20 ms·

As child care costs soar, more parents may have to exit the workforce

191 points by lxm 3y ago

carbocation 3y ago
My personal view is that most of these problems are downstream of a failure to build housing.
- userinanother 3y ago
  Not all, lots of issues with private equity buying up all the childcare centers. Lots of regulatory burden and generally occurring at a time in people’s lives when they are low on the earning cycle
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm sure the facilities alone cannot be cheap and all labor costs more because they can't afford housing either. Build! Build! If the moon doesn't hit it it's not too tall!
- gamesbrainiac 3y ago
  I agree that housing is a part of it, but I think time is a bigger factor.
- apwell23 3y ago
  And lack of low skill immigration
cperciva 3y ago
They're not exiting the workforce. They're switching jobs -- moving into a field which is in high demand and in many cases pays more.
- chacha102 3y ago
  I agree - they are exercising the principle of opportunity cost. While most parents probably would make more than the $700 / month, the value might simply not be worth it. I remember a study that concluded that in reality, there is a cap on how much additional money improves your day-to-day life. And if a family is already past that on one income, why do you need two?
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    > $700 / month That cant be right. I am in a LCOL area and its almost double that for 1 kid. And its one of the cheapest options. It says the average is 700 per household. Perhaps it counts households without kids?
    - PenguinCoder 3y ago
      Has to; from my own anecdotal experience. More than double that in a LCOL area here as well.
    - Paul-Craft 3y ago
      The exact number doesn't really matter. The point is that the difference between the cost of childcare and what a parent may make as a second earner has a significant opportunity cost that may not make working outside the home a good deal.
  - Waterluvian 3y ago
    Can’t put a price on those years. They're just incredibly precious. I can’t imagine people send their kids off to daycare because they want to. It’s just such a loss you can’t ever get back.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - userinanother 3y ago
      0-4 years kind of suck 5-10 though yeah those are gold
      - ndriscoll 3y ago
        My two year old is awesome and says/does new funny things every single day. She's been a hoot since maybe 1-1.5. I'm super lucky to get to spend all day with her right now while on leave for my 1 month old. Being able to pop out of my room and see her during the day is also one of the best perks of remote work. She's only recently started to notice/take interest in other kids, and the other day we went to the park and the playground was empty, and she goes "Where's my friends? FRIENDS!!!!! My friends are hiding." She's also decided our cats' names are mama meowy and dada meowy (they're both male). The 1 month old is not so fun yet, granted.
- justrealist 3y ago
  I'll preface this by saying my wife is a full-time parent for our two children so I am very supportive of full-time parenting, but from a raw economic perspective a 4-1 staffing ratio (at a daycare) or 10-1 at a preschool would be a lot more efficient as the current two children we have.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    Depends on whether the outcomes are the same. If it's just about keeping them alive, sure, but if more individualized attention and family bonding results in better adults (or better behaved/cheaper to educate students) down the line, there's a price for quality that needs to be accounted for.
    - qudat 3y ago
      Exactly. A child is a future contributor to the workforce. If outcomes are different then this is an investment. It’s an empirical question, to be sure, but it is theoretically possible the outcomes are different.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    In theory yes but the 4-1 has lots of overhead plus extra facilities plus taxes. Is probably closer to 3:1 after overhead and 2.5:1 after transactional taxes
    - justrealist 3y ago
      I'll grant the overhead but the taxes are not a loss from a GDP perspective, that's just money shuffling, goods are still produced, services are still rendered. In-home daycare is also common too, and then there's not a ton of facility cost.
      - userinanother 3y ago
        I thought we were talking economic output. GDP isn’t a good metric to use when you compare work that generates no GDP output. Someone already mentioned that taking care of your own kid generates a net gdp loss of 1.x your income where x is the ammount you would pay to a child care facility.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  Yeah, after adjusting for taxes, my wife made more money than I did (in opportunity costs anyways) the years we had 4 kids at home.
  - sokoloff 3y ago
    We came to a similar conclusion and my wife wanted to stay home with the kids. Her income, when taxed at our full marginal tax rate, would have otherwise been nearly completely consumed by childcare and other costs we could avoid if she worked on the household. So, we lost 5 years of her 401k contributions in exchange for her getting what she preferred, what the kids enjoyed, and a lot more meals at home as a family. That trade was well-worth it.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Yeah, it's not like these parents vanished into thin air. They are doing work that produces real value, we simply can't capture the output as a clean number in GDP or, maybe more importantly, tax dollars.
bcrosby95 3y ago
> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found. There's something deranged about a metric when deciding to take care of your own children, rather than pay someone else to do so, results in a worse number.
- rottencupcakes 3y ago
  What? Deranged? A statistic can’t be deranged, only what actions one takes because of it. If a high earning person could take in more than the cost of child care, but chooses to stay home, it does impact GDP. It still might be a fine decision.
  - rayiner 3y ago
    It’s not just a values question, but a valid criticism of GDP as a measure. If you and I stay home and take care of our own kids, then that counts $0 to GDP. If we take care of each other’s kids and pay each other an amount that balances to $0, that contributes significantly to GDP.
    - threeseed 3y ago
      If you think about what you wrote it doesn't actually add up. If you're both staying at home and paying each other X then where did you get the money from to generate X. You would've had to do some economic producing activity.
      - Forgeties79 3y ago
        Their partners’ respective salaries
      - aidenn0 3y ago
        I hand you $100 and you hand me $100. We can do that until the paper currency wears out and generate huge amounts of GDP!
loeg 3y ago
Wow, only $700/month. We pay $1600 for one kid and that's relatively affordable for daycare in our area.
- betaby 3y ago
  So about 10$/hour. In you area can you a find a person willing to babysit for that money? Each time I hear 1-3k$ for kindergarten it sounds expensive.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    The kindergarten teacher also watches much more than one child though. I do wonder how much money typically goes towards real estate cost and insurance.
  - ajsnigrutin 3y ago
    And taylor swift tickets cost $100 (made up number) for two hours of music... try to get someone to sing for $50/h. Oh wait, there are multiple concert visitors, and a kindergarden group has multiple kids per carer there.
    - cableshaft 3y ago
      > And taylor swift tickets cost $100 (made up number) for two hours of music Yes, a very made up number, Taylor Swift tickets for this year's tour were between $50 on the low end and $500 on the high end (plus fees) for the initial sale[1], and averaged $1600 in the resale market, with some tickets for that were close to the stage selling for up to $6300[2]. [1]: https://stylecaster.com/entertainment/music/1624301/how-much-taylor-swift-tickets/ https://stylecaster.com/entertainment/music/1624301/how-much... [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-tickets-resale-for-more-than-10-times-previous-tours/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-tickets-...
  - userinanother 3y ago
    Not possible to do legally. That’s below minimum wage age way below after you do employer taxes
rayiner 3y ago
> The measure would allocate $16 billion in mandatory funding to child care centers each year for the next five years, among other things. Guess what that’s going to do to the price of childcare.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  We never learn.
- camel_gopher 3y ago
  Existing daycares will raise rates, but new daycares will also arise.
  - futureamish 3y ago
    Except they won't because your in a maximized market with like 1000 wealthy people holding all the bags, all trying to cross-extract coins. The dusty old adages of classic economics no longer hold water.
- malfist 3y ago
  What's the alternative?
  - fh973 3y ago
    In most of Germany, daycare providers are subsidized directly and the rate they can charge is fixed (depends on parents income). They are also quality monitored. The providers are usually small non-profit businesses. Works well for the parents, but leads to low wages for the personell.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  Increase supply of childcare providers and lower the cost due to basic supply/demand economics?
  - huytersd 3y ago
taurath 3y ago
