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Why Child Care Is So Expensive

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Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#221

Post by chris5745 »

pfortuny wrote: post #57
jperras wrote: post #7

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…

“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”. 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 hav…

I understand the spirit of your position, but I think many or most people certainly value “homemaking” for lack of a better term. It’s not a “job” in the sense of monetary revenue, but it makes having a “job” possible for a partner, and has indirect monetary value in addition to the non-quantifiable value of the role itself. Like many “jobs”, homemaking is almost always thankless. I think instead of trying to get our caretaker(s) on the cover of Fortune or whatever we should just thank them more.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#222

Post by com2kid »

tharne wrote: post #206
pfortuny wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”. 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 hav…

Agreed. There are very few things in life as important as raising one's children well. To say that we should incentivize or otherwise coerce people into outsourcing the upbringing of their own children so they can punch a time-clock is beyond misguided. We've elevated "careers" to an almost god-like status where we end up engineering our lives to serve our careers instead of the other way around.

> Agreed. There are very few things in life as important as raising one's children well. To say that we should incentivize or otherwise coerce people into outsourcing the upbringing of their own children so they can punch a time-clock is beyond misguided.

This same statement can be applied to healthcare (our family's health is one of the most important things we have, why do we outsource it to doctors?) and cooking (nutritious meals are the keystones of a good life, why do we let anyone else cook for our family?)

Also how is giving someone a choice to work or raise kids misguided? Are you assuming people don't get satisfaction from their work? Or that there can't be a balance?

I'll agree that we worship at the corporate alter too much, and that our society actively works against raising a family, but helping lower the cost of childcare is encouraging families.

As it stands right now people aren't having kids because it is so expensive, and telling them "your values are wrong, stop working and have a kid instead!" isn't going to change minds en masse.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#223

Post by captainredbeard »

buboard wrote: post #220

Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home (excluding single parents of course)? Either childcare is not a big expense , or there's some kind of societal taboo against raising your own kids at home? Is this part of the bigger bubble that makes raising kids so effortful and costly in time, that people just end up not having them?

Social pressure against stay-at-home moms is a large force that often goes unrecognized.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#224

Post by pwthornton »

buboard wrote: post #220

Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home (excluding single parents of course)? Either childcare is not a big expense , or there's some kind of societal taboo against raising your own kids at home? Is this part of the bigger bubble that makes raising kids so effortful and costly in time, that people just end up not having them?

This logic could be applied to k-12 education, which would be rather expensive if not government-subsidized.

Pre-school in particular benefits both the children who receive it and the parents who are able to work. A lack of affordable childcare disproportionally falls on women as well, which is something worth tackling.

The other issue not even mentioned here is that childcare and pre-school are expensive but they don't pay well. A larger role from the government would pay these people more and provide more stability for pre-school teachers and children alike.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#225

Post by kcolford »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #52
zeveb wrote: post #40

> 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…

> While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often. 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…

Furthermore, there are significant screenings that happen before a child care worker can become one while there's virtually none before someone becomes a parent. It's only after the fact that an abuser is caught.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#227

Post by mrlala »

buboard wrote: post #220

Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home (excluding single parents of course)? Either childcare is not a big expense , or there's some kind of societal taboo against raising your own kids at home? Is this part of the bigger bubble that makes raising kids so effortful and costly in time, that people just end up not having them?

>Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home

Well if both parents are fairly career driven, it's pretty hard to stay at home for 6+ years until full day school starts, and that is only for 1 kid.. could be 8/9 years with 2 kids close in age. Since it's usually the woman, she is basically giving up any solid career having that kind of work gap.

And you say 'work at home' but you can't have a fulltime working at home job with very young kids. You could manage it to some degree at age 4/5+ but before then you would hardly have any time to actually focus on a job at home.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#228

Post by giarc »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #195
giarc wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree... we pay a dayhome (a licensed childcare in someone's home) $875/month which includes 9 hours of care per day and 3'ish meals per day. That's like $40/day or like $4/hour. Where else are you going to get that value?!

The median household income in the US is $59K. Paying $875/month isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination. What value.

$875 is in Canadian dollars in a large urban city.

I stand by my comment that $4/hour childcare is good value. Please show me somewhere in North America where that is expensive.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#229

Post by roenxi »

yorwba wrote: post #112
jaltekruse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure this is the strongest case you could make for saying this ought to be the responsibility of the government. If people can make more working than childcare costs, then they can make their own decision about how to invest their own time and money. Why does the government need to pay for this, if they argument is ultimately that the wages of women now working is what ends up paying the cost of the service?…

> If people can make more working than childcare costs, then they can make their own decision about how to invest their own time and money. Why does the government need to pay for this, if they argument is ultimately that the wages of women now working is what ends up paying the cost of the service? Before a stay-at-home parent enters the workforce, they may not have the money to pay for the childcare that would free…

That is an excellent reason to provide maybe 1 or 2 months of subsidised healthcare to women who with children who are seeking work. Something extremely targeted and modest. But it seems a bit questionable in the thread context of "the program literally pays for itself" which presumably means the program is encouraging high earning women to enter the workforce, ie, those with valuable skills, substantial experience and a contacts network that means they can probably bear the cost of finding work.

Re: Why Child Care Is So Expensive

#230

Post by namdnay »

kelnos wrote: post #171
wklauss wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, even at a more local level. New York City, for example, has a free pre-k (4yo) program. But in order to be effective, some of these policies need to be applied nationwide. In other cases, state budgets are simply too constrained for them. Like someone said in the comments, this is a program that could paid itself with the income tax from both parents working, but in the US the majority of income tax goes to…

> Like someone said in the comments, this is a program that could paid itself with the income tax from both parents working That's a bit of a weird point to make, though. That income tax is already going toward paying for government programs. If you divert some of that to pay for early child care, some other programs will be left under- or unfunded.

The idea is that these programs bring additional tax revenue by encouraging parents to work
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