Having children: the luxury Spain's middle class can no longer afford

Having children: the luxury item Spain's middle class can no longer afford

A child no longer comes with a loaf of bread under its arm. It arrives with a mortgage on its back, with a nursery that costs half the rent, and with the certainty that, unless you are a millionaire, raising it means years of sacrifice. Some still see it as a life project; more and more voices describe it as a ruinous decision that perpetuates precariousness. The conversation about birth rates has turned economic, and the numbers give no respite.

Reproduction as an economic sentence

One of the harshest currents holds that bringing children into the world under current conditions is an act of selfishness or, worse, of cruelty. The life you hand over comes with guaranteed suffering: illness, disappointments, antiestéticar. And anyone who cannot offer a financial cushion is only multiplying the chain of struggle. "If you're not a millionaire, having children enslaves you for the rest of your life," they sum up.

The two-salary theory

The structural explanation for the fall in the birth rate points to the dual paycheck. When women entered the workforce en masse from the 1990s onward, the family could no longer be sustained on a single salary. From then on, housing found its alibi: two available incomes pushed prices to double. What used to cost 100,000 euros began to cost 200,000. And the birth rate plummeted, not for lack of desire, but for lack of margin.

The child as a luxury and the absent state

The diagnosis is shared even by those who oppose pessimism: raising a child has become a luxury item, a symptom of a good financial situation rather than a vocation. Public aid, when it comes, is token. The 400-euro checks, the one-off birth incentives, are remembered as demagogic patches that do not even cover a nursery, and that in no way compensate for the price paid.

The response of parenthood and the antiestéticar of loneliness

On the opposite side, parenthood is defended as the only adventure that gives meaning. The response is the experience of watching someone grow, of educating them. And it appeals to the antiestéticar of loneliness: those without children end up in care homes that no one visits. Old age is presented as the bill for selfishness.

The clash is not resolved. And at the close appears the fact that throws anyone off: "Having children is hard, but if you do it right they love you, though it's so hard that it doesn't pay off." Said by a father, not a skeptic. Perhaps the problem is that the decision to bring life into the world no longer depends on emotion, but on a calculator that keeps you awake at night.