The number of people I know in their 30s who can only just afford food and shelter is so high - these are people in the same economic class who'd have had kids 20 years ago. We do extremely little to make a society that encourages people having kids, or honestly just living a life doing much other than working. Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords. The workers are still being paid under a living wage. Keep in mind its mostly privileged people who can afford a single income that have the option to exit the workforce. Unless we can make cost of living more affordable for everyone we can't expect anything to get better. In 1985 a median wage worker would spend only 55% of their check on housing healthcare transportation and education, now its 105%.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords. Labor in the US is pretty expensive in the grand scheme of things. $15 is peanuts to make, but a lot for parents to cover. Take this scenario. You have an infant room with 8 kids and have 2 teachers in a LCOL area. Tuition is 325/week. Total incoming weekly tuition is 2600. If you find 2 people who will work for $15/hr thats 1200/week in labor costs. Plus FICA, insurance, and anything else required to pay per employee. With no redundancy (so no sick/vacation days). Then you have to pay rent, utilities, maintenance, front office staff, and have enough left over for someone find it all worth it. There is really no way around it - if you want people at the bottom to make a decent wage then customers will have to pay it. And $15 isn’t exactly decent even in LCOL so daycare costs would probably need to rise at least another 33% in this scenario which moves the low end price of daycare from 1300/month to 1729/month.
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    Fundamentally, I believe the US either needs to subsidize childcare directly (either as guaranteed slots at childcare facilities or payments to families for a parent to stay home and provide care) or make peace that people will have less or no kids because they are unaffordable (unless you are of means and can afford children as if they are luxury goods) in the current socioeconomic macro. Will this help? I'm unsure. Children are heavily subsidized in Scandinavian countries with pro natalist policies (in some circumstances, governments paying cash for children does not move the needle much and comes at a high cost), not subsidized much at all in China comparatively, and both cohorts continue to see a decline in total fertility rates. These are complex systems problems where the cost to modify inputs is high, and latency in feedback also high. https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4141600-pro-natalist-policies-are-great-but-declining-birth-rates-are-here-to-stay/ https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4141600-pro-natalist... https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-come-with-a-hefty-price-tag https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-... https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Policy_responses_low_fertility_UNFPA_WP_Final_corrections_7Feb2020_CLEAN.pdf https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Policy_res... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3136991/can-china-boost-its-birth-rate-adopting-nordic-position https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3136991/can...
cassac 3y ago
I don’t know why anyone would disparage anyone taking care of their own kids. The “workforce” sucks and people should be ashamed they’ve been convinced a “career” is something they should aspire to at all costs. Maybe instead of giving people money to pay for child care they should give people money and just let them stay home and enjoy being with their children.
- asynchronous 3y ago
  Personally convinced the hustle culture is just a way to normalize a larger tax base for the government.
  - somedude895 3y ago
    This isn't really hustle culture as much as feminism telling women that being a stay-at-home mum means not being emancipated, ironically telling them how to live life without following the path they want to follow. But maybe you have a point in that the reason elites embrace feminism is to increase GDP (see also the USSR selling the shoving of women into grueling factory work as "liberation")
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  I mean... I like my profession and like having a career. But I also have healthy boundaries on work - usually working 30 hours per week with full pay.
  - huytersd 3y ago
    Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs/professions according to surveys so you would be in the minority.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    > usually working 30 hours per week with full pay. that must be a nice perk that helps influence your fondness.
- huytersd 3y ago
anonreeeeplor 3y ago
I see a lot of people going to homeschool. Especially as unemployment rises into stagflation.
agomez314 3y ago
If a parent exits the workforce, and this happens at scale, wouldn’t it reduce the supply of labor and therefore increase salaries? Just a tenuous hypothesis
- baq 3y ago
  A parent doesn't exit the workforce, they just work as a parent.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    They stop competing for other jobs, increasing demand and pushing down salaries.
    - baq 3y ago
      They compete with childcare jobs and housekeeping jobs.
gamesbrainiac 3y ago
I hope this has an effect on wages increasing so that two parents working full time isn't the only option for middle-class families.
aynyc 3y ago
Just tossing it out there. I wish they make child care cost like daycare tax deductible.
- CityOfThrowaway 3y ago
  Yes, making as many kid-related things as possible tax-deductible is a sensible way to provide "subsidies" that incentivize more children.
- freditup 3y ago
  It is, sort of, through Dependent Care FSA programs which let you contribute money pre-tax and then spend it on child care. For some reason though, the limit is $5000/year which isn't nearly enough to cover any sort of frequent child care. It's also sort of a pain to administer these programs. There's also a child care tax credit which gives a similar amount of tax savings. So overall you do have some tax benefits to help with daycare costs, but they could be better.
newsclues 3y ago
Good, refocusing on strong families will be good for everyone.
Manuel_D 3y ago
It'd be good to see if there's a more up to date survey, but substantially more working parents would rather not work and take care of their kids full time: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-mothers-prefer-full-time-work/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m... This discussion is usually framed in terms of "people can't work because they have to parent kids" when in reality is more like "people can't spend as much time parenting because they have to work". If money were not a problem, more people would quit their jobs or work part time to spend more time with kids. And as other commenters have pointed out taking care of children is indeed a productive job even if a stay at home parent doesn't file a W-2. Furthermore, there's some research (though not without controversy) that kids cared for by parents have better outcomes than those placed in child care.
jumboliah 3y ago
Higher birth rates make for higher GDP. Encouraging careers for birthing parents suppresses birth rates. We are playing the short game, not the long game.
dingi 3y ago
Having children is overrated anyways. If you don't have money or time, don't make them. Let's see how economic pundits achieve never ending growth without new people.
leetrout 3y ago
This year I started a company building daycare software. My goal is to grow it sustainably while targeting small, independent providers. There is so much shitty software out there that is over priced. I want to build safe, secure software I enjoy using myself while also being accessible for folks who arent savvy with technology everyday. I am moving very slow right now since it is just me but excited about the potential. My first customers are free while we figure out features but my goal is to charge $0.25/child/month. Waitlist and landing pages are free. Text and email notifications are pay per use while offering free credits each month. My wife is a teacher, my mom was an SLP and I am a parent who never had a small, local provider have tech in their day care and payments and comms were manual and paper. Real ability to affect change here.
nn3 3y ago
If its one adult per 10 kids and they each pay 700 the child care is making 840k per kindergarden teacher. Assuming the adult makes 60k a year thats 780k of overhead. Where is it all going?
- medvezhenok 3y ago
  You sure you didn't tack on an extra zero there? 700x10x12 = 84K, not 840K.
sjjrjrkkt 3y ago
[flagged]
llamaInSouth 3y ago
dont have kids
MandieD 3y ago
Costs of childcare from 7:30-16:00 in metro Nürnberg (Nuremberg) at publicly-subsidized locations open to all children, without any further income-based subsidies: - 400 EUR/mo fees plus 80/mo lunch and drinks for 12 months - 3 years at Krippe (creche/nursery school) - 120 EUR/mo fees plus 100/mo lunch and drink for 3 - 6 years at Kindergarten (preschool and then US kindergarten year), because Bavaria really, really wants children of non-German-speakers in preschool but found out that subsidizing only those children was politically untenable. There may be further discounts for the Vorschule (school preparation) year that starts at age 5 and is more like US kindergarten There are further subsidies for parents who don't earn much, especially for 3 - 6 year olds. In short, very inexpensive as long as you're not trying to work a full-time job, and it's a lot easier to scale a serious full-time job back to a part-time contract for a few years here than it would be in the US. In some areas, there are not enough Krippe and Kindergarten slots; in our area, you have to apply to several and do so a few months ahead of time if you want one reasonably close to your home. We had to take a Krippe slot in the next neighborhood. Care outside of 07:30 - 16:00 is not nearly as well-organized or subsidized. I've made the choice not to find out; I work part-time and will do so until my kid is well into primary school, in large part because I want to spend a few hours a day making sure that he can speak and read English. Some of the subsidized Krippes and Kindergartens are run directly by the city adjacent to the public school system; others are run by the major churches (Catholic and Lutheran), Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers' Welfare - traditional Social Democrat-aligned social services provider), and other community organizations. They need to meet certain standards to get those subsidies, and so far, the quality of care and education my kid has gotten at both his Krippe and now his Kindergarten compare well to what my friends in the US paid $2000+/mo for. As in the US, Krippe and Kindergarten workers are not paid very well in Germany, and have had a few warning strikes in the past year.
- niemandhier 3y ago
