Why Child Care Is So Expensive | Hacker News Reader

Why Child Care Is So Expensive

theatlantic.com

198 pointsjseliger496 comments

It doesn't have to be this way.

Québec has had subsidized daycare for almost 25 years, and the program literally pays for itself (and more!) via increased income taxes from parents that would have otherwise chosen to stay at home.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/12/affordable-daycare-su...

> In Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, a day of child care cost on average $10 in 2016

> Quebec’s program, which introduced low-fee, universal child care in the province in 1996, centered on a few core premises: that if the government helped make child care accessible and affordable, it would allow more women to join the workforce, increase childhood development and social skills, and ultimately raise revenue for the government through increased payroll taxes. In at least two of those objectives, the scheme has been widely successful, says Pierre Fortin, an economist at the University of Quebec at Montreal, and the country’s leading expert in the economics of subsidized child care: It’s increased participation of women in the workforce, and cost efficiency.

> Since beginning the program more than two decades ago, Quebec has seen the rate of women age 26 to 44 in the workforce reach 85 percent, the highest in the world.

> Early estimates anticipated the program would generate 40 percent of its costs via increased income taxes from working parents. Instead, it generated income taxes to cover more than 100 percent of the cost. “In other words, it costs zero, or the cost is negative,” Fortin said. “The governments are making money out of the program.”

The program isn't perfect; there are a variety of issues that have popped up over the years, but since we were literally the first in the world to offer such a comprehensive, sweeping, subsidized plan for the entire provincial population of ~7.1MM in 1996 that was then used as a model in various Scandinavian countries, I'd call it a rousing success.

I'm curious about the other side of the coin: Parents who would like to stay at home and provide care to their own children, but who feel as if they cannot because of financial constraints. Does this program do anything to help them?

That's actually one of the not-so-great facets of this program.

It demands a minimum of 80% participation, meaning that if you wanted to stay at home to take care of your children but use subsidized daycare 1-2 days a week to give yourself a break, it's currently not possible. If a child is absent for more than 20% of the "regular" schedule, then the daycare loses that subsidy spot due to it being under-utilized.

There's a movement to help correct this, but it's not simple due to how funds and resources are allocated and planned for.

It's as if they read in "Brave New World" about the abolition of the family unit and they took that as an instruction guide.

That happened some time ago. In fact, one of the issues with so many women in the workforce is that in the 50's that same class of women were providing community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now. Frankly I am unsold on the benefit to society of women in the workforce. Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families? It's a taboo, now. I'm not saying we should go back, but as a society we appear generally unwilling to discuss this reality and loss to family. As if nannies are an entirely sufficient replacement for mothers, but I don't think they are.

That's a hot take you've got there, and probably going to get downvoted to oblivion, but I'm curious about some of these points:

> community networking functions, allowing for local problem solving and support that is somewhat extinct now

What are you referring to in particular? Community booster orgs? The PTA?

> Did we gain women's freedom at the cost of strong and good families?

Were families really that better off? I think back to the 50's and all I see is things like alcoholism, racism, parochialism, and insularity. I also see a world in the aftermath of WW2, where all other global-scale economies were devastated, save for the US, and could afford to pay husbands fantastic wages while mom stayed home and ran the house; those salaries aren't a reality now.

> Community booster orgs? The PTA?

Yes, yes, and.. social networks. You know, the kind where people call each other and make plans like play dates and canning sessions. These days that seems to be only available to the upper middle class. All of it is still here, but weaker, less pervasive, and unavailable to many.

> Were families really that better off?

You're absolutely correct, and to answer that requires better and more data than I even know how to look at. The 50's is maybe not even the best time to evaluate since the suburban boom was creating some of these problems for the first time, too. How many families were really doing well, vs how many families were struggling? Perhaps the data would show that in fact it's better for families that women can choose either (or even in exceptional cases, both) paths. The good news is that this subject is not as taboo as I'd feared, the comment is not being obliterated.

> alcoholism

There is no evidence I can find that shows we are any better off now than we were in the 50's with regards to alcoholism. In fact, according to [1] and [2], we appear to be in a low point of per-capital consumption, similar to a low that occurred in the late 1950's.

[1] https://pubs.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/arh27-1/30-38.htm [2] https://vinepair.com/articles/americas-consumption-beer-wine...

> I think back to the 50's and all I see is things like alcoholism, racism, parochialism, and insularity.

Good thing none of those exist any more!

Yes, exactly. We traded away strong families and neighbourhoods for women's freedom. And then most of the benefits of that freedom were captured by employers through stagnating wages and landlords through skyrocketing rent and real estate prices.

We should be aiming to have fewer people in the workforce, not more. The economy is for the people, not people for the economy.

> And then most of the benefits of that freedom were captured by employers through stagnating wages and landlords through skyrocketing rent and real estate prices.

Don't forget the gub'ment gets its cut too!

If you go further back, it's easy to argue that the dissolution of the extended family in favor of the nuclear family as part of the western industrial revolution caused even more problems that were hidden by the high rate of economic growth during this time.

The benefit is that the other half of the population also deserved life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Likewise, we didn't abolish slavery because it would be good for cotton prices.

Do you have reason to believe that most women throughout history were not happy being homemakers and mothers? Do you believe women are happier now that they are having few or no children and are instead working to support a corporation that will kick them to the curb when they are no longer of use to it, rather than giving love and care to the most cherished people in their lives?

Some women will prefer that sort of corporate lifestyle, for sure, and I don't think anyone is advocating for making it illegal for women to work. But you don't get a successful and happy society by catering to small minorities at the expense of the success and happiness of the overwhelming majority.

Some women are happy being homemakers today, and some are happy in the workforce. (Same with men.)

I'm not sure how we are currently catering to women in the workforce. If anything, it seems quite the opposite.

>Some women are happy being homemakers today, and some are happy in the workforce.

Far more were happy being homemakers in the past.

>I'm not sure how we are currently catering to women in the workforce.

Affirmative action, equal opportunity laws, corporate funded programs to instruct men how to behave around women in the workplace, pervasive media praising women with jobs, praising the child-free husband-free life, on and on and on. You have to not be looking in order to not know about it.

Oh, I didn't think reducing discrimination counted as catering. You're not really saying increasing discrimination to previous levels would make women happier, are you?

I think encouraging them to be homemakers rather than encouraging them to be in the workforce would make them happier, generally, and that we should strongly prioritize catering to the majority. Do you think women are happier now than women in previous generations? Because all of the polling I've seen says no.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyl... for instance. You can always blame it on there not being enough equality yet, or once they've passed men in whatever metric you have your eye on, you can always blame it on more abstract things.

But I don't think any amount of equality is going to make them as happy as they would be making their homes into warm and loving places for their families, and experiencing their children growing up and eventually having children of their own, in a society that appreciates them for doing just that.

If the small minority of women that that doesn't work for have a worse time in the work force because society prioritized things other than making it nice for them, too bad. I don't care. You make society strong with rules that work for the majority.

You keep coming back to whether women were happier in the aggregate before. That's a great link, but I don't draw the same conclusions you do from it.

We're in a transition period. Women who work still have to do the majority of housework and childrearing at home, due to their male partners' lack of participation. You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places, experience their children growing up, etc? Or is that not the same thing?

You say you don't prioritize making workforce participation "nice" for women, but we're really just talking about making it "fair". You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.

Ultimately, I believe women, as all human beings, are capable of making their own choices and deserve a fair playing field. I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.

>We're in a transition period.

You can say that, I guess. There's no particularly compelling reason to believe that getting through the transition period to the promised land is possible or that the grass in actually greener on the other side.

>You exalt domestic virtues in women, so surely you must agree that these men should do more to make their homes warm and loving places

If that's what will make quality of life better for them and their families. I don't know of any compelling reason to believe it should.

>Or is that not the same thing?

I don't know, for sure.

>You make society strong with rules that are fair for everyone.

I think there's a lot to be said for that, in general, but is it really fair to women or to their families if the pursuit of achieving this ideological vision of total fairness and equality between the sexes ends up reducing their quality of life?

>I think your preferences unfairly limit the viability of one choice and tilt the scales toward the choice you like better, and your assertion that it's for their own good just serves to infantilize them.

We know from data that they did like it when the scales were tilted toward that choice better than what they have now. There's no compelling reason to believe that they'll like the "fair playing field", if it's possible to get there, better than they'll like what they had before.

I don't know for a fact that most of them won't like it, but I think there are good reasons to guess that they won't, and, if your goal is to increase their life satisfaction and that of their families, it seems insane to me to push an entirely ideologically motivated set of changes onto our entire culture all at once without having pretty damn good reason to believe your end goal is achievable and actually desirable.

The science is still out on whether men and women are genetically predisposed toward different average behaviors and preferences. The idea that they are seems completely reasonable to me, given the simple fact that men produce thousands of gametes per second for their entire post-pubescent lives, while women produce one per month for 20-30 years. Reproductive and child-rearing behaviors are obviously vitally important to how we turned out because we only descend from the people whose succeeded in reproducing and keeping their children alive. I don't know for a fact that our brains are hardwired to help us out differently as a consequence of our different relevant anatomy but I think it's totally reasonable to guess that they do, in the absence of compelling evidence to the contrary.

If they are predisposed toward different behaviors and preferences, then trying to socially engineer men and women to all be exactly the same is doomed to failure, and a whole lot of people are going to suffer for it, and indeed they already are, as we can see. And sure, some women would benefit from it while the majority suffered, but like I said, if you want a strong society, you make rules that work for the many, not the few.

Canadian parental leave policy is now granting an amount of parental leave for the mother who carried the pregnancy, an amount of parental leave to be shared between the two parents, and an amount of parental leave for the second parent. So basically the second parent is strongly encouraged to take time off to spend time with the child, so that they too, not just the carrying mother, partake in early parenting...

The issue is likely matching up these spaces. What if parent A wants care on Monday and Tuesday but not Wed-Fri. The daycare then needs to find parent B that wants Wed-Fri. That might be easy in large cities, but in small towns that might only have a handful of daycares that becomes much more difficult. Additionally, since there are mandatory staff to kid ratios, part time parents make scheduling really difficult.

I'm not sure this is the strongest case you could make for saying this ought to be the responsibility of the government. If people can make more working than childcare costs, then they can make their own decision about how to invest their own time and money. Why does the government need to pay for this, if they argument is ultimately that the wages of women now working is what ends up paying the cost of the service?

I am generally not one to rail against the government running efficient programs for general welfare, I support single payer healthcare in the US and many progressive policies. I do however think we need to consider the line where anything you buy has the government involved in re-distributing resources to make it cheaper for people with less money.

Ultimately, it might be good to allow economic forces to produce an economy again where single income households can afford to raise children, regardless of the gender of the parent who is earning an income. More work doesn't always mean societies or families ended up better off, parents spending time raising kids should not be seen as just sunken cost because we could have gotten tax money out of them.

> If people can make more working than childcare costs, then they can make their own decision about how to invest their own time and money. Why does the government need to pay for this, if they argument is ultimately that the wages of women now working is what ends up paying the cost of the service?

Before a stay-at-home parent enters the workforce, they may not have the money to pay for the childcare that would free up time to work. Essentially only governments have both the money and the incentive to invest in making childcare widely available.

That is an excellent reason to provide maybe 1 or 2 months of subsidised healthcare to women who with children who are seeking work. Something extremely targeted and modest. But it seems a bit questionable in the thread context of "the program literally pays for itself" which presumably means the program is encouraging high earning women to enter the workforce, ie, those with valuable skills, substantial experience and a contacts network that means they can probably bear the cost of finding work.

So, you seriously consider that a person who can get a salary that would cover child care costs wouldn't be able to borrow a single month salary worth of cash to make the transition?

“It would allow more women to enter the workforce”.

I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce.

This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they have, and of course, caring for the family is not a proper job.

That is so wrong on so many levels.

I am not claiming that it is easy, the best or the most engaging or whatever. I only claim that society has given up on valuing raising one’s children and keeping the household together, and this is terrible.

I don’t think that it’s that people don’t value those things but that people are unable to have the luxury to act on that belief. I’m also not convinced that the choice was made by the broad base of society.

I think you’re being overly picky and cherry-picking your argument here. I don’t know anyone who thinks that child rearing is not hard work, and all agree that it is valuable.

But in the context of this discussion, “productivity” is an economic term for the production of goods or services, and the generation of income for the workers. Child rearing does neither of those things directly, so as an economic activity, it doesn’t register and thus those parents are not part of the workforce. Again, that does not mean it is not a valuable thing to do for both the child and society, but it also does not directly add to GDP, generate income taxes, etc.

Child rearing produces children that are adults and had the attention of a fully invested parent. Are you sure you're measuring the right thing?

The reality is that the atomic family model is antiquated. In our society, the individual is the unit We must therefore make the individual strong, meaning that we need to support both parents independent all the while having children.

We can observe that the old model was better in terms of a certain metric, but that's not going to help. We need to invest in making child rearing effective in today's world.

The atomic family model is not antiquated. The majority of the country follows that model with research demonstrating that is the best path for success.

> In our society, the individual is the unit

This is definitely the wrong mindset.

It's funny you should mention GDP, because childcare is one of the iconic well-known examples of why it can be a misleading measure. If person A is paid to care for person B's kids whilst they work, that results in higher GDP than if person B cares for their own kids and person A takes the job instead, even though exactly the same amount is being done, because caring for those kids is no longer a service that counts towards GDP under the latter scenario.

Isn't that a much more general argument? Anytime I do some garden work myself, fix some appliance myself, clean my house, buy groceries, cook my own dinner, do my taxes alone, drive my car myself, etc, I'm not increasing the GDP, but I would be if I paid for the respective service.

Also note how in your first scenario both people earn money, in the second scenario only A does (ending up with more than what B had in scenario 1).

You're completely missing the point of the parent comment and misunderstanding the concept of what the workforce is.

Being a part of the workforce in this context means you are contributing income taxes. A full time parent contributes $0 in income taxes from their labor and hence is not a part of the workforce.

The value of raising a child full time is not at issue here and you're attacking a straw-man. A subsidized day care gives a parent the option of returning to the work force if they wish. This could be because they want to work, or because they have to to feed their family. The parent comment was pointing out that this choice does not result in a deficit to society but rather in a net surplus which makes it worth it to implement and offer regardless of how parents choose to raise their children.

That’s a problematic definition of in the workforce- in the US 32-47% of people filing tax returns have 0 or negative income tax liability. Paying payroll taxes might be a better definition. Regardless, accounting for value provided in “gray market” untaxed like child rearing, in home work, and volunteer work is very hard and subject to a lot of assumptions in economic models. It’s not a complete strawman argument to worry about it when discussing ROI.

Theoretically, we should just grant parents a tax exempt voucher per child every month that is exchangeable for cash or daycare at equivalent rates. That way you aren’t disincentivizing stay at home parents or other familial care (like grandparents or shared part time parenting).

I think you're missing the point of the "childcare is not part of the workforce" argument. It's not that it isn't work, and it's not that it isn't important. It's that, in many cases, the economic comparative advantage for the (often) female caretaker of those children is not being fully utilized.

That is to say, caring for a child is a service that costs X. But it is being performed by a person who's skills are valued at Y, where Y > X. That represents an economic loss that doesn't have to happen, if instead you substitute someone who's most highly valued skill is worth X for that caretaker.

Now, that ignores the benefit of having a child's own parents care for them, which may or may not change how you evaluate the question depending on your perspective on these things.

Not just an economic advantage either, but for the mental health of the mother, it's very rare to meet a woman who only desires to stay at home for the duration of a child's life.

>it's very rare to meet a woman who only desires to stay at home for the duration of a child's life

I assume you mean until the child goes to school or perhaps becomes an adult, and in my experience it's not rare to meet women like that.

It certainly was not rare in previous generations, so to the extent that it is rare today, it's due to cultural changes. If women's mental health is suffering because certain elements of society have convinced them they should be working instead of caring for their children, we should just as strongly consider countering those elements.

What is very rare in my experience is to meet an older woman who wishes she had spent less time with her children when they were young.

I'm pretty sure your last statement is also true for men, quite possibly to a greater extent (since men more commonly focus on their careers to the exclusion of their children).

Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though? In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more money going to work and sending your kid to daycare than being a stay at home parent.

The people who choose to stay at home often either have multiple kids (higher X) or earn little enough (lower Y) that it's not an economic advantage for them to work. But those people would be a net loss (to the government) in the Quebec system too.

So, I think the argument would be that many mother's could go back to school and increase their skill-value to Y if they weren't stuck caring for children, maybe. I'm not sure. It's not clear to me that subsidized child-care is necessary, but I think if I were to make the argument, it'd look like that.

EDIT: Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care. Such that caring for the marginal child is substantially cheaper than almost anyone's potential income in the traditional labor force.

> Another argument is that there are economies of scale to subsidized child-care

There are some very difficult to snswer questions with a scale argument applied to young children. Without bothering to look for a source it seems quite reasonable that young children who socialise 1:(small n) with a caregiver in a family unit turn out quite differently to those who socalise 1:(big N) in a 'highly efficient' daycare centre.

I could see that argument either being a pro or a con; most parents are as bad at parenting as they are at everything else. But the issues involved in creating economies-of-scale in child care mean it should be considered potentially neutral until they have been debated (vs considered as a net-positive as is normal in economics).

100%. We shouldn't be creating perverse incentives. Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone. For taxpayers, it's just more money out of their pocket and for the parents, you're being encouraged to leave your children with strangers so you can go and work a job that doesn't pay enough to cover the cost of paying those strangers.

We need to get past the ridiculous idea that staying home with one's children while their young is some sort of failure. It's not. It's valuable work, which coincidentally is why childcare is as expensive as it is. Frankly, given the importance of the work, I'm surprised childcare doesn't cost more.

It's not that it's a failure, it's that being taken out of the workforce for many years is damaging to careers. It's more than a matter of perception. Public school starts when kids are 5. If you have several kids, it could then take someone out of the workforce for a decade. While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult, especially at a point where you're past your prime years such as your 20 or 30s.

>While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult

On the other hand, it's impossible for your children to get back the time they could have spent in their most formative and vulnerable years around people that love them, rather than minimum wage daycare workers.

It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment?

It's complicated, and just saying it's better to have a stay-at-home parent versus "minimum wage daycare workers" (who in my experience are actually often highly qualified), is an incomplete perspective (IMO).

>It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being.

Sure, as with any social science there are huge numbers of complicating factors, which makes it difficult to really study anything conclusively. No double blind studies, obviously.

>If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse?

Studies would be great, but probably far worse. Teenagers and young adults are developing independence from their parents and would probably feel overly constricted.

>Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot?

No, we can't know it without running trials.

>Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years?

Maybe in some cases. The overwhelming majority of people aren't going to go to any college "better" than a state university and wouldn't benefit from it.

>"minimum wage daycare workers"

Why put that in quotes?

>who in my experience are actually often highly qualified

Qualified for what? To show children the love and care that their parents would show them? I don't think so, because I don't think you can fake that, and I don't think their love for the children can be genuine because any loving parent would be emotionally destroyed if they couldn't see their child any more because the child graduated from daycare and moved on to kindergarden.

Whilst none of those points are necessarily wrong, I think you have implicitly ignored the happiness of the parents in your arguments. Many parents who feel they have to work and then pay for childcare and not see their children in order to make ends meet are definitely not happy about that at all. That shouldn't be forgotten.

Both my kids have been in nanny shares. That’s a bit higher end than minimum wage daycare, but, trust me, they’ve been better taken care of and more loved than if I’d had to take care of them. Comparative advantage works another way with daycare: you can benefit from hiring a professional.

> it's impossible for your children to get back the time they could have spent in their most formative and vulnerable years around people that love them, rather than minimum wage daycare workers

Professionally trained, well rested, day care professionals probably do that job just as well as me, or better. Also, there are 168 hours in a week and the kids still spend a large part of that with their parents.

>Professionally trained

Minimum wage. High school diploma.

>day care professionals probably do that job just as well as me, or better.

If you are truly so terrible at taking care of children that you cannot care for your own flesh and blood better than minimum wage workers can simultaneously care for multiple children to which they have no personal emotional attachment, then please, get your children away from yourself as often as possible.

>Also, there are 168 hours in a week and the kids still spend a large part of that with their parents.

70+ are lost to sleeping, and more for younger children, so no, they don't spend a large part of that time with their parents in any meaningful way.

If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.

> Minimum wage. High school diploma.

No way! The training after high school for day care professionals in my country takes 4 years and is much better paid than minimum wage.

If nothing else, I could never hope to beat them on experience.

There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.

>If nothing else, I could never hope to beat them on experience.

That's fine. Unless you are emotionally stunted, they could never hope to beat you on love.

>There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.

Starting at what age? Is this what you're referring to: https://theglobepost.com/2018/12/13/denmark-compulsory-dayca...

If so, that's quite a bit different from what you described. That sounds like it's more about forcibly integrating foreign populations. They're not targeting Danish children with that.

Love is not a quantity linearly dependent on the contact hours I spend with them. Having other people involved in their upbringing does not mean they receive less love.

Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.

[1]https://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/sweden-mandator...

>Love is not a quantity linearly dependent on the contact hours I spend with them. Having other people involved in their upbringing does not mean they receive less love.

OK, I don't know what that means. What I do know is that if you're dropping them off to be raised by people that don't care about them nearly as much as you do, and who aren't going to miss them very much if they never see them again, they're not going to get the kind of love that they get from you during those hours. The longer those hours are, the longer they go without getting that kind of love, and the more they become convinced they aren't worth the full attention of a person that loves them. I don't think that's good for them.

>Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.

From your link, it looks like this affects children of age 6. When people in the US talk about day care or child care services, they're taking about children up until the age of 5 at most, and usually actually just up until the age of 3. For children aged 3 and 4 it's usually called pre-school rather than day care or child care service.

In the US, children at the age of 6 are entering their second year of school, which if they attend a public school is free from kindergarten (age 5) to the end of high school (age 18). This article is about the expense of child care in the US. The law you've linked is entirely inapplicable to this discussion.

The kids spend 70 hours sleeping and 40 hours at day care... That's still 58 hours to spend with their parents. That's plenty of time! Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.

No, it's really not 58 hours to spend with their parents.

>Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.

I don't really know what the point in this comment is. Do you think kids outside of daycare don't do unstructured play with other kids?

Cooking is what, 1 hour a day? And it's something you can often involve your kids in, same with the other household errands (let's say that's another hour). That's 14 hours gone. We still have 34 hours left. So basically 5 hours PER DAY still to spend with your kids. That's still a lot!

>Cooking is what, 1 hour a day? And it's something you can often involve your kids in

If you want it to take three times as long, I guess. It's good to do with them sometimes obviously but most people are not going to have time for that on a regular basis.

>That's 14 hours gone. We still have 34 hours left. So basically 5 hours PER DAY still to spend with your kids. That's still a lot!

Assuming the child sleeps 10 hours per day, which is well below what's recommended for 0-3 year olds, and you magically get all household chores done in two hours per day as you suggest, 24 of those 34 hours are going to be on the weekend.

Parents who both work full time are essentially weekend parents, and the weekend is when the parents have to catch up on everything they couldn't take care of during the week.

Also, 34 is less than half of the hours they would have with a stay at home parent.

> Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone.

Subsidizing a dead-end low-wage job is a net loss for everyone.

But low-wage jobs are often an important part of the route to other jobs for those entering or re-entering (even with previous higher-wage work) the workforce.

The US Dept of Labor had a paid family leave report out a few years ago that convincingly argued that paid family leave—which is typically measured only in weeks—had a measurable improvement on women’s retirement savings, because it meant they were more likely to stay in the workforce and save more for retirement.

A large part of the reason it doesn't cost more is that a day care working can watch 5+ children at once, whereas a parent is probably only watching 1-2 kids.

Because your while your gross Y is greater than X, your net Y might be well below (especially when you have 2 or more kids).

Subsidized care is needed because of taxes:

Y = Annual pay on open market

X = Cost of childcare

Y' = Takehome pay after taxes

Y' < X < Y is an inefficient utilization of resources that subsidized daycare can fix (since the subsidies come out of Y-Y', it can be revenue neutral or even revenue positive for the government).

Do you care if the country's population drops dramatically? I'm sure many people are fine with that, but if you're a country looking to stay strong economically the math says you'll need to incentivize childrearing somehow.

I think subsidized daycare is a great idea as long as it isn't too much of a disincentive for those who want to stay home with their kids. When I was looking into childcare I noticed there were a lot of options that were only 2-3 hours a day. It took me awhile to realize these were breaks for parents who stayed at home and they were not targeting parents working full time. The parents I do know that have stayed at home could really use and appreciated some reprieve here and there. Nicer gyms and even grocery stores offer temporary childcare. I'm confident there are fewer options in middle/lower class neighborhoods.

Most people I know who chose to stay at home have only one or two kids. Even for those who have, say, five kids I wouldn't say it would still be a net loss to the government (many regulations mandate 1:6 caretaker:child for pre-walkers to 1:15 starting at age 5 for childcare). There are other advantages to group care like being able to spot issues that aren't age appropriate. As a parent I don't have a large sample size for most milestones. "Normal" can have a range of a year for many developmental skills, but others can stick out in a group setting. Spotting these things early can go a long way in addressing them. Scheduled pediatrician visits are only once or twice a year and last ~30m. So many things can be easily missed.

>I think subsidized daycare is a great idea as long as it isn't too much of a disincentive for those who want to stay home with their kids.

Why would you be OK with any kind of disincentive to parents staying home with their children?

>There are other advantages to group care like being able to spot issues that aren't age appropriate. As a parent I don't have a large sample size for most milestones. "Normal" can have a range of a year for many developmental skills, but others can stick out in a group setting.

You don't have to dump your children off to be raised by minimum wage daycare workers in order to put them in a group setting. You can also create these group settings, and gain a larger sample size, by spending more time with your friends and family members who also have children. As a bonus, you and your friends and family members can observe the behavior yourselves, and not rely on the judgment and interest of minimum wage daycare workers, who could get a new job at any point in time and be perfectly content to never see your child again.

> Why would you be OK with any kind of disincentive to parents staying home with their children?

I'm just recognizing the realities of incentivizing anything. There's a difference between a work requirement for both parents and attendance requirement for children and maybe, in some cases, a portion of your income tax would go to a program you don't take advantage of.

> You don't have to dump your children off to be raised by minimum wage daycare workers in order to put them in a group setting.

Where did I say this should be mandatory or that full-time childcare was the best and only option? You're grossly mischaracterizing my position here and the realities of daycare. Part of the reason daycare is expensive, as mentioned in the article, is because of the regulations in place around the environment and staff. I've found group daycare staff are often more qualified than individual nannies.

I would love to see studies because the issues I've seen caught and missed are all anecdotal and do involve tight-knit communities--which not everybody has. The situations I've seen caught did not "rely on the judgment and interest of minimum wage daycare workers" but were done through communication. After discussing an issue between the daycare and parent it would be presented to a pediatrician or other specialist to see if intervention was needed.

> you and your friends and family members can observe the behavior yourselves

Kids act very differently when around primary caretakers and others. Like I said, part of something like daycare would be communicating what you've observed and what they've observed. A select few motivated parents read books and seek out information (often only for their first child), I see a lot of "bad advice" from previous generations. One thing I've seen come up a lot is older generations either don't know, or dismiss, "back to sleep" as a way to minimize SIDS. I also notice that knowledge about children atrophies very quickly. I constantly have to give milestones for my kid; birth weight, when they rolled over, crawled, walked, first word, first sentence. As years pass I have a rougher idea about what's normal and completely forgot about more minor milestones like; parallel play, object permanence, when pronouns should be understood, etc. even when I'm close to other families kids hitting those milestones.

>Where did I say this should be mandatory

Nowhere, just like where I suggested you said it should be.

>was the best and only option?

You said it was an advantage of daycare. My point is that there are better ways to get that advantage.

>I've found group daycare staff are often more qualified than individual nannies.

Minimum wage vs minimum wage.

>The situations I've seen caught did not "rely on the judgment and interest of minimum wage daycare workers" but were done through communication.

If you're relying on daycare workers to communicate to you that there is a potential issue, you are relying on them to be interested enough to make the observation.

>One thing I've seen come up a lot is older generations either don't know, or dismiss, "back to sleep" as a way to minimize SIDS.

And you're going to take the lady at daycare who has a high school diploma's word for it?

>I constantly have to give milestones for my kid; birth weight, when they rolled over, crawled, walked, first word, first sentence. As years pass I have a rougher idea about what's normal and completely forgot about more minor milestones like; parallel play, object permanence, when pronouns should be understood, etc. even when I'm close to other families kids hitting those milestones.

Some parents will be less likely to notice missed milestones than minimum wage daycare workers, I guess. Most children won't miss the milestones, but they will miss the time with their parents, whether they realize it or not.

>Do you care if the country's population drops dramatically?

Given our resource utilization rates and sustainability problems, isn't this a good thing? Yes, some social changes will have to happen to account for the change but this is mostly handled by automation.

I completely agree it's not necessarily a good thing, but from a government overseeing an economy perspective it's desirable. It's something Japan and a lot of other countries are trying to address. Managing population decline is complicated by not being uniform.

It was also an easy filter: who cares if child care is expensive if you don't care if the population grows?

Because markets aren't perfect (in the economic sense).

If they were lots of things wouldn't need to exist, like companies and employees. You could just hire someone on the open market for 5 minutes to type up a letter and it would be perfectly efficient so you'd know that if you couldn't afford to hire someone then it wasn't economically worthwhile.

That doesn't work in reality, and neither does expecting every young parent to negotiate childcare while putting them in a catch-22 regarding finding work when they can't work without childcare and they can't afford childcare without work.

Markets are a great tool, but they're not the only way to resolve co-ordination problems to maximize economic prosperity.

> Why is subsidized daycare necessary in these cases though?

Because of time effects.

> In America if daycare costs X and you earn Y much greater than X, then obviously you'll make more money going to work and sending your kid to daycare than being a stay at home parent.

Yes, but if you would make on average, over the course of the years where a child would need daycare if you weren't at home, much more than the cost of daycare but the crossover point where working is an immediate advantage is several years down the line, and you don't have a financial cushion for the short term, you won't be able to afford to work initially, and by not working you’ll lose earning potential and push out (perhaps infinitely) that crossover date; it's a vicious cycle.

And two things that make that much more pronounced are that day care has a much higher cost for kids under about 18-24 months (there are fundamentally greater requirements for young kids which in most places are also reflected in more strenuous minimum regulatory requirements) and significant employment breaks have adverse effects on short-term employability outside of unskilled labor fairly quickly. (If you genuinely haven't lost skills you can mostly recover from that over time, but your initial return-to-work pay is likely to be far lower if you weren't already at the bottom and aren't returning to an existing job after a protected leave.)

Taxes are one reason. You have to earn Y where Y >= X * 125% (vaguely speaking) just to break even.

If your first thought is something like, maybe we shouldn't tax X spent on daycare- well, that's a subsidy.

In fact, we don't (at least the first $5k, if you have access to a DCRA through your employer.)

Why you need to have access to a DCRA and can't simply deduct child care expenses, I have no idea. It's like with an FSA, it seems someone wants to provide a benefit but is purposefully making it harder to use...

Indeed, although $5k is nowhere near enough to cover full time childcare.

No, the point is that there is more to life than money. Caring for your own child has value that isn't captured by the amount of money you would have to pay someone else to do it. If you only care about economic efficiency then the whole idea of childcare is misguided; to maximise productivity you should set children to work as soon as they're able.

FYI, "comparative advantage" has a specific meaning, it isn't just a synonym for "advantage, but in economics".

Subsidized childcare is good, but even though it has liberatory potential this is still coercive to women because now they have a financial incentive to work for somebody other than themselves. This means that this reform is beneficial to the buisness community and many women, but not all women as some would prefer to do the work themselves.

We should subsidize childcare in efficient group settings, but we should also pay women that decide to stay home and do that work from public funds at decent salaries.

Only then, when women are free to choose their own destiny free of financial pressure can we say we've made the kind of difference in the world we want to see.

EDIT: In fact, there are probably many different childcare arrangements that women would pick: alone, in groups with friends or relatives, or in the employed laborforce. All of these should be realistically on the table.

EDIT2: While practically speaking in our current society, women would be the most affected, this should apply to any primary caregiver regardless of gender identity.

A tax credit of $10/day/child for stay at home parents might make sense?

(Admittedly I only skimmed through the article, but) Isn't the article saying that because of the program, child care is reduced to costing $10/day, but otherwise would cost much more?

For example, in lower COL places in the US, it usually costs the range of $100/day for a nanny that works 8 hours a day, and for higher COL places (e.g. Palo Alto) it could even be say $300/day. Daycare (with groups of children) can be a bit cheaper, for sure.

But the point being, to have tax credit that matches that kind of effect, we'd need at least tax credits of $90/day/child for stay at home parents, to make sense, and including weekends too (i.e. 365 days a year).

Agreed. There are very few things in life as important as raising one's children well. To say that we should incentivize or otherwise coerce people into outsourcing the upbringing of their own children so they can punch a time-clock is beyond misguided. We've elevated "careers" to an almost god-like status where we end up engineering our lives to serve our careers instead of the other way around.

> Agreed. There are very few things in life as important as raising one's children well. To say that we should incentivize or otherwise coerce people into outsourcing the upbringing of their own children so they can punch a time-clock is beyond misguided.

This same statement can be applied to healthcare (our family's health is one of the most important things we have, why do we outsource it to doctors?) and cooking (nutritious meals are the keystones of a good life, why do we let anyone else cook for our family?)

Also how is giving someone a choice to work or raise kids misguided? Are you assuming people don't get satisfaction from their work? Or that there can't be a balance?

I'll agree that we worship at the corporate alter too much, and that our society actively works against raising a family, but helping lower the cost of childcare is encouraging families.

As it stands right now people aren't having kids because it is so expensive, and telling them "your values are wrong, stop working and have a kid instead!" isn't going to change minds en masse.

Comparing raising children to receiving healthcare is absurd. Raising children is an instinct that's hardwired in each of us. Administering healthcare as we do today is a modern technical skill specific to a particular time and place.

Regarding your last comment about people not having kids because it's too expensive, while that may be a popular thing to say it's 100% false. As individuals and societies become wealthier they have fewer kids not more. The poorest places have the highest birth rates and that's true both within and and between countries. People are free to have as many or as few kids as they like, but it's silly to argue that money is a barrier when we are living in the wealthiest era in human history. Why are people having fewer kids? Who knows, but my guess is that it probably has something to do with historically high levels of access to birth reliable birth control and the decreased importance that most folks place on having large families. Those aren't necessarily bad things, they're just historical outliers.

> People are free to have as many or as few kids as they like, but it's silly to argue that money is a barrier when we are living in the wealthiest era in human history.

Around where I live two types of housing are being built:

1. million dollar+ McMansions. 2. Tiny 1 or maybe 2 bedroom apartments for rent.

Of course there is existing housing stock, for around $600k-$800k for a house that is good for raising a family in.

My friends with kids are dumping 10-25k into education, and the ones with younger kids also have to factor in child care.

So, sure, for dual income families earning 300k a year[1], it has never been a better time to have kids.

I'm not going to argue that higher income countries have less kids, of course they do, the higher % chance kids survive the less need there is to have a lot of kids.

But I honestly wonder if people are having as many kids as they want to if economics weren't an issue.

[1]This is not even an exaggeration, for people living in major coastal metros, the quality of life trade-off is either drive 1h to 1.5hrs and have affordable housing, or have a commute that allows for a life and not be able to afford housing that would allow for kids. Those being the two choices society presents is 5 types of bullshit.

Raising children is an instinct that's hardwired in each of us.

Maybe, but raising children well certainly isn't...

And more certainly than that, neither is raising other people's children well in exchange for minimum wage.

>Raising children is an instinct that's hardwired in each of us. Administering healthcare as we do today is a modern technical skill specific to a particular time and place.

After hearing stories from my wife, who works at a daycare, I believe the crappy pay for childcare professionals is holding down the skill level. If a childcare worker can learn the basics of childhoold developmental psychology, education, and some medical techniques, then what's stopping them from just getting a more profitable college degree? Some people with bachelor's degrees come in, but they don't stay long.

Only after working in childcare for 16 years did she land at an employer who required all workers to pass a decent certification course at a community college. If daycares paid better, they might retain skilled workers.

> This is one of those cultural ideas embedded in XXI Century logic which only does harm and transmits the wrong message: people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they have, and of course, caring for the family is not a proper job.

First off, what if someone doesn't want to be a stay at home parent? Why force traditional values on them?

But, in terms of pure economics, let's put it at an extreme.

Child-care is too expensive, a woman who would otherwise go on to make breakthroughs in medical science stays at home.

The lost value to society is in the literal millions.

This scenario only has to be repeated a few times before it becomes economically irresponsible to not offer subsidized child care.

And, given how large the population is, this situation will happen.

The ideal of capitalism is that people are rewarded for their contributions to society overall, by providing value for others (ideally increasing net happiness!) people are reimbursed.

Now I'm not going to even try and say that is what always happens, obviously things have gotten a bit off kilter, but by and large I'd say that for many jobs out there, that is still true.

And the thing is, some people have an outsized impact, potential is on a curve, and if a single person on the far end of the "can help out humanity' curve is not enabled to do all that they can do to help out, then we all lose out.

I'm not sure .

In a very large share of people work either in bullshit jobs or unnecessary jobs or are replacablable.

On the other hand, if children would get more love,maybe more of them would grow to be exceptional?

The problem is there is no easy way to know in large swaths what jobs are BS or unnecessary.

And of course someone could have a BS job and then later move on to a job that does have an impact!

Trying to evaluate the worth of people is pretty much futile, and whenever it has been attempted there have been huge negative outcomes.

And even during less extreme historical circumstances, it is just expensive to do, the recent example being drug testing for welfare recipients. The cost to do the drug testing far exceeded the money the government saved denying benefits.

In the end being non-judgemental and treating people equally turns out to be a rather economically efficient solution.

My view is that 99% of jobs are either unnecessary or replacable.

Heck, even when we talk about Newton's discoveries , other people on similar stuff at the time and would have gotten there.

And if it's 99%, why not let the family choose which parent stays with the kid ?

Combine that with paying really well to trully important jobs.

You'll get reasonably good results with that.

> My view is that 99% of jobs are either unnecessary or replacable.

I think this is a very upper middle class white collar view.

Over 2.1% of Americans work as cooks (!!)[1] and another 3.6% work as grounds cleaning. Just keeping buildings somewhat functional is a lot of work.

Then you have all the people working on sales floors, not everyone wants to buy from Amazon!

3.5% in construction.

7.8% spread across all maintenance occupations just keeping everything glued together.

Another 5.9% in production (manufacturing), even with the incredible amount of automation that has taken place there.

So we're well above 10%, and that is just taking a look at hard to automate categories that have more than 1% of people in them!

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/emp-by-detailed-occupation.ht...

Some of those jobs are important(1), but most replacable - many people can do that job.

And I'm not saying thry don't carry done value , just that raising your kids well, in my view, is much more important.

(1)are all cooks and restaurant that necessary ?

> (1)are all cooks and restaurant that necessary ?

The idea seems pretty ubiquitous, as soon as a society gets any amount of wealth you'll find people being paid to cook food at scale.

And cooking is one of those things that scales up very well, it doesn't have to mean fancy sit down restaurants. There are still a few places I can grab food for cheaper than what I'd be able to prepare it myself at that quality level, though sadly those types of venues have seemingly been on a decline for decades.

With modern preservation methods, factory made food can reach very high quality. Google the french chain picard, or micvac.

Maybe not for fried food, and salads(easy to make). but for most other types of food it can work.

>But, in terms of pure economics, let's put it at an extreme.

>Child-care is too expensive, a woman who would otherwise go on to make breakthroughs in medical science stays at home.

This sounds like a fun game.

Child-care is subsidized. A child who would otherwise have been raised by a loving parent is raised by minimum wage daycare workers who don't care about the child.

The child consequently develops antisocial behavior disorders and shoots up a classroom full of children, one of which would otherwise have gone on to make breakthroughs in medical science.

> Child-care is subsidized. A child who would otherwise have been raised by a loving parent is raised by minimum wage daycare workers who don't care about the child.

You are assuming massive incompetence on the part of child care workers with no prior evidence. At scale of course saving lives will result in the life of a future criminal being saved, but on the whole the # of good people outweighs the number of bad people, thus why society continues to, however slowly, lurch forwards.

In comparison to unknown potential future murders, there are known numbers for how many woman leave the workforce after having kids, 30% of women with bachelors degrees, and 19% with a Masters or PhD. [1]

19% of women with a post graduate degree is huge. How many millions of dollars of investment in education is that? If someone wants to leave work then of course they should be allowed, but if they don't and feel they are forced to? That sucks, and it is a net loss for society.

[1]https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/09/the-number-of-women...

>You are assuming massive incompetence on the part of child care workers with no prior evidence.

The fact that they earn minimum wage is evidence of their collective incompetence. The fact that they would not be emotionally destroyed by never seeing the child again when either they leave their job or the child moves on is evidence of their indifference.

>19% of women with a post graduate degree is huge. How many millions of dollars of investment in education is that? If someone wants to leave work then of course they should be allowed, but if they don't and feel they are forced to? That sucks, and it is a net loss for society.

Should we not first ask why they thought it was a good idea to get an advanced degree?

> The fact that they earn minimum wage is evidence of their collective incompetence.

So, because society undervalues their work, they are incompetent losers, with anti-social behavior disorders?

Please, pray tell, how much do you think the people who grow the food that you need to live get paid? Do you think as poorly of them?

>So, because society undervalues value their work, they are incompetent losers?

Because society pays less for that sort of work, the sort of people that end up doing that work will tend to be less competent than the people that do more highly paid work.

I'm not sure how you've concluded that society undervalues their work, though. That seems to me to be a matter of opinion.

The real people who grow my food are the engineers at Monsanto and John Deere and chemical fertilizer companies and they make plenty of money.

The farmer ultimately adds very little value compared to the above, sorry to say.

> The child consequently develops antisocial behavior disorders and shoots up a classroom full of children

School-shootings are such a big problem in Quebec and Scandinavian countries where childcare is subsidized. They must be caused by the evils of subsidized childcare.

Substitute whatever antisocial behavior you want, it's beside the point.

And do you have any reason to think that countries with subsidized childcare have more antisocial behavior than those without to support your claim?

That wouldn't support my claim very much at all, really, because there are too many confounding variables and too few countries to support any kind of causitive claim. I don't know if countries with subsidized childcare have more antisocial behavior, and I don't think it would shed any light on the situation. The subsidization is only relevant insofar as it increases utilization of childcare.

The only thing that can shed light on the question of whether childcare is harmful to children is scientific research with large sample sizes that carefully control for confounding variables.

