4 ms·
If you are a young couple with an infant in the Bay Area you don't have much of a choice. A friend of mine and his wife decided that they would be better off if
by diego 18y ago
If you are a young couple with an infant in the Bay Area you don't have much of a choice. A friend of mine and his wife decided that they would be better off if she quit her job and took care of their two kids for a few years, as her take-home salary wasn't enough to pay for day care.
- robg 18y agoIs the limiting factor good quality observers/teachers? Why don't they open their own daycare? It's a lot of work, but if a parent has quit their job any ways, what's a few more kids?
- sjh 18y ago> what's a few more kids? An insurance liability, for one thing.
- HeyLaughingBoy 18y agoQuite simply: it's insurance and state-mandated minimum child-provider ratios! The least we ever paid for childcare was $820/month and that was a very good preschool that had extremely low staff turnover -- we were lucky. When my son was younger, the costs were higher: infants cost over $1000/month. That said, many people here in MN do in-home daycare which is usually much less expensive. Usually it's a parent who has decided to stay home with her baby and gets the training and insurance to care for other children as well to cover the cost of her leaving her job. However, as you get to the preschool years, the quality varies radically. They may give good childcare, but the learning experiences can be slim to none. My son entered Kindergarten extremely well prepared and immediately outdistanced most of the other kids. Odds are that in-home daycare would not have prepared him for school as well.
- bmj 18y agoThis is the case, I think, in most cities, even where the cost of living is not as high as the Bay area. At best, one salary is enough for day care costs, but very little is left over.
- pmorici 18y ago40k seems excessive. say you paid the teacher very well they would get what like 100k a year? So you are saying that 1 teacher can only watch 3 kids? There are entire families with more kids than that.
- jedberg 18y agoHeh. If the teacher was REALLY well paid, even for the Bay Area, they would get maybe 80k a year. The starting salary in Palo Alto (the highest in the bay area) is under 50k. A teacher with 10 years of experience will probably be making about 75k. http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_salaries.shtml http://www.pausd.org/community/employment/teachers/teacher_s...
- vlad 18y agoA preschool teacher typically makes 18-25K a year across the country; I would guess 30-35K is as high as it gets in even the most expensive parts of California (experienced or not).