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Why Childcare Workers Are So Poor, Even Though Childcare Costs So Much
- wolframarnold 11y agoBeing a parent of a young child myself, I can very much empathize with this article, and the plight of child care workers. The conclusions are only logical that this is an area where government support and intervention can reap vast societal benefits. There is an increasing body of research indicating that the quality of the care a child receives from birth, as well as the safety of socio-cultural environment a child is born into (which can be controlled by high quality child care), are strongly correlated with how productive a member of society the child grows up to be. Why wouldn't the government want to maximize that? If we can pay for elder care via social security, how can we afford not to pay for child care? Some countries are ahead in this regard.
- wtbob 11y ago> The conclusions are only logical that this is an area where government support and intervention can reap vast societal benefits. If it's not an economical proposition, involving the government surely can't help. The issue is that folks want a very high caregiver/child ration, for what is essentially unskilled labour (any non-pathological adolescent or adult can take care of children acceptably). So the supply of workers (i.e., just about everyone) vastly outstrips the demand. Why not just go back to single-earner households and extended families?
- smtddr 11y ago>>any non-pathological adolescent or adult can take care of children acceptably Define "acceptably". Some babysitters think it's acceptable to just chat on Facebook all day and plant the child in front of the TV for 10 hours. That's not acceptable to me, but that's more or less what you get for very cheap labor; just someone to keep you legally clear from abandoning a minor. Like those super-cheap bare minimum car insurance that does nothing but keep you legally driving. Here's the definition of acceptable when it comes to my children: Take kids to parks and museums. Can avoid using profanity around them. Won't smoke around them. Won't be speeding down the highway with them. Can be trusted not to fill my children with junk food. Can truly trust them to actively watch the kids so they don't do something crazy like sticking a fork into a power outlet or turning on the gas stove without the flame, thus filling the house with gas. Right now, the only people my wife & I trust with our kids are their grandparents... aside from the pre-school teachers. Finding quality childcare is harder than you think.
- Daishiman 11y agoHow do you want to go back to single-earner households when the vast majority of families don't have enough income to support all their members from two salaries? There is no economic incentive, system-wide, for having less people working for more money.
- sawthat 11y agoBecause many intelligent and skilled people want to have children, and they'd rather work in a challenging and rewarding job that pays them enough to pay for child care. That's why.
- hugh4 11y agoWhy is your solution more government involvement? Why not less? If there's so much money to be made in child are, why aren't childcare centres popping up on every street corner? It's the kind of business you can easily run from your house. Get five neighbours to pay you twenty bucks a day to look after their kid, and everybody is coming out ahead. I can only assume that the reason it doesn't happen is massive government licensing requirements.
- merpnderp 11y agoThat's exactly why it doesn't happen. In OK you must get specialized certifications to look after more than one kid who isn't your own.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago> Get five neighbours to pay you twenty bucks a day to look after their kid, and everybody is coming out ahead. Well, except the kids.
- hugh4 11y agoKids don't care, as long as they have a yard to play in and some other kids to play with.
- jacalata 11y agoWho said you had a yard?
- thaumasiotes 11y agoHaving been one of these kids, I can assure you this is totally untrue.
- protomyth 11y agoYou might want to look at the Harvard study on Head Start before you render that judgement.
- vacri 11y ago
- protomyth 11y ago"There is an increasing body of research indicating that the quality of the care a child receives from birth, as well as the safety of socio-cultural environment a child is born into (which can be controlled by high quality child care), are strongly correlated with how productive a member of society the child grows up to be." Can you please cite these research results. There are some specific results, but I would be interested in your long term data.
- smtddr 11y agoYou need proof that a child growing up with quality care and a quality social/cultural environment is more likely to be able to function and "succeed" in life as an adult?
- protomyth 11y agoI need proof when someone says "growing body of research".
- moonchrome 11y agoYes - I've seen studies that show things like "quality education" don't really hold up under close inspection (for eg. when you control for student performance before college difference between elite colleges and standard ones disappears). I would be interested how research defines this "high quality social/cultural environments" and how it controls for factors such as genetics, family cultural and financial background, etc. Separated twin studies would probably be ideal (but I'm not an expert in the field).
- d2xdy2 11y agoI agree; I'd like to see some long-term information on this.
- Eridrus 11y agoIt's not readily apparent that increasing the amount of children per staff member will significantly impact a child's ability to "succeed" in life as an adult. I'm not sure how we expect a 1:6 ratio to be "cheap", even before factoring in costs like real estate.
