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Study shows two child household must earn $400k/year to afford childcare
- toomuchtodo 9mo agohttps://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/child-care-affordability-study/ https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/child-care-af...
- cafard 9mo agoI am not in that market, but this seems implausible. My neighborhood is pretty prosperous, but I doubt that $400k/year is the standard. Yet kids do go off to daycare.
- altairprime 9mo ago400K gross before taxes is qty2. of $200k/yr which is IC4 or so, right? Seems plausible enough.
- ALittleLight 9mo agoMedian family income in the US is a little over 100k. 400k to afford childcare is a ridiculous lie/error.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- altairprime 9mo agoYes, that’s the point they’re claiming: a median family cannot afford healthcare. Are there any figures in particular asserted by the article that you consider faulty, or merely the conclusion?
- ALittleLight 9mo ago"Uh, excuse me. This ad for a payday loan company says the vast majority of households can't afford this thing that most households with children do, in fact, afford and pay for. Which figures do you dispute?" Concluding something farcical and then asking people to debate it is silly and a waste of time. 400k is an extremely high household income. Childcare is a common expense for families with children. The claim that only extremely high income people can afford a common expense is wrong on its face and needs no further analysis.
- toomuchtodo 9mo agohttps://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-daycare-costs-by-state/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-daycare-costs-by-sta...
- Seattle3503 9mo agoThey might be spending more than the recommended 7% of their income on childcare. That's where the 400k number came from.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- AngryData 9mo agoI believe it can be pretty high, but $400,000 seems utterly ridiculous to me. You spend $100K per year per kid just for child care? You can hire a live-in nanny for that amount of money.
- casey2 9mo agoMost families are in poverty with regards to childcare, they just don't realize it. Sure you could keep a child alive on less, but to "raise" one involves a host of social social capital, enrichment, and cultural integration. Child care is ridiculously expensive because most attention is captured by frivolities (and companies abusing child labor). Say you spend 10K a year on food, school supplies and some sport, unless your child becomes a scholar or athlete you have failed to raise them. You might have prevented obesity and built some amount of discipline, but you've prevented them from making connections outside school/sports. Do you think hiring a nanny would, over time, go most of the way towards raising your children? If so then $400,000 isn't ridiculous, if not then shouldn't it be higher? Unfortunately more than 99% of children in America are chronically undervalued, parents have overly cynical beliefs about their children starting from ages even earlier than 4. By the time a child sees any real investment they are likely to just give it straight to the mag7
- mbreese 9mo agoThe devil is in the details. The crux of the article is in these two lines: > Across the U.S., the average annual cost of care for an infant and a 4-year-old is $28,190, according to Child Care Aware of America. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) considers child care affordable when it accounts for no more than 7% of a household’s income. It’s been awhile, but the $28k number seems reasonable. It’s more expensive in different areas and the article goes into the numbers by state. But the part where it gets difficult to see is the 7% number. You only require $400k/year if you cap child care costs at 7%. When my kids were in daycare, it cost significantly more than 7% of our income.
- ggggffggggg 9mo agoIf you pick 3% you need 800k/yr! Oh no! Sadly most of us pay far more than 7%. Fortunately mostly that’s ok and it all works out. (Except we will work until we die, but hey! Capitalism!)
- freefaler 9mo agoIn every system from hunter-gather society, feudalism, socialism and capitalism you need to exchange your work for the products of the work of other people. No system will give you the ability to not work and get what you want. The capitalism is the least bad one where there the correlation between "making something that people want" to the value you can keep to feed yourself.
- margalabargala 9mo agoYour comment is a bit of a non sequiter. The parent comment is complaining about capitalism draining savings such that retirement becomes impossible. Other systems have robust retirement available for the elderly.
- freefaler 9mo agoReally? Where will these resources will came from if the capitalist system is the most productive of them all? You can't redistribute something out of nothing. You need a healthy tax base to redistribute. Childcare is just too regulated and people don't want to do it and ask for a premium on childcare. Retirement in socialist country? Or in China before the capitalism came there? Or in a feudal society where your children where your insurance in the old age?
- dagmx 9mo agoTitle should really clarify: “In the US”. Childcare is much cheaper in other countries, even relative to the lower earning potentials. Canada for example is working towards $10/child/day childcare https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campaigns/child-care.html https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/campa...
- ETH_start 9mo agoThe cost is distributed across the people through taxation.
- dagmx 9mo agoOkay, and? Being cheaper in total, cheaper to the individual and generally amortized aren’t mutually exclusive.