I understand the spirit of your position, but I think many or most people certainly value “homemaking” for lack of a better term. It’s not a “job” in the sense of monetary revenue, but it makes having a “job” possible for a partner, and has indirect monetary value in addition to the non-quantifiable value of the role itself. Like many “jobs”, homemaking is almost always thankless. I think instead of trying to get our caretaker(s) on the cover of Fortune or whatever we should just thank them more.

> I think many or most people certainly value “homemaking”

There is definitely a good sized segment of America that views homemaking as occupying some position below earning a salary. My wife (a homemaker) encounters this routinely among a certain set of career aspiring women.

Completely agree. Raising a family is work and it does add to the greater good of the world. And, it's not being measured properly, which leads oeople to assume that dual income is the "right goal" when it's an intrinsic bias to the situation.

> I understand what the quote means but, honestly, this is one of the big wrong points of our society: that caring for the children full-time is NOT being part of the workforce.

I see it more as a way of self-sufficiency and financial independence from the spouse. I believe one of the wrong points in our 'free' society is that it's perfectly acceptable to basically rely on your spouse for financial stability. That is a frequent source of abuse, resentment, unfulfilled dreams, and the regular 'i raised MY kids' narrative during divorce proceedings etc..

> people’s life is as valuable as the money the work or the “job” they have,

Unfortunately this is the world we live in, especially with the lack of social safety net provided by the state. Someone must go out and make money in order to sustain a certain level of quality of life.

> I believe one of the wrong points in our 'free' society is that it's perfectly acceptable to basically rely on your spouse for financial stability. That is a frequent source of abuse, resentment, unfulfilled dreams, and the regular 'i raised MY kids' narrative during divorce proceedings etc..

But here's the opposite view point: as parents, both my spouse and I would rather have either myself or my spouse be a full time carer of our baby, than sending her off to daycare and have both of us working.

What do you suggest is the solution then; other than making enough money / hitting the startup lottery jackpot and retiring before having kids?

you're talking temporary solutions. I was responding to permanent solutions.

I don't really know what you mean. Can you elaborate?

Sorry, I misread your point. Nevermind, I thought you were talking about something else.

> What do you suggest is the solution then; other than making enough money / hitting the startup lottery jackpot and retiring before having kids?

Maybe not a popular opinion but I firmly believe that the state needs to use the parent's tax money into protecting it's newest citizen by providing generous paid time off to its caregivers. Lots of states in Europe do it successfully. The US implements some sort of social Darwinism in which the more well-off kids get either more facetime with their parents or higher quality care.

But it is. It’s just that it’s made more communal.

I don’t really see the moral panic in having children being raised together in groups rather than by a dedicated or househusband.

Maybe we should pay parents to stay home and watch their kids instead of subsidizing day care.

Or we could just subsidize parents and let them choose how best to use the subsidy to provide for their kids.

It’s always struck me as strange. Working for a boss that doesn’t care about you past the next review is liberating, but working for a family that loves you more than anything is oppressive.

Also why can't men take care of the children and women work?

If childcare is so expensive, maybe in two-parent households, one parent's job should be to raise the children while the other works.

>Also why can't men take care of the children and women work?

They can, and some do, but there is the tricky problem that women tend not to want to be married to men that make less money than them.

This is what I do. I take the parental leave (I can take 7-9 months I believe) and my wife goes back to work (she makes more than I do, so it makes sense).

One thing to account for this is the social pressure in which way people marry in respect to their own economic condition. Why this exist is an entire other discussion, but it has lasting impacts.

> Also why can't men take care of the children and women work?

They can, and often do. I know of several executives where I work who have stay at home husbands. This arrangement may not be as common as the traditional one, but it's more common than you think

It's an incredible contribution, but in general childrearing isn't a skill you'd use in other areas of work. So the time spent on it is wasted compared to the extra e.g. 5 years becoming more competitive.

Ask yourself: is caring for my 2-3 kids at home, cleaning the house, cooking, laundry, ... Really the most interesting way I want to spend my life?

There are some (mostly women) who choose this. There are many many more (mostly women) who do this because they don't see any other choice, either due to cultural pressure or due to financials.

There are also studies that show it's good for the kids to be with other kids and in a more structured learning environment than a home can offer.

It's not that childcare is undervalued it's that most women want to see themselves as more than just responsible for bearing and rearing children.

What you are defending is the classical conservative relationship model. Nothing wrong with that. Indeed it can be pleasant for many people. For many more it is not a satisfactory way to live their life. It's also often not satisfactory for the working partner that rarely gets to see their kids.

Now, where it gets interesting would be more flexible models like they are common in the Nordics, e.g. both parents working 60-80% and alternating childcare and household duties on different days/weeks. THAT is a progressive and for all sides positive model.

> is caring for my 2-3 kids at home, cleaning the house, cooking, laundry, ... Really the most interesting way I want to spend my life?

I would absolutely chose that over punching a clock everyday.

You have to do the cooking and cleaning and laundry anyway and you're also leaving an aweful lot out of the good stuff out in your description.

Guess you didn't read the original article, because it mentions the exact program you linked towards the bottom about Quebec. One negative found was

So a success for parents and for the economy, but not for the well being of the kids.

I did read the article. It didn't link to the CityLab article that I posted, which I found to be a bit easier to read.

If you read the meta-analysis paper that they link to that describes the "not so good for the well being of the kids", you'll see that they're comparing children that attend daycare to children that are wholly raised at home with one or more parents:

> A recent view of effects of previous child care exposure on outcomes in adolescence suggest that more hours in child care in general does not affect test scores, but has a negative effect on non-cognitive outcomes, such as impulsivity and risk-taking (Vandell et al., 2010).

These negative findings have nothing at all to do with subsidized vs. non-subsidized childcare.

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right, the way I structured that takes away from what I was trying to say. Thanks for your hard work.

Interesting!

Any response to the view that universal-childcare-educated children are "DQN" from over in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21745453 ? (I'm not sure I understand it.)

As I've linked to in previous replies, all the studies[1] I've seen are meta-analyses that compare kids in Quebec to kids in other provinces. I don't see anything that accounts (nor could they, really) for the huge variety of factors that can differ among children in the same age group across vastly different provinces. Quebec is markedly different from the rest of the country and North America in more ways than our socialized universal daycare programme.

Moreover, they are comparing kids that are in daycare vs. kids that are raised solely by one or more of their parents; the fact that the daycare is "universal" or subsidized doesn't have anything to do with it. Moreover, the studies show that the kids are effectively more impulsive and more prone to risk-taking, and have found zero correlation with their cognitive abilities.

1. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571.pdf

Do you think inflation has been a significant outcome of this program?

Quebec hasn't become measurably more expensive than other Canadian cities in the last 25 years and is way more affordable than a comparable city like Toronto.

This is true, but keep in mind that in QC the salaries are lower, and there is a high demand for workers.

A big part of this is because the workers have to be Francophone, and often bilingual (esp. in Montreal).

The article specifically calls out the Quebec experiment as having a negative impact on the children:

>So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

And it was about as vague as could possibly be:

> But young Canadians who were eligible for the program experienced, as teenagers, “a significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction” relative to Canadians from other provinces. So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

The paper itself expands on it a little bit more:

These negative findings have nothing at all to do with subsidized vs. non-subsidized childcare. They're essentially comparing children in daycare vs. children that are able to be raised by one or more parents, full-time.

Would kids be better off being raised by their parents more than being raised by specialized childcare workers? Perhaps. But not everyone is given that opportunity, regardless.

Subsidizing something tends to increase the utilization of it, so more kids will be in childcare if you subsidize childcare.

Intuitively the extremely poor will benefit (the kid would have been neglected or malnourished &c. without subsidized child care) at the expense of the slightly less poor (the kid would have had a stay-at-home parent without subsidized child care).

Policy is full of tradeoffs (and politics is full of lying about the tradeoffs to get support for a particular policy).

I've been taking an interest in issues around this:

"child care in general does not affect test scores, but has a negative effect on non-cognitive outcomes, such as impulsivity and risk-taking (Vandell et al., 2010)."

Lately. I believe this is serious factor in the seemingly exponential rise in juvenile crimes in our city lately.

I have also been exploring bad learning / testing in the schools along with lots of other problems like bullying and violence.. talking with some people who work in these areas, it appears no amount of money thrown at the schools / teachers / in school counselors / resource officers is going to fix it...

unless things are fixed at the homes of all the kids in the community. I believe in many of these communities one of the prevalent factors is no stay at home parent..

and sadly this has been going on for so long, in many cases the parents do not have the right knowledge or skills to teach the kids as they likely grew up in a similar no at-home parents, stare at the tube and get bigger kind of situation as well.

I am interested in any research into these areas.

strangely, a day after posting this comment, I see Harvard Business Journal does an article relating... https://hbr.org/2018/11/how-our-careers-affect-our-children

I really don't understand some of these opinions.

My kids all started daycare quite young (less than a year old) and they LOVE it. I suppose it entirely depends on the daycare just as it can depend on the school your child attends when they're older.

The daycare my kids go to have plenty of activities... they do crafts, draw, have plenty of books and toys, play outside, "sports" and dance classes. There's no way I'd have the time or attention span to be able to do all of that with my kids unfortunately. Some parents can do it, but I think most parents need a break more often than not.

"pays for itself...via increased income taxes"?

It's a "nit pick" for sure, but in my understanding, something that "pays for itself" is not dependent on government subsidies. Quebec has some of the highest income taxes in the country - you pay for such services one way or another.

Plus, according to the linked article, there is not enough space in the subsidized program to meet demand, so there are private options available, which must be paid for out of pocket and covered by a tax rebate. According the to the article, the private options do not provide the same standard of care.

> It's a "nit pick" for sure, but in my understanding, something that "pays for itself" is not dependent on government subsidies. Quebec has some of the highest income taxes in the country - you pay for such services one way or another.

The subsidies that are required are offset by the increased labour force participation that occurs as a direct result of said subsidies. Conversely, if the subsidies disappeared, then there's a good chance that many of those currently employed parents would have to make a choice – do I remain in the workforce and pay $1-2k/month for childcare, or do I quit my job and raise my child/children?

I've had relatives that live in Ontario that had to make this choice. Daycare in Toronto is $1600/month, and can be around $2500/month if you have two children. If one of the parents is pulling in $50,000/year (net pay of $38,979), and you have to drop close to $30,000 for childcare, for 2-4 years, is it even worth staying at your job?

> do I remain in the workforce and pay $1-2k/month for childcare, or do I quit my job and raise my child/children?

That the program "pays for itself" in increased taxes implies that the additional tax burden is at least the $1-2k/month required to pay for the childcare.

So if you just cancelled the childcare and reduced the taxes you'd end up at the same place on average, except you wouldn't have non-parents subsidising childcare for parents.

I understood it as it would "pay for itself" in increased tax revenue in the future as the children who had access to better child care become more productive citizens. That sounds like how any other investment works, you pay now for a better situation in the future.

If you argue that you don't want to pay now because you won't benefit in the future because you'll be dead, I assume you're not willing to support any other investments either. That sounds like you're just freeloading on the investments that our ancestors made.

>children who had access to better child care become more productive citizens.

From the article:

But young Canadians who were eligible for the program experienced, as teenagers, “a significant worsening in self-reported health and in life satisfaction” relative to Canadians from other provinces. So, did the Quebec child-care experiment “work”? Yes, for parents and public financing. Perhaps not for the kids.

No, the argument is that the program increases GDP because more women with children are participating in the labor force. A portion of that increase is collected in taxes, and if that amount happens to be the same or larger than what the government spends on childcare, the program "pays for itself".

Non-parents are not subsidizing parents in this scheme. And if the additional amount collected in taxes is greater than the cost of the program, then parents are subsidizing non-parents.

If you cancelled the childcare, the GDP increase would disappear, so the increase in tax revenue would disappear, and you wouldn't be able to reduce the tax rate.

It's also hard to pry apart what "pays for itself" and what doesn't. Quebec doesn't just have incredibly high taxes, they are subsidized by the rest of the productive provinces in the country to the tune of about 10% of their yearly budget. A 10% cut in spending would be classified as incredibly harsh austerity in most cases, and so taking any sort of predictive value from the success of programs run by Quebec is very hard. It should also be noted that for all of these efforts to give incredibly generous benefits to Quebec parents, their birthrate is still among the lowest in Canada and buoyed up only by immigration. So it isn't even really helping people have more children.

Lots of incorrect facts in that comments that need to be corrected.

The program was measured to be productive in the sense that the increased expenses for the program was paid back by the increase income taxes generated by more parents going to work IN THE PROVINCE. Since beginning the program more than two decades ago, Quebec has seen the rate of women age 26 to 44 in the workforce reach 85 percent, the highest in the world (and in Canada). More taxes paid by moms (and dads) paid for the price of the program. So yes, you can measure the success of the program and has nothing to do with the provincial perequation system for having a lower GDP.

Also, the birthrate is not among the lowest, it's actually right in the middle (per capita) and ahead of Ontario (which has the most similar economy). Quebec used to be among the lowest rate in Canada and what the program has done is increasing it dramatically, this has been measured by multiple studies.

Source: https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/daycare-difference-quebec-fert... https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/75-006-x/2018001/article...

> something that "pays for itself" is not dependent on government subsidies.

I think you are ignoring the aggregate here. A govt program can "pay for itself" in ways private action cant because the govt can help smooth out risk among the participants.

Your point that this is ultimately funded by taxpayers is correct, but that doesnt mean the program cant generate more in new tax revenue than it costs. Like roads, education, and other areas, reliable and affordable child care can enable a lot.

(Note I have no actual knowledge of the specifics, so I'm arguing what is possible, not what is definitely happening)

How does the program affect the third factor- childhood development and social skills? Also, making money is fine, but are people happier? Healthier? Thanks for sharing.

>... the program literally pays for itself (and more!) via increased income taxes from parents that would have otherwise chosen to stay at home.

In the US both the left and right play a game where the only way to increase tax revenue is tax cuts to the rich. It has never worked...but politicians be damned if they will ever try anything other than trickle down economics.

> It doesn't have to be this way.

No it doesn't. Rates for Stockholm, Sweden (PDF): https://forskola.stockholm/globalassets/forskola-och-skola/f...

In short:

FULL-TIME RATES

Full-time rates apply to children in the ages of 1-3, who are in childcare for more than 30 hours a week.

Child 1: 3% of household income up to maximum a fee of 1425 kr/month (roughly 149 USD)

Child 2: 2% of household income up to maximum a fee of 950 kr/month (roughly 99 USD)

Child 3: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month (roughly 50 USD)

PART-TIME RATES

Child 1: 2% of household income up to maximum a fee of 950 kr/month

Child 2: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month

Child 3: 1% of household income up to maximum a fee of 475 kr/month

Every family receives child allowance[1]. Child allowance for one child is 1250 kr/month for one child. Two children: 2650 kr/month. Three chidren: 4480 kr/month.

[1] https://www.forsakringskassan.se/privatpers/foralder/nar_bar...

Sweden has a top marginal tax rate of 70% that kicks in at around $98,000. That $149 per month is deceptive when you are paying very high tax rates.

The people benefiting from it aren’t paying those taxes. But obviously taxes pay for government programs.

You're right! Taxing the high earners is a good idea, subsidized child care is just one of the many benefits.

Why is taxing high earners more a good idea? It just gives people an incentive to either not make that much money or leave the country to make more money.

"Taxes are high so I won't try to make more money" - No one ever.

There are lots of people who don't try to make more money because of roadblocks put in by the government. Obviously the uber-rich like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates don't care that much about taxes but for someone in the low to middle income brackets it can be challenging to move up as you pay more in taxes and receive less help from the government.

If you make enough money that you can live comfortably and you would have to move up a lot to counter the offset to make more money in the next tax bracket, I think the majority of people would not bother. Outside of HN, a lot of people are satisfied with making an okay salary and having steep tax bracket changes just amplifies that. Obviously, everyone would like to make more money if they could do so easily but if it is very difficult to do so, a lot of people will not be bothered.

The people who do want to make a lot of money and become rich, well if they have to deal with crazy taxes, they are going to either find away around the tax laws, or simply leave the country which both options are not good for the country.

> Obviously the uber-rich like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates don't care that much about taxes but for someone in the low to middle income brackets it can be challenging to move up as you pay more in taxes and receive less help from the government.

The people in the middle income brackets don't want to move up, in the sense that they don't want to work 20% harder, to get a 3% increase in their paycheck. (Which is how most employers 'reward' hard work.)

That's because effort and remuneration aren't linked in a 1:1 fashion, not because the marginal tax bracket for the next dollar they earn is three percent higher than the previous one.

> you would have to move up a lot to counter the offset to make more money in the next tax bracket

This is not how tax brackets work.

>"Taxes are high so I won't try to make more money" - No one ever.

No, but the Swiss banking system, Panama Papers, Canadian shadow company situation et al. can attest to the fact that when income / wealth rises to a certain level and those who've earned / attained it feel the level of tax being levied at them is of an unfair level, a vast amount of money that could be taxed will be off-shored.

Everyone, particularly those in areas with a low sense of shared identity and the mutual obligations that comes with it, will try to minimize their tax bill some way or another and once one attains a certain level they will unlock mechanisms to avoid tax at a level that will be detrimental to the rest of the players in their given system.

Not everyone grew up in an as money-centered society as the US. A middle class Swedish lifestyle is plentiful and way beyond the reach of most people in most countries, including most Europeans. Whether you believe it or not, making 1.5x as much (or twice) in America is not that attractive for many people, especially because of how social issues are handled there. Not to mention family, friends etc. People aren't some mindless particles flowing towards more money.

That may be true, my perspective as a Canadian which is a fairly socialistic country compared to the US is a bit different. We have a massive problem with the brain drain as a lot of people who are college educated go to the US to earn higher salaries, especially in but not limited to tech. But its possible that the proximity to the US is a factor as you can still easily visit your friends and family in Canada while living in the US.

>We have a massive problem with the brain drain as a lot of people who are college educated go to the US to earn higher salaries, especially in but not limited to tech.

Anecdotally a lot of those same people are 1st generation immigrants, 2nd generation children of recent immigrants or are merely here for school from places such as China in the first place, and as such don't feel much of a tie to Canada or to being Canadian.

Not to mention that Canada, at least in the major English-speaking cities, does not have much of a residual sense of community left.

Hence the situation is very different to a largely homogeneous society with an inherent sense of shared identity such as Sweden.

I dont think people are leaving Canada because they have to pay higher taxes or because they hate the healthcare system.

> I dont think people are leaving Canada because they have to pay higher taxes or because they hate the healthcare system.

That's not what I said at all. I said Canadians are leaving Canada because they can make more money outside of Canada(ie. like close to double the salary in some cases). Raising taxes is not going to encourage them to stay if they are leaving because of monetary reasons.

The aforementioned Swedes appear to be quite content paying their high taxes, given the benefits conferred.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2008/nov/16/sweden-tax-bur... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/sweden-competitive-spite-high-tax-... [3] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-02-09/bernie-sanders-wants-...

> Sweden has a top marginal tax rate of 70% that kicks in at around $98,000.

According to wikipedia (0), the top rate is 60% and kicks in at $70,800. What's your source?

> That $149 per month is deceptive when you are paying very high tax rates.

According to the OECD (1), the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is $31,287 a year, which comes down to $2607 per month, of which $149 is 5.7%.

According to the same OECD, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita in the US is $45,284 a year. According to the OP's article, the cost of childcare is $16,000, or roughly 35.3%.

Would you argue that's deceptively high when you are paying little taxes? I wouldn't. If having children is to be considered a basic human right, why not equally consider universal the ability to raise them regardless of income bracket?

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Sweden 1: http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/sweden/

> the program literally pays for itself (and more!) via increased income taxes from parents that would have otherwise chosen to stay at home.

Getting around 50-80k of untaxed labor value for the household is an excellent reason for any family that can manage to have one parent do the childcare job. It’s not so much an affordability issue as it is a cash flow management issue.

If the program pays for itself via increased income taxes, it's still as expensive. It's just the money flow that is different. As it involves the state, it might be even a bit more expensive due to overhead cost (it might also not, if it's not profit oriented).

A lot of really good discussion in this article. I just wanted to add a couple of things:

It is a true blessing if a mother or father can stay at home to raise their children. However, over time being a stay at home parent is incredibly isolating. Men are suseptible to depression, but women especially so post-partum. Also, many parents do eventually want to work either part time or full time. The longer one stays out of the work force the bigger the gap on the resume and the harder it is to find work as children grow up. I agree the lowest paying jobs should not be subsidized, but I think the benefits of taxpayer subsidized childcare would be overwhelmingly positive. The quality of childcare makes a big difference in the equation, but parents, especially mothers, should be encouraged to re-enter the workforce if they so choose. Every policy creates incentives and I have no qualms with the ones created by subsidized childcare.

I am convinced the isolated stay at home parent model is not normal human behavior, but a pathology of our particular society which represents an unreasonable expectation derived from an excessive commitment to individualism and independence. It is not psychologically reasonable to expect one person to care for children all day every day. It is not historically or broadly culturally normal. It is not healthy for either the parent or the children to isolate them together like this.

It is normal for children to be cared for by many adults throughout the day, from birth - be they older relatives or simply members of the community. It is abnormal for one person to have to deal with all of their energy and issues. It is normal for children to wander and play and experience a wide and varied world. It is abnormal for them to be kept in a small, unchanging indoor space. It is normal for new parents, especially new mothers, to be intensely supported by their community. It is abnormal for them to be left alone unsupported. It is normal for homemakers to accomplish their daily tasks communally and to be active in their communities. It is abnormal for them to endure years of social isolation, primarily spending time with their children.