- barry-cotter 11y agoPreschool appears to have little if any benefit as measured by school achievement or teacher assessments of school readiness by first grade teacher http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/research/pri/VPKthrough3rd_final_withcover.pdf http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/research/pri/VPKthrough3rd_fin... A Randomized Control Trial of a Statewide Voluntary Prekindergarten Program on Children’s Skills and Behaviors through Third Grade >The third question we addressed involved the sustainability of effects on achievement and behavior beyond kindergarten entry. Children in both groups were followed and reassessed in the spring every year with over 90% of the initial sample located tested on each wave. By the end of kindergarten, the control children had caught up to the TN‐VPK [preschool] children and there were no longer significant differences between them on any achievement measures. The same result was obtained at the end of first grade using both composite achievement measures. In second grade, however, the groups began to diverge with the TN‐VPK children scoring lower than the control children on most of the measures. The differences were significant on both achievement composite measures and on the math subtests. >First grade teachers rated the TN‐VPK children as less well prepared for school, having poorer work skills in the classrooms, and feeling more negative about school. It is notable that these ratings preceded the downward achievement trend we found for VPK children in second and third grade. Further commentary and discussion http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/null-hypothesis-for-pre-k-education/ http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/null-hypothesis-for-pre-k-ed... http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/10/new-results-on-preschool-from-a-tennessee-rct.html http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/10/new...
- tomcam 11y agoRight now none of these countries is breaking even. They are paying these cost through deficit spending--borrowing from the very children they are asking their neighbors to pay for.
- caseysoftware 11y agoThrow in a few million immigrants who are a net negative on the social system for the few few years (optimistically) and we have an impending doom that just got a decade or two closer.
- plonh 11y agoWe don't even need govt to pay for childcare, we just need to make it fully deductible as a "business" expense. The office janitor's salary is deductible from the business owner's income tax, but the child caregiver is not.
- ausjke 11y agoMy theory is that due to their young age, two teachers can only manage ~10 kids on average, assuming each one is paying 1000/month on average, that's 10000 per month, after admin/rent/tax/insurance there are not much left to split between two staffs. Daycares are very local and can not be too large in size, all in all there is not much economy of scale.
- draw_down 11y agoIt's weird to even think that because you pay a lot for something, the employees must be well-off.
- smtddr 11y agoIt's only weird if the employee isn't directly responsible for creating that something. e.g., You can buy a Lambo for nearly one million but the cars salesman who sold it to you probably isn't rich. But when you buy a painting for nearly one million, it'd make sense to think the actual painter is doing pretty well. A (good)public school teacher in America is woefully underpaid compared to the service they provide. They should be paid similar to doctors & nurses, imho.
- mod 11y agoMy best friend is a public school teacher, and his circle of friends includes many more. I can wholeheartedly assure you they are not as deserving as doctors, in large part because their training is much less rigorous, the job is much less demanding, requires less skill/ability, and a whole lot of teachers aren't "good" teachers. Just like any other profession, you have good, bad, and mostly average. The average teacher does not deserve nearly the same salary as the average doctor.
- andrewchambers 11y agoIf there were higher standards required before you can tech then higher pay would be deserved.
- mod 11y agoI can agree with that, if the higher standards produced better teachers and discouraged the dregs from that career path.
- Retra 11y agoWorking harder as a public school teacher isn't going to result in more pay. There are probably a ton of teachers who started out as "good" teachers and then slowly learned it wasn't worth the effort.
- codeismightier 11y agoIs childcare in fact expensive? According to the article it "can top 15 percent of the median income for a married couple". But considering that taking care of children used to be a full-time job for a housewife, isn't it actually surprisingly cheap relative to historical standards? In general, if there isn't increased productivity because of technology, we shouldn't expect lower costs in terms of labor-hours consumed. See "Baumol's cost disease" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)
- oberstein 11y agoIt's pretty expensive, my own informal surveying of people with kids suggests the 'good' childcare places are basically equivalent of an extra one-bedroom apartment per month per kid. Relative to historical standards, you had not only the housewife, but grandparents, other relatives, and even your neighbors in the immediate community to help share the burden.
- jon-wood 11y agoI'd say you're underestimating. Our son is with a childminder two days a week, and I could easily get a one bedroom place for that money. In the UK the last stats I heard suggested you need an income of £40,000 a year or more to break even on full time childcare.
- merpnderp 11y agoHigh quality child care is very expensive. The average daycare feeds your kids cheese puffs and processed foods and takes no special interest in customizing a child's experience. It is expensive to use child care that forgoes the state matching food grants (which encourage the cheese puffs), and focus on specialized care for your child.
- plonh 11y agoI have never seen a childcare that feeds cheese puffs.