- ETH_start 9mo agoNo reason why it would be cheaper in total, given the government workforce would inevitably unionize, leaving the taxpayer with very little bargaining power.
- timcambrant 9mo agoYes, which is great. Everybody pays so no one pays much. No one is poor from paying for other people's daycare.
- ETH_start 9mo agoYou can replicate that individually by just saving.
- theshrike79 9mo agoThat's how a welfare state operates. It's long term second-order thinking that people on the right side of the political spectrum tend to lack in my experience. I pay taxes so other people can afford to have kids, they can stay home and give the kids a stable childhood. Then the kids will go to subsidised childcare (0-250€/month depending on income) and later to school where they have free school lunches and well-paid teachers. Why? Because I'm getting old and when I retire we need people working and paying taxes so there's money to pay for MY healthcare and pension.
- apparent 9mo agoThe chart claims that you need to make over half a million dollars a year ($516k) to comfortably afford child care in Minnesota. I'm sorry, that is absolutely ridiculous.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoSo where did this 7% number come from? Another way to look at that is one parent brings in 100% of their income, and when the second parent wants to get a job they have to sacrifice 14% of their pay to get childcare while they're away. That seems low to me. Another way to analyze this is to look at how many children a single worker has to take care of to hit the same pay. If childcare for 2 kids is 14% of a salary, and salary is half the cost of running a daycare, then you need 29 kids per childcare employee?? How is that supposed to work? Edit: And yes I'm aware subsidies can exist but this hits an area where the subsidies are so high that the 7% number still needs explanation.
- semi-extrinsic 9mo agoFor comparison, I live in a Scandinavian country where childcare is subsidised, and here a family with two kids living at the poverty limit spends 8% of their income on childcare.
- ETH_start 9mo agoBaumol's Law suggests the money spent on less automatable industries increases as the economy becomes more automated, so I question if the 7 percent figure is either realistic or achievable, given childcare is highly resistant to productivity gains through automation.
- jballanc 9mo agoWhen I was a young kid, my mother was a “stay at home mom”, which meant that she babysat the kids of 5 or 6 of the other families in our neighborhood where both parents worked. For me, it was a wonderful experience growing up having a ready-made group of close friends and my mother close at hand. It did mean that my mother effectively sacrificed her career (though she eventually went to work for my father as his office manager and was instrumental to his success), but I’m certain she was not charging $20k/yr/kid (or whatever the equivalent in 1980s dollars would be). What Americans seem to only just now be waking up to is that lack of work/life balance, lack of family leave accommodations, and loss of community has a very real, very tangible dollar amount cost. I’m very, very tired of the knee-jerk response to every “socialist” proposal being, “yeah, that’s great, but how are you going to pay for it?” How are you going to pay for not having family leave? How are you going to pay for not having universal healthcare? How are you going to pay for not having tuition-free college for all? These choices have a cost, and Americans are paying that cost every day!
- gustavus 9mo agoI have 4 kids (all under 12) and make quite a bit less than $200k with me being the only provider in the home and although I wouldn't say we're exactly where I want to be financially I don't think that were completely bankrupt.
- feverzsj 9mo agoMaybe buy less organic food, go to a public school and take public transit.
- dangcensors 9mo agoGod forbid people have a traditional nuclear family where the mother raises and nurtures the children into competent adults.
- catlikesshrimp 9mo agoGod forbid men abandoned their families (children, wives) for selfish reasons. But they still do. It is not cool to be a single mother without a career, because you wanted women to be housewives by profession. Take a tour in Afganistan. I heard they just enacted a law for beating housewives. https://htnworld.com/taliban-afghanistan-domestic-violence-law/ https://htnworld.com/taliban-afghanistan-domestic-violence-l...
- dangcensors 9mo agoThose are mental gymnastics to justify extinction. There is nothing mysoginistic about the human reproductive and child rearing process that every generation of humans has followed from the dawn of our species up until about 20 years ago.
- bad_haircut72 9mo agoNo mysoginism, just a bunch of women telling their daughters/granddaughters their regrets.
- dangcensors 9mo agoWhat daughters or granddaughters if they're never born?
- PostOnce 9mo agoAnd then who pays the mortgage that now requires 2 incomes? We are not building a society, we're building some kind of mass labor camp. Which means eventually we're going to get a prison riot because people are tired of the conditions.
- charcircuit 9mo agoIt's more affordable for a mother to care for her own children than paying someone else to do it for her.
- timcambrant 9mo agoWhy not the dad? Only infants specifically needs their mother.
