The costs are the same as any other service industry - you have to pay more for higher quality teachers and you have to pay more for a location in more expensive areas.
So it seems strange to me that each child would cost ~$15/hr -- the full cost of a single low-skill resource, 1:1 with children; You're not seeing the scalability of groups kick in. Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand, it seems clear this isn't simply supply/demand. There are many who want childcare, but there are many more who should be capable of supporting it.
There are also of course difference in popularity/quality which will contribute to a price gradient, but if you're seeing $2k/mo/child as your "basic daycare" costs, there's something up -- there's no inherent reason to the job that I can think of that would stop someone from undercutting that price point.
> Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand
I would start with liability costs, it must be massive for a professional daycare facility given how emotionally invested people are with their kids. Next would be redundancy of employees. Babies and toddlers transmit tons of germs, and so the adults around them would get sick too. Plus legally mandated ratios means there has to be adequate coverage for vacations, sick days, emergencies, turn over, etc.
And the population of working age people continues to decline, so I would not associate low skill with high supply of labor. I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a daycare employee.
I also would not describe managing multiple babies and toddlers properly as low skill, or at least not low effort. It seems to be very strenuous, and I do not think I could do it.
Low skill, yes - perhaps not for the life-saving training needed, but I suspect most any able-bodied adult can be trained how to care for an infant or toddler in a week or so (after all, parents get zero training beyond "you need a car seat" when sent home from the hospital).
Whether there are people able and willing at the price listed, I don't know. It seems a job that could be done by teenagers (at least as assistants, supervised) but I suspect they are prohibited.
Because there’s a low barrier to entry, people want money, and unless it were particularly horrible or life-threatening, if you’re going to find a high supply of labor anywhere, it’s going to be in a low-skill job?
> I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a daycare employee.
I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a McDonald’s employee, or a bank teller, or a pool cleaner, or a gardener, yet I seem to find quite a few of them.
It’s low-skill — you don’t need a 4-year degree and aspirations to get into it. You just need to want money, and have no better options.
> I would start with liability costs, it must be massive for a professional daycare facility given how emotionally invested people are with their kids
But that’d be the same with anything taking responsibility over handling kids — eg summer schools, camps, extra-carriculars, etc. I’m sure they have good margins (parents throw money at anything supporting children), but I don’t think they’re getting barraged by insurance premiums for it.
Legal ratios might help explain it, but that’s part of the “something is going on outside of labor supply/demand”.
So there is your answer. People have better options.
And prices for labor at the bottom have increased for almost all jobs at the bottom of the pay scale. Fast food, landscaper, bus driver, daycare worker, etc.
The obvious cause would be a reduction in supply of labor willing to do the jobs at the bottom of the pay scale.
I would expect the trend to continue as the labor force participation rate continues to decline, partially due to decades of lower and lower birthrates not offset by immigration and automation.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Some people might be coming from a very different perspective on what constitutes a good price.
I’m a stay at home dad or at least I was until my son started pre-k a few months ago.
There’s no amount of money that would make me feel comfortable also taking care of someone else’s children in my home. Just not worth the trouble or the risk.
Of course, the poorer people have no choice and make it work, but I'm certain they get "caught" now and then.
I guess I assume that if you have a rapport with a neighbor, you can trust that they won't be out to screw you if a kid gets hurt, but maybe that's naive. Or maybe my parents were just lax; I remember my grandparents let us ride around on a moped that could do ~35 mph when I was probably under 10, and we'd go wander around in a forest near their house, or me and the neighbor kids would go play in the desert near my house growing up when I was probably ~6. Probably never more than .5-1 miles away, but still pretty much only "supervised" by older kids.
At age 5, I was driving my BMX around Montgomery Co, Alabama with a single shot Remington .410 bungee strapped to the handle bars. I was a latch key kid from the day I started kindergarten. I was cooking for myself and dressing myself starting then as well.
I won't allow my own child to experience any of that.
At age 6 I wasn't quite strong enough to saddle our horses by myself so I would just hop on my quarter horse every afternoon after school and ride her bareback. She threw me once because of a snake and I spent ~3 hours hanging upside down with my leg tangled in a barbed wire fence because my ma wasn't at home. The horse was just standing there staring at me the entire time while our 3 dogs took turns licking me in the face as blood dripped from my leg.
I can't imagine my own son coming away from such a scenario unscathed, but maybe there is a good bit of development between 3.5 years and 6 years. I honestly don't know as this is our first child.
More free kids probably means more dead kids. Get a bad dice roll and the kid is dead and now you're in jail for some form of neglect induced manslaughter. Get a good dice roll and the kid gets life experiences, confidence, and more ability to navigate the world. Don't roll the dice at all -- maybe the kid locks up and can't rise to the challenge later in life when they meet challenges that threaten their life.
Life is a gamble. What I find ever more frustrating is the legislation and the child welfare organizations and courts increasingly take it out of the parents hands to determine what level of freedom and risk is appropriate for their children. I'm not sure there is any 'right' answer, but if there is a threshold I think we've long past moved beyond it towards the point of paranoia.
