Isn't this literally the case in the US? You list dependents on your tax form.
Facts. I remember daycare costs almost equalling mortgage payments back in the early 2000s, for 2 kids. It's wildly expensive to have kids in the US.
It still does. Close to $3000 a month where I am
I own a house in NYC. My mortgage payment is almost exactly $2000 a month, and that's with taxes and insurance already added to it. $3000/month for daycare is utterly insane.
Even with employer-subsidized daycare, it was more than our mortgage. Watching what people who couldn’t make that work had to do really pushed me solidly into the camp of seeing free government-provided daycare as a basic right. Even if you’re a total sociopath who doesn’t care about the stress, there’s like a century of research showing that things like stable & supportive early years set children up to be more successful for the rest of their lives, and the challenges of finding and paying for daycare put a ton of stress on most parents, hitting the poorest the hardest.