Investing In One's Children - the Payoff

Readers may have noticed my blogging absence in the last few weeks. One of the reasons for the absence is that I have been enjoying one of my kids' graduation from medical school. Though the achievement is primarily hers, there is definitely an enormous pride and pleasure for me as a parent to see the fruit of many years of time, effort and money spent raising her. The payoff of such investment is primarily emotional for the parent but for the child there is also the tangible reward of higher earnings. Doctors are extremely well paid (though saddled initially with average education debt for a new doctor apparently in the order of $150k) but higher education means higher pay on average across the board - by almost 40% in Canada over secondary education according to the Education Counts website (which also shows that women earn only about 60% what men do ... the fact that about two-thirds of the new doctors in the class were women will chip away at that statistic). Education perfectly fits with the idea of investment as something that pays off later.