- 11y ago
- streptomycin 11y agoWould have been more interesting if they just broke down the expenses of a childcare center, like that one described in the article with 19 kids and 3 teachers making $9/hr that the owner says is just scraping by.
- protomyth 11y agoThe budget for Head Start is a matter of public record, and they are a fair representation of the costs (just ignore the social services budget items).
- rbritton 11y agoThe article cover only superficially covered this, but the biggest expense is definitely labor (my great aunt ran a daycare for around 20-25 years). At least in my area, there is a maximum limit of children per adult at a childcare facility. This alone places a limit on the maximum revenue per employee before considering other expenses.
- cheald 11y agoOne has to keep in mind that the average cost per employee to the employer is about +40% over the employee's base wage (taxes + benefits, per BLS data). $9/hour costs the employer about $12.60/hour.
- spronkey 11y agoKnowing a few childcare centre owners, they're very profit driven, and they're generally doing pretty damn well. The staff are paid peanuts, and it shows in the quality of the care. I don't think I'd ever send my kids to one of their centres!
- akafred 11y agoIn Norway, there is a max price on child care which makes it affordable and the best option for most people. The government subsidizes somewhere around two thirds of the costs. I guess labour costs are 70%+ in most cases. There are both public and privately run child care centers/kindergardens. The privately run are subsidized on more or less equal terms as the publicly run, and the norms for employee density and other minimum quality requirements are the same. About one third of the employees are pre-school teachers (three years of higher ed), the rest are either skilled (there is a child worker professional vocation ed you can take) or unskilled. I don't think there are many cases where employees can not afford to have their own kids in child care. In my municipality parents of all children in child care are surveyed every year and the reports from the survey are public. My guess is that the whole thing is more or less funded by the increased taxes paid by keeping a larger part of the population working. (I could also mention that parents share about a year of paid leave for each birth so most kids are around one year old when they start in child care.)
- vasilipupkin 11y agomakes a lot of sense to subsidize childcare heavily, it's one of the most pro growth policies one can come up with - let's people actually work and not worry about what to do with the kids. Norway is oil rich, though, so not clear how relevant this is for US
- rayiner 11y agoChild care is cheap. We pay $1,100 for full time care in Baltimore per month. That works out to $5/hour. 8 kids per class. That's $40/hour, and pays for two teachers plus overhead.
- sitkack 11y agoBaltimore. That is like saying abandoned buildings are cheap in Detroit.
- sremani 11y ago$1100 per month is about normal price in Texas too.
- op00to 11y agoI think what the poster is getting at is any place that's not San Francisco or the Valley is cheap because we're all a bunch of rubes playing in jug bands in the rest of the country.
- sitkack 11y ago1100 isn't even cheap. This guy in Baltimore is a single person and probably makes at least 2x the medium income for entire family. Cheap for him. The pre-tax pay for someone making $10/hr is 1600 a month.
- xenadu02 11y agoWe pay $780 here in SF for three half days. When we go to five full days it will be near $1600.
- m_eiman 11y agoHere in Sweden, we pay about $230 per month for two kids, full time. The oldest one has after-school care, about $50 per month. Tax subsidised, of course. Of all the ways tax money can be used to create a more level playing field for the next generation, this is IMHO one of the best. Parents get to have a career, kids get to know other kids from varying backgrounds, and kids with less than ideal parents get to do more worthwhile things than stare at TV and eat at McD.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- fiatmoney 11y agoNearly any living human being can do "child care" (if you think about it for a minute, there is an excellent reason why this should be the case). Half of them are probably even above average at it. Thus, high supply and limited demand -> low wages.
- Symmetry 11y agoAlso many people enjoy spending time around young children.
- meric 11y agoTaxes. A person staying home looking after the kids and cleaning after them is not taxed. If that person goes to work instead and leaves their kids with a carer, the person has to pay income taxes, the carer will also have to pay income tax, the business have to pay sales tax, the premise the business is staying at will also pay tax on the collected rent. As soon as you outsource caring kids there are 3-4 more sets of taxes to pay. 20% from the person, 20% from the carer, 10% for the business sales tax and perhaps an additional 5% on the tax on rent. Every dollar spent on childcare, 50% goes to the government. The benefit of going to work has to be twice as good as staying home with the kids, as determined by economics. I haven't even begun to mention the intrinsic benefits of spending time with your children...
- tn13 11y agoI agree. I will be surprised if the facilities dont have to pay some kind of liability insurance too to protect themselves from legal abuse. However there is no evidence spending time with children has any benefit.
- meric 11y agoIntrinsic benefits = the good feelings and relationship building you get from raising your own child, as opposed to spending your time & attention serving strangers in a restaurant.
