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Comment by codeismightier | Hacker News Reader

Is childcare in fact expensive? According to the article it "can top 15 percent of the median income for a married couple". But considering that taking care of children used to be a full-time job for a housewife, isn't it actually surprisingly cheap relative to historical standards?

In general, if there isn't increased productivity because of technology, we shouldn't expect lower costs in terms of labor-hours consumed. See "Baumol's cost disease" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)

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I used to work in child-care. We charged $14/day for after-school care (4-5 hours), and the staff-to-child ratio was about 20:1. Counselors made < $10 hour. This was 2001-2007 or so.

Child care was the biggest money maker at my organization, which was a fully-featured ymca with seasonal sports, fitness, olympic pool, gymnastics, rock wall, skate park, and 10 million in the bank. We had a pre-school, after-school, and summer camps. I can't speak to the % of net income that came from child care, but I think it was very large.

I think given multiple children, it becomes very likely that it's better for one parent to stay home. They get to spend a lot more time with the kids at a very small financial difference.

You can only have a 20:1 with older kids. Infants and toddlers need more staff. The age mix is an important cost component.

[edit http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/tta-system/teaching/eecd/L... has space and staffing rules for EHS and HS which states tend to copy]

We were allowed to have 30:1, actually (with 4 and 5 year old kingergarteners, any school-age kids).

We typically kept about 20:1 until a time when we were trying to qualify for a higher standard, which required a 15:1 maximum.

And occasionally my co-counselor would be gone and I'd have 50+ kids for the day. It went okay for me, but many of the counselors could not have managed that whatsoever. In fact, many of my later co-counselors couldn't handle any amount of children by themselves.

Hard to work ability into a standard, of course.

You are damn lucky you didn't have a fire or other emergency. I also recommend checking the insurance and local laws to find your personal liability in those situations.

We had multiple groups and plenty of other staff, they just wouldn't be assigned to my group.

For instance, I might have the soccer field for a given rotation (we had several each day), and on the playground nearby was another group or two, supervisors inside, etc.

Any kind of non-herding-children emergency would have been handled without issue. Fire could be an issue, though I'm not sure an additional staff member would improve the situation much--the problem would be the doorways creating choke points.

Colorado requires a 15:1 ratio for dogs:humans in group play style dog care facilities.

I'd take 15 humans over 15 dogs ANY day.

Little humans are typically very controllable and well-behaved, and even more so after a few days in a good system.

> typically very controllable and well-behaved

I went to my sons school the other day - parents were invited to attend for half an hour. He's 6. The children sat down quietly when the teacher asked. One of the parents took a phone call (!), at which point one of the kids immediately turned around, gave her the most incredibly stern look and went "shhh!" - it was quite amusing to see a bunch of 6 year old kids behaving better than their parents.

Conversely, though, I had teachers as a kid that wouldn't have been able to get anyone to behave... My class drove more than one teacher to run crying from the class room. In primary school.

That basically is what the article says. I don't find it surprising at all.

Do the math: if parents want one carer for every N kids, they have to pay 1/N-th of the costs of a carer.

I guess that 10 is a conservative estimate for the value of N, taking into account holidays, sick days, and the fact that kids will be at the center for over 8 hours because parents have to do their own workday between dropping off and picking up their child.

Also, parents do not want to make daycare look industrial, daycare needs a kitchen, beds so that kids can rest in the afternoon, etc. That means parents effectively have to pay for about half a second house for their kids, an extra set of toys, etc. and they want it all from 8AM-6PM, so daycare providers cannot run shifts to more efficiently use their facility.

Edit: and don't forget income tax. Parents have to pay a daycare worker's income before tax from from their income after taxes.

For me, that makes it clear that, at current price level, daycare workers cannot have a middle class income. Also, if they had, lots of people couldn't afford child care.

And historically, child care wasn't a full time job. Housewifes also prepared food, cleaned the house, washed clothes, found time to repair clothing, went shopping, etc. Even with modern appliances, that adds up.

>For me, that makes it clear that, at current price level, daycare workers cannot have a middle class income. Also, if they had, lots of people couldn't afford child care.

You're assuming here that the payment all has to come from the parents disposable income. Other countries (try to) address this with government or employer subsidies for childcare, eg in Australia http://www.humanservices.gov.au/customer/services/centrelink...

Doesn't most countries finance school for older children partially or entirely through taxes as well (primary school)?

Obviously, education is seen as a necessity both for (semi)functioning democracy, but also for any modern society to work. It seems odd that we're happy to take care of kids for free (or highly subsidized cost) from the age from 6 to 16 -- but somehow the years 1-6 needs to be paid for by parents? Are those 4 years really so much more expensive, that it wouldn't make sense to just roll that all up into one budget?

I actually need to look at the arguments around this in Norway -- free school from the age of 6 to 18, along with a free college education isn't really an issue - and full coverage of child care services also have broad agreement -- but somehow simply making said childcare free seems to be much more contentious. Or perhaps just overlooked.

