Raising a teenager on $85 a week - the case for a renewed policy focus on the costs of older children and young people
Peter Davidson
Australian Council of Social Services
Contact Email:   peteracoss.org.au

Contemporary public debate over reform of family payments is focussed on the financial and time stresses facing low and middle income families with preschool age children.

For most families, this is the time when financial pressures are greatest, as one parent withdraws from the labour force and the family struggles with high mortgage payments. Indeed, "doing it tough" is a rite of passage for young Australian families.

Accordingly, over the past two decades family assistance payments have been boosted for young families, both to reduce poverty and to court swinging voters in outer suburbs.

There is some justification for this policy bias in favour of young families: the indirect costs of children - essentially the cost of caring for them at home - fall with age. Yet it ignores the well-documented fact that the direct costs of children rise with age.

The result is a large gap between the actual costs of raising older children and the family and youth payments that are supposed to meet them. Although families with older children are no more likely to be living in poverty than young families, their poverty is likely to be much deeper. For example, a jobless sole parent family with one dependent child aged 16 years receives $64 per week less in social security payments than an equivalent family with a 3 year old. Yet the research tells us that the direct costs of raising the child have risen by 50%, at the very least.

Policies to reduce child poverty should give priority to improving income support for low-income families with teenage children.

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