I am not sure what a healthy pattern for family support and child rearing looks like in this society, but I think public support for young child care, better connections with older relatives and neighbors for light child care, and light or part time but potentially meaningful work and social connections for parents is a lot closer to normalcy than the current locked together in isolation suffering silently pretending to be happy wondering why you're the only one struggling model we have now. The current model is insane and it is a testament to our toughness as human beings that we all try so hard to make it work and survive as well as we do.

It may be a side effect of suburbanization and the mass migration to single-family homes.

While we can blame the suburbs on a lot of social problems, this is not one of them.

Families who raise their children in cities have all the same problems.

I personally think it is much easier in a city than a suburb, or at least very different.

I believe it to actually be a result of industrialization, and I think that the old "model" could actually be more healthy for children (barring advances in society, medicine, etc).

Industrialization centralized jobs to factories, offices, etc. Previous to that, most operated their business as an attachment of their home, whether operating in trades or in aggriculture. So the children, the family, etc, were all together all of the time.

Our family actually works that way as I have a job as a remote developer and my wife is a stay at home mom. It's a great balance as I get to see my kids all day, and my wife is able to get breaks.

> It is not psychologically reasonable to expect one person to care for children all day every day [...] It is normal for children to be cared for by many adults throughout the day

I'd argue having the child away from parents so often is harmful as well. Financials aside, that middle ground somewhat exists: stay at home parents that still leverage social environments for their kids. I too don't know how we can get everyone there, but the first step should be recognizing that a non-working parent doesn't have to be an isolated parent.

I just cannot see any harmful effects of my child being at daycare every weekday from the age of around 9 months.

If anything he seems to really enjoy both going there and coming home. He has tons of friends, and the teachers are fantastic.

I guess this strongly depends on the environment though. Maybe we just found a really good one. It kind of feels the same as having the community take care of the kid.

Literature from twin studies would like to disagree with you. Most people overestimate the effect of parenting and underestimate the effect of genetics in determining child success. Genetics is more than 50% of the game.

As for the other 50%, the absence of parenting is bad for a child, since much of development is based on receiving adequate amounts of care and nutrition. However, this amount is satisfiable by engaged parents interacting with kids after work. The relationship between outcomes and sheer volume of hours of care provided by the mother is only weakly correlated after a certain threshold.

tl;dr: Daycare is fine for your kid, don't overthink it. If you're the kind of person who worries about this sort of thing, you're already ahead of the game.

This is a weird comment that, in my experience, doesn't represent the reality of today's stay-at-home parents. I'd love to see hard data on this, but let me share my anecdotes in response to the middle paragraph here. My older sister has been a stay at home mother for almost a decade, so I'll share my observations from being an uncle:

> It is normal for children to be cared for by many adults throughout the day, from birth - be they older relatives or simply members of the community.

My sister engages in a community of stay-at-home parents and homeschooling parents (there is a lot of overlap and she also homeschools) to provide her children with socialization and to also share the burden of parenting all the small ones.

By contrast, in daycare, where my sister and mother both worked professionally at different times, it is common for adults to be split between many children, usually as many as seven or eight per adult (by regulation).

> It is abnormal for one person to have to deal with all of their energy and issues.

See above

> It is normal for children to wander and play and experience a wide and varied world. It is abnormal for them to be kept in a small, unchanging indoor space.

Funny that this is an example! Many daycares are inside only or maybe have a small playground. By the time the child is 5, they're expected to sit still in actual school all day! My nephew and nieces get the pleasure of participating in something called "Forest School" where they're able to socialize with other children their age and learn about nature, shockingly, outside in nature. They're also always allowed in the backyard and have friends in their neighborhood as well. So actually from what I've seen, homeschooled kids and kids with a stay at home parent actually get _more_ outside time. It's the poor kids in day care and school that don't get to go outside.

> It is normal for new parents, especially new mothers, to be intensely supported by their community. It is abnormal for them to be left alone unsupported. It is normal for homemakers to accomplish their daily tasks communally and to be active in their communities. It is abnormal for them to endure years of social isolation, primarily spending time with their children.

Again, see above. Maybe this varies a lot by locale, but here in Texas, none of your criticisms actually apply to the community of stay at home moms and homeschoolers that I have observed in my community.

How does one find these stay-at-home communities? By gods, we've tried for years.

Through church, mostly, I believe. In her case at least.

Not sure why this is greyed out, but I appreciated your comment. Is Forest School a thing beyond where you live, do you know?

I believe it is and in fact I think I read an article here on HN not too long ago that talked about it. There seems to be an associated organization:

https://www.forestschoolassociation.org/what-is-forest-schoo...

Your experience sounds lovely. I think you may have misinterpreted my frustration with the standard experience and expectation of stay at home parenting as advocating for widespread use of daycare. I do think that option is a little closer to normalcy, but I also think it is still not very close. I suppose it depends on how it is done. Your experience sounds even better to me. I do not know exactly what a healthy experience would look like in this society, but I expect there are people who have figured it out on a small scale. I am pleased to hear this appears to be the case. I wish your community every success and hope your lifestyle spreads. The commonly accepted narrative of what we as parents are supposed to be doing, at least the one presented to me, is something I find very unreasonable.

To be completely clear, I am not criticizing parents who stay at home to raise their children. I am criticizing a society which expects them to do it alone. I am not advocating daycare as a panacea. I am saying any communal support at all represents a step away from the insanity. It sounds like your local community does not have the expectation that stay at home parents should naturally be superheroes. Please take over the world. :)

It's definitely weird when you think about it. It seems like a relatively new model.

That said - what are you going to do about it? Our major cities and culture are not setup for addressing these issues at all. We have a hard enough time trying to pass anything through congress. Trying to get some huge child care bill through is nigh on impossible. On top of that - it will, of course, not do anything for people who live in the more expensive regions of the USA because paying for child care is expensive - sure - but the price of housing those children can be just as expensive if not more.

> What are you going to do about it?

Have lots of kids and encourage them not to move so that there is a large support structure in place foe their children and their children's children.

Unless you have riches beyond imagination - this is not feasible in a modern economy... My SO is a prime example of this. She grew up in the bay area but she herself could never afford a home here cause homes be $2m now. Her parents never bought a home - so she will never inherit a fortune either. Even if they did - she wouldn't inherit it until they were dead (and thus unable to help take care of the children). So, she's either going to be unable to afford childcare (cause parents dead) or be unable to afford the house (cause parents alive) - likely unable to afford either (cause really she ain't ever gonna make enough either way).

It's not very popular in the US but multi-generational housing has existed for thousands of years in other parts of the world and solves for this, even while renting.

I don't think it "solves for this"... Those types of units are not cheap where I am and they're rare. It's not like you spend $100-200k and suddenly you have a suitable multi-generational home. Where I am - it's going to be at least $1m-2m extra. The kids can't afford that in a mortgage - let alone cash that a remodel would require.

Sure it does. It just might not work for you. I can certainly respect that everyone's situation is different but I do think your original comment is highly Bay Area biased. There are plenty of other (better IMO) areas that are more affordable, including New York.

I'm not sure what I am going to do about it. I appreciate the encouragement to elevate my frustration into a serious problem to consider trying to solve. I doubt throwing money at it via government is the answer, though perhaps it is a piece of it. It's possible there's a way to change this via a service, but it seems like a big piece of the solution would have to be a big cultural change.

> I agree the lowest paying jobs should not be subsidized, but I think the benefits of taxpayer subsidized childcare would be overwhelmingly positive.

I don't understand. What's the difference?

You are using taxes revenues to subsidize uneconomical labor to be economical.

What is so different about subsidizing a entry worker's pay or their child care bills?

---

FWIW, the article makes no mention of it, but child care is tax subsidized in the U.S. via the Child Care Credit [1].

[1] https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc602

I have to agree - we are a society, not a corporation; should such decisions really be made on prospective income tax revenues?

It really is much more isolating today than it would have been years ago. Back when it was the norm for a parent (usually mother) to stay home with the kids, so did every other mother on the block. My wife stays home with our kids and, within the neighborhood, she is pretty much limited to hanging out with retirees. Fortunately, she's found that there is actually quite a large number of other stay-at-home mothers/fathers if you expand your search radius beyond the neighborhood. As such, she schedules meetups, play dates, and homeschool co-ops at least two days a week. It's possible to not be lonely and depressed, but as with anything takes some effort and creativity.

I disagree that the benefits of subsidized childcare would be overwhelmingly positive. They would be positive only for those who wish to work. For those who wish to stay home (and I believe the number is higher than most people estimate), it makes it an even more expensive opportunity cost and adds even more cultural pressure to conform. And, when it comes to raising kids, I think diversity of upbringing, rather than conformity is the real answer.

> Men are suseptible to depression, but women especially so post-partum

Depression is actually much more prevalent in women, in general, need t just post-partum[0]. I've linked a single reference, but there really is a lot of evidence here (although I think men probably hide it more frequently than women, but that's just my unscientific opinion!).

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4478054/

Growing up, about 10 families all had kids within 18 months of each other, within a 3 mile radius. The parents all got together and worked out a time share agreement where all 10 kids would get dropped off from roughly 9-5 at one parent's house, then a different parent's house the next day, etc so that one house had 10 kids for an entire day, every two weeks. This happened from about age 0-3 pretty religiously. It worked out partly because all the parents were in the same age/ethnic/religious/income group, but it might work across wider groups. It didn't cost anything. We called it the "babysitting group" and 30+ years later I'm still pretty good friends with most of the kids in our group.

I think "modern" parents take their kids to the park to try and socialize with other parents/kids but the unstructured method doesn't seem as effective.

my sister solved this joining her local moms club. No idea what support exists for dads

It really comes down to the ratio. Our state has a 4-1 ratio for infants (which is entirely reasonable). You are basically paying for 1/4 of a person's time. If you want to put them into a daycare where the worker is adequately paid, that's $6000 a year alone, let alone overhead costs for facilities/admin.

No matter who pays for it, raising children is time consuming. And time is becoming more valuable.

For reference, MA ratios (some of the most restrictive in the country) are:

    1-14m: 7:2
    15-32m: 9:2
    33m-7y: 10:1
     -- https://child-familyservices.org/wp-content/uploads/ma-regulations.pdf

Just as comparison, in Finland the max ratios are quite close:

<3y: 4:1, max 12 children per group (3 educators)

>3y: 8:1, max 24 children per group (3 educators again)

Two thirds of educators need to have a bachelor's degree in early childhood education.

Exactly right. People also forget that while the parent works 8 hours a day, the kid is dropped off before and after commute time which means the kid may be in daycare for 9 or 10 hours. So if you get infant care at $175/week for four infants divided by 50 hours, you get $14/hour and that is gross revenue to the business. If you happen to lose an infant to a parental move, now you are losing money for that class. You can do better on the 10+ kids because the ratios are much better.

As you said, we are valuing time more and more. I can't imagine what childcare would costs with a $15/hour minimum wage. A lot of mothers would probably be forced to give up their job.

Isn’t that market forces valuing a mother (or one parent, regardless of gender) at home raising their kid(s) more valuable than at the job they’d be giving up? I'm not sure I see a problem with the economy tilting towards parents being parents versus outsourcing their childcare (within reason, when one parent can comfortably support their family).

We just went through the process of finding childcare for our infant. Originally, we were going to have my wife's parents move in to help, but her father was suddenly diagnosed with lung cancer, forcing us to scramble for child care. With my wife's student loans, it wouldn't be prudent for her to not work.

Childcare costs more than twice as much as our mortgage. We live in a blue state where many businesses feel compelled to pay $15/hour for unskilled labor. We interviewed child care providers who wanted $18-$22 per hour with no certifications, degrees, or training. We looked at au pairs, but the agencies all wanted $8k-$10k up front with no guarantees.

The idea of paying minimum wage to a child care provider also seems wrong too. Your child is spending more time with this person each week than they are with you. I'd think you'd want to pay more than minimum wage, to get quality caregivers.

Right, but how do you pay more than that, but still make it worthwhile for the parent to work after the cost of child care is deducted from their pay check?

I wonder how the ratios are decided. 4:1 sounds pretty generous. There are families out there with stay at home mums that have 5 kids, and the mothers there have to do housework too. So the government is mandating here the child:carer hour ratio is better than some actual families.

Do infants actually need the kind of attention these ratios imply? What happened to the era when families with lots of kids would just let them play outside all day?

Infant != kids.

Twins are quite stressful for mothers, and 4 infants would be like having quadruplets. Usually the ratios continue to rise as the children get older. Here's California's rules, for example. From kindergarten (66 months age on average) and up it's 14:1

- Infants (birth to 18 months old) -1:3

- Toddlers (18 months to 36 months old) -1:4

- Preschool (36 months to enrollment in kindergarten) - 1:8

- Children enrolled in kindergarten through 14 years old - 1:14

Are these numbers based on anything concrete or are they just judgment calls? Whatever one thinks about class sizes, 14:1 seems absurd as a legal limit for everyone. There's no clear and present danger with having an adult watch 30 4th graders. (My guess is the preschool and toddler cutoffs are also too strict, although I feel less confident.)

Most of those families with multiple kids don't have 5 infants, but rather ages of the children are spread out. The ratio GP is talking about is, I believe, a limit so that infants are not neglected due to lack of time on the caretakers part. Infants do need lots of care and attention specifically during early development.

Unpopular opinion - but I think farming out the majority of the raising of children to daycares is a bad idea in the long term. Obviously some times you don't have a choice, but I think stay-at-home moms (or dads) are extremely valuable for the development of the child and potentially worth more than any monetary gains to be had from dual-income.

Yeah, you might not be able to afford a nice house or car as quickly, but you get absolute control over how much love, attention, and correction your developing kids receive.

The person who gets "Uber, but for Parenting, not cars" right will make a fortune.

The solutions in the article are "Medicaid, but for Parents, not doctors."

What we need is "a culture with jobs that will pay enough to support two adults and their children, so that care of children, family, and the community is an expected part of every adult relationship."

I think this is the killer untapped market for Uber. Just book a really long Uber ride and let your kid spend 8 hours in the car while you’re working. Driver can still pick up other passengers and your kid can interact with them for enrichment. Doesn’t have to be a complete waste of time. When the kid is old enough, give them a raspberry pi and let them learn to code or something while they’re riding around. Driver can stop at Whole Foods for Soylent or whatever else the kid may want to eat/drink.

I hope this is satire.

It would probably end up in way too many lawsuits from all towards all directions and across.

Exactly. This offends so many people to even bring it up, but I agree 100%. Our children are the most precious people in our lives, but we're willing to give them the worst of our time. If both parents are working, they come home at the end of the day too exhausted to invest in their children. Why are the kids getting the left-overs? Does that seem fair to them?

Studying Quebec's universal daycare launched in 1997 (with slogan "Children at the heart of our choice"), Jon Gruber @MIT and colleagues found... they didn't fare so well. Negative effects especially for boys and aggressive kids.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...

It's weird to me the goal would be "make sure everyone has daycare" instead of "make sure people can raise their children".

What would taking the same amount of money and using it as a direct cash transfer subsidy look like?

I think those are two separate ideas. I agree we shouldn't have a culture of "farming out" childrearing, but I disagree offering childcare options has to encourage that. I think in any case, we need work environments more sensitive to work/life balance.

A lot of parents who chose to stay at home described having multiple young kids as chaos and "just trying to survive." I also get, "It's just so nice to talk to adults." Higher end communities offer a lot of options for temporary childcare; daycare programs that are 2-3 hours, gyms, and groceries offering childcare while you're there that seem specifically focused on stay at home parents. Those aren't options for most people.

Just an hour or two break can really help recharge, or just plan appointments or outings. If you're lucky enough that they sleep through the night or nap, you're still tethered to the house. I really think doing things outside of a relationship helps make parenting more fruitful, but since being a parent is 24/7 you just don't have options unless you have a strong network and are willing to ask/pay for help.

Not everybody has the choice to go single-income--many couples need two incomes to survive at all. Also there are single-parent households that have zero choice in the matter as well.

I'm not sure that having a child growing up in an isolated environment, interacting with mostly one person, is good or healthy. I have a hunch that exposure to many people, situations and environments is better for the child, as long as the overall exposure is positive. Not only that, but the isolation of the caregiver probably makes the caregiver less fit (depression, imagination-killing-routine) to provide quality education. In that lense, I think there's solid arguments for why "farming out" might be better for everyone, child and parents.

Absolutely, it would go a long way towards reducing the population's sense of individualism and better prepare the next crop of corporate drones. We should get started at once!

I don't think the argument had anything to do with isolation. Your reply sounds stereotypical. Stay-at-home parents - and similarly, home-schooled children - usually have a richer and more vibrant community than schooled children and the average 9-5 working parent.

I've met hundreds, and it always strikes me as a more ideal life, because it's steeped in strong community.

Of course there are the isolation exceptions that make headlines in news media.

If America embraced a proper work and life balance, we could have both. Not all Mom's and Dad's want to stay home, and afew hours of quality daycare could be beneficial to most kids.

I say this as a parent with 6 kids and a wife who has cared for all of them.

So the three reasons given by the article.

* Primarily labor driven. You can't automate, you can't reduce hours, you squeeze 9 hours of child care out of an 8 hour workday.

* Regulation. This prevents the one way to lower labor cost: increasing child to adult ratio. Laws prevent this.

* Real estate costs. Child care can't be moved to cheaper cities and there is even limits on the extent it can be moved within a city before it becomes to costly (in time) for parents to utilize it.

Overall... I think the second reason can be wrapped up into the first one. While legally mandated insurance and such do have an impact, the biggest impact is the limit on child to adult ratio which has the largest impact on costs and that is because it limits the efficiency a single worker can have. If the ratio is 4 kids to 1 adult, the cost will never be below 1/4 the adult's salary. If you expect the adult to be paid a living wage, then in terms of others earning a living wage, 25% of their income will have to go to child care, and that is before counting any taxes or other costs.

That’s also before subsidies. You can subsidise so it never exceeds X% of the household income, which is what they do in France

The end result is still the same when you average it out. If your ratio is 4 to 1, the average wage of 1 child care worker has to be split between 4 adults, meaning that if they are being paid equal amounts, 25% of net income has to go to child care.

Even if that money actually comes mostly from the top 1%, the average money per person works out to the same. This explains why the cost is so high. With regards to explain why the cost is so high, if that cost is being paid by the parents directly or by the rich via taxes and subsidies is not a factor in that cost, only in how it is paid.

This may be somewhat off-topic, but I'm often surprised that leftist policies like the article advocates are often proposed at a national level? Why is this? Why not propose a state-sponsored child-care system in a leftist state - California, Washington, Massachusetts, etc. I'm not trying to start a war here, simply genuinely interested why people on the left push national social programs versus propose them in very wealthy left-leaning states?

This is just a guess, but in America basically all taxes are taken at the federal level. It's easier to move that money around then add on state taxes.

"Basically all"? I disagree. I think that state taxes total about half of federal taxes.

That's the outlier, though. Most states tend to hover in the 5% range. A few states have 0 income tax, but typically make up for it with property tax. But nowhere close to the Federal tax rate...

Most states hover in the 5% revenue compared to what the federal government collects in that state? I strongly disagree.

For example, Utah's tax revenue was $9.9 billion in 2018-2019. Federal was $3.6 trillion. But Utah only has 1% of the US population. So if the rest of the states taxed at the rate Utah does, that would be $990 billion, which is about 1/4 of the Federal take. It's way more than 5%. And Utah is not a high-tax state.

Interesting math. Where does it come from if not income? Corporate taxes? Sales/fuel taxes?

Well, I looked at total revenue. So that will be income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, property tax (if any of that goes to the state), car registration fees... everything. You can look at individual states and get the breakdown. For Utah, it's primarily income and sales tax.

Because those states already taxed their citizens to the breaking point. It's much easier to pass it off to the federal government where you can't escape by moving to Florida.

That is interesting. I wonder how other national programs are generally funded (or would be funded, Medicare For All for example). Are they massive wealth transfers from low tax to high tax states?

The biggest wealth transfer from low to high tax states tends to be low-GDP areas like the midwest spending tax money to educate people, and then having their best and brightest move away to generate tax income for New York and California.

It has been reliably demonstrated for decades that conservative poor states receive more national (federal) dollars than they pay in to the system. Wealthy states like California and New York recieve less than 95% of the funds they put in. The NASA campus in Huntsville, Alabama was put there for no other reason than to funnel national dollars into the state for decades. Johnston Space Center (i.e. Mission Control for Apollo/Moon, ISS etc) in Houston, until SpaceX built their spaceport in Texas, was built over a thousand miles from the nearest rocket launch pad for similar reasons. Just one example.

They are, even at a more local level. New York City, for example, has a free pre-k (4yo) program. But in order to be effective, some of these policies need to be applied nationwide. In other cases, state budgets are simply too constrained for them. Like someone said in the comments, this is a program that could paid itself with the income tax from both parents working, but in the US the majority of income tax goes to the federal government, I think.

> Like someone said in the comments, this is a program that could paid itself with the income tax from both parents working

That's a bit of a weird point to make, though. That income tax is already going toward paying for government programs. If you divert some of that to pay for early child care, some other programs will be left under- or unfunded.

Unless the subsidy enabled workers to work instead of mind children, and thus pay more income or consumption tax. NOT APPLICABLE IN STATES WITHOUT SUCH TAX.

