What Are Children Worth? Why the Cost of Raising Kids Cannot Measure Their Value
I have eight children. Occasionally, someone hears that number and looks at me with the same expression they might use if I admitted to raising livestock in our living room. Eight? Yes, eight.
The next question is rarely theological. It is usually economic. “How do you afford that?” It is a fair question. Children eat. They need clothes. They outgrow shoes at precisely the moment you remember buying them new shoes. They participate in activities, require transportation, and possess an astonishing ability to discover expensive needs in groups.
I sometimes joke that I have eight retirement plans. My older children have not found that joke nearly as reassuring as I have. The cost of raising children is real. Parents should budget wisely and consider the practical responsibilities involved in welcoming and raising human lives.
But something dangerous happens when the cost becomes the primary category through which we understand children. A spreadsheet can tell us what children require. It cannot tell us what they are worth.
When a Nation Changes Its Mind About Children
For decades, China restricted family size to control population growth. Now the nation is facing the long-term consequences of a shrinking and aging population and is encouraging families to have more children. But generations do not reverse direction as quickly as government policy.
Families have built lives around smaller households. Housing is expensive. Employment feels uncertain. Education is intensely competitive. Parents calculate the cost of raising a child and decide the numbers just don’t work.
The podcast conversation that prompted this article cited estimates suggesting that raising a child to age 18 in China costs more than 6 times the nation’s per capita gross domestic product. Government subsidies, tax credits, free hospital deliveries, and childcare payments have been offered, but families often describe them as small compared with the cost of eighteen years of care.
The economic challenge is genuine. But beneath the financial question is a worldview question. What are children for? Are they units of future productivity? Are they consumers who place strain on limited resources? Are they potential workers needed to support an aging society? Are they an investment whose return can be measured through academic achievement and care for elderly parents?
Or are children people created by God, entrusted to families, and given present value long before they produce anything? How we answer that question changes everything.
The Cost Matters, but It Must Not Control
It would be irresponsible to pretend money does not matter. Parents need housing, food, clothing, healthcare, education, and transportation. Children can expose financial weakness and require adults to make difficult choices.
A couple may need to reduce entertainment expenses. A family may choose a smaller home. Parents may drive an older vehicle, adjust vacations, share bedrooms, buy used clothes, or decide that four streaming services are not essential to human flourishing.
These choices are not insignificant. But practical considerations should inform obedience, not replace it. Christians believe God is involved in family life. We seek His wisdom regarding marriage, fertility, adoption, caregiving, and the children He may entrust to us.
That does not mean every family will look the same. Some couples long for children and cannot have them. Some are called to foster or adopt. Some face medical, relational, or financial realities requiring deep discernment. Others may be using financial language to disguise a more personal concern: “Children may interfere with the life I want.” That question deserves honesty.
Poverty Does Not Automatically Mean Children Are Unloved
Adults sometimes assume that children with fewer material advantages necessarily have worse lives. That is not always true. A child raised by a devoted single mother with limited income may experience greater security and a sense of belonging than a child surrounded by wealth yet largely unknown to distracted parents.
Money can provide opportunities. It can fund excellent medical care, enriching travel, safe housing, books, lessons, and quality education.
But money cannot guarantee that a child is known. It cannot manufacture warmth at the table or force siblings to forgive. It cannot create delight in a parent’s face or replace the adult who stays. Affluence is not evidence of family health, and poverty is not evidence of family failure.
We should address genuine material hardship and work to help families flourish. But we should not conclude that a child’s value or future can be calculated by household income. While children need resources, they also need love, truth, boundaries, belonging, purpose, and adults who receive them as gifts rather than burdens.
When Education Becomes an Industry of Anxiety
In many countries, education is among the highest costs of raising children. Parents fear that without the correct school, tutoring, lessons, examinations, and university placement, their children will fall behind. Education matters greatly because it can awaken curiosity, open opportunities, develop gifts, and help children discover who they are and how they might serve.
But education becomes distorted when children are treated as products whose value is demonstrated through scores. In intensely competitive systems, children may be expected to earn perfect grades, master multiple disciplines, play an instrument, speak several languages, and secure admission to an elite institution.
They learn to perform. They may not learn how to be human. A child can achieve academically while remaining lonely, afraid, exhausted, and unsure whether anyone loves her apart from success. A son may conclude that a disappointing grade does not merely describe his performance. It describes his worth. That is too much weight for education to carry.
Children Are Created to Be, Not Merely to Do
God did not create children primarily as future workers. He did not form them merely to produce, compete, achieve, or support an economy. Children are human beings before they are human doings. They bear God’s image. They can worship, wonder, play, create, love, learn, forgive, serve, and participate in community.