  Prepare for some complications when your kids enter primary school. After school care is less well organized and ( as per my personal experience ) after school tutors are overwhelmed by the amounts of homework and learning that are necessary. As a consequence kids of parents that depend on after school have a disadvantage. Since this is more often the case in low income families social strata probably get solidified.
maxehmookau 3y ago
Has anybody noticed that the same politicians who are demanding "more babies" and decrying that millennials aren't having enough children are the same politicians that insist on allowing the free-market to dictate childcare costs? The lack of children being born in the US and other western countries is (partly) a direct consequence of the lack of good quality, subsidised childcare. More importantly, where is this money going? I know for a fact that the frontline workers who actually _look after_ children aren't seeing a marked increase in their pay. So it's just more profit for the private equity firms who own these businesses.
- polski-g 3y ago
  The free market isn't dictating the costs of childcare. The government is. Every state has maximums for employee to child ratios. Every state has zoning restrictions for facility locations. Some states have college degree requirements. If your state limits the ratio to 4 to 1, then the cheapest possible cost for coverage would be 1/4 of the employees' salary. If you want to bring costs down, then loosen these restrictions. Allow facilities to set their own ratios and charge accordingly and consumers to make the choice of the risk they tolerate
  - maxehmookau 3y ago
    So we can reduce the cost of childcare by reducing the quality? Sure, but these are children, not screws, or planks of wood, or consumer electronics. The government is mandating minimum _safety_ standards for the people who are minding the next generation of humans. We really need to be asking where that money is going and why costs are so high. The government really is not the problem here other than that they're not subsidising it enough.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      It comes to general question of cost of living. Why is cost of living so high? Solve the cost of living and labour becomes cheaper and thus things like childcare come cheaper.
thejackgoode 3y ago
2.1 children per woman is the fertility rate for population reproduction. It is scary to me to think how much needs to change in the developed world that the 3-children household becomes the norm.
namelosw 3y ago
It's a good thing to take care your own children. "Loses an estimated $122 billion a year" is like a weird attempt to makes it sounds bad. The puzzle need to be solved is how to let people rejoin the workforce later without their career wrecked (with a discontinued CV).
- pjmlp 3y ago
  And how to sustain themselves during the time they can't work, have to take care of the children, and might also become ill during that period.
- shawabawa3 3y ago
  > It's a good thing to take care your own children If you want to, yes. If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to
  - firejake308 3y ago
    The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else. I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.
- baq 3y ago
  It's a bad thing taking care over your children does not count as GDP.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- 3y ago
ilikerashers 3y ago
$700 per month. Those are rookie numbers. Come to the UK where childcare is £2k per month. The UK system gives mediocre benefits and also penalises you if one of you makes >100k a year.
- Redsquare 3y ago
  £2k? - where on earth is that - it is around £1.2k in Manchester
  - jamesfmilne 3y ago
    If you have two children under 5 you could easily be £2k in childcare for both of them. And £2k probably doesn't even cover 5 days a week for two kids. I daren't think about what it'd cost if you had 3 kids under 5 years old!
  - ilikerashers 3y ago
    London zone 4. Pretty typical and can go higher.
  - shawabawa3 3y ago
    The nursery my daughter goes to just increased their prices from £1.8k/month to £2.1k/month for children under 2. It's slightly less for children over 2 and even less once they hit 3 and get 15 hours free This is London zone 2
- shapefrog 3y ago
  These numbers are also ignoring the gap in (median/average/decent) pay between the US and UK (2021 averages in USD: $58,260 for the US and $38,291 for the UK). Oddly it has conditioned many friends who were stauch opponents of private schools (waste of money and only generates entitled poorly educated people) to feel more comfortable with paying the cheaper private school fees for primary school (or they took one look at the public alternative and realised the reality)
  - ilikerashers 3y ago
ksimukka 3y ago
In Oslo, Norway we are currently paying about $300/mo for full time child care (it is more like kindergarten). That’s the maximum out-of-pocket that parents have to pay for a single child. Our taxes contribute to the kindergarten system and the government requires that all children from the age of 1 have a right to attend. We have hundreds of both private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) kindergartens in the Oslo area. So it scales well and benefits the entire community and local economy. I wish the US could experience what we have here in Norway.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) I think these may be inverted - public is what is owned by the government, private is for profit. Nonetheless, children being raised by the state is not a positive. As a parent you get to see your child for a couple of hours a day during the week and for two full days during the weekend. Not ideal to be honest.
te_chris 3y ago
$700? Luxury. Try £1900 for 4 days in a central London daycare.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
In America, government programs tend to ignore the middle class and go straight to families earning far less than $100k annually. The studies reporting aggregate economic losses include middle class earners but the beneficiaries of the bill are those on the lower income scale.
- MisterBastahrd 3y ago
  The Middle class in the US refers to homes that bring home between $55K and $89K.
Dowwie 3y ago
> According to a recent survey by Care.com, for parents that pay for childcare, 67% are already spending 20% or more of their annual household income on such services. Care.com inflates market prices to pursue its own margin goals. Caretakers who aren't using care.com or agency, operating in a cash business, charge far less than reported in the care.com marketplace. This aside, you're still paying 15-25 dollars per hour in the NYC metro area for such services.
gumballindie 3y ago
Happening in the UK as well. For those where both parents work basically the child is raised by the state or people outside the family. I believe this can be called what it is, poverty, and it's reaching extreme levels.
truculent 3y ago
> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found. If this is the market value of childcare, and those children are being cared for, then can we say that the value has been transferred rather than lost? Following the link to an article about the study suggests the figure is an aggregate of a few other estimates: > The report found that not having child care — or enough child care — costs individual parents more than $5,500 a year, or more than $78 billion in total. And businesses lose $1,640 on average for each working parent due to lost revenue and hiring costs because of insufficient child care, totaling $23 billion annually. And the government loses, too — about $21 billion in lost income and sales tax revenues a year, or $1,470 less per working parent because parents without enough child care earn less and therefore consume less in their communities. I suppose this assumes that the level of care given to the children is approximately equivalent in both cases. In which case, I presume the argument is that more efficient childcare (fewer carers per child) is better.
nojvek 3y ago
Republicans are all pro-life, no abortion yada yada, but they are so against increasing minimum wage. Against child credits, which is a huge help to parents and did in fact reduce child poverty. Seems like a double standard when their actions seem making life worse for those who are alive. At this point, the US is hybrid artificial hive-mind intelligence optimizing for creating the largest megacorp monopolies in the world instead of optimizing for their working population.
- gnz11 3y ago
  > At this point That’s been US policy for the last 100 years or so, especially post-WWII. Citing Chomsky, et al.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  I don’t want my taxes to pay for your children. If you have children, that’s your burden.
  - Argonaut998 3y ago
    Taxes pay for all sorts of things that ‘we don’t like’. It’s a benign statement. Certainly, paying taxes for daycare is more fruitful for the country as a whole rather than paying taxes for welfare for those who do not work (yet have many children) — a huge net negative for society, and of course taxes for waging war which you don’t seem to bat an eye at.
  - claudiulodro 3y ago
    Today's children will be enabling your future retirement. You're going to be their burden, whether it's paying for your social security or keeping the value of your stocks high.
- anon291 3y ago
  The child credits also causes inflation. I benefitted a lot form them and even I can see that. I can't imagine a more disastrous policy at this time than expanding those.
joelegner 3y ago
High childcare costs universally generates outrage. But should it? Perhaps this is how the population eventually flattens. Maybe it is okay that the marginal cost of another human being keeps increasing. If adding a child to the planet is expensive, people will have fewer. The population will plateau. An even worse overpopulation problem may be averted or mitigated.
- firejake308 3y ago
  The problem is that the incentive doesn't work. Low-income folks have more children than high-income folks, even though they're the ones who are more adversely affected by childcare costs (larger percentage of budget). If disincentivizing having children through high childcare doesn't work, then we should accept that people will have as many kids as they want to, make things easier for the people who are already alive, and find other ways to manage overpopulation (easy access to contraception being the most effective and humane)
- Argonaut998 3y ago
