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COSTS OF RAISING CHILDREN
Who Should Pay?
Training Handout
These are rough lecture notes, not smoothed for general use
Making babies may be fun, cheap and easy, but raising them is costly.
By “raising” them we mean socialization plus providing for their needs.
It is the only way society has for perpetuating (reproducing) itself.
Why does it fall onto the parents to pay all the costs?
The commodification process:
Treating a social responsibility as if it were a consumer good.
We are more and more commodifying our activities
Examples: education, parks, town planning,
highways.
In whose interests?
Corporations, conservative governments that
support. them.
The process started with the industrial revolution
(by owners of capital)
A product of capitalist society.
Trends in commodification:
Pre Industrial societies see raising children
as a social responsibility
These include our own past, gathering, fishing,
hunting, and agrarian societies.
Commodification came with industrialization
(capitalism)
The past 50 years saw an intensification
of the notion, values, practice.
Children are now less seen as investment
in production and old age security
More trends in socialization patterns:
Smaller families = fewer older siblings to
help care & socialize
More of both parents working = more reliance
on outside agents
Television: 50 years, created and expanded;
increasing role
Increase in day care facilities, acceptability,
and use
More organized sports and recreational organizations
More fear of harm to children, less freedom
for them to roam
More regimented and controlled childhood
= less independent thinking
Increased cost by using more outside agencies
(fewer children)
Decrease in moral training = rising crimes,
cheating
If
the state is the political representative of society, and society can reproduce
or perpetuate itself only through socialization, then the costs of that
socialization should be born 100% by the state. That is logical and
fair. Life and society are not guaranteed to be either logical or
fair
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2011.08.16
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