41–50 of 127 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you make just enough money at work to pay for childcare, what the heck are you doing? $540/40hrs = $13.5/hr. Any number of jobs pay this little.
That's take home pay. With taxes it's much higher.
I'd recommend reading the linked briefs for a high level overview.
The failure to me seems in outsourcing your child to a daycare, vs parents having flexible schedules to actually take care of your kid (either 1 with PT job or staying home FT, or both with flexible jobs). I understand this isn't popular in our culture these days, but I imagine it has many positive outcomes for the child and family.
I'm not saying you're saying this, but there's this fallacy/myth out there that if you don't want to spend 24 hours a day (or all waking hours of the day) with your child and responsible for their well-being, then you're a bad parent or damaging them or something. It's possible to love your kids, enjoy spending time with them, be a great parent, and also find it exhausting or even untenable to be responsible for them all the time.
There's also this idea floating around that people used to raise kids with an extended network of adult caregivers, and that that was good for everyone. That resonates with me. For people who don't have family around to help, daycare has sort of taken that place, for better and worse. (Daycare providers are not faceless service providers -- they become close members of your extended community!) The downsides of this are widely talked about. But I know folks who've had loads of family help ... with significant associated emotional burden.
Seems like this well educated, high income market is still organized around one parent not working full time or a grandparent living nearby.
That policy wonks are laser-focused on the "market" is the problem. This is one aspect of the capitalism-fueled social collapse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you make just enough money at work to pay for childcare, what the heck are you doing? $540/40hrs = $13.5/hr. Any number of jobs pay this little.
That's take home pay. With taxes it's much higher.
A few thoughts: 1. Waitlists are a scam. In NYC, it's ~$150 non-refundable just to apply, and daycares won't tell you how long their waitlist is (and per the article, are often over subscribed). I wish there was legislation that these are refundable, or capped at ~$20 or so. 2. The cost of daycare here is around $2500/kid. So with two kids, you're looking at $60k/year, which is $100k pre-tax. And so if you have two k…
Career progression paths tend to yield highly backloaded payoff.
This is all anecdotal, but I believe they did their research on this given their childcare needs.
We paid a lot of money for childcare when there was a (possibly illegal) daycare a few apartments down with a lady watching a bunch of kids. She only wanted $500 a month but we paid $2000 to an expensive one. Imagine advocating for cut rate care for your own children . Considering I’m leaving my most priceless thing with strangers it isn’t crazy to me that it’s expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A significant part of what you were paying out is liability insurance etc and not necessarily better care.
I don’t mean to say I want the illegal daycare outlawed. I’m sure the lady was fine. I just think it’s absurd that we expect daycare to be cheap when you are entrusting the most valuable thing in your entire life to strangers. People think this should be free?
They aren't strangers if you take the time to get to know them, and their current customer families, beforehand.