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Comment by ummonk | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a spouse? You might be worried about public school quality, but at some point it would be cheaper to just have the spouse stay at home and home school.

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Except the stay at home spouse doesn't get any pension/social security benefits from this, plus it tanks their career with massive impact on future earnings.

SS is split with a partner.

That makes the spouse financially dependent on the partner for life, which can be a bad situation.

Nope. You get the same social security benefits (50% of what the earning spouse would get at your age) after divorce if you were married for at least 10 years.

They get 50% of their spouse's benefits at that age.

As long as they were married for at least 10 years.

Not to forget that OP could do the home schooling and the spouse keeps working.

Homeschooling is like a second job, though. One where you can't bullshit and lie your way through it.

If you can snag a WFH job, you can homeschool after grade 5 pretty easily. School is half daycare and a lot of students doing work, and half foller topics you don't need to study.

This is the way to do it IMO. I've worked with people with kids and OE people. The people with kids aren't double-dipping dragasses.

and where you don't get paid and which doesn't give you any credit on your CV when you go to look for your next job and where you don't get any social security benefits.

I don't think the OE crowd is loading up their CVs with these concurrent jobs. And kids are the original social security.

Huh? Why would the spouse do it instead of OP?

And why do you think having a full-time tutor is cheaper than group care at a school?

Potentially OP could do it. But from the wording of the comment, it sounds like OP is the main earner in the household, so if they have a spouse then the net income opportunity cost from not working would be lower for the spouse.

As to why it's cheaper, that's a calculation they have to make. If the spouse's net income (looking at marginal tax rates) is greater than 3k a month, then it's not cheaper.

Not to pick on you but that attitude infuriates me and belittles teachers.

You seem to imply that “anyone” can be an effective teacher. That’s simply not true. Plus many children react much better to people outside the house. I was definitely that way. And my wife has many amazing qualities but she would make a horrendous teacher.

I mean, the teacher quality varies a lot, and the average teacher is unlikely to be smart enough to teach the child of a HN commenter optimally, so it's not hard to match their effectiveness.

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