I suppose one could make up microeconomic arguments along the lines of a solid education for all benefits all, while allowing all parents those extra 3-4 per child in the job market might not benefit all. Perhaps more interesting is the general trend that there's less work -- so having people spend some time off from work (with eg: pay from the government) might simply be a more efficient model going forward.

But if we accept that free primary school is a good thing, I don't see how we can argue that free kinder garden isn't too.

It does come out of parents disposable income, eventually.

If the government subsidizes it, taxes will go up and disposable income goes down (though part of the cost gets externalized to childless taxpayers).

If most employers pays for it, cost of living will go down, and salaries will also go down (for everyone, so your childless coworker's salary will also go down and the difference will either go to the shareholders, or maybe the CEO will just pat himself in the back for his brilliant cost cutting ideas and give himself a big Christmas bonus).

All in all, it sounds like the only cases where it makes sense to subsidize is in countries with an aging population. Otherwise, it's fairer to pay living wages to workers and have each parent pay out of pocket.

> Housewifes also prepared food, cleaned the house, washed clothes, found time to repair clothing, went shopping

These are all tasks that 'child care' includes, and some of them are magnified in difficulty when kids are attached.

> Edit: and don't forget income tax.

At the income levels at issue, payroll tax is far more significant than income tax.

> ... daycare workers cannot have a middle class income. Also, if they had, lots of people couldn't afford child care.

I know this will sound terrible, but if you cannot afford to pay child care, maybe the economy is telling you that your marginal job is not worth be done or held. The reality in US and many countries following it's economic model is that unemployment is a chronic, ignored problem. Marginally useful jobs can exist because there is always a big pool of desperate people ready to take poverty wages. You will do yourself and everyone a favor by not competing in that race to the bottom.

As long as the child is being raised by a family with at least 2 adults, a stay at home mom or dad is perfectly capable of providing care while at the same time engage in all types of frugality and household economy activities that will extend the salary of the sole breadwinner beyond what is normally possible for a couple of overstressed careerists. They can also engage in education and creative activities that will allow them to pick up a career later, when the kids are old enough to attend school (which is a sort of mandatory daycare, anyways).

Also, it is important to recognize that a single parent raising children is a extraordinary and unsustainable situation (though sadly common through history). Subsidies, charity and informal help from extended family, friends and neighbors should be directed to this cases, instead of being spread out trying to benefit as many people as possible.

It's pretty expensive, my own informal surveying of people with kids suggests the 'good' childcare places are basically equivalent of an extra one-bedroom apartment per month per kid. Relative to historical standards, you had not only the housewife, but grandparents, other relatives, and even your neighbors in the immediate community to help share the burden.

I'd say you're underestimating. Our son is with a childminder two days a week, and I could easily get a one bedroom place for that money. In the UK the last stats I heard suggested you need an income of £40,000 a year or more to break even on full time childcare.

High quality child care is very expensive. The average daycare feeds your kids cheese puffs and processed foods and takes no special interest in customizing a child's experience. It is expensive to use child care that forgoes the state matching food grants (which encourage the cheese puffs), and focus on specialized care for your child.

I have never seen a childcare that feeds cheese puffs.

In San Francisco, full time day care can run about $2k a month - here's a link to the costs for the day care for faculty and staff at UC Berkeley ($1600-$2125, depending on the age of the child). Let's go with $1700 for the calcs, to keep it conservative.

http://ece.berkeley.edu/facstaff

so, ($3,400 * 12) / .15 = $272,000 a year.

There may be cheaper options, but seriously, fifteen percent sounds very low even for two income well paid families. And of course, at such an ultra wealthy income bracket, tax breaks have phased out far lower in the income scale.

Another way to look at it is $3,400 * 12 = $40,800. Let's assume a 20% tax bracket (assuming one spouse makes a good income and intends to keep working), so it costs you $51,000 to go to work vs staying home. Even if you don't strictly lose money by working, that second income has to go way up before it's really worth it.

There is one other factor, of course, which is career continuity. It may make sense to work essentially for 20% of your pay if it means that in 5-6 years, when the kiddos are older, you can rejoin the workforce at a higher income level, rather than trying to break in after an extended absence. Also, my numbers are a worst case scenario, where you have two small children in daycare at the same time, though of course spacing it out comes with a different set of problems.

Add in the sky high cost of housing, and you can see how hard it is to raise a family in the bay area now. The best bet is actually to have one very high earning spouse (medical or nursing specialist, higher echelons of law or finance, some upper tech or managerial positions). $200k+ a year is a very different picture if it is all earned by a single spouse. Alternatively, for two very high earners (again in that 200k+ range), the percentage spent on childcare and basic housing starts to diminish to acceptable ranges.

This is also why, ahem, I don't take claims of a labor shortage in SF seriously at "six figure" salaries if the salaries are barely above 100k.

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