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Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

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Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#111

Post by Analemma_ »

ch4s3 wrote: post #66
UncleOxidant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not having kids I didn't realize how insane childcare costs had gotten. Someone posted an article to a local reddit that says people are pre-registering unborn children for childcare because there are so few slots available. Others responses indicated that it's running around $1500 to $2000/month for childcare. Add in housing costs and no wonder people are hesitant to have kids now.

Yeah its really insane. The child care space has been legislated into un-affordability. Between licensing requirements, staffing ratios, building codes, and a litany of other requirements its a service that can basically only be provided to upper middle class families if not HEAVILY subsidized.

It’s genuinely not legislation. Labor is expensive, which combined with the reality that anything beyond a 4:1 child-caretaker ratio is pretty bad for children pretty much guarantees that child care can never be cheap in a rich country with rich country labor costs.

EDIT: I should've said "infants" and not "children" here, where the necessity of a 4:1 ratio really applies. As children get older this ratio can get higher.

I recommend https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-math..., from someone who just assumed that child care costs were because of government intervention, and then did the math and found out this isn’t the case.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#112

Post by sokoloff »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #55
BWStearns wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's apparently one big driver in the labor shortage. Childcare costs were so high that when everyone was home people realized the second job wasn't actually that useful and now there's one stay-at-home parent (seems weighted towards mothers[0]). [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/14/some-gender...

Thanks for posting this - that's been my general theory regarding a big portion of the labor shortage, but I didn't have much info to back this up. If you are a mother making near minimum wage (which, these days, is around $15 in most major metros, regardless of what the actual law is), and you need to be on the job site for 8 hours/day, you're barely if even covering the cost of child care plus commuting and other j…

My wife stayed home for several years after we realized that nearly every dollar of post-tax, post-401K cashflow her job brought in went right out to childcare (and she had a well above US median household income, PhD-required job in science). She was happier; kids seemed happy; she's now back in the workforce at a similar role and happy with that transition back as well. (We did lose N years of 401K max contributions, but that seems totally worth it.)

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#113

Post by logifail »

CalRobert wrote: post #88
poulsbohemian wrote: post #72

It's election season and I've been out talking to voters, who share their life stories... what I would say is that there are many women who are choosing WFH because they either can't afford or can't find day care, which may lead to deciding that hey, they might as well have another baby if they are now committed to this employment model. I've spoken to several women who were over-qualified for the jobs they had taken…

We had two kids largely because my wife was resigned to her career already being destroyed, so why not?

> We had two kids largely because my wife was resigned to her career already being destroyed, so why not?

there are also some men out here with (how can I put this nicely?) less-than-stellar-careers precisely because of this factor, too.

[We live in a perhaps-somewhat-less-than-entirely-enlightened part of Europe] and our local "Mum and Baby" group finally got round to renaming itself to "Parent and Baby" group after I started attending the third time around... :)

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#114

Post by time_to_smile »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #54
BWStearns wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's apparently one big driver in the labor shortage. Childcare costs were so high that when everyone was home people realized the second job wasn't actually that useful and now there's one stay-at-home parent (seems weighted towards mothers[0]). [0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/14/some-gender...

Not having kids I didn't realize how insane childcare costs had gotten. Someone posted an article to a local reddit that says people are pre-registering unborn children for childcare because there are so few slots available. Others responses indicated that it's running around $1500 to $2000/month for childcare. Add in housing costs and no wonder people are hesitant to have kids now.

What's really insane is that the actual people providing childcare get paid pretty horrendously given that they are the ones that are going to be taking care of your kid potentially 8 hours a day (and it is a really challenging job).

This also means that there is concerningly high variance in the quality of individual care providers, since it's a difficult job and pays awful you get the usual mix of "passionate about kids" and "I can't find any other work". Even the best facilities you have to be very observant to make sure your kid doesn't end up in a bad situation. I recall one care provider fondly telling me how much she loves riding her bike to work only to later find out she had her license taken away by repeated DUIs and another that fled the country after too many parents complained about situations that looked a lot like abuse.

Ultimately they're very much like nursing homes for small children. Very frustrating to pay so much only to have to remain vigilant that you don't pick up your kid only to find they've been sitting in some other kid's pee for an hour.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#115

Post by hollywood_court »

ndriscoll wrote: post #103
poulsbohemian wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if subsidized, if there aren't providers it doesn't actually fix the problem. Here in WA we have the Fair Start act to provide subsidies, but where it gets weird now is... does government step in and also start state-funded care facilities to cover the gap? Or does government create incentives to bring more private care providers into the market? As you point out, there's also a question of whether we've created…

I guess it's a matter of social networking, but I would think essentially any stay-at-home mom could still take in a few kids. It wouldn't even occur to me to check whether that's "allowed".

