Does your baby have a pension yet? If not, why not | Emma Beddington

Parents are being encouraged to give kids their own ‘self-invested personal pension’. But where’s the money coming from? Fifteen million of us aren’t saving enough for our own retirement

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.