Can you afford your child?

Family planning depends on the family budget just as much, if not more, than it depends on the fertility gods, writes SHEILA WAYMAN

HEIDI AND Daniel Giles have a three-and-a-half-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy and now they are considering whether or not to try for another.

“If I won the Lotto I would have a third child in a heartbeat,” says Heidi. But without that unlikely intervention of fate, they are left mulling over the implications of extending their family.

“I wouldn’t have discussed with anybody our decision to have our first and our decision to have our second,” she says. “Our discussion to have our third, which is ongoing, I would have with the cashier at Tesco!”

At this stage in their lives, an extra child seems to be a bigger step, logistically. “The economic climate is not helping because we would be thinking about education and stuff like that: college fees.”

Daniel (32) works in his family’s auctioneering business in Tralee, Co Kerry. Heidi, also aged 32, who sees herself primarily as a stay-at-home mum, puts the two children in a creche part-time so she can fit in three mornings a week work at the auctioneers and nurture her fledgling business, a homemakers’ website called Cleansheets.ie.

“The jump from zero to one was a no brainer; we definitely wanted a child,” she says. “The jump from one to two was a no brainer, we definitely wanted a sibling for our daughter.” Now they are looking before they leap for the third time.

For a start, it is a big decision in terms of childcare. “I can justify two in a creche but I can’t justify three. So we can’t have three if I want to work until one is at school.

“It is a very big jump in terms of the car. I am not happy to wedge a booster seat in between the two big Isofix car seats.”

A people carrier would be on the agenda.

“We’ve had a boy and a girl so the clothes are covered. He will be out of his cot, she will be out of the buggy, so that is all okay . . .

“Of course we can discuss and plan all we like,” she adds, “but the fertility gods still need to smile if we do decide to try!”

First-time parents often talk about how it is the moment they step out of the maternity hospital with their baby that the enormity of being totally responsible for another little human being hits home. Amid the elation and exhaustion, keeping the little mite alive and getting some sleep are usually the initial concerns.

What it is going to cost to raise that helpless baby to become a self-sufficient adult is a worry for another day – if you knew, you might want to give it back, quick!

But a year or two later, when parents are thinking about a return trip to the maternity hospital, finance will be foremost in the minds of many – especially during a recession.

FOR A two-income couple, a second child means the doubling of already hefty childcare costs. Can they really afford that along with the mortgage? And if they eliminate the childcare costs by having one parent at home, can they still pay the mortgage?

The one-income parents struggling to pay their bills wonder how they could possibly stretch their budget to feed, clothe and educate another child. They also worry about being only one redundancy away from financial disaster. Meanwhile, the no-income parents know how tough it is to survive on social welfare payments.

The average parent in the UK is spending the equivalent of €211,264 on bringing up one child from birth to the age of 21, according to a survey there earlier this year, with childcare and education accounting for more than half of that bill.

It is unlikely to be any less here – and indeed there is evidence to suggest it could be significantly more. In addition, the prospect of your offspring not needing any financial support after the age of 21 looks increasingly unlikely.

The research by the Liverpool Victoria Friendly Society found that families educating their children in the state sector spend €54,775, including about €37,396 on a three-year university degree course.

However, the equivalent “free” education here is estimated to cost nearly €70,000. Research published last July by Bank of Ireland Life, in association with online parent resource Schooldays.ie, found that putting a child through primary school costs about €12,000, while for secondary school it is €13,000. The €42,000 then required to support a child, living away from home, through third-level education does not include any re-introduction of college fees. The current scarcity of part-time jobs makes it difficult for students to pay their own way.

This estimate of the cost of going to college tallies roughly with the International Education Board’s advice to overseas students that they can expect their annual living expenses (excluding fees which non-EU students have to pay) to cost them anything between €7,500 and €12,000 here, depending on their location and lifestyle.

The UK survey reported that most parents expected to spend about €18,758 feeding a child up to the age of 21 and €14,480 on clothes during that time. Despite dropping prices, we still undoubtedly pay more for most food and clothes this side of the water.

The cost of healthcare here also pushes up expenditure for the majority of families not covered by a medical card. Parents paying at least €50 for every visit to the doctor can only envy their counterparts in the UK who, whatever their income, can bring a child free to the GP whenever they want, thanks to the NHS.

IT IS no wonder that financial considerations are making 78 per cent of mothers in Ireland think twice about having another child, as reported in a recent survey conducted by the parenting website Rollercoaster. More than half the families said the cost of childcare was their biggest concern.

One in two of the families was paying more than €150 a week to have a child minded, and for one in five it was more than €250. So taking a ballpark figure of €200 a week, that is €36,400 for three and a half years’ childcare, on average, before the child starts school.

That is presuming the mother can get and takes the full entitlement of more than nine months’ maternity leave to be at home with the baby. But that involves the financial sting of going 16 weeks without pay.

