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Children eat at a kindergarten in Shanghai. China's childcare market is worth about 500 billion yuan a year. |
The prospect of having a baby is enough to make many people break out into a cold sweat. These days the challenges ahead are not just sleepless nights and a drastic change in lifestyle but also the growing cost in financial terms.
Indeed, for Huang Li, a 30-something employee of a Beijing IT company, a baby would be "more like a God-sent burden than a gift", even though it would delight his wife.
The healthy couple, who have been married for five years, live comfortably with a higher-than-average income in a small apartment and have a car.
But after checking with friends and colleagues, he was appalled at the impact fatherhood would have on his take-home pay.
"I would have to spend thousands of yuan on the baby every month," Huang said, who calculated a monthly spend of 1,000 yuan on milk powder, 500 yuan on disposable diapers and 1,500 yuan on kindergarten - a total of 3,000 yuan.
"Most importantly, I would need to get a bigger apartment of at least 100 sqm so my parents or in-laws could move in," he said.
Huang said both he and his wife would continue to work, necessitating the roping in of grandparents to help with childcare.
He reckoned almost all the couple's approximately 15,000 yuan monthly income would be spoken for.
More than 16 million couples in China took the leap into parenthood last year, and it's a figure that is growing 10 percent year-on-year.
In 2008, about 25 million babies were born in China. There were more than 100 million infants under the age of six - a figure close to half of the entire population of the United States.