In addition to taking “in a few kids” they would also take on a great amount of liability and risk.

I’m a stay at home dad or at least I was until my son started pre-k a few months ago.

There’s no amount of money that would make me feel comfortable also taking care of someone else’s children in my home. Just not worth the trouble or the risk.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#116

Post by setr »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #86
lupire wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think $2000/month after taxes is a good price?

There is no such thing as a “good” price. It might just be that the supply of labor to enable the price that people desire for childcare does not exist.

Childcare (specifically thinking of daycare) strikes me as a low-skill job, so labor volume should be fairly high -- excluding I guess things like extra-filtering for background. And as far as I can think of, there's no substantial upfront costs outside of the normal elements -- building, room setup, initial training, etc. It also strikes me as something that can be done with some scalability -- a decent sized group of children can presumably be supported by relatively few adults. At least proven by schools, which can have like a 1:16 - 1:24 teacher:child ratio.

So it seems strange to me that each child would cost ~$15/hr -- the full cost of a single low-skill resource, 1:1 with children; You're not seeing the scalability of groups kick in. Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand, it seems clear this isn't simply supply/demand. There are many who want childcare, but there are many more who should be capable of supporting it.

There are also of course difference in popularity/quality which will contribute to a price gradient, but if you're seeing $2k/mo/child as your "basic daycare" costs, there's something up -- there's no inherent reason to the job that I can think of that would stop someone from undercutting that price point.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#117

Post by tkk23 »

poulsbohemian wrote: post #72

It's election season and I've been out talking to voters, who share their life stories... what I would say is that there are many women who are choosing WFH because they either can't afford or can't find day care, which may lead to deciding that hey, they might as well have another baby if they are now committed to this employment model. I've spoken to several women who were over-qualified for the jobs they had taken…

>who were over-qualified for the jobs they had taken to WFH

What's missing to link those women to matching jobs? There must also be many new mothers who would like to work but who haven't found a WFH job.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#118

Post by hollywood_court »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #84
ch4s3 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah its really insane. The child care space has been legislated into un-affordability. Between licensing requirements, staffing ratios, building codes, and a litany of other requirements its a service that can basically only be provided to upper middle class families if not HEAVILY subsidized.

Typically, infants are at 1:4 ratio and toddlers 1:7 and at 3 year olds, 1:10. (Massachusetts has a 2:7 infant ratio). Having managed 1 infant myself, even 1:4 seems like a lot of responsibility. I would not want my infant or toddler to be watched over by more lenient ratios.

The ratio is part of the reason we pulled our son from daycare so early and kept him at home until he was the proper age for pre-k.

In his daycare class there was one adult looking after up to 9 children. One adult that didn’t earn a living wage and didn’t have any kind of benefits. There is no way a reasonable person could possibly trust that adult to be both content and provide a decent quality of care.

The adults in the room were always visibly angry and frustrated and a reasonable person could not blame them.

Re: Remote work may have fueled a baby boom among U.S. women

#120

Post by lotsofpulp »

setr wrote: post #116
lotsofpulp wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a “good” price. It might just be that the supply of labor to enable the price that people desire for childcare does not exist.

Childcare (specifically thinking of daycare) strikes me as a low-skill job, so labor volume should be fairly high -- excluding I guess things like extra-filtering for background. And as far as I can think of, there's no substantial upfront costs outside of the normal elements -- building, room setup, initial training, etc. It also strikes me as something that can be done with some scalability -- a decent sized group…

Why are you assuming a job that is presumably low skill has a high supply of people willing to sell their time to perform that low skill job?

> Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand

I would start with liability costs, it must be massive for a professional daycare facility given how emotionally invested people are with their kids. Next would be redundancy of employees. Babies and toddlers transmit tons of germs, and so the adults around them would get sick too. Plus legally mandated ratios means there has to be adequate coverage for vacations, sick days, emergencies, turn over, etc.

And the population of working age people continues to decline, so I would not associate low skill with high supply of labor. I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a daycare employee.

I also would not describe managing multiple babies and toddlers properly as low skill, or at least not low effort. It seems to be very strenuous, and I do not think I could do it.

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