What about this take: having a child is a responsibility. An expensive and serious one. Why should others pay for your choice?
Procreation is a choice on an individual level but on a societal level it is not a choice at all, it is absolutely mandatory. So, someone's got to do it, and if you're not going to do it, then it's not unreasonable for you to contribute to others who are doing it.
Furthermore, if you benefit from future workers in any way in the future without having kids of your own, if you did not help pay for those kids then you're effectively benefiting from something you didn't do shit for: namely raising those kids who became workers who ended up paying for your pension, keeping the lights on, keeping your ETFs growing, paying for your healthcare, etc., etc... So you should pay, or you should have kids.
It absolutely is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
Your future living situation may be in part dependent on the economic strength of the nation you're living in, and thus there's collective onus on ensuring that future. It's reasonable to believe that one ingredient in a vibrant economy is people, sufficiently many doing sufficiently interesting and valuable things. At the end of the day, the only way to have future people is to have children now. Thus, collectively, we should be interested in supporting the work of building future generations to be sufficiently populous, vibrant, and motivated, even if we are motivated only by our own future wellbeing.
And I suppose you can magnify this argument to the degree that you feel collective responsibility toward our shared civilizations. And negate it to the degree that you believe we'll someday within your practical lifespan achieve miraculous technology like functional and practical immortality.
If we're going to be brutually economic about it: Are you invested in stocks or bonds at all? If our population collapsed, so would those. Today's investors' wealth is tied to the success of future generations.
That's brutally market-oriented. The brutal economics looks like starvation.
If you're a 12 year old teenager who doesn't know anything about society and economics.
If you apply this logic to any resource that is being paid for collectively (like roads or maybe safety/rescue service), but not being used by everyone at all times, it becomes very evident why "others" pay for something that benefits the collective.
But there is no reason for the cost of childcare to go up and up. Literally just enable better pregnancy/parenthood laws and create an abundance of childcare centers so that costs can go lower.
If you want childcare to be cheaper for parents it must be subsidized, or we need higher unemployment to make childcare a more attractive field (though I’d argue you don’t want people caring for your kids out of desperation for a job), or we must make housing cheaper/less competitive so that people can afford to do this out of passion.
I think it’s worth it from a societal standpoint, though.
There is also a surprisingly significant administrative burden, so you typically need administrators to handle things like state licensing compliance (including surprise inspections), parent communication, teacher scheduling, billing, payroll and all that entails, cleaners, scheduling and contracts for photographers and activities, new enrollment, tours, marketing efforts, insurance, etc. These are typically older teachers, so they’re not the most technically savvy group, and perhaps less productive when tech is involved than you might think. And parents expect to be able to text them, pay online, etc nowadays, so they have to use some tech. But the upshot is sometimes they can pinch-hit to meet your ratios.
SaaS has gotten surprisingly expensive, too, that was sucking a big hole in our budget when I first started helping out, and while I’ve trimmed it significantly, it’s still surprising how greedy they are compared to eg 5 years ago (looking at you, Gusto). Ditto thinks like online payments with credit cards, had to put a stop to that asap.
The school I help with is a nonprofit, so there are no shareholders, and the building is a little more than 10% of our operating budget, so it’s not landlords. There is no “excess money” for us, but maybe there is in one of the corporate operations.
I generally think early childhood care should be better subsidized in the US.