- grecy 11y agoYou can expand this to everything in your life you could pay for. Gardening, painting, car maintenance, cooking, cleaning, growing vegetables, hunting, making clothes, this list goes on. Anything you can do yourself will save an enormous amount of money because using money is extremely inefficient.
- randyrand 11y agoLets say child care costs you $12 an hour. That means staying home is 'worth' $12 an hour to you. In order to make it worth going to work, you need to make $12/hr + taxes. Otherwise youre actually losing money by going to work. In other words, our tax system is encouraging people to stay home. Whether or not we want to do that is up for debate but we can fix this by 1) taxing stay at home moms for the value they are creating or 2) removing child care service taxes. Its a valid argument.
- everyone 11y agoArticle does not answer the question implied in its title. Where is the money going?
- fleitz 11y agoLabour... $10 * 40 * 4.3 * 1.10 (taxes, bennies, etc) = $1892 per month. Rent... Etc... Basically no one can accept that children might survive without constant adult supervision so costs are astronomical. The cheapest daycare is having 2+ kids and getting a live in care giver that way rather than pay 2X for daycare you pay 1X and divide it over 2+ kids.
- everyone 11y agoYeah, these seem like the obvious costs + ones you would expect with almost any business. Based on the title I expected something different or interesting to be revealed.
- ef4 11y agoThere is a basic assumption that people aren't questioning: that older children are useless in helping teach and supervise younger children. This flies in the face of historical experience, and it robs everyone involved of opportunities for learning and growth. It is nuts that we segregate children by birth year, all the way from preschool until college. In a mixed-age setting, the older kids can do enough teaching, entertaining, and watching to significantly amplify a single adult's capabilities. To the point where much higher kid-to-adult ratios work just fine. And far from taking something away from older kids by engaging them in this work, you actually give them valuable learning opportunities. You give them real responsibility to be proud of, an immediate motivation to master the things they'll be asked to teach, and a longer-term perspective on their own growth and life trajectory.
- everyone 11y agoThis is how more normal (hunter gatherers, stone tool using farmers for example) human societies work, with kids in multi-age groups of both sexes. Also the grandparents play an important role in childminding. Jared Diamonds recent book "the world until yesterday" is on the topic of stuff we can learn from such other societies.
- ef4 11y agoAgreed, elderly people are also tragically isolated from their traditional role of helping and being helped by children. And people complain of all the same problems with the elderly: they need to be looked after, and it's expensive, and caregivers are underpaid.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago>Also the grandparents play an important role in childminding. // Child-"minding" gives the wrong impression I feel, child-rearing [raising to adulthood] perhaps gives a better view. Childminding to me suggests the very basic task of ensuring the child doesn't come to harm as opposed to the more complex task of aiding them to develop in to well rounded adults.
- chrstphrhrt 11y ago
- grecy 11y agoAs a thought experiment, can anyone think of something that is expensive, where the direct employees are well paid? I feel like that no longer happens in the world, with profits being pushed ever higher.
- randyrand 11y agoAre profits actually going up? Are people becoming greedier? Why is competition failing?
- spronkey 11y agoYes, yes, wealth distribution. On the latter, these days it's getting too risky for people who aren't already wealthy to innovate, and disrupt. Corporations are getting increasingly large, and the number of viable competitors in some of the more prominent industries is generally not increasing - because the entry cost is so high.
- yummyfajitas 11y agoLack of competition gives companies more money to throw around, some of which will make it's way to employees. It's the competitive industries where wages need to remain low. Goldman and Google have a 20% profit margin and pay their employees well. Walmart has about 3% and lots of competition.
- spronkey 11y agoPretty sure both Goldman and Google pay their employees market rates.
- makomk 11y agoLess competition also means less competition between employers for employees. Sure, they have more money and they could give some of it to their employees, but there's no reason to. Goldman and Google are employing a relatively small number of highly-skilled people, which means they have to pay them more than Wal-mart pays its retail staff. Their pay is almost exactly what those people would expect to be paid for the same jobs elsewhere. For example, it turns out that Google pays their software engineers only slightly more than Wal-mart (really, look it up) despite demanding higher skill levels from employees.
- analog31 11y agoIt's not too different than college teaching, and could be a model for the future of education careers in general.
- smokey_the_bear 11y agoBoth of my kids go to in home daycares in the neighborhood. The caregivers take care of 4-6 kids per day, and make 60/day per kid, and they get paid vacations. Financially, it seems like they make significantly more than they would teaching in a large center. I like the homey feel of the daycares, that it's a little cheaper, and walking distance. They also both provide snacks and lunch, which is nearly impossible to find in a large center. They have to live in homes that are set up as daycares though, and it's very hard for them to take a sick day.
