Parents are rarely short of sources of crushing guilt and night-time waking, but here’s an unlikely new reason to feel you’ve let your offspring down. Have you got your kid a pension? If not, why not, you feckless loser? Rather than screen-free childhoods, Stem camp subscriptions or gourmet bento lunchboxes, the latest middle-class must-have, according to the Times, is a Junior Sipp, or “self-invested personal pension”. Get started early, and the voodoo of compound interest over time could mean you’re well on the way to making the apple of your eye an “alpha pension millionaire”.
Even more inherited wealth disparity – exactly what this country needs! People wondering whether their own pension (if they have one) will be enough for a thimbleful of gruel 30 years from now may find this suggestion somewhat fanciful; last month the Pensions Commission warned that at least 15 million of us aren’t saving enough for our own retirement, let alone anyone else’s. Plus kids already cost an arm, a leg and a kidney. In 2024, the Child Poverty Action Group calculated raising a child in the UK to 18 cost £260,000 (£290,000 for lone parents); it’s probably even more now. Are parents really doing this? It seems like a big and unwarranted vote of confidence in the global economy and geopolitics, given the dire state of both.
It’s too late for my kids anyway (sorry, lads), but in view of the above, I propose we collectively choose to view this as about as realistic a prospect as getting a teenager to stick to their revision timetable, and let ourselves off the hook. Let’s, instead, enjoy the silliness. Imagine a preschooler with a pension, searching for their reading glasses so they can check on their portfolio in the FT over a flaxseed-heavy breakfast, with their child espresso and child statins – adorable! What other later life essentials do our children need to get a head start on – National Trust membership, good secateurs, Wigmore Hall season tickets? If they get those, they should also get the dodgy knees, creeping sense of squandered potential and weird crush on an Antiques Roadshow expert – it’s only fair.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
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