  Low income and unemployed people have the most children and are heavily (if not completely) subsidised by the government. So this will only work if you want those to multiply. Furthermore, the USA is not overpopulated, the world is. This is a Western problem. People from India or Nigeria have no problem having 5+ children, so your solution makes no sense other than to punish working parents.
hermannj314 3y ago
The solution proposed is that the Federal government intervene in subsidizing child care. I disagree. Because Federal intervention comes with caveats to shape the image of the "noble poor" Federal intervention is a trojan horse to create a dependence on them. Don't take their poisoned charity. I feel like the chasm between a work-at-home mid-west farm family, a single mother raising a kid in a metropolis, and a dual-income SV couple with an au pair have very little in common. Federal intervention fails not because of a lack of empathy but because our regional cultures and beliefs play a significant role in the sacrifices and choices that shape how we think our kids should be raised. Stop letting Washington raise our children as if all 350 million of us were a monolith of shared values.
- asylteltine 3y ago
  If childcare is too expensive for someone, maybe they shouldn’t have children? Just a thought.
  - hermannj314 3y ago
    How do you implement this as a policy or political belief? When we were having our 2nd kid, there were complications that killed my daughter and almost killed my wife. The trauma caused us to need to move closer to family and I went several months without a job. We relied on family to help us pay bills. Should we have lost our first kid because we didn't think things through and plan enough financially? I didn't consider when I had my first kid that several years later I would be dealing with trauma that would derail my life and career. Everyone seems happy now and we have money, but your point is that I should have never started a family at all since I did have a period of time where "childcare was too expensive"?
migf 3y ago
Onsite daycare is the future of office work if employers are actually serious about getting people to be in office.
- angmarsbane 3y ago
  Patagonia has on site childcare.
- derwiki 3y ago
  Do any software companies in the Bay Area offer this?
thelastgallon 3y ago
Economic/GDP growth is converting work that is usually done for free and making it paid. Then Govt can extract taxes, super rich can have monopolies (and subsidies!) and the grunts can have highly-replaceable low paying jobs to pay taxes and rich people richer. Keep people happy by showing bullshit statistics about how their life is getting better! TVs are cheaper every year --> your life is so much better. But healthcare, food, energy going up -- sorry they are not part of the metric. Childcare is consolidating, which means higher costs and lower pay. Lots of childcare chains in the US: https://winnie.com/resources/the-biggest-childcare-brands-in-the-united-states https://winnie.com/resources/the-biggest-childcare-brands-in...
nocsi 3y ago
The solution to daycare is to really not daycare. Want kids? Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with: * People giving up on kids and substitute it with dog ownership * Daycare rackets wherein they just turn on blippi as soon as the parents are gone. * Professionals that have migrated to a 4-day work week have figured out that they could create a co-op daycare/school and help raise one another's kids * Go full remote and grind out the parenting/work until your kid is old enough for some sort of preschool. I've been actually seeing more and more parents just bringing their kids to work. I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare. That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans.
- verinus 3y ago
  Interesting difference: here in Europe, it is mostly agreed on that childcare should be free, like any education.
- Tade0 3y ago
  > I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare. My take is that needing to figure this out is the real punishment here. France has the highest fertility rate in the EU (and higher than that of the US) and subsidies apparently are the way forward. They need to be applied correctly though. My country is currently doing worse than Japan even though it's spending, as a percentage of GDP, than France on subsidies - these are in the form of what amounts to an UBI scheme for parents per child. The US has a lot of low-hanging fruit here, like having any sort of actual parental leave, not just whatever pittance the employer throws in people's way.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  >Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with Those are all awful and while I see your point about subsidization being a band-aid, it's way better than what these "solutions" are. Because they clearly haven't "figured out how to make things work". - a kid is not a pet. And there's a whole rabbit hole about how people adopted and abandoned pets as the pandemic came and went. Besides, not having a kid makes the whole thing moot and runs into current issues on first world population growth. - To be honest, this is fine as long as they are honest about it. Not every Daycare doesn't need to be pre-pre school, you may just want a responsible, trustworthy adult to make sure the house doesn't burn down and you can offer that at a discount. But odds are they can't be honest due to regulations. - I'm very confused on how this works unless every single people in the co-op has their day off on different days. - this is probably the best compromise out of them all, but the most exhausting. It may be borderline impossible to do depending on the industry you're in. >That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans. I'd hope we don't get to a point that raising a child is a non-bankruptable loan. But if so, its still better for the current situation than student loans. Many people have children older, and that means they have more savings prepared. And late 20's/30's adults understand debt and interest a lot better than an 18YO leaving home for the first time. I think the real solution is simply to solve the housing and minimium wage issues, though. Helps way more than parents to boot.
VoodooJuJu 3y ago
>Both parents work >So they can afford 2 cars >So they can both go to work >So they can afford child care while they're working >So they can pay for the dinner they can't prepare themselves because they're working >And the people who work in school and childcare >Do so to afford 2 cars >So they can go to work >So they can afford school & childcare >And they can afford to pay service workers to prepare their food >... People are starting to wake up to this madness for shilling every single human to become a worker unit. Children are suffering. People who've shilled for this arrangement should be charged with crimes, as they've harmed children, if only indirectly. But states and corporations should bear the brunt of the punishment, as they've worked in unison to create propaganda that agentizes the uneducated to shill work as a noble end, rather than a means to an end, all so GDP and profits can soar. When your god is money and efficiency, you suffer, especially your children.
hammock 3y ago
Broad-based, federally-funded before- and after-school childcare is the next logical extension to follow here. Serves the state politically in terms of education and control, prevents crime, and keeps the economy humming (preventing deflation and supporting burgeoning debt service costs)
poulsbohemian 3y ago
Really important to see both sides of the child care equation. States will often make available subsidies for families to cover the cost of child care, but then will overlook the issues that cause there to not be enough care providers. There's a catch-22 in that well-intentioned states will increase the standards in order to operate a day care, but that causes some care providers to exit the market. The proverbial grandmotherly character who opens her house to a few kids before and after school really can't legally operate in my state, which then makes it harder for someone with the means or subsidies to even find the care.
nescioquid 3y ago
Having lived through the "Reagan Revolution", I've frequently encountered the wry observation that Reagan's economic policies, which are said to have forced women into the workplace as previously single-income families struggled to survive, did more for "women's lib" than the ERA which has so far failed to be ratified as an amendment. If the standard of living has fallen so far that any second income is just going to be a wash against a $700 monthly expense for a wide group of people, I find it frustrating that culturally we can't talk about class.
tamimio 3y ago
It made sense back in 80s and 90s when the money IN were far more money OUT, nowadays, it makes more sense to conserve the spending since the ratio of income/spending is reversed by inflation and low wages.
MisterBastahrd 3y ago
We're reaching end stage capitalism, where the giant corporate forces are so large that governments and regulatory agencies and the Fed have little ability to corral them while workers' rights are being eroded and pay is stagnant. I'd ask how long before we start seeing company stores opening up again, but IBM beat me to the punch with their pathetic new retirement scheme. First they made the cost of living so expensive that two parents need to work to live comfortably, and now they've made it so expensive that childcare is unaffordable, which just puts more stress on the entire family. The propensity of the wealthy to keep their ill-gotten gains is going to heavily depend on how they treat benefits in the US, but the problem is that Republicans are going to demand a "free market solution," which is going to be virtually indistinguishable from school vouchers. It will result in daycares simply raising their rates and pocketing the difference. Public school systems largely already have plenty of property to house preschool kids. Make it a federally funded program and put daycares under the existing school systems. Yes, some small business owners will be out of luck, but their employees will all be vastly better off because those jobs pay virtually nothing and the benefits are always garbage if they even exist, and the kids will be better off because the workers will have more accountability.
andrewdubinsky 3y ago
whispers If only more people could work from home

