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Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs avai
by nugget 7y ago
Great childcare and elder care is very expensive and the people who do these jobs well are, in my experience, quite well compensated relative to other jobs available to them.
- noonespecial 7y ago>Great childcare and elder care is very expensive It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.
- sdfin 7y agoAren't there childcare and elder care agencies that aim at families of different socioeconomic levels? I guess that the rich hire expensive nannies at expensive agencies. What you comment sounds unlikely to me.
- nugget 7y agoI agree there’s a sourcing/matching problem that leads the administrators in these markets to capture a disproportionately large share of any value premiums paid.
- ip26 7y agoI ran through the numbers when my kid started in childcare. It turned out there wasn't really a grand bureaucratic conspiracy. Instead, mainly labor is just really expensive. When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.
- elil17 7y ago$30k/year is not a lot of money - definitely not enough to raise your own kids on
- ip26 7y agoNo, but it does mean that as a parent, if (in this canned example) you are paying $18k/year- while the number initially sounds crazy- nearly all of it is going directly to caretaker compensation, not bloat & largess.
- pmiller2 7y agoMaybe not, but it's a lot of money for most families to pay someone else to take care of their kids.
- cjlars 7y agoThat this is even arguable, I think, makes the OPs point.
- michaelt 7y agoI agree childcare you pay for is often expensive - I was thinking more of the unpaid work done by stay-at-home parents and families caring for their own elders - who earn no direct salary for their efforts. But nobody would say they ought to stop.