Why Is Raising A Child So Expensive?

It seems that how parents treat their children is deeply impactful. Not only are children affected throughout their childhood, but they continue to be affected into adulthood.

Reading Your One Wild and Precious Life, I am struck by how many ways we carry self-defeating tendencies.  

If parenting can leave lasting scars, then we should focus on how to make good parenting more widespread.

To reduce bad parenting should we formalise training programs? I think we should. For example, there is the National Childbirth Trust in the UK.

Intuitively, parents with less resources would struggle more to deliver good parenting. This implies that bad parenting may be more prevalent in lower-income families (though of course more reading needs to be done on this!).

And if this is true, then it sounds like a symptom of the same problem: raising children in a good and healthy environment is hard and expensive.

Beyond helping parents, we should look into making childcare more accessible. Is there anything that we can do to make it less expensive? Regulatory solutions also include maternity and paternity leave.

As with many policy-based solutions, a societal consensus would make it easier to pass legislation.