Even the richest family, is it under great pressure to swallow the golden beast?

I don't know when children got the title of "four-legged gold eater". I have to say that this title is really realistic.

Nowadays, compared with before, the cost of raising children is too far away. Children's food and clothing costs are not mentioned for the time being. Just paying for his tuition will consume almost all the wages of a large number of laborers.

No wonder young people nowadays say that they can't afford to have children. If they are brought up in this way, even rich parents will feel great pressure, let alone ordinary families.

These two days, my colleague Jason often complains that her son spends a lot of money in the summer vacation, saying that it is almost equivalent to her salary for half a year.

At first, no one believed it. After Jason broke down the expenses item by item, everyone found that they could really spend so much money.

Jason's various incomes add up to about one year100000, which means that her son spent her 50000 in a summer vacation. How did this happen?

In fact, it is not difficult. Of these 50,000, at least 45,000 were spent on cram schools and summer camps for their sons. In the first half of the year, Jason's son was still in the second grade of primary school, but his grades had obviously declined.

Zhang Jie didn't want her son to go on like this, so she decided to make up lessons for him in the summer vacation and finish what she wanted to learn in grade three first, so that she would have a first-Mover advantage after she was promoted to grade three.

However, cram schools are not cheap, and major courses such as Chinese, mathematics and English should be enrolled separately. Coupled with my son's two hobbies, painting and music, the cost of these cram schools alone has exceeded 30 thousand.

Subtract this more than 30,000, leaving less than 20,000. Excluding a summer camp, there is not much money left, just enough for my son to eat and wear for more than two months.

With children, you will find that what you usually think of as large consumption is not worth mentioning in the face of the cost of raising children.

Take women's favorite cosmetics as an example. A few hundred dollars of lipstick will be spent by two or three classes of children. However, lipstick can be used for more than one year, and two or three remedial classes for children will last for several hours.

The four-legged golden eater lives up to its reputation. Wealthy families complain that clothing, food, shelter and play, and children's products are not cheap. Every parent doesn't want to treat their children badly, so the better things they buy, the better. Merchants also caught the parents' mind, so they levied IQ tax on maternal and child products.

Of course, due to the different materials, the cost of many maternal and child products is indeed higher. The superposition of these two factors leads to the fact that children's products on the market now, whether they are eaten, worn or played, are not cheap.

Food and clothing consumption is only a small head, and education investment is the real big head. If the children's food and clothing consumption has already made their parents big, then the investment in education is even higher than that of ordinary parents, and even some high-income parents are complaining.

For example, school districts in first-and second-tier cities, regardless of size, cost millions. How many years have parents accumulated this?

Even if you don't buy a school district, you can easily spend tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands a year just by enrolling in various cram schools and taking him out to see the world, which is almost the salary of ordinary people for one year.

Therefore, the real big head of raising children is the investment in education.

It is precisely because raising children is too expensive that the fertility rate in China will drop again and again, because more and more people realize the reality. Since there is not so much money to make children happy and train them into an excellent talent, then simply don't give birth.

However, how many people can really suppress the reproductive instinct buried deep in genes?

The high cost of childcare not only worries parents, but also makes children unhappy. Parenting in an arms race can only involve the whole society. In recent years, the word "involution" appears more and more frequently on social networks, which fully shows that involution is a true portrayal of today's society.

In fact, the involution of society is not only due to overpopulation and lack of resources, but also closely related to the concept of parenting in the whole society.

East Asian countries, including China, are famous for attaching importance to education. Therefore, every child has to spend a lot of childhood chewing knowledge that is meaningless or even useless to life except for exams.

Because as long as he doesn't do this, he will soon be overtaken by those children who are less talented than him but follow the trend of social parenting.

Parents' money is gone, and children's happy childhood also misses such a parenting atmosphere. The direct consequence is that parents don't spend less money, and their children's childhood is unhappy. Ironically, however, his starting line has not improved significantly, because everyone is doing this, and the result is equivalent to everyone standing still.

To break this dilemma, we need to reflect on the whole society. Every parent should seriously think about what kind of growth path we should pave for our children.

Can we only sacrifice our children's happy childhood as a price?

If so, it is the incompetence of adults, imposing the pain of competition on children who should be carefree.