191 points by lxm 3y ago

carbocation 3y ago

My personal view is that most of these problems are downstream of a failure to build housing.

userinanother 3y ago
Not all, lots of issues with private equity buying up all the childcare centers. Lots of regulatory burden and generally occurring at a time in people’s lives when they are low on the earning cycle
ajmurmann 3y ago
Yeah, I'm sure the facilities alone cannot be cheap and all labor costs more because they can't afford housing either. Build! Build! If the moon doesn't hit it it's not too tall!
gamesbrainiac 3y ago
I agree that housing is a part of it, but I think time is a bigger factor.
apwell23 3y ago
And lack of low skill immigration

cperciva 3y ago

They're not exiting the workforce. They're switching jobs -- moving into a field which is in high demand and in many cases pays more.

chacha102 3y ago
I agree - they are exercising the principle of opportunity cost. While most parents probably would make more than the $700 / month, the value might simply not be worth it. I remember a study that concluded that in reality, there is a cap on how much additional money improves your day-to-day life. And if a family is already past that on one income, why do you need two?
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  > $700 / month That cant be right. I am in a LCOL area and its almost double that for 1 kid. And its one of the cheapest options. It says the average is 700 per household. Perhaps it counts households without kids?
  - PenguinCoder 3y ago
    Has to; from my own anecdotal experience. More than double that in a LCOL area here as well.
  - Paul-Craft 3y ago
    The exact number doesn't really matter. The point is that the difference between the cost of childcare and what a parent may make as a second earner has a significant opportunity cost that may not make working outside the home a good deal.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  Can’t put a price on those years. They're just incredibly precious. I can’t imagine people send their kids off to daycare because they want to. It’s just such a loss you can’t ever get back.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - userinanother 3y ago
    0-4 years kind of suck 5-10 though yeah those are gold
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      My two year old is awesome and says/does new funny things every single day. She's been a hoot since maybe 1-1.5. I'm super lucky to get to spend all day with her right now while on leave for my 1 month old. Being able to pop out of my room and see her during the day is also one of the best perks of remote work. She's only recently started to notice/take interest in other kids, and the other day we went to the park and the playground was empty, and she goes "Where's my friends? FRIENDS!!!!! My friends are hiding." She's also decided our cats' names are mama meowy and dada meowy (they're both male). The 1 month old is not so fun yet, granted.
justrealist 3y ago
I'll preface this by saying my wife is a full-time parent for our two children so I am very supportive of full-time parenting, but from a raw economic perspective a 4-1 staffing ratio (at a daycare) or 10-1 at a preschool would be a lot more efficient as the current two children we have.
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  Depends on whether the outcomes are the same. If it's just about keeping them alive, sure, but if more individualized attention and family bonding results in better adults (or better behaved/cheaper to educate students) down the line, there's a price for quality that needs to be accounted for.
  - qudat 3y ago
    Exactly. A child is a future contributor to the workforce. If outcomes are different then this is an investment. It’s an empirical question, to be sure, but it is theoretically possible the outcomes are different.
- userinanother 3y ago
  In theory yes but the 4-1 has lots of overhead plus extra facilities plus taxes. Is probably closer to 3:1 after overhead and 2.5:1 after transactional taxes
  - justrealist 3y ago
    I'll grant the overhead but the taxes are not a loss from a GDP perspective, that's just money shuffling, goods are still produced, services are still rendered. In-home daycare is also common too, and then there's not a ton of facility cost.
    - userinanother 3y ago
      I thought we were talking economic output. GDP isn’t a good metric to use when you compare work that generates no GDP output. Someone already mentioned that taking care of your own kid generates a net gdp loss of 1.x your income where x is the ammount you would pay to a child care facility.
aidenn0 3y ago
Yeah, after adjusting for taxes, my wife made more money than I did (in opportunity costs anyways) the years we had 4 kids at home.
- sokoloff 3y ago
  We came to a similar conclusion and my wife wanted to stay home with the kids. Her income, when taxed at our full marginal tax rate, would have otherwise been nearly completely consumed by childcare and other costs we could avoid if she worked on the household. So, we lost 5 years of her 401k contributions in exchange for her getting what she preferred, what the kids enjoyed, and a lot more meals at home as a family. That trade was well-worth it.
zeroCalories 3y ago
Yeah, it's not like these parents vanished into thin air. They are doing work that produces real value, we simply can't capture the output as a clean number in GDP or, maybe more importantly, tax dollars.

bcrosby95 3y ago

> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found. There's something deranged about a metric when deciding to take care of your own children, rather than pay someone else to do so, results in a worse number.

rottencupcakes 3y ago
What? Deranged? A statistic can’t be deranged, only what actions one takes because of it. If a high earning person could take in more than the cost of child care, but chooses to stay home, it does impact GDP. It still might be a fine decision.
- rayiner 3y ago
  It’s not just a values question, but a valid criticism of GDP as a measure. If you and I stay home and take care of our own kids, then that counts $0 to GDP. If we take care of each other’s kids and pay each other an amount that balances to $0, that contributes significantly to GDP.
  - threeseed 3y ago
    If you think about what you wrote it doesn't actually add up. If you're both staying at home and paying each other X then where did you get the money from to generate X. You would've had to do some economic producing activity.
    - Forgeties79 3y ago
      Their partners’ respective salaries
    - aidenn0 3y ago
      I hand you $100 and you hand me $100. We can do that until the paper currency wears out and generate huge amounts of GDP!

loeg 3y ago

Wow, only $700/month. We pay $1600 for one kid and that's relatively affordable for daycare in our area.

betaby 3y ago
So about 10$/hour. In you area can you a find a person willing to babysit for that money? Each time I hear 1-3k$ for kindergarten it sounds expensive.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  The kindergarten teacher also watches much more than one child though. I do wonder how much money typically goes towards real estate cost and insurance.
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  And taylor swift tickets cost $100 (made up number) for two hours of music... try to get someone to sing for $50/h. Oh wait, there are multiple concert visitors, and a kindergarden group has multiple kids per carer there.
  - cableshaft 3y ago
    > And taylor swift tickets cost $100 (made up number) for two hours of music Yes, a very made up number, Taylor Swift tickets for this year's tour were between $50 on the low end and $500 on the high end (plus fees) for the initial sale[1], and averaged $1600 in the resale market, with some tickets for that were close to the stage selling for up to $6300[2]. [1]: https://stylecaster.com/entertainment/music/1624301/how-much-taylor-swift-tickets/ https://stylecaster.com/entertainment/music/1624301/how-much... [2]: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-tickets-resale-for-more-than-10-times-previous-tours/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/taylor-swift-eras-tour-tickets-...
- userinanother 3y ago
  Not possible to do legally. That’s below minimum wage age way below after you do employer taxes

rayiner 3y ago

> The measure would allocate $16 billion in mandatory funding to child care centers each year for the next five years, among other things. Guess what that’s going to do to the price of childcare.

asynchronous 3y ago
We never learn.
camel_gopher 3y ago
Existing daycares will raise rates, but new daycares will also arise.
- futureamish 3y ago
  Except they won't because your in a maximized market with like 1000 wealthy people holding all the bags, all trying to cross-extract coins. The dusty old adages of classic economics no longer hold water.
malfist 3y ago
What's the alternative?
- fh973 3y ago
  In most of Germany, daycare providers are subsidized directly and the rate they can charge is fixed (depends on parents income). They are also quality monitored. The providers are usually small non-profit businesses. Works well for the parents, but leads to low wages for the personell.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
Increase supply of childcare providers and lower the cost due to basic supply/demand economics?
- huytersd 3y ago

taurath 3y ago

The number of people I know in their 30s who can only just afford food and shelter is so high - these are people in the same economic class who'd have had kids 20 years ago. We do extremely little to make a society that encourages people having kids, or honestly just living a life doing much other than working. Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords. The workers are still being paid under a living wage. Keep in mind its mostly privileged people who can afford a single income that have the option to exit the workforce. Unless we can make cost of living more affordable for everyone we can't expect anything to get better. In 1985 a median wage worker would spend only 55% of their check on housing healthcare transportation and education, now its 105%.

