The cafeteria was loud with the noise of admitted students committing to their future, but at a corner table, a mother and her youngest child hunched over a phone screen. A spreadsheet glowed with columns of pros and cons, tuition figures, and distance from home. The child, who uses they/them pronouns, had just watched peers pledge themselves to the university, and the weight of the looming decision pressed down. This was not the first time the mother had shepherded a child through the college admissions maze—she had sent four others before—but it was the first time the choice would take her child six hours away, to a campus that had offered a customized visit and a financial aid review that shaved thousands off the cost.

That private reckoning is being repeated in households across continents, though the numbers on the spreadsheet are growing starker. In Italy, an observatory run by Legacoop and Ipsos found that for 21 per cent of families, a single child consumes between 40 and 70 per cent of household income, with clothing, schoolbooks, and medical expenses hitting working-class families disproportionately hard. Viewed from Buenos Aires, the arithmetic is shifting from how to afford children to whether to have them at all: a longitudinal study by the Universidad Austral revealed that only 46 per cent of Argentines now consider having children very important, a drop of 31 percentage points in a decade, and among those aged 18 to 34, barely a third see parenthood as essential to a full life. In the United States, a parallel calculation is playing out in the spread between a four-year university degree—averaging over $38,000 annually—and a community college education at roughly a tenth of that price, a gap that, once interest on federal loans is factored in, can swing a family’s balance sheet by more than $114,000 over two decades.

Yet the ledgers of family life contain entries that no spreadsheet captures. A study published in JAMA Pediatrics, the first of its kind in a major medical journal, tracked 130,267 births in the state of Georgia and found that 796 fathers died within five years of their child’s arrival; 60 per cent of those deaths were from preventable causes—homicide, accidental injury, suicide, overdose. The researchers, based at Northwestern University, noted that while fatherhood overall was associated with lower mortality, the transition to parenthood left many men dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, in Brazil’s Campinas region, public defenders have recorded 10,652 children registered without a father’s name since 2016. A national campaign called “Meu Pai Tem Nome” offers free legal assistance to establish paternity, but for mothers like Andréia Pereira Barbosa, the process stalls when the alleged father simply does not show up for a DNA test. In Indiana, state law is equally blunt: if parents are not married and paternity has not been legally established, the newborn’s birth certificate bears only the mother’s surname.

Against this backdrop, the advice handed down to young people entering adulthood is taking on a harder, more practical edge. A college instructor who has taught more than a thousand students over a decade urges parents to let their children handle their own communications with professors, to enrol them in self-defence classes before they leave for campus, and to research mental health resources early. A 23-year-old Haitian-American student who worked as a home health aide through community college and into her university years describes the job’s physical toll—operating a Hoyer lift to transfer a patient from bed to wheelchair, a device she likens to a parachute that you pump by hand—and the emotional weight of losing a long-term client. “It’s definitely a rewarding job because you’re helping someone in need,” she said, “but it does take a lot out of you.”

In a small apartment in Piracicaba, a cleaning woman named Fabiana Fernanda do Prado Rodrigues is still waiting for the fathers of her two youngest children to acknowledge them. “They didn’t want to register them and said they weren’t theirs,” she told a local television crew. Her children’s birth certificates remain incomplete, a blank space where a name should be. It is a silence that echoes across the data sets and the dining-table calculations, a reminder that the cost of raising a child is measured not only in euros, pesos, or dollars, but in the weight of what is absent.