The idea is that these programs bring additional tax revenue by encouraging parents to work

The reality is that currency-issuing federal governments everywhere run perpetual deficits (and some economists argue they have no revenue constraints at all.) States can't do this.

Why would an activist's article propose a state-level policy? The point of activism is to push the agenda forward by demanding a lot MORE than you can practically get via compromise.

Just a guess but the areas where they may have the greatest economic impact may not be the wealthy states like CA, MA, WA, but some of the poorer states.

They do, to some extent. See this link for example[1]. But states are constrained in ways that the federal government is not.

The main difference is that the federal government can 'print money' to fund spending (the most recent tax cuts were essentially funded that way) and hope that long term economic growth from the policy change negates the increased deficit.

The second reason is that the Federal government takes more of the tax pie than states do. According to this link[2], the federal government gets 65%, states take 20%, and cities/municipalities 15%. And keep in mind that a good chunk of the federal money goes back to the states via federal programs. So if you are going to target your policy initiatives, might as well aim for the biggest slice of the pie.

[1] https://www.chs-ca.org/child-care-payment-program [2] https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-breakdown...

The free rider problem is usually the reason We Can't Have Nice Things at the state level.

Many states (perhaps all?) must have a balanced budget every year. This means that these programs also need to have financing attached to them—so your free childcare plan either includes a new/higher tax, and/or cuts to other programs. Makes it a much harder sell.

There’s a very dramatic “I’m right and your wrong” narcissism on the left, that feels stronger than the narcisismo on the right or center - led by stronger emotions for their beliefs than the others. I’m not entirely sure why but it almost seems tautologically explained by the left more strongly following their emotions.

Left people feel emotionally obligated to spread their “correct” opinions that “help people” as far as possible. Nationally > state.

I live in Massachusetts.. mentioned in the article as averaging $16k.

I have a child who stopped going to private day care a year and a half ago. For us it was more like $20-24k/yr for child care. There were centers near one of my workplaces that were more like $35-40k/yr/child. Anything near the trendy high tech office spaces in Boston/Cambridge is going to be in that > $30k/yr/child range.

I think there are nice profits being made because:

- The teachers/caretakers make 50% at best of what public school teachers make

- They just in time schedule the living daylights out of everything

- You can easily figure out the gross income of the "school" because the tuition figures are public and you can see the # of rooms in the school and calculate from regulation how many kids are there. They were always 95% full in my experience

- The expensive/fancy ones tend to be owned by big chains & franchises, those are not operations that exist without someone getting rich.

One of the biggest day care chains in the country is owned by Bain Capital.. they've made a lot of money on it. They don't get into stuff that isn't profitable.

My experience was even at the upper end of the market the product is pretty darn bad compared to public school systems in our area. The public school staff is amazing and incredibly professional compared to the private day care staff. Not even close. And the ratios for elementary school are better than pre-school/pre-K at expensive day cares in our area. And even if you took all our local & state taxes and gave 100% to the school it does not match what day care costs. And obviously the state & town do not give 100% of the money to the school system.

For another data point, my wife and I live in Cambridge, MA we just hired a nanny for our 6 month old son at a rate of 23/hr for 30 hours per week (~35k/yr)... This was competitive with nearby day care center rates.

Yes I was referring to Kendall Sq. day cares when thinking of $36-40k/yr. I worked there when my child was born.

We had our kid in the infant class at a chain daycare in Central, $3400/mo. His older sibling was $2900/mo. And the care wasn't even that great...We moved them to a daycare closer to our house, a little further out. The costs went down 25% and the quality went up dramatically. It's really amazing how hit or miss the quality of the day care options are in the area, and how obscenely expensive it all is. But it's an easy equation for them--you simply look at the after-tax income of a biopharm mid-career professional and you make it cost that. The families are willing to pay that amount of money for 3-4 years because leaving a parent out of the workforce causes a loss of career trajectory and a subsequent loss of future income. Basically you sacrifice a few years of current earning to not lose out on the time in role.

> 23/hr for 30 hours per week (~35k/yr)

Don't forget about the "nanny tax" (Household employer tax). You might not have to pay it this year if you're under the threshold but you probably will next year: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nanny-tax.asp

I live in MA, and I've used in-home daycare.

My current provider is a husband and wife team, and they aren't getting rich. (They charge $50 / day.)

Previously, I used an in-home provider where she ran a smaller in-home daycare, and her husband had an engineering job. They (household) had more money than my wife and I did. Ironically, even though she charged $55 a day, because she provided all food, it was "cheaper" due to time saved on our end.

I'm currently in Indiana (ugh), but had my oldest daughter in Michigan. Michigan in 2000, seemed to have some subsidies that essentially set the price for daycare. I believe in home was $45 / day. Indiana has no such subsidies and costs can vary hugely. I've seen anywhere from $25 /day to $70 /day.

Emily Oster mentioned on a podcast [1] that although she enjoys spending time with her kids much more than she enjoys working, the marginal value of kid time declines while the marginal value of work remains steady. In my experience a lot of parents feel this way. We may agree that the intrinsic value of family is much higher than that of work or the economy, but spending too much time with one's kids can feel like a drain at a certain point, even for very loving parents. At that point, the parent probably isn't doing anything great for the kids. It's good to have another outlet.

[1] https://newbooksnetwork.com/emily-oster-cribsheet-a-data-dri...

Spending time with kids can be very draining and exhausting. Not all the time that you are spending with them is quality time. Also, since parents don't need a degree or a whole lot of experience, this is an indication that childcare is only a minimum wage job unfortunately. Also, kids really like to spend time with their own peers and doing group activities.They don't care if you are not with them all the time

Women's introduction to the workforce was the right thing to happen but it fundamentally hurt labor and the "middle class". You can't double the supply without changing anything in the system and inflationary effects of dual income are ridiculous.

I don't think there's any firm evidence to back this up. In Japan, women entered the workforce much slower than the West. Yet incomes and wages in Japan have grown at slower rates than America and Europe.

Japan has some pretty severe confounding economic factors however.

See this Liz Warren book:

https://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-...

Henry Ford realized that the automobile was not going to change the world unless auto workers were so productive that they could easily afford the cars they made.

That kind of productivity increase is not possible w/ Childcare. I remember a Z Magazine cartoon more than 20 years ago where two women were pondering the mystery of why a child care worker can't afford child care and the unspoken punch line was that it was the perversity of capitalism but, no, it's not that economically efficient to pay somebody else to watch your kid for you. It makes money for the day care center, it makes money for your employer if you go to work, you pay taxes on the money you earn -- it makes money for a whole lot of people who aren't you.

You, not so much.

Universal child care is currently reeling from the discovery that recipients of universal child care in Montreal have turned into DQN adolescents. Maybe "the kids will be alright" in the end, but it is not looking like a program that pays for itself like Head Start.

What is DQN?

Japanese slang for "Delinquent"

In my state, a single childcare worker can watch up to 6 children. If they are infants I belive the number goes down to 4.

That is not a lot to work with.

If there wasn't any overhead, the childcare worker with one infant would pay 1/4 of their wages on childcare, which doesn't leave a lot for housing, food, transportation, student loans, etc. They are only infants so long however...

Actually there is overhead, the child care center has to pay for a building, administrators, marketing, and possibly taxes.

Contrast that to the auto worker, who probably gets a new car relatively often, let's say it works out like a $300 a month, or $3600 a year.

I think auto workers are relatively well paid, so the cost of that car is 5% of their wages as opposed to 20% or more.

Your acting like this is new, the poor have always been crapped on. It was common for wet nurses babies to die in the 18th and 19th century. A mother can make enough milk for 2 babies, but the wealthy who hired wet nurses didn't want poor babies around their precious rich babies.

Heartbreaking: https://daily.jstor.org/lifesaving-horrifying-history-wet-nu...

edit (typo)

Well it's a chicken and an egg thing. Did women entering the workforce hurt labor? Or was labor hurting and that's why women entered the workforce?

This is actually quite interesting, because the timeline for the massive inflation in the US during 1980s (which was solved by Volcker, RIP) roughly lines up with the upswing in labor participation rate among women: https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/...

Of course correlation =/= causation, but perhaps it was one of the contributing factors to the 10+% inflation rates of the late 70s early 80s.

This doesn't make economic sense.... 'doubling supply' is what economic growth is.... producing more should be balanced out with people consuming more, which is what a healthy economy does.

This is like arguing that the invention of the assembly line caused inflation because you could produce too much.

You contradict yourself by saying 'double supply' and 'inflationary effects'... increasing supply of a commodity (in this case labor) should DECREASE inflation, not increase it.

It makes perfect economic sense: it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value. The only confounding factor is whether the increase in workers increases the speed at which the economy grows/ I'd guess it probably does, but not enough to offset the downward pressure on wages.

It is pretty well accepted fact in economics that a growing workforce is a good thing for economic growth.

> it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value.

You are leaving out a crucial factor - the wages that the 'new' workers earn are going to be spent in the economy, growing the economy as a whole. This is increasing the 'demand' side of that supply and demand curve.

This is the same flaw that anti-immigrant people use when saying that immigrants 'take our jobs'. They take a job, but they also create jobs by spending the money they earn. That is what an economy is. Every worker creates more value than they take (otherwise no one would hire the worker in the first place!)

The most solid argument in this direction (IMHO) is that quite a lot of the extra spending seems to have gone on positional goods, like housing. It's mostly a bidding war, and once every family has two earners, the winning bid is much higher.

And, making that worse: Once you have two careers to plan for, it's much harder to move to a smaller cheaper city to escape. Perhaps both of you can find good jobs in the big city, and in 5 smaller places... but not the same 5! So you have to pick the big center.

In these types of discussions I think "good for the economy" is a weasel phrase -- what's good for the economy is not necessarily good for the worker. This should be obvious: child labor was great for the economy for the reasons you mentioned. Similarly, we've seen massive economic growth since the 50s but at the same time a single-earner, blue collar family can't afford to buy a house and raise three kids.

It's very clear that an increase in labor supply puts downward pressure on wages and there's plenty of evidence that the economy is not growing fast enough to offset that pressure.

Counter-point: my anecdotal observations suggest that folks are so intent on competing for housing that in the decades since dual incomes became commonplace the main effect has been to simply dramatically inflate the price of housing. In other words, the extra money may not be making it into the general economy much and it may instead just be supporting higher home prices.

Of course, home prices are not completely isolated from the rest of the US economy, but I think that's a far cry from the idea that each household just now has twice as much money to spend on goods, entertainment, food, etc.

I was thinking about this, too. In areas where housing supply is constrained, the increasing prevalence of dual incomes means people can bid higher, more competitive offers on housing. And of course they do, because why wouldn't they?

I would even expect this to be true, though on a smaller scale, in areas where housing supply isn't constrained, since, in general, each individual house is unique to some extent; two dual-income families fighting over the same house will have more resources to throw at their bids.

> In other words, the extra money may not be making it into the general economy much and it may instead just be supporting higher home prices.

This was the topic of conversation this weekend between my wife and I and 4 other couples that we are friends with, each of us with young children. We live in SoCal. We have young kids. We basically can afford to live here, despite having high-paying, dual-income households. That's it, we can afford living. We can't afford to go to Disney very often. We can't afford to go to the San Diego Zoo very often. We're keeping pace with house and car payments (this was a big one for my wife and I, we no longer have car payments and are doing everything we can to make our situation work with the automobiles that we have), with childcare, and trying to put away money for our kids at the expense of the local economy.

I somehow don't feel any more financially secure or independent; I don't feel like I have more discretionary income than when I first moved to California and was making $10/hour. My own conclusion is that it's a feature of our economy, it's by design.

You have a house and multiple cars but you can’t go to Disneyland as often as you’d like? Such hardship... barely living...

This is such a dismissive comment and misses the main point.

The main point is that these are presumably upper-middle class families. You would expect that with their higher-than-average incomes they would have greater amounts of discretionary income that they would be spending and that their expenses would be spread out across more of the economy, supporting many other businesses and services. Instead the high salaries are being captured by housing costs. Sure they're not hurting, but it is surprising that dual-income, high-earning families are basically breaking even.

The comment is dismissive, but the point stands. The grandparent comment comes off awfully entitled considering all of life’s basic needs seem to be covered and they outright own multiple vehicles in perhaps the highest cost of living area in the United States. Not to mention, the higher proportion of income going toward housing is likely the consequence of protectionist measures to keep the riff raff out and maintain as much status for their children as their income possibly allows. Move to a worse school district and you’re likely to see your housing cost go down by a factor of 50%. Not to mention, the grandparent freely admits to putting money away for the kids, I assume this means college savings of some sort.

I’m making a great deal of assumptions but not being able to go to Disney land at the drop of a hat seems awfully trite.

I think you really are missing the point, though. You may have found the comment entitled, but I don’t think there was anything fundamentally offensive about it, and your reaction reflects more about your discomfort with the existence of the upper middle class than it does about the actual topic under consideration. No one is asking you to feel sorry for them — they’re just illustrating a point about where money gets spent in the US economy.

Dual income families are — and for decades have been — spending their extra second income on housing rather than the rest of the economy. The comment you’re referring to is therefore very relevant because it shows that trend in action. Housing — and other opportunities in life it enables, like access to schools, (real life) social networks, safety, etc. — supersedes everything else in importance for many families, so second incomes are just spent on what is ultimately a bidding war over housing.

And I would like to emphasize your point and add that the dismissive observation really isn't helpful because the main point is especially true for those who really do struggle.

If the highest-earners of the middle-class have their discretionary income locked up in housing costs, how much more difficult is it for those who don't have the same level of income. Housing then eats into non-discretionary expenses.

I don’t care about that. My point is that when I hear about someone who can only afford living, I think they mean they have to choose whether they can afford heating this month, or whether they can afford proper meals, or new school clothes for their kids. Not whether they can afford to go to fucking Disneyland multiple times a year. This commenter is feeling very sorry for themselves over a standard of living that, to a non-American, DOES sound affluent and what a high earner might have.

The topic was where does the increased dual-income money go. The poster provided very strong (anecdotal) evidence that it's captured by housing.

And as a non-American, from an ex-Communist state, where salaries are still a fraction of those in the US, that standard of living sounds anything but affluent. Here, families with two upper-middle-class incomes and 1-3 children are more likely to own multiple houses, than barely be keeping up with their mortgage. It's just another story for the growing pile of reasons to never move to the US. Being in the top 5-10% of earners and in debt just from housing is not normal.

In the Midwest, anecdotally, I live in an affluent area and see families all the time that hit Disney annually.

Boggles my mind...

> You have a house

I have a mortgage, insurance, and taxes.

> multiple cars

I'm really tearing up the road in my 2004 Scion (that I got used in 2010) and my 2014 Honda.

I also have exorbitant childcare costs that are leading my wife and I to question the value of my wife or I continuing to work and live in this place.

I'm not rich. I don't live in Ladera Ranch. I don't own a Tesla and a Range Rover. But fuck me for thinking it'd be fun to take my kids to Disneyland or a Zoo.

His point stands. The average family income in America less then $64k. I'm going to assume you make more then that, probably alot. Yes, we know you have a high cost of living.

Plenty of people would love to live in CA, and make enough to stay there. I'm also going to bet you are fully funding your retirement, it's a lower percentage of your income to max out your 401k.

I understand you don't feel rich, but be grateful for what you have and enjoy life. If your not having sleep for dinner or worrying about the electricity being turned off; you have it good.

What's his point, though? Is the point to randomly shame someone? I fail to see how this advances the conversation in any meaningful way.

What point are they making, exactly? If you look at what they actually said, they're mischaracterizing what I've said to rant about (my apparent / perceived lack of) class consciousness.

If you can follow a plot line, you'd intuit that I came to this state poor. I'm very well aware of what the lesser fortunate and folks in poverty are dealing with; I've been there myself. Thankfully without children, but I can certainly imagine what it's like to be homeless with children, having been homeless for a brief period myself and now having children of my own.

And that was the entire point of my comment. If I'm sitting here today, given my current economic status, without the ability to direct my discretionary income in a way that would benefit the local economy (Disney and the SD Zoo are just two relatable examples, they're being cherry-picked to support that persons rant) then what hope do those in the lower-middle class or below have?

I've watched my economic output get sucked into a vortex by landlords and banks and government and now I can add on the insane costs of childcare. This was true when I was poor and it's still true today when I am not.

Where in anything that the other commentor has said are they making a point about what I am saying?

I agree with your point. I'm high income in the midwest and dealing with the same thing. Rent and Healthcare go up and up and up.

It is more complicated - there is workforce and capital. In order to have higher labor productivity (or GDP per capita), you need higher rate of capital to labor, so you need that capital growth be larger than workforce growth.

If you increase workforce but not increase capital (or increase workforce more than capital), then it is true that economy as a whole (GDP) will grow, but GDP per worker will go down, there would be downward pressure to wages and upward pressure for capital yield.

> It makes perfect economic sense: it's a simple supply and demand curve. Increasing the number of workers decreases their value.

That assumes that the number of available jobs is perfectly-sized and fixed, and that there's no other work that could be done (or no under-employed, existing work that could be done better) if we had more workers. That would seem not to be true.

> That would seem not to be true.

How would you explain the stagnant wages of the last 4+ decades compared to the massive economic growth? I don't think there's much evidence that the relationship between labor supply and economic growth is anywhere near one-to-one (e.g. one more person working means their wage is added to the volume of labor demand).

Wages have not been stagnant across all sectors of the economy. Certainly some jobs aren't valued as much, and their value hasn't been growing or even keeping pace, but there are plenty of areas where wages have been increasing quite a lot over the last couple decades. Given that this is generally a tech-focused forum, that shouldn't be news to anyone here ;)

>That assumes that the number of available jobs is perfectly-sized and fixed, and that there's no other work that could be done

No it assumes the exact opposite of a fixed number of jobs-- it assumes the other work wasn't being done because wages were too high to make it profitable, but as the workforce grew the price of labor dropped until employers wanted to hire into those jobs. That's the whole idea behind supply and demand.

The economy isn't something to optimize unto itself, but rather a system that is supposed to serve humans. Additional labor is "being produced", and sure it is also "being consumed" - what this really means is we're all working more, and to what end?

The childcare discussion cuts to the heart of this, because the language of economic optimization cloaks its real world results - the addition of ever-more third-party intermediaries to raise your own kids, such you can keep on performing the most system-legible labor possible.

What should have really happened is that "full time employment" should have been redefined to 30 hours per week, a few decades ago. By now we should be at 20-25 hours per week. We're in the age of the greatest technological progress in history, yet rather than success, the treadmill is turning faster than ever! All to produce more layers of bureaucracy, overpackaged fast food, or junk that ends up in a river. And then we do our penance lamenting about "sustainability", when the simple answer is to stop overproducing in the first place.

I'm sure it's more complex than this, and of course equal opportunities for everyone is good, but yes I think it hurt.

More people going to university -> Demand outgrows supply, universities can charge more and spend more money on appealing things. More student debt.

More workers -> More supply than demand, companies can pay less.

Each worker needs a vehicle. More expenses.

Both parents working, need to pay someone else to take care of kids. More expenses.

More debt/expenses, less pay.

More people sitting in traffic, more parents that don't get to be with their kids as much, more reliance on public schools to raise kids.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy

Why don't people say this about population growth? The US population is 2x what it was in 1950. Yet nobody says that this depresses wages causes problems. Would we have a stronger middle class if we Thanosed the population? That doesn't seem right.

Population growth leads to more consumers as well as producers. Activating a "dormant" producer segment (as if stay-at-home parenting isn't producing tangible value...) leads to an increase in producers, while the number of consumers stays the same.

dual income houses have more money to spend...

And I'll point out that your parenthetical is one of the points of the article: that stay-at-home parenting is apparently extremely costly to replace.

So it's a double-edged sword: you flood the supply side with new laborers while keeping the demand side static, and you increase the general cost of living because you now have to pay for childcare that you used to get for free.

> Would we have a stronger middle class if we Thanosed the population?

There is historical precedent for it, see 14th-century Italy after the Black Death halved the population.

https://dailyhistory.org/How_did_the_Bubonic_Plague_make_the...

Women entered the workforce in response to a societal and social ideal and not based on the free market (outside of severe labor shortages during WW2). Of course it has a direct impact on wages and quality of life for everyone.

We definitely felt this. My wife ended up quitting her job when we had our first because all of the child care options we investigated were going to require basically her entire after-tax income to support.

It only made sense if she was planning to grow her career and just ride out the daycare for 5 years until the kid went to school, but even then it's contingent on not having another kid during that time.

At the end of the day being a stay-at-home mom made a lot more sense.

If she did have a career she wanted to continue, the calculation is pretty strong on the 'riding it out until school'. You have to count ALL the salary you are going to make for the next 30-40 years of working, because sitting out for 5 years will have an effect on your income your entire career.

One problem is that it affects not just her, but whole family. When she is in full time work, then husband have to say no to later meeting, to switch with her on all those celebrations and competitions and so on. There is more coordination, work and stress for everyone, not just woman in question.

When kids are sick and they are often, you have to deal with it somehow - again either risk own employment and status on the job or own projects or demand that husband stays home some of those days.

The same goes with part time work. I know multiple women who do less then 8 hours a day not because they want to, but because they would need husband to come home from work sooner otherwise to be able to make it all. Had he had a job where he could (or if he was willing to - at least in two cases it is not job but him making excuses), they would prefer to work full time (due to those positions being more interesting).