nonethewiser 3y ago
> Daycare is expensive for the same reason that everything is expensive - money to investors and landlords. Labor in the US is pretty expensive in the grand scheme of things. $15 is peanuts to make, but a lot for parents to cover. Take this scenario. You have an infant room with 8 kids and have 2 teachers in a LCOL area. Tuition is 325/week. Total incoming weekly tuition is 2600. If you find 2 people who will work for $15/hr thats 1200/week in labor costs. Plus FICA, insurance, and anything else required to pay per employee. With no redundancy (so no sick/vacation days). Then you have to pay rent, utilities, maintenance, front office staff, and have enough left over for someone find it all worth it. There is really no way around it - if you want people at the bottom to make a decent wage then customers will have to pay it. And $15 isn’t exactly decent even in LCOL so daycare costs would probably need to rise at least another 33% in this scenario which moves the low end price of daycare from 1300/month to 1729/month.
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  Fundamentally, I believe the US either needs to subsidize childcare directly (either as guaranteed slots at childcare facilities or payments to families for a parent to stay home and provide care) or make peace that people will have less or no kids because they are unaffordable (unless you are of means and can afford children as if they are luxury goods) in the current socioeconomic macro. Will this help? I'm unsure. Children are heavily subsidized in Scandinavian countries with pro natalist policies (in some circumstances, governments paying cash for children does not move the needle much and comes at a high cost), not subsidized much at all in China comparatively, and both cohorts continue to see a decline in total fertility rates. These are complex systems problems where the cost to modify inputs is high, and latency in feedback also high. https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4141600-pro-natalist-policies-are-great-but-declining-birth-rates-are-here-to-stay/ https://thehill.com/opinion/immigration/4141600-pro-natalist... https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-come-with-a-hefty-price-tag https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-... https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Policy_responses_low_fertility_UNFPA_WP_Final_corrections_7Feb2020_CLEAN.pdf https://www.unfpa.org/sites/default/files/pub-pdf/Policy_res... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3136991/can-china-boost-its-birth-rate-adopting-nordic-position https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3136991/can...

cassac 3y ago

I don’t know why anyone would disparage anyone taking care of their own kids. The “workforce” sucks and people should be ashamed they’ve been convinced a “career” is something they should aspire to at all costs. Maybe instead of giving people money to pay for child care they should give people money and just let them stay home and enjoy being with their children.

asynchronous 3y ago
Personally convinced the hustle culture is just a way to normalize a larger tax base for the government.
- somedude895 3y ago
  This isn't really hustle culture as much as feminism telling women that being a stay-at-home mum means not being emancipated, ironically telling them how to live life without following the path they want to follow. But maybe you have a point in that the reason elites embrace feminism is to increase GDP (see also the USSR selling the shoving of women into grueling factory work as "liberation")
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
I mean... I like my profession and like having a career. But I also have healthy boundaries on work - usually working 30 hours per week with full pay.
- huytersd 3y ago
  Most people are dissatisfied with their jobs/professions according to surveys so you would be in the minority.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  > usually working 30 hours per week with full pay. that must be a nice perk that helps influence your fondness.
huytersd 3y ago

anonreeeeplor 3y ago

I see a lot of people going to homeschool. Especially as unemployment rises into stagflation.

agomez314 3y ago

If a parent exits the workforce, and this happens at scale, wouldn’t it reduce the supply of labor and therefore increase salaries? Just a tenuous hypothesis

baq 3y ago
A parent doesn't exit the workforce, they just work as a parent.
- logicchains 3y ago
  They stop competing for other jobs, increasing demand and pushing down salaries.
  - baq 3y ago
    They compete with childcare jobs and housekeeping jobs.

gamesbrainiac 3y ago

I hope this has an effect on wages increasing so that two parents working full time isn't the only option for middle-class families.

aynyc 3y ago

Just tossing it out there. I wish they make child care cost like daycare tax deductible.

CityOfThrowaway 3y ago
Yes, making as many kid-related things as possible tax-deductible is a sensible way to provide "subsidies" that incentivize more children.
freditup 3y ago
It is, sort of, through Dependent Care FSA programs which let you contribute money pre-tax and then spend it on child care. For some reason though, the limit is $5000/year which isn't nearly enough to cover any sort of frequent child care. It's also sort of a pain to administer these programs. There's also a child care tax credit which gives a similar amount of tax savings. So overall you do have some tax benefits to help with daycare costs, but they could be better.

newsclues 3y ago

Good, refocusing on strong families will be good for everyone.

Manuel_D 3y ago

It'd be good to see if there's a more up to date survey, but substantially more working parents would rather not work and take care of their kids full time: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-mothers-prefer-full-time-work/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2007/07/12/fewer-m... This discussion is usually framed in terms of "people can't work because they have to parent kids" when in reality is more like "people can't spend as much time parenting because they have to work". If money were not a problem, more people would quit their jobs or work part time to spend more time with kids. And as other commenters have pointed out taking care of children is indeed a productive job even if a stay at home parent doesn't file a W-2. Furthermore, there's some research (though not without controversy) that kids cared for by parents have better outcomes than those placed in child care.

jumboliah 3y ago

Higher birth rates make for higher GDP. Encouraging careers for birthing parents suppresses birth rates. We are playing the short game, not the long game.

dingi 3y ago

Having children is overrated anyways. If you don't have money or time, don't make them. Let's see how economic pundits achieve never ending growth without new people.

leetrout 3y ago

This year I started a company building daycare software. My goal is to grow it sustainably while targeting small, independent providers. There is so much shitty software out there that is over priced. I want to build safe, secure software I enjoy using myself while also being accessible for folks who arent savvy with technology everyday. I am moving very slow right now since it is just me but excited about the potential. My first customers are free while we figure out features but my goal is to charge $0.25/child/month. Waitlist and landing pages are free. Text and email notifications are pay per use while offering free credits each month. My wife is a teacher, my mom was an SLP and I am a parent who never had a small, local provider have tech in their day care and payments and comms were manual and paper. Real ability to affect change here.

nn3 3y ago

If its one adult per 10 kids and they each pay 700 the child care is making 840k per kindergarden teacher. Assuming the adult makes 60k a year thats 780k of overhead. Where is it all going?

medvezhenok 3y ago
You sure you didn't tack on an extra zero there? 700x10x12 = 84K, not 840K.

sjjrjrkkt 3y ago

[flagged]

llamaInSouth 3y ago

dont have kids

MandieD 3y ago

Costs of childcare from 7:30-16:00 in metro Nürnberg (Nuremberg) at publicly-subsidized locations open to all children, without any further income-based subsidies: - 400 EUR/mo fees plus 80/mo lunch and drinks for 12 months - 3 years at Krippe (creche/nursery school) - 120 EUR/mo fees plus 100/mo lunch and drink for 3 - 6 years at Kindergarten (preschool and then US kindergarten year), because Bavaria really, really wants children of non-German-speakers in preschool but found out that subsidizing only those children was politically untenable. There may be further discounts for the Vorschule (school preparation) year that starts at age 5 and is more like US kindergarten There are further subsidies for parents who don't earn much, especially for 3 - 6 year olds. In short, very inexpensive as long as you're not trying to work a full-time job, and it's a lot easier to scale a serious full-time job back to a part-time contract for a few years here than it would be in the US. In some areas, there are not enough Krippe and Kindergarten slots; in our area, you have to apply to several and do so a few months ahead of time if you want one reasonably close to your home. We had to take a Krippe slot in the next neighborhood. Care outside of 07:30 - 16:00 is not nearly as well-organized or subsidized. I've made the choice not to find out; I work part-time and will do so until my kid is well into primary school, in large part because I want to spend a few hours a day making sure that he can speak and read English. Some of the subsidized Krippes and Kindergartens are run directly by the city adjacent to the public school system; others are run by the major churches (Catholic and Lutheran), Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers' Welfare - traditional Social Democrat-aligned social services provider), and other community organizations. They need to meet certain standards to get those subsidies, and so far, the quality of care and education my kid has gotten at both his Krippe and now his Kindergarten compare well to what my friends in the US paid $2000+/mo for. As in the US, Krippe and Kindergarten workers are not paid very well in Germany, and have had a few warning strikes in the past year.

