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Comment by legitster | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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