- apparent 9mo agoA couple reasons: Moms often nurse past infancy, and once she's taken 18-24 months off work, it makes more sense for her to continue the pause. On average, moms seem to derive more enjoyment from spending time with babies. I have some male friends who had almost zero desire to spend time with their babies/toddlers. I don't know many women who feel similarly (I'm sure there are some, just many fewer).
- em-bee 9mo agoon the contrary, it makes less sense if you want women to get equal chance of a career at work. the likelihood of women staying at home reduces their chances at being promoted, causes them to get paid less, etc. the pay gap, which is supposed to disappear comes from this difference. if you want to equalize this then you effectively need to force dads to stay at home for the same amount of time as moms, so that their careers are affected in the same way.[1] of course this won't work without a massive change in culture. men have no interest in spending time with children because that's what they learned from their own parents. i wanted to stay with my children, but when i did i hated it because i had no role model to draw on. i didn't know what to do with them. my wife also wasn't very helpful with guidance. interestingly this is worse in europe than it is in china. i see more men taking care of children in china. of course most of those are grandparents but at least they provide the needed role models. this correlates with more equality of women in the work place. (although it is still far from ideal) [1]that then leaves the issue of childless people having a career advantage. if you want people to keep having children that advantage must be eliminated, hence making the case for child support for everyone. germany pays almost 300$ per child per month regardedless of income. and even that is not enough. stay at home parents should have their time count as worked for their pension, or they may need a full salary for example. i don't know what would really work here.
- silisili 9mo agoI have so many thoughts on this from my own life experience. Latchkey kid, YMMV. When I was a child, it was normal for neighborhood moms who didn't work to just watch kids for favors or a nominal fee. My memories are fuzzy, but I seem to mostly remember watching daytime TV soaps and eating PBJs probably more often than a child should. Now that I'm older, I'm flabbergasted by regulations and costs for simple daycare. I've met numerous people who spend more on childcare than they make in a month. Not to sound trad anything, but that just doesn't make any financial sense to me. I've no idea what the solution is. NM recently announced free child care, interested to see how that plays out. For everyone else... there's gotta be a saner solution.
- samrus 9mo agoOut of curiosity, whay are the regulations? If you leave your kid with a friendly neighbor, what laws are you breaking? How would you get in trouble?
- silisili 9mo agoThat I don't know exactly if it's just one on one, as I've not read up on it when it's a more personal relationship. I do know that my own wife, who was home all day watching just one child, was open to taking on more for free, but regulations around it made it way more of a headache than it was worth. There are laws about how many kids you can watch, how long you can watch them, licensing, child to adult ratios, state visits, etc. Basically, if you wanted to be open to watching 5 kids for a working day, doing so would be illegal in every state I've lived in. Every state has regulations and laws that at face value most people would agree with, but together end up in a system where you have to pay thousands per month for a facility to watch a child.
- black6 9mo agoMy wife had a very successful "farm school" in Mississippi by staying under the limit for required childcare licensing. At the time one could have six children (in addition to one's own) and not have to be a licensed childcare facility.
- wjekkekene 9mo agoIs this some American bullshit thing? There is no way that’s true in normal countries… here in a different part of northern hemisphere, we pay $100 usd per month 11 months a year…
- em-bee 9mo agoin this german article there is a table with numbers: https://moms-favorites-and-more.de/kosten-kindergarten/ https://moms-favorites-and-more.de/kosten-kindergarten/ (disclaimer: i wonder if that site content is AI generated. some details/inconsistencies don't add up) first column is public or private, second is age, then lowest cost vs highest cost, and finally average. highest overall is 18000€ per year for private childcare institutions for 1-2 year olds. thats more than 21000USD. and that may still be subsidized and not include meals. it is also usually income dependent. so it's not american bullshit. what it is however is american lack for child support. the joke in germany on the other hand is that you need to apply for a space years in advance. possibly even before you are pregnant.
- sceptic123 9mo agoWhy is a loan comparison site doing this kind of research? Why would you trust this kind of research from a loan comparison site?
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- RickJWagner 9mo agoWow. My wife and I have 3 kids, all went to college. At the time the first was born, we decided she’d stay home and be a full time mother. She coached them through school and ACT prep, which brought academic scholarships for all 3. We have friends where the couple both stayed at work. Maybe they take nicer vacations than we do, some sent their kids to more expensive colleges. Oddly, I retired before anyone from that group. Some say they can’t afford to retire. Trad wife worked out for us. My daughter has a career and is entering marriage age, I’m conflicted about that. I hate for her to leave her career behind, but that’s the path that worked for my wife and me.