niemandhier 3y ago
Prepare for some complications when your kids enter primary school. After school care is less well organized and ( as per my personal experience ) after school tutors are overwhelmed by the amounts of homework and learning that are necessary. As a consequence kids of parents that depend on after school have a disadvantage. Since this is more often the case in low income families social strata probably get solidified.

maxehmookau 3y ago

Has anybody noticed that the same politicians who are demanding "more babies" and decrying that millennials aren't having enough children are the same politicians that insist on allowing the free-market to dictate childcare costs? The lack of children being born in the US and other western countries is (partly) a direct consequence of the lack of good quality, subsidised childcare. More importantly, where is this money going? I know for a fact that the frontline workers who actually _look after_ children aren't seeing a marked increase in their pay. So it's just more profit for the private equity firms who own these businesses.

polski-g 3y ago
The free market isn't dictating the costs of childcare. The government is. Every state has maximums for employee to child ratios. Every state has zoning restrictions for facility locations. Some states have college degree requirements. If your state limits the ratio to 4 to 1, then the cheapest possible cost for coverage would be 1/4 of the employees' salary. If you want to bring costs down, then loosen these restrictions. Allow facilities to set their own ratios and charge accordingly and consumers to make the choice of the risk they tolerate
- maxehmookau 3y ago
  So we can reduce the cost of childcare by reducing the quality? Sure, but these are children, not screws, or planks of wood, or consumer electronics. The government is mandating minimum _safety_ standards for the people who are minding the next generation of humans. We really need to be asking where that money is going and why costs are so high. The government really is not the problem here other than that they're not subsidising it enough.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    It comes to general question of cost of living. Why is cost of living so high? Solve the cost of living and labour becomes cheaper and thus things like childcare come cheaper.

thejackgoode 3y ago

2.1 children per woman is the fertility rate for population reproduction. It is scary to me to think how much needs to change in the developed world that the 3-children household becomes the norm.

namelosw 3y ago

It's a good thing to take care your own children. "Loses an estimated $122 billion a year" is like a weird attempt to makes it sounds bad. The puzzle need to be solved is how to let people rejoin the workforce later without their career wrecked (with a discontinued CV).

pjmlp 3y ago
And how to sustain themselves during the time they can't work, have to take care of the children, and might also become ill during that period.
shawabawa3 3y ago
> It's a good thing to take care your own children If you want to, yes. If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to
- firejake308 3y ago
  The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else. I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.
baq 3y ago
It's a bad thing taking care over your children does not count as GDP.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
3y ago

ilikerashers 3y ago

$700 per month. Those are rookie numbers. Come to the UK where childcare is £2k per month. The UK system gives mediocre benefits and also penalises you if one of you makes >100k a year.

Redsquare 3y ago
£2k? - where on earth is that - it is around £1.2k in Manchester
- jamesfmilne 3y ago
  If you have two children under 5 you could easily be £2k in childcare for both of them. And £2k probably doesn't even cover 5 days a week for two kids. I daren't think about what it'd cost if you had 3 kids under 5 years old!
- ilikerashers 3y ago
  London zone 4. Pretty typical and can go higher.
- shawabawa3 3y ago
  The nursery my daughter goes to just increased their prices from £1.8k/month to £2.1k/month for children under 2. It's slightly less for children over 2 and even less once they hit 3 and get 15 hours free This is London zone 2
shapefrog 3y ago
These numbers are also ignoring the gap in (median/average/decent) pay between the US and UK (2021 averages in USD: $58,260 for the US and $38,291 for the UK). Oddly it has conditioned many friends who were stauch opponents of private schools (waste of money and only generates entitled poorly educated people) to feel more comfortable with paying the cheaper private school fees for primary school (or they took one look at the public alternative and realised the reality)
- ilikerashers 3y ago

ksimukka 3y ago

In Oslo, Norway we are currently paying about $300/mo for full time child care (it is more like kindergarten). That’s the maximum out-of-pocket that parents have to pay for a single child. Our taxes contribute to the kindergarten system and the government requires that all children from the age of 1 have a right to attend. We have hundreds of both private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) kindergartens in the Oslo area. So it scales well and benefits the entire community and local economy. I wish the US could experience what we have here in Norway.

gumballindie 3y ago
> private (owned by the government) and public (for profit) I think these may be inverted - public is what is owned by the government, private is for profit. Nonetheless, children being raised by the state is not a positive. As a parent you get to see your child for a couple of hours a day during the week and for two full days during the weekend. Not ideal to be honest.

te_chris 3y ago

$700? Luxury. Try £1900 for 4 days in a central London daycare.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

In America, government programs tend to ignore the middle class and go straight to families earning far less than $100k annually. The studies reporting aggregate economic losses include middle class earners but the beneficiaries of the bill are those on the lower income scale.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago
The Middle class in the US refers to homes that bring home between $55K and $89K.

Dowwie 3y ago

> According to a recent survey by Care.com, for parents that pay for childcare, 67% are already spending 20% or more of their annual household income on such services. Care.com inflates market prices to pursue its own margin goals. Caretakers who aren't using care.com or agency, operating in a cash business, charge far less than reported in the care.com marketplace. This aside, you're still paying 15-25 dollars per hour in the NYC metro area for such services.

gumballindie 3y ago

Happening in the UK as well. For those where both parents work basically the child is raised by the state or people outside the family. I believe this can be called what it is, poverty, and it's reaching extreme levels.

truculent 3y ago

> The U.S. economy loses an estimated $122 billion a year when parents leave work or reduce their hours in order to stay home with young children, a February study from ReadyNation found. If this is the market value of childcare, and those children are being cared for, then can we say that the value has been transferred rather than lost? Following the link to an article about the study suggests the figure is an aggregate of a few other estimates: > The report found that not having child care — or enough child care — costs individual parents more than $5,500 a year, or more than $78 billion in total. And businesses lose $1,640 on average for each working parent due to lost revenue and hiring costs because of insufficient child care, totaling $23 billion annually. And the government loses, too — about $21 billion in lost income and sales tax revenues a year, or $1,470 less per working parent because parents without enough child care earn less and therefore consume less in their communities. I suppose this assumes that the level of care given to the children is approximately equivalent in both cases. In which case, I presume the argument is that more efficient childcare (fewer carers per child) is better.

nojvek 3y ago

Republicans are all pro-life, no abortion yada yada, but they are so against increasing minimum wage. Against child credits, which is a huge help to parents and did in fact reduce child poverty. Seems like a double standard when their actions seem making life worse for those who are alive. At this point, the US is hybrid artificial hive-mind intelligence optimizing for creating the largest megacorp monopolies in the world instead of optimizing for their working population.

gnz11 3y ago
> At this point That’s been US policy for the last 100 years or so, especially post-WWII. Citing Chomsky, et al.
asylteltine 3y ago
I don’t want my taxes to pay for your children. If you have children, that’s your burden.
- Argonaut998 3y ago
  Taxes pay for all sorts of things that ‘we don’t like’. It’s a benign statement. Certainly, paying taxes for daycare is more fruitful for the country as a whole rather than paying taxes for welfare for those who do not work (yet have many children) — a huge net negative for society, and of course taxes for waging war which you don’t seem to bat an eye at.
- claudiulodro 3y ago
  Today's children will be enabling your future retirement. You're going to be their burden, whether it's paying for your social security or keeping the value of your stocks high.
anon291 3y ago
The child credits also causes inflation. I benefitted a lot form them and even I can see that. I can't imagine a more disastrous policy at this time than expanding those.

joelegner 3y ago

High childcare costs universally generates outrage. But should it? Perhaps this is how the population eventually flattens. Maybe it is okay that the marginal cost of another human being keeps increasing. If adding a child to the planet is expensive, people will have fewer. The population will plateau. An even worse overpopulation problem may be averted or mitigated.