What children do matters. Responsibility matters. Diligence matters. Education matters. But doing should grow from being. A child who knows “I am loved, known, and made with purpose” can work from a place of security. A child who believes, “I must perform so I will be worth the investment,” operates out of fear.
The outward achievements may temporarily look similar. The formation underneath them is not.
There Is More Than One Way to Be Smart
Another danger of performance centered education is that it recognizes only a narrow range of intelligence. Word and logic abilities are often rewarded most heavily in school. Children who read quickly, write clearly, remember information, and perform mathematical reasoning tend to receive the strongest academic affirmation.
Those are important gifts, but they are not the only ones. A child may understand the world through pictures. Another learns through music. One needs movement and touch. Another notices patterns in nature. And some think best with other people. Dr. Kathy Koch’s 8 Great Smarts remind us that God distributes abilities broadly. Children may be word smart, logic smart, picture smart, music smart, body smart, nature smart, people smart, or self smart.
Every child possesses all eight to some degree. Some are stronger and more easily awakened than others. A healthy education helps children discover and develop those strengths. It does not treat them like second class citizens because their best abilities do not fit a standardized examination.
The carpenter, nurse, mechanic, farmer, dancer, counselor, engineer, pastor, artist, teacher, and electrician all use real intelligence. A trade is not a consolation prize for a child who failed at education. It may be a faithful expression of how God designed that child to serve.
A Good Education Awakens
Without educational opportunity, some strengths may remain dormant. Children need exposure. They need books, tools, music, movement, questions, nature, relationships, stories, experiments, and time to reflect. They need adults who notice what makes them come alive.
But awakening a child’s abilities is different from manufacturing a high performer. Awakening asks, “What did God place here?” Pressure asks, “How can we make this child valuable?”
The first begins with gratitude. The second begins with anxiety. Education should help children discover who they are and why they are the way they are. It should prepare them to solve problems, serve people, understand truth, and participate faithfully in the world. It should not convince them that they exist to justify the expense of raising them.
The American Cost May Be Self Expression
In the United States, the barriers to having children are not always the same as those in China. For one, the financial cost remains real. But another concern often sits beneath the conversation: personal freedom. Will children limit career growth? Will they interrupt travel? Will they make weekends less spontaneous? Will they reduce our ability to pursue hobbies, causes, relationships, fitness, comfort, or personal expression?
These are not imaginary trade offs. Children change life. They make some activities harder. They require plans to bend. They place limits on time and money. And they introduce people into your home who may have little respect for silence or the carefully arranged rhythm you designed for Saturday morning.
But limits are not always enemies of flourishing. Sometimes limits form us. A child may interrupt self expression and reveal self centeredness. A sibling may limit independence and teach responsibility. A family commitment may prevent a teenager from doing exactly what he wants and teach him that belonging involves obligation.
The question is not simply, “Will children cost me freedom?” The deeper question is, “What kind of person will unrestricted freedom form me to become?”
Family Teaches Us We Are Not the Center
My older children spend time with their younger siblings. Sometimes they want to, and sometimes we ask them to. Someone could look at that expectation and conclude that a large family is limiting their development. Perhaps they would advance more quickly toward careers and personal ambitions if younger siblings did not pull them home.
But that interpretation assumes independence is always the highest form of maturity. Family teaches something different. You belong to people; people need you. And because of that, your time is not exclusively yours. Love creates obligations, and responsibility does not disappear just because you have reached adulthood.
Community is learned first in the family. This does not mean older children should become substitute parents or carry responsibilities that belong to adults. But appropriate participation in family life can develop patience, competence, generosity, and loyalty. They are not being prevented from having a life. They are learning how shared life works.
Children Receive a Vision of Family by Watching Us
What do our children learn about marriage and family by observing us? Do they hear us describe them mainly as expensive? Do they believe they ended our freedom? Do they assume adults with children are perpetually inconvenienced? Do they hear more complaints than gratitude?
Parents are allowed to be tired. We can admit that parenting is difficult, and we should definitely not create a false picture of effortless family life. But children should also know that we delight in them. Our home is full, and our schedules are complicated. And even though the grocery bill occasionally appears to have been produced by a small corporation, it’s fun.
There is noise, movement, conflict, laughter, correction, forgiveness, and always someone nearby who has misplaced something important. The children love one another. They support one another. They are becoming people inside a community where their lives are connected. This does not mean each of them will have a large family. God may guide them differently, and circumstances may differ.