Unless she gets the job a the daycare - I hear they have money to pay well?

The article actually says that the salaries are pretty terrible, but insurance, facilities, and regulations make it expensive to the parents.

Daycares do not pay well.

> her entire after-tax income to support

An interesting fact of our progressive income tax that combines spousal income is that the lower earning spouse is strongly disincentived to stay at home instead of work. This is especially true if one spouse has very high income.

Goodhart: When the metric becomes the goal, it ceases to be a good measure... (paraphrase)

Seems like we've been moving all domestic productivity into the realm of Taxable GDP. Some say it's a conspiracy, for me it's just an observation.

Home cooked meals has become meal prep kits, home delivery. ChildCare has been outsourced (out of the home or a small community of cooperating parents). Household cleaning to cleaning services etc.

Unfortunately I think you just have to frame thing in terms of economic measures in order to get certain policymakers to take you seriously. While some will recognize that having well-adjusted, well-educated, well-taken-care-of young children is something the government should help fund, others will take the attitude that the parents are solely responsible for that, and we shouldn't be "wasting" money on doing something the parents should be doing already. You'll also get arguments against "interfering" in parenting.

But many policymakers will react positively if you relate new policies in terms of the economic growth they promise. It's difficult to do, in this case, though, but I get why they're trying.

On the other hand, there are huge advantages to specialization. Professional cooks are less likely to cause food-borne illness, and can generally cook tastier, more varied meals.

Same goes for any other domestic work. Someone who cleans professionally can clean a house faster and better than someone who works in an office 8 hours a day. In fact, I'd bet a professional cleaner typically is faster and does a better job than a stay-at-home spouse who divides their time between every conceivable domestic task.

What if I don't want to follow the specialization trend to it's logical conclusion? I think there is a cost to personal well being that's not being considered here.

As the article notes, the reason is regulation and women entering the workforce.

Honestly I don’t see a problem. We as a society have decided that we would rather be 100% safe rather than accept risk for lower cost, so we enforce strict ratios on children to caretaker ratios, license people, make in-home sprinklers mandatory, etc. $16k per child per year in Massachusetts is that cost.

For what it’s worth, none of my friends put infants in daycare due to the cost. They either got foreign au pairs or hired someone under the table for cash (very common in immigrant communities)

> foreign au pairs

https://www.steffanslegal.com/blog/first-circuit-holds-that-...

> For what it’s worth, none of my friends put infants in daycare due to the cost. They either got foreign au pairs or hired someone under the table for cash (very common in immigrant communities)

I'm hoping your friends are libertarians who disagree with the current political zeitgeist in Massachusetts.

It would be very depressing to hear that your friends are Liberals who publicly support these daycare laws and then privately flaunt them by 1) favoring non-American workers and 2) paying them in cash to avoid taxes

Unfortunately I think that kind of cognitive dissonance is quite common. People feel the need to make sure "everyone is safe", but then believe their ability to judge how to best do that supersedes the law. Those laws are for "other people", not us.

> Most of the achievement gap between black and white American students is in place by kindergarten. Meanwhile, dozens of studies of preschool programs since the 1960s have shown that early-childhood education can slash the black-white kindergarten achievement gap in half.

The common orthodoxy is that the achievement gap is caused by and solvable through the schools, but the reality is much different.

Interestingly, the achievement gap between black kids from two-parent households is almost non-existent, however since 70% of black kids are in single-parent homes, the effects of those homes is borne out in the statistics — but the cause is misattributed. “Black” students are treated as a homogeneous group, but really the gap is between “black students from single (or no) parent homes” and white students (of which the majority are from two-parent households.)

The destruction of the black family is what is really behind this so-called achievement gap. The origin of that destruction is a discussion for another time, but the Moynihan Report foretold this back in 1965. The Coleman Report from the same period, also described the achievement gap as being primarily originated from the family, rather than schools. [1]

This article is long, but it relevant: https://www.city-journal.org/html/black-family-40-years-lies...

[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/posts/us/2016/07/13/50-years-ago-t...

I encourage healthy debate about controversial issues like this. When I opened up my New York Times today, I found this article, which questions how important two-parent households are for childhood success, especially among Afro-American youth:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/two-parent-family...

Some quotes:

“living in a two-parent family does not increase the chances of finishing high school as much for black students as for their white peers”

“Greater involvement in extended family networks may protect against some of the negative effects associated with parental absence from the home”

The conclusion of this New York Times opinion piece is that structural racism has more impact on the success of young Afro-American kids than single parent households.

If you follow Raj Chetty's work on income mobility it appears that single parents in the neighborhood matter a lot more than single parents themselves. Since single parenthood is much more common for black families and our cities tend to be segregated, black kids tend to grow up around single parented kids which is a disadvantage. Basically having two awesome parents doesn't make up for having your entire world be not that. And having a single parent doesn't ruin an upbringing surrounded by people with two parent families. I think it's as much about shared culture as anything, the social norms get established by majority rule basically.

Sometimes I think childcare isn't expensive at all. There are these creatures I've nearly sacrificed my sanity for during their infant years, maybe got diminished mental capacity due to lack of sleep, given blood, sweat, tears, would risk life and limb for them...and here I go giving a total stranger $20/hour to (hopefully) do that in my stead for a short while.

I agree... we pay a dayhome (a licensed childcare in someone's home) $875/month which includes 9 hours of care per day and 3'ish meals per day. That's like $40/day or like $4/hour. Where else are you going to get that value?!

The median household income in the US is $59K. Paying $875/month isn't easy by any stretch of the imagination.

What value.

$875 is in Canadian dollars in a large urban city.

I stand by my comment that $4/hour childcare is good value. Please show me somewhere in North America where that is expensive.

No one is claiming that paying that is easy for everyone, merely that taking care of someone for 9 hours a day, including meals, for $40/day is actually ridiculously cheap. I can't think of many (any?) services I could pay for that would cost a mere $4/hr for labor+materials.

Shame the person earning that can’t afford their own childcare.

You'd actually be surprised that most at home daycare providers choose that profession. Most typically have their own child and decide to also take in a few other children to make extra money. I ran a startup in this field and worked with many dayhome providers. Some do it as their career, some do it for a few years while their children are young and they would like to stay home and be with them.

Here in California, once a kid is four or five years old (ready to go to elementary school), we provide subsidized care at public schools in the form of ESS (Extended Student Services). It costs under $5000 a year to have the kid cared for from 6:30am to 6pm (usually, parents drop off their kids later and pick them up earlier). The staff are very professional and kind people.

Yes, there are issues with more parents who want their kids to be in it than slots available, and there are about four or five weeks a year when it’s not available, but it does provide excellent child care for kids.

"One side effect of “the end of babies”—or, less dramatically, the steady decline in fertility rates around the world—is that today’s parents spend more time and money on the few kids they do have."

Might that be a cause of declining fertility rates rather than a side-effect of it?

To me it seems pretty logical that some parents in a position to use birth-control to limit the size of their families would decide to do so, given the costs of child care.

How about going to Asian style societies where the caregivers are grandparents or older people? Most people close to retirement (or already retired) don't need as much money since medicare already takes care of them.

That would be great be apparently current older generations have been brainwashed into thinking that your entire goal for your life is to save for a lavish retirement where you will finally get to enjoy yourself every day after you retire and should have no responsibilities. Which basically equates to- don't enjoy any day until you retire because you are so busy focused on retirement.

My parents are like that.. my mom even moved to live close to one of my siblings and the grandchildren.. but complains every single time she has to watch them because it takes up her valuable retired time... ok.

>My parents are like that.. my mom even moved to live close to one of my siblings and the grandchildren.. but complains every single time she has to watch them because it takes up her valuable retired time... ok.

That can't be serious complaining since most financially wholesome retirees are bored out of their minds. Besides the few vacations they take a year, what else is there to do all day?

The deal works both ways in most Asian societies. Grandparents take care of the grandchildren, children take care of the grandparents.

But in the West many children shuffle their folks off to a home. Kind of tragic all around.

The deal gets a lot harder when you move to new york or another country for a better job.

I think there are a lot of crappy attitudes around both child care and elder care, but I reject the notion that a child has an obligation to care for their parents. Children don't choose to be born, and any parent that chooses to have kids in part because they want someone to take care of them when they get old is incredibly selfish.

Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home (excluding single parents of course)? Either childcare is not a big expense , or there's some kind of societal taboo against raising your own kids at home? Is this part of the bigger bubble that makes raising kids so effortful and costly in time, that people just end up not having them?

Social pressure against stay-at-home moms is a large force that often goes unrecognized.

This logic could be applied to k-12 education, which would be rather expensive if not government-subsidized.

Pre-school in particular benefits both the children who receive it and the parents who are able to work. A lack of affordable childcare disproportionally falls on women as well, which is something worth tackling.

The other issue not even mentioned here is that childcare and pre-school are expensive but they don't pay well. A larger role from the government would pay these people more and provide more stability for pre-school teachers and children alike.

> This logic could be applied to k-12 education, which would be rather expensive if not government-subsidized.

No, because most parents aren't good at teach their kids basic knowledge.

> Pre-school in particular benefits both the children?

Disagree, it's a virus-fest and a herdish, artificial beginning in life. People who are lucky enough to grow their kids in rural/family/small town settings have it much better.

> A lack of affordable childcare disproportionally falls on women

agreed, but that can easily be worked on

>Why then don't one of the parents choose to stay at home or work at home

Well if both parents are fairly career driven, it's pretty hard to stay at home for 6+ years until full day school starts, and that is only for 1 kid.. could be 8/9 years with 2 kids close in age. Since it's usually the woman, she is basically giving up any solid career having that kind of work gap.

And you say 'work at home' but you can't have a fulltime working at home job with very young kids. You could manage it to some degree at age 4/5+ but before then you would hardly have any time to actually focus on a job at home.

Work at home? What job can you do while effectively caring for a toddler?

> work at home

You mean "work at home" as in, not work? Ever dealt with a toddler? Kiddo will be at your workspace non-stop. You can't just tell them not to either.

If you want to get anything done without distraction, the easiest solution is to park them in front of a TV all day. Not sure if that is the outcome you'd want. Daycare at least gives them a full day of interacting with others their age, learning new things, etc. Not just watching TV or being ignored at home.

The listed reasons:

> First, although child-care workers aren’t expensive on an hourly basis—their median hourly wage is less than that of non-farm-animal caretakers and janitors—labor is the biggest line item for child-care facilities. Unlike, say, car companies, they can’t cut spending by moving labor to poorer countries or by replacing human workers with machines.

> The industry is highly regulated, perhaps reasonably so, given the vulnerability of the clientele ... Other costs include insurance to cover damage to the property and worker injuries, as well as legal fees to deal with inevitable parent lawsuits.

> Finally, there’s the real estate. The most expensive child-care facilities tend to be situated near high-income neighborhoods or in commercial districts, where the rents are high. And they can’t downsize in a pinch, because most states require them to have ample square footage for each kid.

You forgot mandatory ratios. This sets the limit on how low costs can be.

Anecdotally, the margins can be fairly large. I am aware of one daycare in the NYC metropolitan area with around 100 students that PROFITS nearly $9000/yr/student.

Their teacher pay scale also tops out at $15/hr, but each teacher represents around a $8000/month revenue stream.

The daycare’s rent is about $40,000 a month.

And the root cause: "I'd let my wife stay home but the returns on my labour have diminished so much in the past 50 years that she has to work too."

I don't understand the argument this article is making. It goes from establishing that the cost of child care has increased much faster than other goods/services, to advocating that the government pay for it. Where's the connection? Simply moving the costs from new parents to the US tax-base won't do anything to address the underlying causes of the high costs.

It seems to me that we need solutions to address the high cost in any case, and the question of whether the government should be more involved is an orthogonal concern.

Unless the argument is that there's not an effective way to control the costs, so the government should help pay for it to not overly burden new parents. But, I didn't see that point explicitly made in the article.

Surprised that there wasn't any mention of Baumol's cost disease: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease.

Child care is likely expensive for at least two reasons:

- Child care is a superior good (in the economics sense). As we get richer, we almost certainly spend more of our money on it, as we do in other areas that are substantially driven by signalling (see health care, education).

- It is absurdly regulated and there is nothing close to a free market. My family participates in a child care sharing arrangement that results in several families regularly breaking the law. That is because it is illegal to watch more than 4 children (if at least one of them is not yours) without state licensing.

>"In Massachusetts, which requires one caregiver for every three infants, the average annual cost is more than $16,000. In Mississippi, which allows a one-to-five ratio, the cost is less than $5,000."

Even if the workers were making 100% of the costs of childcare, This means that the Mississippi employee is being paid half as much as the Massachusetts employee. Mississippi's economy is clearly not comparable to Massachusetts's economy. Why is the Atlantic treating this comparison as valid?

On top of that the MA regulations are different in other ways. Any day care center in MA that is $16k+ you will find that 90%+ of the staff have at least a Bachelor's degree in Early Childhood Education. Probably not the case in a place where the average cost is less than $5000.

My mother always said raising kids was a full time job.

The difference today is that we measure it.

And the difference is that other the economy's full time jobs pay a lot less than they used to, relative to costs like housing, education, and healthcare, which have all vastly outstripped wage growth.

I understand your point, but I'm not sure those are accurate measuring sticks, as people's expectations of housing, education, and healthcare have changed drastically since the boomers' generation.

Regardless, it's easy to be an economic powerhouse when most of Asia had yet to undergo industrial revolution, and the rest of the developed world was rebuilding from war. I don't think it's surprising that wages are stagnant -- our economic output has competition now.

When women work, their hours are actually evaluated in monetary terms and the cost is added to the cost of childcare instead of ignoring their unpaid working hours. That's just better accounting.

What is increasing the childcare so much? Other countries with less resources than 1st world countries have inmense amount of childs and I don't understand why everything became so expensive.

In most countries, people generally live with or near their extended families, and grandparents/aunts/cousins watch over the children if the mother works. This is much less common in America.

according to this https://www.care.com/c/stories/15167/what-is-home-daycare-an...

in MA the cost of family daycare is still $6 per hour. This is below min wage and is dirt cheap!!!

Imagine if we paid daycare $25-50/hr ? then the daycare would be truly unaffordable ... how about $103,000/year daycare cost ($50/hr) ???

Our daycare used the State's regulated rate. I live in zip 97201 and it's $1,415 a day for infant care. This is the basic licensed daycare rate. I found that childcare would use this a base and go up there there.

https://www.oregon.gov/DHS/ASSISTANCE/CHILD-CARE/Pages/Rates...

It seems to me this is another case of government interference causing vast increases in cost, especially the caretaker to child ratio: 1:3 = $15,000 1:5 = $5,000. And what does the author advocate? More government meddling! Higher standards! Good intention policies with bad economic outcomes / unintended consequences needs to stop. Yes we know if every child had 1:1 care from someone with a Ivy league child psych degree we would all be better off. Unfortunately that's not the society we can afford even in the affluent west. Save it for the elite who have the cash to burn. Don't force lower income folk into your preferred world view. You cripple them economically and then cry for more intervention because you crippled them. Sure, its one thing to enforce safety standards, its another thing entirely to enforce that every 3 children has a surrogate "parent" of the highest standard. Imagine if they imposed this ratio on grade school education. And no I'm not saying 1:100 is fine. Obviously not. But I knew people who watched 1:10 kids growing up in their own home, a mix of low income and middle class. While not ideal they all lived normal lives and everything turned out just fine for those children in the end.

Child care is expensive but I rather pay for someone to watch and look after my child at a daycare center then doing it 24 X7. Taking care of the house and children is just mindless, time consuming and exhausting, It doesn't give me the satisfaction that I get when working with something that requires a degree and talent.

Quality care SHOULD cost a lot of money because hard educational labor (child care) should be well compensated!

Great quality teachers (early childhood) SHOULD be able to earn $75-100K + Which means that really daycare should be at least somewhere around $50-75K/year.

> While it’s admirable for companies to fill the day-care vacuum, the absence of a national solution is an indictment of American policy.

California is very different from Vermont which is very different from Mississippi. It doesn't make any more sense for the three to have identical child-care systems than it does for Denmark, Italy and Lithuania.

I don't find his argument that only the federal government is large enough to capture the upside particularly compelling, and his straw-man counterarguments are … strawmen.

Moreover, it's also important to understand what the second-order results of any state child-care policy are. While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often. If so, a child-care policy which substitutes non-parent care for parent care will likely result in increased rates of mistreatment.

> While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often.

Why would you think this? I’m pretty sure there are way more cases of child abuse by parents than child abuse by day care workers. Day care workers don’t deal with children with much privacy, there are other kids and day care workers, whereas parents have none of those constraints. Also, for day care workers, it’s just a job, vs. parents who are more emotionally caught up in taking care of their kids (and could make more mistakes due to emotions).

Furthermore, there are significant screenings that happen before a child care worker can become one while there's virtually none before someone becomes a parent. It's only after the fact that an abuser is caught.

> Moreover, it's also important to understand what the second-order results of any state child-care policy are. While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often. If so, a child-care policy which substitutes non-parent care for parent care will likely result in increased rates of mistreatment.

I am friends with lots of K-12 teachers and have known people who work with kids and families in various other capacities. I would absolutely not care to bet any amount of money that child care workers abuse or mistreat kids at higher rates than parents do.

> While parents do mistreat their children, I am reasonably sure that child-care workers mistreat children more often.

I wouldn't expect that to necessarily be true at all.

Regardless, it's irrelevant: with more and more families opting to go dual-income, childcare services will continue to become more and more necessary. This problem isn't going away; it's only going to get worse.

The solution is simple: extend the public school system to the newborn. It's widespread, the background check system is in place, the logistics are in place. The only question is funding and the legislation mandating it.

In Sydney average cost of daycare per childcare is very high — about USD 90. Denmark is half the cost. Often what drives up the cost is heavy regulation of ‘quality standards’.

The article gives only nominal growth rates and does not mention if adjusted for inflation.

next they should make an article titled “Why getting into great physical shape requires a lot of effort”.

Is anyone really learning anything from this article? Or is this just a general complaint looking for a boogeyman.

The thing with female workforce participation: isn't it just symptom of the society getting poorer. My wife worked her ass off. I was making about 130k / year. She was making about 60k / year. Then we not only moved from the US to Poland (where live is just so much cheaper). But I also started making about 330k / year. All the willingness to work evaporated on her part :-) Instead we have another kid. She stopped talking about work and started talking about having more kids. Of course, that's anectodal, but also common sense, isn't it?

My little theory is that while men still made enough money to support good life in the US (50s, 60s) most women just didn't want to work. If you can have a house, nice car, four kids, vacation home, 40 hour week, no credit card debt, no school debt, and all of that on carpenter salary -- why not to enjoy life instead of spending 50-60 hours at the office?

The dirty secret is that most women work because they HAVE TO. It's not a choice. It's sold to the society at large as something glamorous because -- what? They're going to tell the truth? Yeah, you need to work your ass off 50-60 hours a week, with credit card debt, student loan debt, two cars loan, etc, etc. just to be able barely make it to have two kids at 35 ? Because before that you need advanced degree or two. Actually both of you do... I mean how is that a better deal?

I can see that also from the reaction of my wife friends who stayed in the US working to basically help their husbands as one salary won't cut it. It's not like they wouldn't prefer to stay at home with kids. But, again, it's not like they have a choice.

I don't think that's necessarily woman-specific. I'm a guy, and if I could stay at home all day and spend time with my kids, I would too. Certainly, I would if my wife was making 330k/year :D

Yes, but also it's not like having maternal instinct wouldn't make this decision easier for you.

And keep in mind, statistics say than one of the divorce factors is husband making less than wife. From her perspective: this isn't sexy at all.

I'd interpret these results with a grain of salt. They are, after all, culturally (and circumstantially) bound. If making money wasn't so important to raising kids, then women might express quite different preferences in partners. I believe there is some evidence for this if you look at mate preference in nations with more social support.

Just anecdotally, women seem to be interested in men who excel in some area, not just in salary. Successful musician's, artists, scientists, etc all do pretty well, even if they aren't top earners.

I guess what I'm cautioning against is reading your "studies" as suggesting that women don't find lower earners "sexy." Much simpler economic circumstances could plausibly explain the higher rate of divorce.

Please keep in mind, I said socio-economic status. But, homeless looking, constantly drank, smelling of urine Charles Bukowski had plenty of young, attractive and willing lovers. My point being exactly his high socio-economic status. We're talking about one of the best American poets. How many of these you get to meet? Hey, he might even write a poem about feeling he has for you if he likes you. That's what was so damn hot about the guy. Not money. With no money at all, his status was extremely high. I'm not pushing this vulgar simplistic idea here that women are all about money. They are after men who are really, really good in their niche. Even when the niche doesn't provide any money. It's about status they're after. This usually translate into money, but not always. Bukowski was dirt poor. With high status.

EDIT: grammar

Right, but what you are saying now borders on tautological: women like those with high socioeconomic status. But socioeconomic status is just the combination of all things which makes people like you.

I think the parent comment is saying that his paternal instinct is clashing with society and culture.

wait, are you saying that staying at home with the kids is not work?! It is arguably a harder job than most white collar jobs out there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWcJZ210AaM

Yeah but kids can smile and bond with you. Computers can't. It's hard work, but it's a bad idea to compare the two either way. One might come naturally to some people, even if they're (gasp) computer programmers.

Something can be, at the same time, both more work and more enjoyable than office work.

Harder doesn't mean worse, necessarily. There are lots of things I'd rather do than my white collar programming job, and most of them are at least as much "work" as it is—they just don't pay nearly as well.