firejake308 3y ago
The problem is that the incentive doesn't work. Low-income folks have more children than high-income folks, even though they're the ones who are more adversely affected by childcare costs (larger percentage of budget). If disincentivizing having children through high childcare doesn't work, then we should accept that people will have as many kids as they want to, make things easier for the people who are already alive, and find other ways to manage overpopulation (easy access to contraception being the most effective and humane)
Argonaut998 3y ago
Low income and unemployed people have the most children and are heavily (if not completely) subsidised by the government. So this will only work if you want those to multiply. Furthermore, the USA is not overpopulated, the world is. This is a Western problem. People from India or Nigeria have no problem having 5+ children, so your solution makes no sense other than to punish working parents.

hermannj314 3y ago

The solution proposed is that the Federal government intervene in subsidizing child care. I disagree. Because Federal intervention comes with caveats to shape the image of the "noble poor" Federal intervention is a trojan horse to create a dependence on them. Don't take their poisoned charity. I feel like the chasm between a work-at-home mid-west farm family, a single mother raising a kid in a metropolis, and a dual-income SV couple with an au pair have very little in common. Federal intervention fails not because of a lack of empathy but because our regional cultures and beliefs play a significant role in the sacrifices and choices that shape how we think our kids should be raised. Stop letting Washington raise our children as if all 350 million of us were a monolith of shared values.

asylteltine 3y ago
If childcare is too expensive for someone, maybe they shouldn’t have children? Just a thought.
- hermannj314 3y ago
  How do you implement this as a policy or political belief? When we were having our 2nd kid, there were complications that killed my daughter and almost killed my wife. The trauma caused us to need to move closer to family and I went several months without a job. We relied on family to help us pay bills. Should we have lost our first kid because we didn't think things through and plan enough financially? I didn't consider when I had my first kid that several years later I would be dealing with trauma that would derail my life and career. Everyone seems happy now and we have money, but your point is that I should have never started a family at all since I did have a period of time where "childcare was too expensive"?

migf 3y ago

Onsite daycare is the future of office work if employers are actually serious about getting people to be in office.

angmarsbane 3y ago
Patagonia has on site childcare.
derwiki 3y ago
Do any software companies in the Bay Area offer this?

thelastgallon 3y ago

Economic/GDP growth is converting work that is usually done for free and making it paid. Then Govt can extract taxes, super rich can have monopolies (and subsidies!) and the grunts can have highly-replaceable low paying jobs to pay taxes and rich people richer. Keep people happy by showing bullshit statistics about how their life is getting better! TVs are cheaper every year --> your life is so much better. But healthcare, food, energy going up -- sorry they are not part of the metric. Childcare is consolidating, which means higher costs and lower pay. Lots of childcare chains in the US: https://winnie.com/resources/the-biggest-childcare-brands-in-the-united-states https://winnie.com/resources/the-biggest-childcare-brands-in...

nocsi 3y ago

The solution to daycare is to really not daycare. Want kids? Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with: * People giving up on kids and substitute it with dog ownership * Daycare rackets wherein they just turn on blippi as soon as the parents are gone. * Professionals that have migrated to a 4-day work week have figured out that they could create a co-op daycare/school and help raise one another's kids * Go full remote and grind out the parenting/work until your kid is old enough for some sort of preschool. I've been actually seeing more and more parents just bringing their kids to work. I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare. That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans.

verinus 3y ago
Interesting difference: here in Europe, it is mostly agreed on that childcare should be free, like any education.
Tade0 3y ago
> I really don't think subsidization is an answer. It punishes parents that figured out how to make things work w/o daycare. My take is that needing to figure this out is the real punishment here. France has the highest fertility rate in the EU (and higher than that of the US) and subsidies apparently are the way forward. They need to be applied correctly though. My country is currently doing worse than Japan even though it's spending, as a percentage of GDP, than France on subsidies - these are in the form of what amounts to an UBI scheme for parents per child. The US has a lot of low-hanging fruit here, like having any sort of actual parental leave, not just whatever pittance the employer throws in people's way.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
>Here are the options that people in the Seattle Metro have come up with Those are all awful and while I see your point about subsidization being a band-aid, it's way better than what these "solutions" are. Because they clearly haven't "figured out how to make things work". - a kid is not a pet. And there's a whole rabbit hole about how people adopted and abandoned pets as the pandemic came and went. Besides, not having a kid makes the whole thing moot and runs into current issues on first world population growth. - To be honest, this is fine as long as they are honest about it. Not every Daycare doesn't need to be pre-pre school, you may just want a responsible, trustworthy adult to make sure the house doesn't burn down and you can offer that at a discount. But odds are they can't be honest due to regulations. - I'm very confused on how this works unless every single people in the co-op has their day off on different days. - this is probably the best compromise out of them all, but the most exhausting. It may be borderline impossible to do depending on the industry you're in. >That and we start getting into a similar scenario as student loans. I'd hope we don't get to a point that raising a child is a non-bankruptable loan. But if so, its still better for the current situation than student loans. Many people have children older, and that means they have more savings prepared. And late 20's/30's adults understand debt and interest a lot better than an 18YO leaving home for the first time. I think the real solution is simply to solve the housing and minimium wage issues, though. Helps way more than parents to boot.

VoodooJuJu 3y ago

>Both parents work >So they can afford 2 cars >So they can both go to work >So they can afford child care while they're working >So they can pay for the dinner they can't prepare themselves because they're working >And the people who work in school and childcare >Do so to afford 2 cars >So they can go to work >So they can afford school & childcare >And they can afford to pay service workers to prepare their food >... People are starting to wake up to this madness for shilling every single human to become a worker unit. Children are suffering. People who've shilled for this arrangement should be charged with crimes, as they've harmed children, if only indirectly. But states and corporations should bear the brunt of the punishment, as they've worked in unison to create propaganda that agentizes the uneducated to shill work as a noble end, rather than a means to an end, all so GDP and profits can soar. When your god is money and efficiency, you suffer, especially your children.

hammock 3y ago

Broad-based, federally-funded before- and after-school childcare is the next logical extension to follow here. Serves the state politically in terms of education and control, prevents crime, and keeps the economy humming (preventing deflation and supporting burgeoning debt service costs)

poulsbohemian 3y ago

Really important to see both sides of the child care equation. States will often make available subsidies for families to cover the cost of child care, but then will overlook the issues that cause there to not be enough care providers. There's a catch-22 in that well-intentioned states will increase the standards in order to operate a day care, but that causes some care providers to exit the market. The proverbial grandmotherly character who opens her house to a few kids before and after school really can't legally operate in my state, which then makes it harder for someone with the means or subsidies to even find the care.

nescioquid 3y ago

Having lived through the "Reagan Revolution", I've frequently encountered the wry observation that Reagan's economic policies, which are said to have forced women into the workplace as previously single-income families struggled to survive, did more for "women's lib" than the ERA which has so far failed to be ratified as an amendment. If the standard of living has fallen so far that any second income is just going to be a wash against a $700 monthly expense for a wide group of people, I find it frustrating that culturally we can't talk about class.

tamimio 3y ago

It made sense back in 80s and 90s when the money IN were far more money OUT, nowadays, it makes more sense to conserve the spending since the ratio of income/spending is reversed by inflation and low wages.

MisterBastahrd 3y ago

We're reaching end stage capitalism, where the giant corporate forces are so large that governments and regulatory agencies and the Fed have little ability to corral them while workers' rights are being eroded and pay is stagnant. I'd ask how long before we start seeing company stores opening up again, but IBM beat me to the punch with their pathetic new retirement scheme. First they made the cost of living so expensive that two parents need to work to live comfortably, and now they've made it so expensive that childcare is unaffordable, which just puts more stress on the entire family. The propensity of the wealthy to keep their ill-gotten gains is going to heavily depend on how they treat benefits in the US, but the problem is that Republicans are going to demand a "free market solution," which is going to be virtually indistinguishable from school vouchers. It will result in daycares simply raising their rates and pocketing the difference. Public school systems largely already have plenty of property to house preschool kids. Make it a federally funded program and put daycares under the existing school systems. Yes, some small business owners will be out of luck, but their employees will all be vastly better off because those jobs pay virtually nothing and the benefits are always garbage if they even exist, and the kids will be better off because the workers will have more accountability.

andrewdubinsky 3y ago

whispers If only more people could work from home