@nikkaloola: Yesterday Georgie Dent, CEO of @The Parenthood, gave a speech at the National Press Club. She laid out the real cost of raising a family in Australia, and it's a lot. It costs around $17,800 a year to raise one child. Over the past 20 years, the cost of raising a family has gone up 134%, while family income has risen just 102%. Kids get 12 weeks of school holidays, but working parents get four weeks of leave, which leaves hundreds of hours of care to find every year. As Georgie put it, our workplaces and schools still assume there's a "spare adult" at home to cover the gap. Usually it's mum, and mothers' earnings drop 55% in the five years after having a baby. Every time this comes up, the response is the same: "you chose to have children." It's a simple answer, and it's moot. Society quite literally depends on people having children, so if you're part of society, you're affected by whether people can afford to have them. When raising kids becomes unaffordable, people stop having them. Australia's birth rate has dropped 25% since 2008, and Georgie says much of that is about affordability, not wanting fewer kids. That's a society problem, not a parenting one. By 2063, the number of Australians over 65 will more than double. Fewer kids today means fewer workers, fewer taxpayers funding hospitals and aged care, and staff shortages in everything from childcare to your local GP. Her ask is simple: treat childcare and paid parental leave like roads and hospitals. Infrastructure we all fund because we all benefit. In her words, "It's not a personal failure. It's a policy failure." #childcarecosts #costofliving #workingparents #birthrate #australianmums

Nikka 🇦🇺

Open In TikTok:

Region: AU

Thursday 24 September 2026 03:41:24 GMT