[EDIT] that includes staying home to teach my kids—much rather do that, and it'd 100% for sure be much harder. Pays zero dollars though, and someone's gotta keep the bills paid.

With a possible exception of before they can talk and are potty trained, child care is not harder. And it is far far more enjoyable spending time with your kids.

Unless parent edited their comment, sounds like you're way over-interpreting their comment. I wouldn't mind being a stay-at-home parent if my SO made bank, it's not because I think it'd be "not work" though.

100 hour workweeks kills people, 40 hours of work and 60 hours of parenting doesn't, 100 hours of parenting doesn't. Parenting therefore isn't work, parenting is life on the work-life balance spectrum, so it isn't soul crushing in the same way work is. Parenting can still be a lot of work of course, but it isn't work in the same way a job is work, it is more work in the way a vacation trip is work or a hobby is work.

do you have a business for 330K/year in Poland?

I would be very careful about making that large a generalization (that all else being equal, women would prefer to stay home over working).

Childcare is mind numbing work, especially with young kids. Sure, some women (and men) would prefer that, but a LOT of women prefer office work over raising children.

"why not to enjoy life instead of spending 50-60 hours at the office?" is really selling short how much work raising young kids is. It is NOT enjoying life to stay home with toddlers. Maybe once they start school and you get hours to yourself, but before that it is way more time consuming than working at an office.

I know, I have done both. I took long paternity leaves to care for both of my kids, and while I love being able to bond with the kids, I was so happy to be able to go back to work. The freedom I have at the office compared to being home with the kids was night and day. Just being able to go to the bathroom when I need to, to get food when I want..... young kids are non-stop work.

I LOVE being a dad, but the weekends are way more stressful than the weekdays. Wrangling kids is way harder than programming computers.

I totally agree. I work from home programming so my dad office and my programming office is the same place. Taking conference calls and browsing HN is way easier than wrangling 3 kids 5 and younger.

> I would be very careful about making that large a generalization (that all else being equal, women would prefer to stay home over working).

Especially within earshot of my wife. Stuff like that pisses her off to no end, with good reason. She's smart and accomplished and very much enjoys the challenges of a professional career.

well, somehow the society at large has no problem with exactly opposite generalization: that women prefer to work over staying home with their kids.

It is an individual matter, I agree. With most women definitely having the preference of staying at home. But for that the right partner is needed, i.e. one who provides enough resources for her and her kids. If this is not present she will go to work. We decided as a society to frame it different just not to face difficult truth, which is society becoming poorer. It's just so much easier to say that somehow nowadays women prefer working to following their maternal instinct.

As a man you are wired to compete with other males for resources to be brought to your partner and offspring. I'm sorry but this is just how it works. Women define male attractivness based on his socio-economic status. Of course if you don't want your wife (and other females and society at large) to look down at you, you will eventually go back to work and work your ass off. She on the other hand, can but she doesn't need to. It's not like you or pretty much anyone will look down at her for not working. Current social fashions aren't going to change five milion years of evolution of the species.

Women marched for right to work and education. It was not males forcing them to, it was literally movement by women.

Of course they did. So that they can work. But don't have too. Great deal if you ask me.

The right to do something is different from the want to do something. How many people have fought for their right to vote? And yet how abysmal is voter turnout every year?

The desire for education is very different from the desire for work.

I am not saying there are no women (or even the majority of women) who want to work because it is their choice. But I think we are making it a gender issue when really it isn't. Do most men want to work or do they have to? Social mores have dictated the man be the provider for centuries, if not millenia.

I think it depends on the individual more than the gender.

> Social mores have dictated the man be the provider for centuries, if not millenia.

That is kind of not true.

1.) That is what happens when there is no war, country is rich and when industrial revolutions take people to factories. When they worked on small family farm, both genders had to tend animals, do crafts and so on. Most of things had to be made. The work was gendered, physical strength mattered, but it was not women twiddling fingers at home painting pretty pictures out of boredom.

2.) During economically bad periods, women had to work to survive. Their chances and options were just inferior. Victorian england required male to provide for women, but economics was bad - marriages not happening. (A lot of prostitution tho.)

3.) Plenty male occupations killed males soon. Miners were old by 40 and dead. Women lived longer and used to live from crafts they made and sold.

4.) And obviously, as men die in wars (and some wars killed a lot of men) or are just away then you cant possibly have all women having male provider. Plus, women were raped making them less viable partners.

5.) Take California gold fever - demographics very heavily skewed toward males (and very violent). That means, other places necessary lack males. There is no way for all women to be provided by males, social mores or not. Because males are not there, they are in California and anyway are killing each other. Not coming back. Some women were provided for by family and brothers etc, but the less rich family was the more they had to figure out how to make themselves some money.

Those are all valid points, but aren't those all (edit: mostly) examples of women being forced to work instead of choosing to work? Also I'd say those are exceptions to the rule, not the norm. If anything I'd say you bolstered the top comment's argument (I do not know your stance and am not trying to be combative).

Aren't majority of men forced to work instead of choosing by that definition? These are examples women people living real lives. Wast populations. There was such a thing as idle lifestyle of aristocracy in places where the situation allowed that to male aristocrats. Spending most of their time socializing with each other.

Also, overall they easily make majority of population. Combination of family farms, non-aristocracy, poor people, war situations, dangerous or far away occupations for males, pre-industrial are largely majority of "centuries if not millenia". Can I add former slaves who would be significant part of population here?

The "we expect the half of population to be mostly idle and mostly unused" is unnatural exceptional situation. And in case of muslim countries considerable physical violence is used to keep it that way.

When you talk about what was happening and was feasible for centuries, you cant skip over such was populations. They did not had power, had less control over own lives, but they did existed and count.

Also, most of those feminists marches were middle class or rich women. Poor women worked already, they however had sucky jobs and had completely different needs. Turns out that when women are actually in that supposedly great optimal situation, they want to get out, significant percentage is discontent and unhappy.

> Aren't majority of men forced to work instead of choosing by that definition?

Yes, I never said or implied otherwise. I don't know why you think I'm fighting with you.

My entire point is people work because they have to more than they want to, and gender is irrelevant. What I originally said:

> I think it depends on the individual more than the gender.

I'm totally ignorant in all of that, but for me it just looks like out of sudden (historically) we have way too many males. They used to be killed during hunting, wars, competition with other males. Since 1945 we haven't had that. Men became not as hot commodity. This is the motor of the current social changes, isn't it?

For example: only 40% of all Homo Sapiens Sapiens males that have ever lived were able to have offspring. Compared to 80% females.

Your statistics would have 2 women to 1 male making the "norm is one male one female in marriage with children" completely impossible absurd standard.

Doesn't have to be at the same time, think of the case of a first wife dying during childbirth and father remarrying and having more children.

Yes, we have known it since human genome was decoded. The DNA tests always indicate that a person who took the test had twice as many female ancestors than male ancestors. There is no other way than twice as many females procreating than males for it to be true. I hope you are not one of the "DNA deniers"... leftists/marxists are capable of dismissing all types of knowledge to still believe in their rel... err... ideology.

I have a problem with either generalization. I think we, as a society, need to support all choices a family makes (both parents working, or either parent staying home with the kid), and not judge parents for making any choice that works for their family.

I find it very troublesome that you keep referring to women staying home to care for the kids as 'following their maternal instinct' and men working outside at an office as the natural state for men. Saying that "Women define male attractiveness based on his socio-economic status" is downright offensive, and is getting into red-pill incel territory.

There is nothing 'natural' or 'evolutionary' about how we divide up labor in our society. Up until 100 years or so ago, we didn't even have the idea of 'childhood' that we do now. Parenting was not a full time job, kids were just expected to basically raise themselves and tag along while mom and dad did real work. In evolutionary terms, men haven't 'evolved' to work away from home while women raised kids; both parents did work (varying by society type, e.g. hunter-gatherer or farming) to provide resources for the family. Both men and women worked to provide those resources, and kids just hung around. Obviously, women fed babies the first year or two, but after that kids were pretty much on their own.

Your view that men and women naturally live together like a family in the 1950s for all of our history is a great example of a 'just so' explanation for our current gender politics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/women-really-do-pref...

> I'm sorry but this is just how it works

No this is not how any of it works. This is extremly sexist, and has no evidence to support it.

>Women define male attractivness based on his socio-economic status. Of course if you don't want your wife (and other females and society at large) to look down at you, you will eventually go back to work and work your ass off.

Yikes, what is wrong with me? One of my best friends quit his job to become a stay-at-home dad because his successful lawyer wife made more money and wanted to keep working. I've been supposed to look down on him this whole time? Sorry society at large, I guess I missed that memo.

> Childcare is mind numbing work

> It is NOT enjoying life to stay home with toddlers.

> I was so happy to be able to go back to work

> the weekends are way more stressful than the weekdays

I have to say, this kind of perspective on being a parent puzzles me, even though it's pretty widely held. Honestly, many parents I encounter seem almost as if they'd prefer to be their child's aunt or uncle than their mom or dad. Certainly not in title, but possibly in terms of responsibilities.

I get it, raising kids is HARD. But the sense of purpose I feel about writing code that helps my company's investors become slightly richer is totally unlike the sense of purpose I feel about teaching my child about the alphabet, even if many days it feels like a slog.

I like this quote from G.K. Chesterton about the importance of this work. Chesterton is talking specifically about a mother, but I think it holds true whether the primary caregiver is a father or a mother:

> To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors and holidays; to be Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys, boots, sheets, cakes. and books, to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people’s children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one’s own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the hugeness of her task; I will never pity her for its smallness.

Think of it this way. Imagine if when you went to work, you only got to do the "fun stuff" for a hour a day, and the rest of the day you just filled out paperwork and moved things back and forth in a predetermined pattern. And work lasted from the time you woke up to the time you slept.

Being a parent is the greatest joy I've ever known, but the joyful parts are the punctuation on the mind-numbing toil. That toil is only bearable because of the fun bits, but it's still there.

Being a parent is very important work, and can bring great joy, but it's possible to both love the joy and hate the toil in between.

Can you be more specific?

What is the nature of this toil?

I've got two kids: 15 month old boy, 7 year old girl. With the boy, the toil is literally keeping him from killing himself. If you put him downstairs, he'll try to climb up the stairs. He'll climb on the couch and fall off the other side. He'll drop things in the toilet. He'll try to pull stuff off shelves. He'll climb up the chair onto the dining room table. He is not content to sit and eat. I gave him cornbread yesterday, and he insisted on eating with a fork. (Basically just crumbling up cornbread to go everwhere.) If you take the fork away from him he cries. He does this 16 hours a day non-stop. He doesn't nap, he doesn't watch TV, etc.

The girl has no internal monologue. She has to run every thought in her head by you. Most of them are pointless and incoherent, but you have to humor her. She will say "um..." just to keep warmed up for the next thing she might want to say. She requires constant attention and affirmation. She wants you to watch her do a cartwheel--identical the previous million cartwheels--and respond enthusiastically. She won't eat her vegetables. We have a rule that we eat vegetables before we eat the rest of the meal. Every meal becomes a bitter war of attrition where she fights to eat green beans as slowly as possible, hoping you will give up. (Between boy and girl, eating a meal peacefully is impossible.)

Meals--when I was single I once went three months eating a turkey sandwich every day for lunch. Your kids will not put up with this.

Getting them ready to go out is a huge effort. They have a million accessories (bottles, diapers, toys, etc.). They have no sense of urgency. You are trying to get to church on time while girl is starting a craft project.

They generate huge amounts of clutter. Markers, crayons, paper, toys, etc. Taking a hard line on toys is little help, because their school sends them home with piles of art, crafts projects, etc.

They are very rewarding. When they're sleepy and both snuggling on the couch, I hug them and think "I will never do anything better than this." My wife and I will look at the older one playing with the younger one and say: "this is the best part of life, it'll just go downhill from here." The only reason we don't have a third yet is accounting for private school tuition. At the same time, my wife and I relish going to work every Monday so we can deal with angry opposing counsel instead of picking up after the kids.

So true. I have only one kid, 20 months old son and I can relate to what @rayiner is saying. kids drain your mental & physical energy throughout the day, at the same time it is so rewarding experience to have kid.

My heart is so full but my mind is so tired!

I feel like a lot of this labor is generated by the fact that most kids in america can't go run out and play with other kids in the neighbourhood anymore.

Your 7 year old would not be asking for you to endlessly watch her cartwheel and interact with her out of bordem. They would be out playing 24/7 in the local forest, come back for food and boo-boos, be back before dark and be in bed a couple of hours after dinner / night time with an 8 or 9pm sleep time and a 6am wake time.

Kids were not meant to be a lot of work, our society makes them a lot of work.

Unfortunately for those of us who want to parent this way, we risk having the authorities called on us, because the other parents watch too much local news.

It's much safer to be a kid now than when I was growing up, but the news makes it seem like it isn't. I would let my seven year old walk to the park by herself, 1/2 a mile away, if I wasn't afraid of having the cops show up.

When I take her to the park now, I let her play on the structure about 100 yards away, within my line of sight. And still adults will come up to her and ask her where her mommy and daddy are.

That is really the saddest thing to me. I remember with great amounts of happiness when I was between 5 and 10 years old and would ride my bicycle around the neighborhood with my friends, go traipsing around the woods, and exercise my imagination. (Getting home and having to sit still while my mother dug through my hair and scalp for ticks was torture, but was worth it.)

My nephew is not yet four years old, so he's probably still too young to be outside playing on his own, but I fear he'll be in the same boat as your daughter in a few years, unable to do anything outside of his parents' line of sight.

Kids were not meant to be a lot of work, our society makes them a lot of work.

I think you’re right: in the past, each kid was much less work than they are today. The difference is that you also used to have 6 of them, and used to expect that not all of them might survive to adulthood. This is clearly not acceptable approach in today’s society.

Kids could play outside alone in the 40s, 50s and 60s too, and child mortality wasn't 1800s they might all die levels. And in some developed countries like germany and japan it still is possible today [0]. Everything that jedberg described wouldn't probably happen.

Around the 70s the workload ratchet started going up, with each decade adding more and more restrictions. Look at stranger things, today it's a bit iffy to let 12 year olds go out biking by themselves to see their friends. In the 80s you could!

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/02/reader-center/free-range-...

Virtually none of the labor Rayiner is describing is a consequence of his kids not being able to go out and play. As he related, and as anyone who's parented a 15-month-old knows in their bones, keeping them from killing themselves or destroying the house is indeed a full-time job.

I was talking more about the 7 year old than the 1 year old. Also grandparents, the village, other house spouses, etc helped with that early workload too.

That begs the question of the thread, whose premise is that the labor those grandparents or "the village" put in has a price, and it is surprisingly high.

You should give up on the vegetable thing, by the way. Just don't let your kids drink lots of liquid calories and don't feed them hyperpalatable packaged food and they'll be fine. My kids both eat better than anyone I knew at their age, myself very much included --- they're 20 and 18 now --- and they came to it naturally (or by getting bored at the options they had if they were picky).

I'd say every single thing one does in a day is 2-10x as difficult and 2-10x as time-consuming (usually some amount of both, but the two don't always scale in propotion) when youngish kids are involved. Things that might be quick & mindless become slow and mentally taxing, that sort of thing. Of course making mistakes in raising kids, or simply getting unlucky and having kids who are sick a lot or whatever, makes things even worse—in the best case everything's still much harder and takes longer.

And each extra kid bumps up the difficulty & time factors to some degree.

> the sense of purpose I feel about teaching my child about the alphabet

I don't think that's what parents find difficult. It's the other 99.9% of being a parent.

Like I said, I LOVE being a dad and wouldn't change it for the world. The overall reward, of having the bond I have with my kids, sharing with them this world I love so much, is absolutely worth it, and is my purpose in life.

That doesn't change the fact that the day to day is hard. Getting my toddler to eat anything healthy is hard. Getting her to sleep is hard. Cleaning up messes they make is hard. Getting them ready when they don't want to go is hard.

Just because something is really hard doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Raising kids is way up there on both measures; really hard and really worth it. However, the day to day is relentless, and the rewards are not felt with the same relentlessness that the work comes at you. I don't feel rewarded during the moment that I am cleaning my sick kids vomit, but I have to do it anyway.

Raising children is not unlike writing code. It's cool to design the architecture, gin up efficient algorithms, etc. But 90% of your time is spent yak shaving, debugging, responding to mundane feature requests, etc.

It was really cool yesterday to teach my kid long addition. It was a major slog to respond to "dad look at this" or "dad, I have a question" every five minutes because she lacks an internal monologue.

(Full disclosure: non-parent here.)

I think attitudes toward parenting are completely impossible to rationalize, so your puzzlement isn't at all surprising.

Consider that many (most?) people who have kids don't do so out of a 100% independent choice, with 100% foreknowledge as to what it will entail and be like.

People have kids because their parents pressure them to give them grandchildren. People have kids because their peer group is having them. People have kids because their religion wants them to. People have kids because they don't know enough about contraception to avoid getting pregnant, and then their religion or moral code prohibits an abortion.

People have kids because they really really do want to have kids. But they vastly underestimate the work required to raise a kid, and feel completely natural amounts of regret, even if they truly love their kids and want the best for them. But it's still a bit of a taboo to suggest out loud any regrets about becoming a parent, so they keep it bottled up.

So just remember that every parent arrived there due to different circumstances. And regardless, every person -- parent or not -- has different likes, dislikes, desires, and levels of patience. What gives you a sense of purpose could easily be someone else's tedious drudgery. That shouldn't diminish your happiness, or demonize their boredom; it just means that you and some other people are different. Which is basically what being human is about, no?

I think you've made a very good call-out. Not everyone enters parenthood with the same degree of willingness, and not everyone who was initially excited to be a parent continues that way indefinitely.

But I think there's a danger of indifferentism here:

> What gives you a sense of purpose could easily be someone else's tedious drudgery. That shouldn't diminish your happiness, or demonize their boredom; it just means that you and some other people are different.

I don't deny that there are different strokes for different folks, and I understand that not everybody is going to make the same choices as a parent as I do.

But from the point of view of the welfare of the child, I think it's pretty clear that having a loving, stable, attached relationship with an engaged parent is going to be better for that child's overall well-being and future success than a relationship with a parent who loves them but can really only stand being around them in small doses.

I'm painting an extreme there, and I'm not suggesting that a person who drops their kid off at daycare and breathes a sight of relief must be a bad parent or a disengaged parent.

But I do think that rather than treating engaged parents and disengaged parents as just normal human variations of likes, dislikes, desires, etc. we should recognize that it is better for the child to help the disengaged parent become more engaged. And fortunately, there are a wide variety of ways we can do that!

> But from the point of view of the welfare of the child, I think it's pretty clear that having a loving, stable, attached relationship with an engaged parent is going to be better for that child's overall well-being and future success than a relationship with a parent who loves them but can really only stand being around them in small doses.

Absolutely agree! And from the outside looking in, it makes me really sad to see -- for example -- parents who'd rather be buried in their phone all day than engaging with their kid.

But I think maybe that's where there's a slight disconnect between what you and I are saying... I personally don't feel like it constitutes lack of engagement for a parent to derive no joy out of doing something like cleaning up a kid's messes. I can't imagine a context where I'd have any positive feelings about cleaning up a paint spill on a carpet, even if it had nothing to do with a kid of my own.

Some of the other things that the original poster you replied to are maybe a bit borderline questionable. If it gets to the point where you'd much rather be at work than spending time with your kid, that's really bad for the kid, and the family as a whole. Not saying that poster actually feels that way; obviously we have only a teeny tiny bit of knowledge about their life. But I think if sometimes you just get so tired and drained where you feel like you need a break from being around your kid all the time, and your job is an escape from that feeling, that's just normal human needs and behavior... as long as that's the exception, and not the norm, I don't see anything red-flag-y about that.

> but a LOT of women prefer office work over raising children

Do you have any statistics about that? I once saw a map of Japan, which is a place were a good job can still provides for a while family, showing that in every prefectures of Japan except two, more than half of women preferred to be stay at home mom. In two more others it was half-half. Of course there is the cultural context, but it’s interesting that when given the choice for real, most of women would indeed chose not to work.

Also, if one look at jobs that are prized by women, teacher arrive in a very good position. And teaching is basically rising others people kids on an industrial scale.

...assuming that women in Japan can choose at all.

Japan has a paternalistic society that expects every woman to be married by age 30 and drop out of the work force. They aren't a model for other cultures to follow.

Your point about childcare being difficult is absolutely correct, but I don't know if you're correct that a "LOT" of women (I assume you mean counterintuitively more than the commentor implied) would not want to stay home to raise them, all things considered. Based on personal relationships with my wife, sisters, and close family and friends I believe it is very, very common for mothers to find returning to work very difficult (even though it's a lot of work to stay home). I don't think anyone intends to imply that there aren't men who feel this way, that there aren't women who don't feel this way, or that the reason for anyone feeling this way is because work is hard and staying home with kids is easy.

> I would be very careful about making that large a generalization (that all else being equal, women would prefer to stay home over working).

The conversation I rarely see people having is wether a people group (men or women, for example) has a long term positive/regret recollection of the choice. I understand that most of the messaging today is that women can (and should) pursue paid employment and so naturally that becomes the narrative that people repeat. But 30 yrs later do women generally regret entering the workforce to the detriment of having / raising children? Anecdotally I know many men regret spending so much time at work and not being more involved in their children's lives, could it also hold true for women?

So true. We have two kids under 3. I am far more drained taking care of them for a day than I am after a day in the office.

