When people say 'crushing financial burden,' many mean relative to maintaining their current DINK lifestyles
But stay at home parent isn’t a thing nowadays.
If you look at the numbers, around 1/3 of families have one stay at home parent.
If you just look at families with kids too young to stay at home by themselves after school, it’s even higher.
The number of stay at home parents of both genders has been growing since the late 90s.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
This is what you get for living in a car-bound society. In a walkable society, the kids can just walk home if they're 6 years old or so.
I mean, if someone's pension and social services after they retire depend on the positive externalities generated by somebody else, how much is that worth?