “What would the return be on the investment? Are there any laws that would require my children to pay for my nursing home when I am old? Are they going to be a sufficient hedge against poverty and loneliness?” A return on investment . [emphasis in original]

And as Mohler said in another contex t:

One of the responsibilities of Christian people is to produce godly progeny. Nowhere in the Bible is there any kind of blessing upon any form of thinking that would see children as a burden. And in fact both, especially the Old and the New Testament, they were given to us at a time when many other people were sacrificing children on altars.