Love, Labour, and Wages: Should Society Pay Parents?

While everyone, parents and non-parents alike, benefit from children, parents alone incur the cost of bearing and raising them. Johan Bester argues that, since society tasks parents with the labourious and financially burdensome task of raising children, and children are a social good, society has an obligation to help ease the burden of parenting by offering direct financial compensation to parents. While I agree that society should do much more to support parents, I am not convinced that the support should include direct financial payment to parents. After setting out Bester's arguments for this position and distinguishing it from a similar argument in political science, I offer a series of concerns: parenting is unlike socially beneficial employment-type work; Bester's argument may extend in problematic directions; financial incentives may harm the parent-child relationship; and there are other ways to promote parenting. Despite being critical, the purpose of this paper is to invite further discussion among bioethicists on how society can support parents in the important task of parenting.