We pay $42,000 a year in childcare (2 kids, $1,750 /month, which is one of the cheapest options in our area). After taxes its 90%+ of my wife’s entire salary.

It doesn’t make financial sense for her to work, but she’s good at her job, and she’s in a career where taking years off is punishing (law). Honestly though, a big part of it is she wants to work, stress and all. It makes sense to me.

As for me, I would prefer to stay home with them instead of work, but I am the primary earner and am also in a career that punishes people severely who take time off (finance). So here we are.

> I would be very careful about making that large a generalization

Sure - but then, lets also not generalize in the opposite direction. How many women get to work, versus how many have to work?

I think most parents are exhausted to their knees with kids. But they also ~all say that it's their life's blood (I mean the energy, not blood ties obv.).

A job rarely gives you that much meaning.

I know I think I am a much better parent having daycare during the week. I am able to give a lot more to my kids when I am with them since I get that break. I think overall, it improves our relationship.

I actually just wrote about this lol

https://austingwalters.com/tiny-handcuffs/

My general thoughts are that 90% of people don’t want to work - so yea none of us would if we didn’t have to.

One thing that’s always astonishing to me is that it’s not the the poor are necessarily getting poorer... it’s that we want to give more resources to our kids. You can have 10 kids on a salary of $120k a year, you just have to live on rice and thrift.

Given the amount of research that shows that the amount of resources kids have directly impacts their success later in life doing that would severely impact your kids' ability to have a salary of $120k in the future.

Having nothing useful to do day after day is not an awesome lifestyle. It is depression inducing, lowers your confidence and self respect. You are becoming increasingly pointless. Not just makes you feel dependent, but also actually makes you dependent. On one hand, you feel like a taker and useless and golddigger, so you are restraining yourself from asking what you would consider normal had you worked. On the other, partner feels like contributing more too.

It all has actual consequences. Lastly, I remember reading stats about domestic violence rates going down when economics changes so that women earns more or males less. It goes up when it changes other way.

You assume horrible office that expects you to work 60 hours a week. Somehow it is ok for men to work in that horrible office? Why don't men push to work less to actually be with family? Like, man getting to be actually a father and not just a wallet for family?

> The dirty secret is that most women work because they HAVE TO. It's not a choice.

My anecdata is quite opposite. Women having remorse for leaving children in child care, but they can't stand staying at home. They feel lonely.

The US consumer was massively expanding (mostly) his credit during the 50s-80s. This is the American "Golden Age". There's no further room to expand credit -- we tried it in mid 90s-00s and it didn't work out.

There was never a time anywhere in the history of the world where one working man could work a low-skilled laborer's job and comfortably provide for a family of four.

This completely defies logic, considering that 2 kids is replacement level fertility, the world has experienced generally consistent population growth, and most of the labor ever done in the world has been low-skilled labor.

95-99.9% of the population lived in sustenance or worse from the beginning of time until the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1800s.

And outside of the US Post WW2 -- from the 50s to the late 80s -- no where else on Earth could one working low skilled person afford such a high quality of life.

If you consider farmers in the 1890s as living outside of sustenance, I guess to each their own. But they worked 7 days a week, basically 12 hours a day, including their entire family, just to afford basic accomodations and food and almost literally nothing else. This is staunchly different to what an autoworker at Ford or a Steal worker at United Steal or a salesperson at IBM could afford from the 50s to the late 80s.

Compare that to now, a person working at Ford trying to raise a family of four on his/her own can pretty much only afford sustenance again.

i would prefer to work instead of providing full time caregiving to my 1.5 kids and my parents (and also myself, it’s been a very rough pregnancy).

anyone that thinks being the primary caregiver is easier than working out of home is delusional. the pressure would probably crush my wife, honestly.

but here we are, the cost of caregiving meeting our standards are high, and unless i also make $300k a year in the bay area, we’re just going to hit a break even point for all the different people that need to replace me.

> The dirty secret is that most women work because they HAVE TO. It's not a choice. It's sold to the society at large as something glamorous because -- what? They're going to tell the truth? Yeah, you need to work your ass off 50-60 hours a week, with credit card debt, student loan debt, two cars loan, etc, etc. just to be able barely make it to have two kids at 35 ? Because before that you need advanced degree or two. Actually both of you do... I mean how is that a better deal?

> I can see that also from the reaction of my wife friends who stayed in the US working to basically help their husbands as one salaty won't cut it. It's not like they wouldn't prefer to stay at home with kids. But, again, it's not like they have a choice.

Ok, all of that is incredibly sexist. Male here, born and raised under (full) communism, now living in the opposite system and I'm appalled by this attitude. Women work because they have to? Of course they have to. We live in an economic system in which we all need to pull our weight. There should be no class of people (like women) which should be excluded from the workforce based on some ideological bullshit idea from the 50s. It's funny that in the land of the free, financial dependence on a spouse is a badge of honor!

This kind of broken thinking is also the source of the horrors of the US divorce system (for example the absolute batshit crazy spousal support). Let's not even bring up the fact that women also have, like a normal human being, aspirations and ambitions which aim beyond being a childcare provider..

> help their husbands as one salaty won't cut it

Help their husbands? In what way are they helping their husbands? They're not helping themselves or the family? If you look at this from the perspective of 'helping the husband' then there will be a problem in there somewhere. Am a husband. If I can't make ends meet the whole family suffers and the wife isn't helping me, she'll be helping the family.

> We live in an economic system in which we all need to pull our weight.

I love this comment, so I'm going to start here. This very sentence: "We live in an economic system in which we all need to pull our weight". By all you mean which class? Poor? Middle class? Middle-upper class? Rich? Wealthy?

Don't you see how we're tricking ourselves by believing in this false male/female dychotomy? Let's look at it from Marxist perpective: Poor -- male and female work Middle Class -- male and female work Middle Upper Class -- sometimes one of the partners male OR female will work, while the other will not. Upper Class -- both men and women don't work. They earn passive income on their investments, business onwership, real estate ownership, stocks and bonds profits.

So, while we here are arguing if women "should" work or not, the healthy attitude seems to be to do anything possible to be as high on the ladder above as possible. Because the reasons if we work or we don't work have nothing to do with what we believe or want. But they have everything to do with our social status, or as Marx would call it "class". If you are poor you and your partner work. If you are wealthy you and your partner don't work. If you're in one of the middle classes it's a combination. Talking about "women rights" in this scenario is just side-tracking and being blinded by the reality of social classes and social status.

This being said, there is bunch, really a lot of research in psychology strongly suggesting that women are attracted to males who are highly successful. Basically poor woman (low class) will be definitely attracted to a guy in higher class. Based on his class / social status alone. This is basic science of psychology backed by a lot of research. Declining simple biology for signaling reasons just looks so... desperate? (sorry, couldn't resist myself)

> The dirty secret is that most women work because they HAVE TO. It's not a choice. If you can have a house, nice car, four kids, vacation home, 40 hour week, no credit card debt, no school debt, and all of that on carpenter salary -- why not to enjoy life instead of spending 50-60 hours at the office?

I think you can replace "women" with people and make this statement more accurate. I don't see why this would be unique to women, whether you agree or disagree with the "people work because they have to, not want to" statement.

That too is an undergeneralization. People work because they want to just like they breathe because they want to. Claiming that there is some sort of innate desire to work or not work is ludicrous.

That's a separate point from "women work because they have to". Regardless of your POV on whether or not most people work out of necessity rather than desire, I don't see any reason to believe any differences here attributable to gender.

I agree generally (I believe you may be discounting that many women do want careers and the joys of motherhood and it's hard). I disagree with some commenters that this is an overly gendered idea: while it's true that there are plenty of exceptions, it's definitely true that men and women, as a broad generalization, feel differently. While many men feel a sense of pride if they are able to work hard enough and be successful enough to support their family, many women in the same situation feel guilt for missing out on their kids' upbringing during the day (again, since someone is going to say it, I'm aware there are many exceptions). I think the author missed another difference compared with past decades, however: it used to be more common than it is now for grandparents to cover childcare of young children while both parents worked (or in part-time support of a busy mother with many kids). This seems to be less common than it once was, and it might be because we are now two generations into a trend of people waiting much longer to have kids than they once did. As a child, my grandmother was in her 50s and 60s, and was able to take on a good deal of childcare in her retirement. If two generations each wait until 35 to have a first kid, then the grandparent of a 5 year old is 75 and less likely to be able to be relied upon for childcare. Added to this is the fact that the labor market for childcare looks a lot like the labor market for elder care in that both are career options for similarly situated applicants, and there just isn't enough labor supply.

I'm terrified by the fact that this sexist reply is currently the top comment on this thread, so clearly there are many people voting it up, in addition to the fact that many men(and only men) adding their personal takes about how they know why WOMEN make the choices they do.

No wonder there is so much gender inequality in the workplace.

This does not belong on HN.

Wow you're the second guy I met that went home to a good salary. Is this a manager role I guess? My cousin in law is making like 10 zl/hr so I'm not sure what is going on.

Wait...were you making 330k in Poland? Because that would be insane.

If child care is so expensive, wouldn't the income loss of one parent staying at home be irrelevant? Plus, the parent could find some simple side gigs that fit into at home childcare, or even do paid childcare themselves.

I think the real problem is people don't like taking care of kids, and would rather have a stranger do the job. Understandable since kids are noisy, disobedient, stinky little things, but we were all that at some point (probably still are) and someone took care of us.

Then there are all the single parent families, but why are there so many single parent families? Again, I think it is because people aren't willing to put up with each other's imperfections. Yes, sometimes there is real abuse going on that means staying together is actual a danger to life. But, is that the majority of cases? I am doubtful.

So, the real reason child care is so expensive is because we aren't willing to suck up and stick out with the imperfections of other human beings without a paycheck.

> Parent could find some simple side gigs

Highly unlikely! Maybe for a 4 year old there could be some time during the day. Let's say 1 hour. The type of gig where you can do an hour of work and be paid for it ... won't pay much. Let's say $20. It is hardly worth it. Now compare that to being at work.

> I think the real problem is people don't like taking care of kids, and would rather have a stranger do the job.

I don't think so. Taking care of your own kids is much more rewarding than going to work. If work is better it's because the job is great, not because the kids are annoying. Staying at home looking after kids is a lot easier. If you work you have a limited window to get them ready for care, it's a rush, then you have to commute to work, rush back to childcare after work, and then take them home and get them ready super quick for bed. It is not ideal, and not really a choice based on laziness.

> Understandable since kids are noisy, disobedient, stinky little things.

Ok..... That's one way to characterize them I guess. Seems a bit harsh.

> So, the real reason child care is so expensive is because we aren't willing to suck up and stick out with the imperfections of other human beings without a paycheck.

The real reason is it takes a lot of labour to look after the kids, administer the centre, cook, and also real estate and maintenance of property etc. And people pay for it because they need to work to afford to raise kids.

Not so. Child care costs is artificial. In Texas child care was quite cheap. In Maryland costs are extraordinary. People know the demand is there, because there are a whole bunch of type A career minded people who want to climb the corporate ladder rather than look after their little food grubbers. Plus, legislation that forces corporations and government to pay for childcare just makes it all even more expensive, as always happens when you dump public money on some issue.

Also, I suspect the modern feminism that denigrates women unless they have a corporate career is also to blame. Women just have a better instinct for taking care of children than men, and modern culture has told they are worthless if they are a stay at home mom. So neither the male nor female in a modern upwardly mobile marriage want to stay at home with the kids. Thus, they want to stick the kid (usually just one nowadays) in childcare.

And finally, why do people think raising kids is so expensive? It is because of a bunch of extra BS that is unnecessary. They think they need to stick their kid in every program and every possibility of advancement so they can secure a few special spot at top colleges for a few jobs requiring extra special degrees. Meanwhile, such jobs are outsourced, automated, or plain made irrelevant, at the same time there are many blue collar jobs that pay very decently (especially minus college debt) for the taking. Or, if college is truly important, the kid can work their way through, start at community college, get scholarships, join ROTC, etc.

All of these problems are of our own making due to our own expectations, not due to the reality of what it takes to raise successful kids.

I think you are mixing a bunch of unrelated stuff together in some kind of attempt to bash "modern feminism"

I can agree there is a lot of societal pressure to enroll your little kiddo into a bagillion silly programs and stuff, but that hardly has anything to do with childcare costs or feminism.

The logic is both parents have to work to afford kids. Why do people think this is true?

> Taking care of your own kids is much more rewarding than going to work. If work is better it's because the job is great, not because the kids are annoying.

Be careful; you're stating as fact something that is incredibly subjective.

Regardless, "taking care of your own kids" encompasses a lot of things that are not at all like one another. Teaching a kid how to do math: rewarding. Cleaning up after your kid accidentally dumps paint onto the carpet: tedious and frustrating. In part, kids are noisy, disobedient, stinky little things (as well as many other things, some of them not so negative), and I would not consider dealing with that aspect of them at all fun.

(Your opinion on all that might differ, which is kinda the point I'm trying to make here.)

Yes kids do many horrible nasty disgusting things. We romanticize children to their detriment, making us unable and unwilling to stare into the abyss that is toddlerhood and deal with it head on.

> If child care is so expensive, wouldn't the income loss of one parent staying at home be irrelevant

Well, no. You might still come out ahead even if childcare consumes 60% of the lower earners' after tax income.

Also, the big issue is what to do once the kids don't need such heavy parental attention. Sucks to have lost all your work skills. Also can lead to problematic power dynamics in the relationship.

There is much more to life than a corporate career. I would love to be the stay at home dad with zero corporate skills myself. Again this perspective is due to our own weird societal perspective.

Why not look at the macro issues here? The environment is overtaxed. The future is doomed anyway. Why not return to the Roman system where the father has the right to kill the child up until a certain age? Incentives this with a cash payment for every child put down coupled with a requirement to be sterilized for five years. Say a one time payment of $10k per child and a tax deduction of $2k per year of the five years sterile. You can solve global warming, cost of child take, and student debt.

Because they don’t want you to reproduce you dumb fuck.

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Could you please not create accounts to do that with?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm glad the population is mind-bogglingly large so I don't feel obligated to have kids. I can save a lot of money and enjoy peace & quiet while I get better at skateboarding and science and playing video games. Plus, no wife. I never have to do things I don't want to. I never have to please anybody. It rocks.

You should feel obligated.

I believe your opinion is similar to climate change denial since all the experts on the subject disagree with you.

Sounds like extra work and and an unwanted nuisance to my life of leisure. Plus I love alone time, I could never live with a woman long enough to breed with her.

Whenever I walk in public, all I can think is jeez ... there are so many random people. Seems like we need better planning. People just have kids on whim, to satisfy themselves, like a life goal. It doesn't make much sense to me. I think mostly ladies want children.

There is nothing wrong with not wanting kids. Makes sense.

That being said I would recommend toning down the rhetoric of how much better you're off for not having kids - it rings fake and forced as if you needed to convince yourself repeatedly and it is needlessly antagonistic.

The analogy is that of having a dog. I'd like to have a dog. I think it is fun to have a dog. Alas, dogs are not for me, they feel the kind of work and responsibility that I am not ready for. But I respect and admire people that have dogs! I am not going to say that I am so much better off for not having a dog.

> I am not going to say that I am much better off for not having a dog.

But why not? It doesn't diminish dogs or other people who have dogs in any way, it just means that for you personally disadvantages outweigh advantages. So not having a dog will, on balance, make you... well, better-off.

Because as I pointed out it is already implied and serves no other purpose just antagonize and rub it into someone's face.

As a matter of fact it is not even clear that I am better off, I may just think I am, mistakenly. So why reiterate.

Finally, the traits that keep me from having a dog are not necessarily virtues, most likely not traits that make a better person.

> Finally, the traits that keep me from having a dog are not necessarily virtues, most likely not traits that make a better person.

Honestly, I wish more people would speak up more about this topic, although not in an antagonizing way that ecoled_ame did. Precisely in order to fight a stereotype that not wanting dogs or children (well, I guess it's more prevalent for the children) makes you a worse person. But I also understand anyone who just doesn't want to announce it or discuss it.

Anyone who suggests that your reasons/traits for not wanting a dog (or children) makes you a worse person needs to shut up and mind their own selves, which are likely filled with a lot of negative traits as well.

My antagonism is not needless - in fact it serves my purpose. I want to see family values annihilated.

> That being said I would recommend toning down the rhetoric of how much better you're off for not having kids

We could also entertain the reverse: that too much emphasis and pressure is being put on someone being a parent. There is a very widespread self-congratulatory element to being a parent (to the point that many people list it as a job title). But having children is something that people have been doing quite easily and nonchalantly from the beginning of time until these last 2 generations, which spend twice as much as before with their kids (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/11/27/parents-...). There is a parenting bubble that is scaring people away from having children, and maybe it should be addressed as a problem.

Edit: Also, i feel a lot of people have dogs because there are no societal expectations about how to raise your dog. They are much easier to have than children.

I'd like to chime in and agree with this, but perhaps with a bit of a different twist. There are tons of reasons why people are pressured into having kids, and very few people reminding others that having children is a choice, not to mention a huge responsibility. I think we'd have a much happier, safer world if the only people who had kids were those who truly wanted them. Parental, spousal, and peer pressure to have children is very real and very strong, but IMO has no place in being a part of that decision.

> is a choice, not to mention a huge responsibility.

Actually, i think these two are inversely correlated. The demands from parents have become crazy for no apparent benefit. It's illegal to raise kids as they did 2 generations ago. It would become more of a choice if people at large relaxed a bit and let kids be kids or learn by themselves, or in tiny neighborhood groups.

Not sure I follow. I don't see how the changing legality of parenting style has anything to do with whether or not it's a choice to have a kid or not.

don't badger the man,

the world (and Earth) is much better off with fewer people,

it is called quorum-sensing in science, many organisms stop reproducing then they overpopulate, humanity should do the same, if it is a philosophy that is followed, so much better, everyone is better off

I'll bite.

Why should that user feel obligated to have children?

There are other users on this site (I'm not one of them) that argue that the world is suffering from overpopulation. I'm interested to hear your perspective as to why the opposite is not only okay, but imperative.

You sound like you may fall into the category of having a brood later in life (the 50yo+ untethered sugar daddy demographic).

IMO, unless you find a partner that's going the same direction, you're doing the right thing while you're young.

Its a nice perk that in modern times we can have children in our 50's and still live long enough to see them into adulthood (though maybe not see them raise a family if they follow in your footsteps).

I think the trifecta you're looking for is.. No Kids, No Alimony... And NO CHILD SUPPORT PAYMENTS during the best years of your life. If they call you selfish, ask them if they regret their freedom of choice. Theres a good chance they were never free.

The easiest solution to 'child care' -- allow children to come to the office. Most people have cushy office jobs. Kids 0 - 5 do not take up much space.

Parents can take staggered lunch breaks to watch the children. Children would be in a common area that'd be appropriately gated off. In dual-income families, either mom or dad can take the child to their office.

Benefits:

(1) Both parents can work and be with their child

(2) Children see adults working, not just playing. This is good as children want to be like adults

(3) Non-parents get to spend time with babies and children, which is wonderful!

(4) For nursing working mothers, having the baby there would make nursing much easier than pumping. Babies could even be given little bassinets to sleep and wiggle around in near mom and dad, if they want that.

(5) The child/children can share in mom and dad's lunch.

(6) Cute babies in offices!!! How great is that!?

Speaking from personal experience, when my colleagues have been forced due to circumstance to bring their young children in to the office, the experience has always been positive. However, my colleagues seem worried that one of us may be offended and apologize incessantly. We should stop this and just make it a policy that children are allowed in-office. I mean, a lot of companies I've worked at have allowed dogs, which can't be potty trained, don't wear diapers, and sometimes bite people. Why are children treated worse than dogs?

EDIT: responses to this thread are the #1 reason why we will never have affordable childcare. Americans, as a group, highly highly dislike children, even if they won't admit it out of fear of sounding like a misanthrope.

This is essentially what the big tech companies do with their onsite daycare. They have adults who get hired just to watch the kids, and you can pop in and out as your schedule permits.

It's hard to get work done when there are kids in the work area, so I can see why most companies don't encourage this. Especially since some people don't like kids.

Another even better solution is a remote workforce. Then only you have to deal with the distractions of your kid, except during meetings. As long as you can find something to do with the kid, or people are ok with kids on the conference call, it works out.

My employees are used to seeing my kid pop into the frame during video calls, and it's not really a problem.

> Especially since some people don't like kids.

Well those people can be shunted off into some sad depressing part of the building? Or work from home.

Remote work is great, but it's also very nice and social to bring babies in to the office to meet your friends. What's so wrong with that?

The majority of my office is BL2 Lab space, people who bring their kids in are being incredibly irresponsible. The other aspect is a lot of people who would benefit from workplace daycare don't work in white-collar office spaces. Finally segregating people who don't enjoy distractions at work seems very rude, I like kids but I am overly cautious around them, if someone brought their kid into work I'd be more focused on the kid not killing him/herself than my job.

Most people do not work in BL2 lab space. Most office people have desk jobs, where they sit at a desk and type all day.

Eh, I don't want babies in my building. They are distracting and we would definitely get a lot less done. I'm fine with there being a daycare center within the office park, however I'm not fine with it being a communal thing where all the parents take work-time to watch the kids.

I work in a dozen-story building, colocated with a half-dozen other tech companies. There is a daycare on the first floor. There's also a couple loud restaurant. However, due to quality construction practices, adjacent floors are not audible.

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