Like a lot of things, informal, regular babysitting got ruined by a few people trying to hustle it into a business. This seems to be happening to everything that can be gig-ified:
1. People once did X informally for friends
2. Someone realized they could charge for X
3. People start doing X over and over for strangers, turning it into a business
4. Some disaster happens because X is now a hazardous unregulated business
5. Finally, the government steps in with heavy handed regulation, and now only licensed businesses are technically allowed do X.
Having managed 1 infant myself, even 1:4 seems like a lot of responsibility. I would not want my infant or toddler to be watched over by more lenient ratios.
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/418-1...
The 1:2 ratio is for “family daycare”, whatever that means. That is on page 19 of this document:
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/417-F...
From 413: https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/413-D...
In general it usually refers to a family taking on a few extra kids vs a schoolroom/office taking on kids. Requirements are usually different for the family care ones, not necessarily less.
If people got six months or a year, there would be far fewer babies in that labor-intensive category.
In his daycare class there was one adult looking after up to 9 children. One adult that didn’t earn a living wage and didn’t have any kind of benefits. There is no way a reasonable person could possibly trust that adult to be both content and provide a decent quality of care.
The adults in the room were always visibly angry and frustrated and a reasonable person could not blame them.
We drove by his old daycare about a month after I pulled him out and he instantly starting having a breakdown in his car seat. I asked him what was wrong and he said "I don't want to go back to daycare." I told him we were simply driving by en route to the pool, but it took a while to calm him down.
I asked him why he didn't want to return and he said "because the teachers are angry."
And I believed him and it broke my heart. I myself have many negative memories associated with daycare from the 80s. It was not a pleasant experience.
In the US, it seems that we rarely take care of the caregivers to our two most vulnerable groups of citizens. Children and the elderly are cared for by individuals who don't even have the basics to take care of themselves.
Yet the owners of the establishments always make their money. I was seeing red and extremely angry when I learned that I had to pay for daycare when they were closed. Regardless of why they were closed. I had to pay for holidays and I had to pay for 3 entire weeks on 3 occasions when one of the staff members caught covid. Yet none of the employees were paid during those times. That was pure profit for the owners of the establishment.
I was looking around for some day care for my kid, and everything here seems to work out to ~$20/hour. I was thinking "Well, I guess that's about what I'd have to charge if I quit working at $FAANG and ran a day care out of my house.." and considering signing up.
If it's just some rich prick getting richer while an overworked person in front barely scrapes by, though, that is really infuriating. I guess that fits with every other customer-facing business in the bay area though. I feel lucky any time I make it out of a store without getting punched in the face around here
EDIT: I should've said "infants" and not "children" here, where the necessity of a 4:1 ratio really applies. As children get older this ratio can get higher.
I recommend https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-math..., from someone who just assumed that child care costs were because of government intervention, and then did the math and found out this isn’t the case.
And yes, it's likely subsidized; around here there's "free 4k" and some of the pre-4k daycares are subsidized in various ways.
£1200 in my top 5 city would get you a newly built daycare, with all the modern gizmos, a kitchen built "especially for young children", a teacher with 10+ yr experience, and peer children who are the son/daughters of doctors and lawyers. ~£800 gets you an average daycare that is fully up to license / code and generally does a decent job. ~£600 will get you a caring but gray market (usually bilingual or limited english) stay at home mom with a home daycare business.
I would wager the vast vast majority are paying close to ~£800, either through the black/gray market with unlicensed caregivers or in licensed facilities in the vast majority of lower cost of living portions of America.
Half decent infant daycare in SF/SEA/NYC/LA/DC suburbs is going to be minimum $1,700 per month, in the cheapest of those metro areas.
In tier 2 cities, I would question the quality for anything less than $1,300 per month.
And in no major US city would I enroll my child in a $1,000 per month or less daycare.
You can even back into the max teacher pay based on monthly daycare costs since you know how much staff is required, and knowing the living wage in some of these cities.
I would have expected Phoenix to be more expensive, but it is probably cheaper due to more lax staffing ratios.
Because it's hard to exactly define "daycares shouldn't have more kids than they can take care of" they institute fixed ratios.
This also means that there is concerningly high variance in the quality of individual care providers, since it's a difficult job and pays awful you get the usual mix of "passionate about kids" and "I can't find any other work". Even the best facilities you have to be very observant to make sure your kid doesn't end up in a bad situation. I recall one care provider fondly telling me how much she loves riding her bike to work only to later find out she had her license taken away by repeated DUIs and another that fled the country after too many parents complained about situations that looked a lot like abuse.
Ultimately they're very much like nursing homes for small children. Very frustrating to pay so much only to have to remain vigilant that you don't pick up your kid only to find they've been sitting in some other kid's pee for an hour.
They'll nag you endlessly about when you'll be having more kids though.
Shit I have to do this too? I’ve already started saving for the unreasonable cost of college, and the cost of childbirth, and the unreasonable cost of a large (enough) house in my metro. But now this?!
But there's a reason people pay so much attention to schools when buying houses - a good school district will almost certainly have good daycares, and it can be totally worth moving to get those.
Check if your state's 529 covers daycare or preschool, it can be useful.
/parent of two and went through it all
But yes, above the table daycare is ungodly expensive.
Wondering whether I can see any similar signs…