How Children Went from Worthless to Priceless
Looking back at wrongful death cases in the United States reveals a startling fact: the financial value of a child has changed dramatically.
In 1896, for example, the parents of a two-year-old killed due to the negligence of the Southern Railroad Company of Georgia asked a judge for compensation. They argued that their child performed errands worth two dollars per month, but they received nothing beyond the cost of a burial. The judge concluded “that the child was ‘of such tender years as to be unable to have any earning capacity, and hence the defendant could not be held liable in damages.’”
Today, however, parents do not need to prove the economic value of a lost child to receive compensation. Instead they refer to their emotional pain. On this basis, a judge in a 1979 case awarded the parents of a three-year-old who died from fluoride poisoning at the dentist $750,000.
So why did the value of a child change from worthless to nearly priceless?
.. She argues that children became “sacralized” in the late 1800s and early 1900s—a process that transformed children from un-sentimentalized but economically useful little people to economically useless yet emotionally priceless treasures.
.. Middle class reformers led a movement against child labor, successfully passing legislation despite the objections of working class parents who relied on their children’s contributions to the family finances. Reducing infant mortality became a primary public health concern. Car accidents that killed children incited previously incomprehensible expressions of sorrow and outrage that manifested in public memorials.
.. The dramatic changes in how we conceive of childhood remind us that ascribing outcomes to “the market” can easily obscure how the inputs of supply and demand are coloured by changing social and cultural factors. A cost-benefit analysis of national parks will yield very different answers to a nation of couch potatoes compared to a nation of John Muir outdoorsmen.