31–40 of 138 posts
It seems child nurses earn a LOT more than the average IT person?
I know one shouldn't question orthodoxy, but it seems insane to me to have children and then dump them all day, from a young age, with strangers. What's the point of having them if you're not raising them?
It surprises me how rarely this gets said. It seems kind of obvious to me. In Canada a few years ago one party announced billions of funding for government-run daycare centers, while the other party (who won in the end) wanted to give the money as tax credits to parents. Seemed like a no-brainer to me, but I recall quite a controversy about how the latter proposal was "anti child care".
Perhaps the discourse is this way partly because of economics. Postwar economic growth was closely linked to women entering the workforce. A mass exodus of parents back into the home could have negative macroeconomic effects (that's the perception at any rate). From a conventional point of view, the "answer" is to prevent that from happening and commercialize child care itself.
Why is daycare so expensive? Seems to me you need a room and two to three people to watch over the children. If you have 10 children in the room, and everyone costs 40000$, that would mean it costs 400000$ per year to rent a room and pay the salary for three people? It seems child nurses earn a LOT more than the average IT person?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earnin…
With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the parent of a 2 month old, it's a difficult question we're facing right now. Who? How? When? Should my wife, with a doctorate in biochemistry, abandon her career completely and stay home? Should I? I'm not enthusiastic about those options. Should we hire someone? Not wild about that either. I think the best would be to kind of try and switch off, but it's going to require a lot of flexibility, and perhaps earnin…
With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?
We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
From the article: "Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle." It seems that Google was quite generous over the years and finally realized that given the difficult econom…
Instead, they seem to be making the subsidy -- which includes the unique benefit of having children nearby onsite -- conditional on a high level of copayment. Only if you can already afford gold-plated child-care, then you get the additional Google subsidy and proximity. If the copayment is too dear, you wind up getting no subsidy, and your children wind up farther away.
It's like welfare for the already-well-off, which excludes the most needy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?
Wow, I don't think I've ever been so offended by something on this site. Your implication that I haven't thought about the future of my daughter is... something I hope you never say to any other parent. We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
Obviously, you don't have to answer him in detail, but you could do more than simply scold the guy for asking. I know plenty of couples who never thought deeply about finances before they launched into parenthood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, did it never occur to you to get this all figured out BEFORE you had kids?
Wow, I don't think I've ever been so offended by something on this site. Your implication that I haven't thought about the future of my daughter is... something I hope you never say to any other parent. We've done our best to think about the future, but it's unknowable.
The fact is, finding a perfect solution for taking care of small children in an industrial society is probably an insoluble problem. And if so it's not one you can solve before having kids, or after them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a huge business opportunity.
If Google entered the education business its shareholders would (rightly) wonder what its competitive advantage in that market would be, and whether the margins (return on capital) would be more or less than its existing businesses. Seriously, what could Google bring to the table here?
From the article: "Meanwhile, someone at Google woke up one day and realized that the company was subsidizing each child to the tune of $37,000 a year — which nobody had noticed up until then — compared with the $12,000-a-year average subsidy of other big Silicon Valley companies like Cisco Systems and Oracle." It seems that Google was quite generous over the years and finally realized that given the difficult econom…
It seems that google was generous in the way a company is generous by having a policy to pay for traveling employees' hotel stays at the Ritz, and when it learns that they are paying 4x more than competitors who have employees stay at the Marriot, changes its policy by having employees stay at the Ritz but charging them to cover some of the subsidy, instead of changing their policy and paying for employees to stay at…
That said no one is forcing the parents to use Google child care and they could presumably band together and go to the company that ran the original lower cost care service and have them open a cost effective center near by, or something to that effect.