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Being a parent is _punished_ in our society. It messes with your career growth in a dual income family, and for any metro with well paying jobs you're looking a

• cma 3y ago
  How many direct workers per infant are there in daycare, and what's the big source of overhead above that?
  • billyhoffman 3y ago
    In the US child-to-teacher ratios have maximum limits usually set and enforced at the State or municipal level. This ratio also varies by age level with lower child to teacher ratios for infants than for toddlers. In Georgia the ratio is 6:1 for infants. However there is a national daycare certification group NAEYC which has stricter ratios. The daycare where my kids went was NAEYC certified and the ratio was 4:1 for infants.
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      > In the US child-to-teacher ratios have maximum limits usually set and enforced at the State or municipal level. As someone who has a partner who spent years working in a wide variety of childcare (from "high end" to "low end"), these ratios are _routinely_ ignored. There's also significant pressure to come in when sick. She was very sick - "Well, good thing there's a bathroom in your room, huh?" On the rare occasions they really couldn't meet staffing levels and didn't open for the day? Congratulations, everyone gets the day off! Unpaid, of course! Why, yes, we're still billing families the normal weekly/monthly rate...
    • cma 3y ago
      4:1 seems pretty low, people who have triplets are getting close to that when caring for their kids alone during their partner's work day. Is that accounting for cross coverage during lunch breaks and stuff, or 4:1 at all times?
      • Balgair 3y ago
        4:1 at all times in my state. If you've not had an infant with a cold, let alone a room full of them, even 4:1 is cutting pretty close. Sure, when all are healthy and happy, you can maybe go up in ratio. But when things are going not so well then infants need pretty constant care. And things are usually not going well in the winter time. If RSV or covid is going around, even 1:1 care is pushing it. Our daycare had four in the PICU after a bout of RSV went through. Some are still on a canula, months later. That amount of phlegm really messes with the little ones.
• garbanz0 3y ago
  As someone without kids I typically see my coworkers who do have kids be granted special allowances and bond with upper management over the experience of being a parent, etc
  • StayTrue 3y ago
    I had a young coworker blow a fuse because of allowances given to parents not available to others. But I’m so old and have seen it so many times I just shrugged and told him to get used to it. It is what it is.
  • _huayra_ 3y ago
    This is the most frustrating part. I have so many team members who drag their feet on tons of projects and blame it on their parental obligations with seemingly endless levels of understanding from everyone, but if I were to say "I am really burnt out and want to take the day off to go skiing" once in a while, I become the team pariah.
    • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
      I think this is less blame on the parents and more blaming on society’s lack of understanding of human mental health. It’s just when it comes to parents, the trauma and misery of raising a child is more well known and therefore more understanding is granted. It’s also why people without children can be viewed as overly judgmental of flawed parenting— they are kind of being the guy who goes “what, you’re not over it already” to someone who was assaulted or similar.
    • breather 3y ago
      > if I were to say "I am really burnt out and want to take the day off to go skiing" once in a while, I become the team pariah. Find a better team—that's not normal behavior.
      • _huayra_ 3y ago
        Yes it has taken me a while to realize this now, as I had bought into the "well kids are a valid excuse, so who am I to complain?" propaganda for too long. I'm starting the leetcode grind / github "resume" update since the start of this month for that reason.
• ajross 3y ago
  > that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight Maybe you don't have a solution "in sight" because by eliminating tax analysis you're conspicuously skipping the Child Tax Credit[1], which is pretty clearly aimed right at this issue. It doesn't make children into a revenue source or anything, but it's a real and tangible action taken by "our politicians" to address exactly the problem you claim they're ignoring. [1] Also the Child and Dependent Care Credit, also any of the various state policies in the same realm, also the deductability of child care expenses, etc... Basically tax policy IS THE MECHANISM by which government tries to address this problem. And you totally missed it!
  • schnable 3y ago
    And many employers offer Flex Savings Accounts for child/dependent care, which I believe are capped at $5,000 per year. So the child tax care credit is $2,000 cash for each kid, then $5,000 of your child care costs are pre-tax. Criticize that all you want, but why lie about it? Or be ignorant and sanctimonious?
  • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    What is sad about the child care credit: it’s like half the cost of one kid, and doesn’t scale with the number of kids you have. So ya, it saves you ~$1k-1.5K year in taxes, it’s kind of useless.
    • ajross 3y ago
      How is a thousand dollars "useless"? I'll take it if you don't want it. Again, the point is to make having children less expensive, not to hire people to have kids. There's room for argument for what the right kind and amount of public assistance for child rearing should be. But blanket statements like "useless" (or no "solution in sight" upthread) seem ridiculous. Clearly there's useful aid for parents in the modern US.
      • seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Oh it’s fine. But it would still be $1500 or so if I had a second kid, or a third. It’s also like 15% of my overall yearly childcare expenses for one kid who is already in elementary school (and was much less when was in preschool). Just increase the child tax credit by $1500 and be done with it.
• htk 3y ago
  What about this take: having a child is a responsibility. An expensive and serious one. Why should others pay for your choice?
  • matthewaveryusa 3y ago
    A basic function of societies is caring for the young (and old) and I believe socializing the costs of early rearing of children is beneficial to literally everyone. Right now you may not want to help, but when you're old and decrepit you'll want to be living in a functioning economy run by the children you contributed some money to help grow into contributing members of the economy.
  • immibis 3y ago
    If that's your opinion, then fine, but you don't get to complain about birth rates, immigration, "the great replacement", or the unsustainability of the social security fund at the same time.
  • pton_xd 3y ago
    The future of our society depends on it? The same reason we have taxes for any common good, whether it applies to you individually or not.
  • nine_zeros 3y ago
    Nobody else should have to pay for the choice. But there is no reason for the cost of childcare to go up and up. Literally just enable better pregnancy/parenthood laws and create an abundance of childcare centers so that costs can go lower.
    • ericd 3y ago
      You can’t just magically have enough childcare workers willing to staff that abundance of childcare centers. It’s a free job market, and wages have to be competitive, given a tight labor market. We help run a preschool at the moment, and salaries are the vast majority of the budget, the facility is a very small part. It’s extremely hard to keep it staffed without blowing the budget. If you want childcare to be cheaper for parents it must be subsidized, or we need higher unemployment to make childcare a more attractive field (though I’d argue you don’t want people caring for your kids out of desperation for a job), or we must make housing cheaper/less competitive so that people can afford to do this out of passion.
• Telemakhos 3y ago
  My colleague went out on maternity leave and never came back, because it just didn't make financial sense to hire daycare when her husband could support the whole family without her income. She's also happier than she's ever been in her life and loves her baby far more than she ever cared about her job.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• quatrefoil 3y ago
  This is the usual argument people make - that having children is harder and less affordable than before - but the highest fertility rates are pretty consistently recorded in impoverished and conflict-torn countries, where raising a child requires sacrifices much greater than it does in the West. And conversely, increasing standards of living and having more disposable income is the #1 predictor of dropping fertility rates. You see it in Europe, in Asia, in America. The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices than their ancestors did. It's that they no longer want to make small ones. The price tag you mention is what you pay if you don't want to make any lifestyle changes. Not moving closer to one's parents, so that they could provide child care. Not cutting down discretionary spending, not giving up on career goals. I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country where such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference. There may be other reasons to do it, but I guess the only tried and true way to fix fertility is famine and war...
  • dotnet00 3y ago
    In impoverished and conflict torn countries, there isn't much worse that the situation could get with kids and the mortality rate is higher, so there's less interest in family planning. On top of that, most such countries are ones where there is significant cultural pressure to have children early. This also translates to other things, if people are having families in their early 20s, the third generation has relatively young grandparents. If they're having them in the late 20s, early 30s, the third generation has grandparents who are in their 60s and not as capable of chasing after toddlers all day. Being expected to give up on career goals also comes down to the same issue, when you're primarily focused on staying afloat, your career goals are also just to not have things get worse. Famine or war would not reverse this in the West, unless it was at apocalyptic levels such as to cause a total cultural reset back to a society where women are seen as child factories first.
  • immibis 3y ago
    There are two groups of people who consistently have children: People who can afford it, and people who have nothing to lose by not affording it. In the middle is a group who would actually lose a lot by having children, so they don't.
• bluetomcat 3y ago
  Financial issues aside, it brings a lot of uncertainties and responsibilities in your everyday routine. For good and bad, your mind is never truly alone for the rest of your life. The child gets sick and nothing else matters at that moment. You must be able to deal graciously with all kinds of mood emotional states ranging from stubbornness, through laziness, to exhilaration. You must have reserves and be mobilised like a warrior in every aspect – financially, mentally, physically.
• thatfrenchguy 3y ago
  > And that's post-tax, because our politicians love talking about the problems but no solutions in sight. It's not just post-tax for you, daycare providers also pay taxes so it's a double whammy. Most European countries give you a tax credit (which would help a lot more than tax deductions) and have special generous tax schemes for the providers themselves to ensure they get licensed & declare their revenues. Without these schemes, you end up with the current situation where upper-class folks hire nannies under the table and essentially stiff the government instead. France had the same issue and fought it successfully in the 80s by making sure providers make more money by being declared and licensed. It would not that hard with enough federal government intervention. Which will likely not happen because white Americans still think more like German people ("why would you be a working mom") than French people ("why would you stay at home").