- cadecairos 11y agoAs a father of a one year old, soon to be starting childcare, and husband to a trained & registered Early Childhood Educator in Ontario, I can relate to a lot in this article. Care for my daughter nearly approaches my monthly rent, and more than exceeds the monthly income of a childcare worker in Ontario. It almost feels like a better plan to have mom not go back to work, but then she'll fall behind professionally, and the baby will lose our on many social development opportunities.
- radicalbyte 11y agoDaycare should really receive government subsidy - the extra income tax they earn can be used to cover the gap. In The Netherlands we have a 33/33/33 model - parents pay 33% of the costs, the state pays 33% and the parent's employers pay 33% (which is an extra charge split over all workers). In recent years they've tweaked the model: parents with 2 x modal income pay 100% of the costs (and their employers also pay 33%). Only the lowest incomes hit 33/33/33. For the 2nd+ children the subsidy is much higher for all income groups. We send our son to daycare for 2 days a week, costing ~700 EUR/month. My wife works 36hrs (4x9) and I work 40hrs (4x9,1x4 at home). Grandma/pa do one day (the other grandparents live in the UK). I really like this mix - he gets 4/days week of parents, 2/days a week playing with other kids and 1 day of being spoilt by grandparents.
- muuh-gnu 11y ago> For example, with basic income Oh a UBI communist again. Sooner or later every problem discussed leads to someone suggesting the good ole "tax the rich". > paying people to stay home to care for their kids. Why should I pay somebody else to stay home with _their_ kids? What you and other UBIs are suggesting is nothing else than "redistribute other peoples wealth" communism. It _only_ works if you take (by force) from one guy and give it to the other guy. It is not a _solution_ in any form, it is simply mugging.
- e12e 11y ago> It _only_ works if you take (by force) from one guy and give it to the other guy. That's how taxation and government funding works. Are you advocating no taxation, and no government?
- muuh-gnu 11y agoWhatever I'm advocating, youre advocating flat out mugging, and to conceal that, youre giving it other names. Muging, aka forcible redistribution of other peoples wealth is called "communism", so stop pretending youre advocating something completely different by rebranding it over and over and over again. UBI _doesnt work_ without forcibly taking from one group of people and giving it to another group. How forcible redistribution ends up you saw in Soviet Russia. Are you earning so little that you'd rather see our economy crumble like Soviet Russia, than to have hard working people keeping their wages to themselves without being mugged by envious low-earners?
- e12e 11y agoI'm sure we can agree to disagree on what are the most viable and desirable ways to distribute wealth, but any form of taxation is backed by force, and any spending of that tax leads to it being given to someone else. If you don't pay taxes, you go to jail. When government hires someone to do a job, they give some of that money to someone else.
- 11y ago
- cheriot 11y agoDid you expect the business owner to brag about how much she's banking? Her customers and employees would love that. Maybe the article is accurate, but I don't see any attempt to prove it. Each family spends 10% of income. Average household income is X. 3 teachers per 19 kids = Each teacher generates revenue of 0.63X. Considering each parent is making 0.5X in a two parent household, that's cutting it a bit close. Edit: I originally commented with an incorrect 6.3X. Fixed. 19 kids * 10% * X / 3 teachers = 0.63X
- netcan 11y agoThis article is terrible. For all the numbers and percentages it throws around it just doesn't do the sums on the basics. From the article's facts: - 3 teacher for 19 children - 6.3 children per carer. - Cost = 15% of median income - lets assume 1.5 children per family. - 6.3/1.5 =4.2 child carers per family. - 4.2 carers X 15% of median family income = a revenue of 63% of family income per child care worker. Assuming overheads, profits, etc., .... you get the point. Child care is expensive and low paying for similar reasons. It takes a lot of teachers per student. This isn't a government conspiracy or a corporate one, it's just the reality of the requirements of caring for children.
- gluggymug 11y agoI don't think the article is terrible. If childcare businesses are struggling, there will be less and less of them. Which is why the article argues for some form of government intervention.
- netcan 11y agoThe logical conclusion is, in my opinion, that childcare is inherently costly because we need a high teacher/child ratio. I don't really have a problem with intervention, but I'd rather it be in the form of simple payments to the parents. Otherwise, we are paying Jill to take care of Jack's kid so Jack can go out and work making spoons. Why shouldn't Jack look after his own kid and Jill can make the spoons.
- plonh 11y agoBecause it can be more efficient for each person to consistently perform their specialist career for two decades