10 Easy Ways to Make Money Off Your Children

Your child will cost you around a quarter of a million dollars and hand you nothing back for 18 years, a return you'd never tolerate anywhere else in your life.

Good news! Families all over the world have been solving this for centuries, and most of it is easier than you'd think.

Start a YouTube channel for your toddler

You'll make: Low six figures a year once you're past a million subscribers, and a lot more when the brand deals come in. Difficulty: Easy! You already own a phone.

Film her constantly and post daily. The trick is that meltdowns perform better than happy footage, so when she starts crying, keep going. Don't put the camera down, because the clip where she sobs and then hugs you is the one that pays for the extension on the house. Her best years are two through nine, so don't dawdle. A handful of states have started asking parents to put a slice in trust for her, but only a handful, and you can always move.

Marry off your daughter as early as you can

You'll make: Cattle, cash, or land from his family, depending on where you live. Difficulty: One conversation. She may cry through it, but it's still only one conversation.

Say yes to the first serious offer. Nobody has ever thought to tie bride price to the girl's age, which means every year you wait is money you're leaving on the table for no reason at all. Fourteen is workable. And if you happen to live somewhere the dowry runs the other direction, it's even more straightforward, because every extra year of school makes her pricier for you to marry off later. Take her out now, and you've saved yourself thousands before she turns 16.

Send your daughter to relatives in the city to work as their housemaid

You'll make: One less mouth at your table, plus a monthly envelope from Auntie. Difficulty: A bus fare and one short conversation.

Tell everyone she's going for school. In West Africa this arrangement is called confiage, and the school part almost always falls away within a fortnight, at which point she's cooking for a household of six and raising somebody else's babies. Nobody will question you, because the schooling story is the story everyone tells. It's genuinely the cheapest thing on this list.

Take a cash advance from a brick kiln and have your son work it off

You'll make: The full advance today, in your hand. Difficulty: Easy. The kiln does all the paperwork.

Walk in, name your figure, take the money. Your son works it down afterward at a rate the kiln sets. The lovely part: the interest climbs faster than a nine-year-old can carry bricks, so the debt never actually closes. He'll still be paying it down at 30. Meanwhile, you're finished and there's nothing further for you to do about any of it.

Sign your son to a sports academy or a trainee company and take a cut of his contract

You'll make: A percentage of the signing bonus, which occasionally runs to seven figures. Difficulty: You'll need to hand him over around 12.

Agree to your share in writing first, then let him go. A Dominican buscón will house and train him from 12 and split the baseball bonus with you when it comes. An agent in Dakar will take a few thousand in cash to fly him to a trial in Belgium, though do be aware that most of those men simply keep the money. A company in Seoul will take him as a trainee and charge the vocal coaching and the dental work back against earnings that may never arrive, which isn't your problem, because you're not the one repaying it. Roughly nine in 10 come out at 19 with no schooling and no contract. That costs you nothing! The seven years were his.

Spend your daughter's acting money before she turns 18

You'll make: Every dollar of it if you're reasonably prompt. Difficulty: Easy, provided you don't dawdle.

The checks come to you, and managing her money is almost indistinguishable from spending her money so long as you don't sit down and think about it too carefully. Jackie Coogan's parents went through his whole fortune, and all he got was a law with his name on it. That law is 70 years old and still needed, which really tells you everything about how reliably this keeps working.

Open credit cards and loans in your baby's name

You'll make: Whatever the limits allow. Cards, personal loans, utilities, the lot. Difficulty: Easy! The birth certificate is already in the drawer.

Use the number on it. It's spotless and nobody will look at it until she applies for a car loan at 22, by which point the balance is large and the trail is stone cold. Could she report it? She could. But that means sitting in an office and telling a stranger her mother did this to her, and hardly any of them can bring themselves to, so hardly any of them do. They just pay it off.

Run a crowdfunding campaign off your child's diagnosis

You'll make: The cost of treatment and then considerably more than the cost of treatment. Difficulty: Some upkeep. Donations stall around week two.

Set your goal well above the actual bill, because nobody has ever once asked to see a bill, and a campaign that's already hit its target stops pulling in anybody new. Then work the updates. Post every few days whether anything has actually changed, since a warm update containing no news performs just as well as one containing news, and momentum is the entire game. Thank people publicly and by name. The only figure worth watching is the gap between what the hospital charged you and what strangers sent, and that gap is yours, and no one at any point in this process is going to ask you about it.

Have your eldest daughter do all the childcare and housework for free

You'll make: About what a full-time care worker costs, saved every month, for years. Difficulty: None. She's already doing some of it.

Give her the younger three and put her on the register Saturdays. Never call it a job and never offer her anything, and she won't ask, because she'll be too busy being proud of how mature everyone keeps telling her she is. If you farm, the law is openly helping you here: federal rules exempt kids working land their parents own from most of the protections that cover every other child in America. Someone went and lobbied for that exemption on purpose. It's been sitting there for decades with your name on it.

Raise your children to send you money for the rest of their lives

You'll make: Four decades of transfers, beginning with her very first paycheck. Difficulty: Eighteen years of setup. Subsequently, it maintains itself.

Everything above is short money. The real one is the move your mother made on you, which is to bring up a daughter who wires half her salary home every month forever and never once stops to ask why she does it. Start early, around four, and use guilt, which is free. China has actually written the obligation into law. Almost nowhere else has to bother, because shame runs at no cost and has never in the whole of human history missed a payment. ■