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According to research carried out by the insurance provider LV=, it now costs just over £200,000 to bring up a child from their birth to their twenty-first birthday. This works out at an average of around £9,500 a year.

Although many parents would agree that bringing up children is expensive, many would refute this figure, which is over a third of the total annual income of the average family today. The survey has taken certain areas of spending and looked at what they believe is the average cost within each of these having surveyed a group of parents.

Seeing that it costs over £200,000 to bring up a child is something that would scare many parents and parent to be. There is, however, much reason to believe it is possible to bring up children for much less than this.

The report states that it costs £52,000 for education, but does not include private education. It includes things such as uniform and school trips. This does seem a high figure if only taking into consideration things that are considered necessities or important.

Child care is named as the most expensive cost in bringing up children. However, not everyone requires child care. In many families only one parent works or family members can look after children while their parents are working. It could be argued, though, that it is mostly families on low or middle incomes that require child care as they can’t afford to have only one working parent.

Listed amongst the extras are driving lessons and a first car. This is not an essential though and many children pay for this themselves, or don’t learn to drive until after the age of twenty-one anyway. Therefore many parents will find that the high costs of their children learning to drive won’t be paid by them.

The LV= survey does not state whether presents from other family members are taken into consideration. Family and friends often buy items such as clothes and toys for children, something that brings down the cost for such items for parents. Over the course of an entire childhood this can make a big difference.

Holidays are stated as costing an average of over £600 a year for a child. Some might argue, though, that holidays are a luxury and something parents have a choice over. It is nice to go on holiday if you can afford to but not essential if you can’t. There is also the option of having a cheaper holiday closer to home rather than travelling abroad.

The study says that a child’s university years of the ages 18-21 cost £14,000 each, a total of £42,000. This is something many parents will not recognize. In the future parents will be unable to pay their children’s tuition fees for them should they choose to go into higher education. Some parents will help with related costs but many parents are unable to and therefore won’t. Taking off this £42,000 would mean an overall cost of close to £150,000 over twenty-one years.

Everything can be done cheaper. The quality/price of items that need to be bought for children are not given but there is a big difference in the range of items that can be bought, making it very difficult to give exact figures. To use one example, a top of the range pram can cost over £1,000 but you can get a perfectly adequate one for around £100. They are available for less than this if bought second-hand. The same could be said for hundreds of other items someone needs from the age of zero to twenty-one.

It is very hard, almost impossible, to say how much it really costs to bring up a child. Many of the headlines around the LV= study state that “it now costs over £200,000 to bring up a child”. They do not go into enough detail to show how much of a true statement this is and you can never say a specific amount that it takes to bring up a child. All families and their choices are different and in reality this figure varies massively from one family to the next.

Andrew Marshall ©