But I want them to believe family is good. I want them to know they were not the obstacle to our flourishing. They were part of it.
When a Culture Loses Children, It Loses Hope
Jeremiah 31 records a haunting image: “A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping. Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.”
Ramah was associated with exile and departure. Captives were gathered before being carried into Babylon. The image is not only death. It is the loss of futures before they can unfold. Rachel represents Israel grieving its children and, with them, the apparent disappearance of hope. Children give a community more than future workers.
They remind us that life extends beyond the present crisis. They invite adults to invest, build, teach, worship, conserve, create, and hope beyond their own lifetimes. A society without children does not merely face economic problems. It can lose its imagination for the future.
Jesus Did Not Calculate the Return
Jesus welcomed children in a culture where they possessed little social status. He did not ask what they would produce. He did not evaluate whether the time invested in them would yield measurable results. He received and blessed them. He placed them in the middle of adults who were preoccupied with greatness and told those adults to pay attention.
Jesus also paid an immeasurable cost to make us His own. Christian discipleship is not economically efficient. It requires presence, repetition, forgiveness, patience, sacrifice, and love given long before the result can be seen.
Parents participate in a similar pattern. We serve because love calls us to. We disciple because Christ has loved us. The cost is real. But cost is not the same as value.
Obedience Is Rarely Convenient
Having and raising children requires effort. Sin is easy, and obedience is not. It is easy to protect our comfort. It is harder to train children patiently. It is easy to retreat when family life exposes selfishness. It is harder to return and keep serving.
Parents should not make family size decisions out of guilt or social pressure. Nor should anyone assume that a larger family is automatically more faithful than a smaller one.
The invitation is simpler and harder: Listen to God. Trust Him. Examine your priorities honestly. Do not allow fear or personal convenience to make decisions that belong under His authority.
Children Are Not a Drop in the Bucket
Governments may offer subsidies. Economists may calculate lifetime costs. Schools may measure outputs. Parents may balance budgets. Those considerations have their place. But no payment can express the worth of a child.
Children are not economic instruments. They are not academic products. They are not retirement strategies. They are not interruptions standing between adults and the lives they deserve. They are people God made on purpose, for purpose, and with purpose. They bring needs, but they also bring gifts. They cost us something, but in reality love always does.
The spreadsheet may not balance neatly. But a child’s value was never contained in the spreadsheet.
Engaging the Topic Through the 8 Great Smarts
Children may absorb messages about money, achievement, family, and worth through the ways they are smart. These conversations can help them understand that education and work matter, but neither determines their value.
Word Smart
Ask your child to list words they hear adults use about children, such as expensive, blessing, exhausting, joyful, difficult, or worthwhile. Discuss which words communicate cost and which communicate value. Read passages where Jesus welcomes and blesses children, then invite your child to write what those passages reveal about how God sees them.
Logic Smart
Create a simple family budget together and show that raising children involves real choices. Then discuss what cannot be assigned a financial value: laughter, loyalty, prayer, belonging, forgiveness, and shared memories. Logic-smart children may appreciate learning that something can have a cost without being reducible to its cost.
Picture Smart
Invite your child to draw two pictures of family life. In one, show everything a family must purchase or provide. In the other, show what family members give one another that money cannot buy. Ask which picture best communicates what makes a family rich.
Music Smart
Listen to songs about family, God’s provision, gratitude, or belonging. Talk about how a home changes when people sing, worship, or celebrate together. Invite your child to choose a song that represents what they value most about your family.
Body Smart
Complete a family responsibility together: cook a meal, wash dishes, repair something, care for a sibling, or help an older relative. Discuss how work allows people to contribute rather than simply consume. Ask, “How did your effort make family life better today?”
Nature Smart
Plant something and discuss the resources it requires: soil, water, sunlight, protection, and time. Then notice what the plant gives as it grows. Use the experience to explain that caring for life is costly and worthwhile, while avoiding reducing a child to a simple nature analogy.
People Smart
Invite family members to tell one another something they contribute to the home. Include humor, encouragement, practical work, prayer, creativity, and companionship. People-smart children often understand their value by seeing how their presence affects others.
Self Smart
Ask your child to reflect privately on questions such as, “Do I ever feel I must achieve to be worth what my family gives me?” and “What do I believe makes me valuable?” Give them time, then remind them that their worth is grounded in God’s love and design rather than performance or expense.
Remember: However your child is smart, say the truth plainly: “You require time, money, energy, and sacrifice. You are also deeply loved and worth caring for. You do not have to earn your place in this family.”