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Baby first, no kidding!

By Sun Xiaohua (China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-01 08:16

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.

Children eat at a kindergarten in Shanghai. China's childcare market is worth about 500 billion yuan a year. [CFP]

"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.

Beijing Answer Marketing Consulting Ltd, a company engaging in researching statistics about children, discovered average spending on youngsters aged up to six years accounted for one-third of a family's expenditure.

And the cost doesn't always end when the child comes of age. Some parents fork out for a car or even a place to live for their loved one.

The baby care market is worth about 500 billion yuan a year and is expected to double next year.

Since 2000, the industry has seen an annual growth of about 30 percent, much higher than China's double-digit annual gross domestic product growth over the last decade, according to Hangzhou Baby Care Industry Association.

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Analysts are widely agreed that the baby goods industry can serve as a locomotive to drive China's domestic consumption.

Chinese parents, like those of any other nation, want the best for their children and, with the now traditional 4-2-1 structure of grandparents, parents and child, the youngster is the focus of a lot of attention.

Many born in the late 1970s and 1980s were products of the one-child policy that continues to this day.

A survey by Beijing Answer Marketing Consulting Ltd conducted between 2007 and 2008 looked at the expenditure pattern on youngsters as they grew up.

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