51–60 of 522 posts
So the three reasons given by the article. * Primarily labor driven. You can't automate, you can't reduce hours, you squeeze 9 hours of child care out of an 8 hour workday. * Regulation. This prevents the one way to lower labor cost: increasing child to adult ratio. Laws prevent this. * Real estate costs. Child care can't be moved to cheaper cities and there is even limits on the extent it can be moved within a city…
> While it’s admirable for companies to fill the day-care vacuum, the absence of a national solution is an indictment of American policy. California is very different from Vermont which is very different from Mississippi. It doesn't make any more sense for the three to have identical child-care systems than it does for Denmark, Italy and Lithuania. I don't find his argument that only the federal government is large e…
Why would you think this? I’m pretty sure there are way more cases of child abuse by parents than child abuse by day care workers. Day care workers don’t deal with children with much privacy, there are other kids and day care workers, whereas parents have none of those constraints. Also, for day care workers, it’s just a job, vs. parents who are more emotionally caught up in taking care of their kids (and could make more mistakes due to emotions).
The thing with female workforce participation: isn't it just symptom of the society getting poorer. My wife worked her ass off. I was making about 130k / year. She was making about 60k / year. Then we not only moved from the US to Poland (where live is just so much cheaper). But I also started making about 330k / year. All the willingness to work evaporated on her part :-) Instead we have another kid. She stopped tal…
anyone that thinks being the primary caregiver is easier than working out of home is delusional. the pressure would probably crush my wife, honestly.
but here we are, the cost of caregiving meeting our standards are high, and unless i also make $300k a year in the bay area, we’re just going to hit a break even point for all the different people that need to replace me.
It really comes down to the ratio. Our state has a 4-1 ratio for infants (which is entirely reasonable). You are basically paying for 1/4 of a person's time. If you want to put them into a daycare where the worker is adequately paid, that's $6000 a year alone, let alone overhead costs for facilities/admin. No matter who pays for it, raising children is time consuming. And time is becoming more valuable.
1-14m: 7:2
15-32m: 9:2
33m-7y: 10:1
-- https://child-familyservices.org/wp-content/uploads/ma-regulations.pdfEarlier quoted context omitted.
I would be very careful about making that large a generalization (that all else being equal, women would prefer to stay home over working). Childcare is mind numbing work, especially with young kids. Sure, some women (and men) would prefer that, but a LOT of women prefer office work over raising children. "why not to enjoy life instead of spending 50-60 hours at the office?" is really selling short how much work rais…
well, somehow the society at large has no problem with exactly opposite generalization: that women prefer to work over staying home with their kids. It is an individual matter, I agree. With most women definitely having the preference of staying at home. But for that the right partner is needed, i.e. one who provides enough resources for her and her kids. If this is not present she will go to work. We decided as a so…
Women's introduction to the workforce was the right thing to happen but it fundamentally hurt labor and the "middle class". You can't double the supply without changing anything in the system and inflationary effects of dual income are ridiculous.
Well it's a chicken and an egg thing. Did women entering the workforce hurt labor? Or was labor hurting and that's why women entered the workforce?
It doesn't have to be this way. Québec has had subsidized daycare for almost 25 years, and the program literally pays for itself (and more!) via increased income taxes from parents that would have otherwise chosen to stay at home. https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/12/affordable-daycare-su... > In Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, a day of child care cost on average $10 in 2016 > Quebec’s program, which introduced lo…
I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce.
This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they have, and of course, caring for the family is not a proper job.
That is so wrong on so many levels.
I am not claiming that it is easy, the best or the most engaging or whatever. I only claim that society has given up on valuing raising one’s children and keeping the household together, and this is terrible.
I'm glad the population is mind-bogglingly large so I don't feel obligated to have kids. I can save a lot of money and enjoy peace & quiet while I get better at skateboarding and science and playing video games. Plus, no wife. I never have to do things I don't want to. I never have to please anybody. It rocks.
I believe your opinion is similar to climate change denial since all the experts on the subject disagree with you.
This may be somewhat off-topic, but I'm often surprised that leftist policies like the article advocates are often proposed at a national level? Why is this? Why not propose a state-sponsored child-care system in a leftist state - California, Washington, Massachusetts, etc. I'm not trying to start a war here, simply genuinely interested why people on the left push national social programs versus propose them in very…
The thing with female workforce participation: isn't it just symptom of the society getting poorer. My wife worked her ass off. I was making about 130k / year. She was making about 60k / year. Then we not only moved from the US to Poland (where live is just so much cheaper). But I also started making about 330k / year. All the willingness to work evaporated on her part :-) Instead we have another kid. She stopped tal…
I would be very careful about making that large a generalization (that all else being equal, women would prefer to stay home over working). Childcare is mind numbing work, especially with young kids. Sure, some women (and men) would prefer that, but a LOT of women prefer office work over raising children. "why not to enjoy life instead of spending 50-60 hours at the office?" is really selling short how much work rais…
> It is NOT enjoying life to stay home with toddlers.
> I was so happy to be able to go back to work
> the weekends are way more stressful than the weekdays
I have to say, this kind of perspective on being a parent puzzles me, even though it's pretty widely held. Honestly, many parents I encounter seem almost as if they'd prefer to be their child's aunt or uncle than their mom or dad. Certainly not in title, but possibly in terms of responsibilities.
I get it, raising kids is HARD. But the sense of purpose I feel about writing code that helps my company's investors become slightly richer is totally unlike the sense of purpose I feel about teaching my child about the alphabet, even if many days it feels like a slog.
I like this quote from G.K. Chesterton about the importance of this work. Chesterton is talking specifically about a mother, but I think it holds true whether the primary caregiver is a father or a mother:
> To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.