Raising a child is not child's play in China, parenting costliest in world

In China, raising a child is more expensive as compared to the rest of the world, a think-tank has found.

A report by the Beijing-based YuWa Population Research Institute says that China is the most expensive place in the world to raise a child, relative to its GDP per capita.

Chinese parents have to pay 4.22 times more than Australians, 4.06 times more than French, 2.19 times more than Americans and 2.04 times more than Japanese to raise their children till the age of 18.

Women are the hardest hit by the cost of raising children as it affects their paid work hours and wage rates while men’s livelihoods remain largely unchanged.

“Because the current social environment in China is not friendly to women’s fertility, the time cost and opportunity cost for women to have children are too high,” said the report, co-authored by Liang Jianzhang, founder of online travelling site Ctrip, opens a new tab and also a founder of the YuWa institute.

“Due to reasons such as the high cost of childbearing and the difficulty for women to balance family and work, the Chinese people’s average fertility willingness is almost the lowest in the world,” added.

The report comes at a time when China reported a significant drop in population for the second time in 2023 with the number of new births dropping to around half of that in 2016.

Drop in women’s wages

Raising a child in the most expensive country is especially daunting for women as they usually see a reduction of 2,106 working hours while looking after their children aged between 0-4 leading to an estimated wage loss of about 63,000 yuan ($8,700), the report said.

Apart from this, leisure time is reduced for women by 12.6 hours for mothers with one child aged 0-6 and 14 hours for two children.

YuWa says that, in order to stop this disparity, there is an “urgent” need at the national level to introduce policies to reduce the cost of childbearing as soon as possible.

Some of the suggestions include cash and tax subsidies, improved childcare services, equal maternity and paternity leave, access to foreign nannies, allowing flexible working and giving single women the same reproductive rights as married women.

With inputs from agencies