For parents in the higher league of childcare costs, the introduction of a free pre-school year from next January will provide very limited relief. Children enrolled in full- or part-time childcare will be entitled to free pre-school for two hours and 15 minutes per day, five days a week, over a 50-week period. That leaves commuting parents working an eight-hour day with a lot of childcare hours still to pay for.

After-school care continues to be a considerable expense throughout primary school if there is not a parent at home in the afternoon. You would have to allow a minimum of €5,000 a year for that, while state-of-the-art afterschool care, including full-time care during school holidays, costs twice that.

There are other areas of substantial expenditure by parents that could be considered optional extras, such as after-school activities, family holidays, entertainment and the “stuff” so beloved of children of all ages.

ECONOMIES OF scale will apply to some costs, with the first child being the most expensive to raise, as siblings use hand-me-downs. Dublin childcare agency Nanny Solutions has priced a shopping list for a bottle-fed baby’s first six months at anything between €1,914 and €4,634, depending on choice of brands (breast-feeding will knock at least €375 off that).

At present, the child benefit of €166 a month which is paid to all parents is worth €34,860 during the years 0-18. From next year, the half-payment which now applies to an 18 year old will be stopped and the Government has indicated it will tax or means test the entire benefit.

Barnardos is working on calculating costs relating to raising a child in the Republic for an upcoming campaign but a spokeswoman says it is too early to say what its findings will show. In 2007, some 7.4 per cent of children in the State were living in consistent poverty, according to the charity.

During the last economic crisis, the Republic’s birth rate plummeted, from 21.8 births per 1,000 of the population in 1980 to 15.1 in 1990. Undoubtedly emigration was a significant factor then – just as, 20 years later, immigration contributed to a record number of births here last year.

But the current recession means the 75,065 births registered in 2008, representing an annual birth rate of 17 per 1,000 of the population, is unlikely to be matched for some years. As well as reversing the migration trend, the economic downturn is sure to affect family planning.

Many families are in big trouble, trying to cope with less money and more stress, reports the ISPCC’s director of services, Caroline O’Sullivan. In the first six months of this year, the ISPCC had twice as many referrals as it did for the whole of 2008.

Significantly more middle-income earners and professional people are looking to the charity for support. “These are the people who are losing their jobs,” she says. “They have mortgages, they might have two or three children and they are really, really struggling now.

“I know from our own experiences of working with these families, that they have absolutely no intention of having more children,” O’Sullivan adds.

“It is hard enough for them to keep their existing children healthy and fit and ready for school.”

• swayman@irishtimes.com

New expectations: birth rates set to slow down

Birth rates go up and down in surprising ways, says Prof Tony Fahey, head of University College Dublin’s (UCD’s) School of Applied Social Science, who predicts a slowdown in the Republic after last year’s record number.

Certainly Iceland surprised everyone by recording a baby boom, nine months after its banking sector collapsed last autumn. Calling them “Kreppa babies”, from the Icelandic word for “crisis”, commentators suggested that Icelanders were finding comfort in relationships and family life, or that rising unemployment had left people with more time for sex.

However, demographic experts argued that the increase was in line with similar rises in Iceland in recent years and anyway, in a country of just 320,000 people, the numbers involved were too small to draw clear conclusions.

A peculiar age distribution in the population drove up the Irish birth rate in the past 10-15 years, explains Fahey.

“We had a big group of women coming into their late 20s and early 30s, peak time for child-bearing, particularly in the past five years. This was partly due to immigration.”

He believes the rise in unemployment and uncertainty about the future are likely to make couples very cautious about having children. “International research shows the biggest single influence on fertility differentials across countries and across time is the availability of jobs for women,” he says.

Since the 1980s, it has been shown that higher rates of employment of women lead to higher birth rates. Before the 1980s, it was the other way round: high female labour workforce participation went with low birth rates.

“In the 1960s Sweden had the lowest birth rate in Europe and it was usually said that was because women had the option of going out to work there. What seemed to happen, as the 1970s and 1980s progressed, was that women who had the option of going out to work continued to have what were small families by historical standards. But women who were unable to go out to work suddenly went off the whole business of having children in very big numbers.”

By the middle of the 1990s, countries in southern Europe, such as Italy, had the lowest fertility. They also had the lowest rate of female participation in the labour force.

“That is quite a puzzle. The question is what were women in Italy doing? They were staying at home to mind one child.”

But in fact, they were probably not having a second child because they thought, without a job, they could not afford another.

The sharp decline in fertility in Ireland during the 1980s was expected to continue, in line with the experience of other Catholic countries such as Italy, France and Spain.

Instead, “the price of housing shot up, the price of childcare shot up, the opportunities for women to go into the labour force increased dramatically and, lo and behold, the birth rate went up”.

One of the interesting things in Ireland, Fahey adds, is the proportion of middle-class couples who go on to have a third child. But for how much longer?

Sheila Wayman