It is necessary to calculate the cost of raising a child, but it is unwise to complain about the cost of it and about high living expenses in the name of "child's slaves."

Real Difficulty

Xiao Sanza (Time Weekly): Several years ago, some parents reached the conclusion after calculation that raising a child in big cities such as Beijing would cost 480,000 yuan ($69,000)—and nowadays the expenses have soared. In Beijing, for example, the expense of raising a child is estimated to have risen 100 times in the past 20 years. The growth of parents' income, however, is falling far behind.

Young parents, who are already slaves to mortgage or car or credit card debts, seem to have lost the courage to dream a dream. When even survival and self-development become problems, to have a child seems a luxurious plan.

Ethicists talk passionately about the necessity of carrying on an ancestral line. But what they say will not help solve young couples' problems.

"Slaves" generally refer to the young people who received middle or higher education and are from low-income families.

They belong to the middle class, but some of them have lost the confidence of being a member of the middle class. This is a problem the whole nation should take seriously, because without a stable middle class, it is difficult for society to operate well.

A second reform was recently proposed. It differs from the efficiency-focused first reform that was initiated more than 30 years ago. This new one is supposed to stress fairness. To cure the wounds caused by the global financial crisis, China badly needs to change its export-oriented economy to domestic-oriented. However, if the public does not have enough money, who will boost domestic demand?

Recent years have seen proposals to change of the current one-child policy, that is, to allow a couple at most to have two children, to build up a healthier family structure. But if more and more young couples refuse to have children, what is the use of a loose family planning policy? If child-raising expenses continue to rocket, the social order will be damaged because of the public's growing dissatisfaction.

Huang Ningning (www.cnhubei.com): Raising a child is never just as easy as buying several bags of milk powder to feed her or him. For example, when a child goes to school, the door of endless demands on money opens. The state input into education is not enough and no one knows how much has been peeled off in the process of fiscal allocation. Due to the imbalanced distribution of education resources, parents all hope to grab the best possible resources for their children and try to do that as a main strategy in life. It is not that parents don't want to save money, but they do want to provide better opportunities for children's growth and education.

In many Western countries, a highly developed social welfare system helps parents raise their children more easily. But in China, parents have to pay almost all the bills by themselves.

In the circumstances, no matter how effectively a person spends his or her savings on children's education, it just doesn't help.

Wang Chuantao (hlj.rednet.cn): No one likes to see their children fall behind others in areas such as food, toys and education opportunities.

Pressed by hard lives, many young couples find themselves unable to afford bringing up a child. Jobs, health care, education, housing, gas prices, and so on, plague them. "Child's slave," along with terms such as "mortgage slave," "credit card slave" and "car slave," vividly depict the extremely passive state of today's young people.

If they were all wealthy pop stars, no one would choose not to have children. It is better to improve peoples' living conditions than to scold debt-smothered young couples for not having children.