Investing in mothers? The long-run impact of a universal child care
nber.org
nber.org
Based on their level of maturity and actual evident danger in the immediate surrounding area, 8 on the low end, 12 or maaybe 13 on the high end, anything higher and I'd say something's gone wrong, perhaps at the societal level.
And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.
As a GenXer, ~12 (?):
I'm pretty sure my parents stopped hiring baby sitters once my sister turned 12.
But even aside from that, I was allowed to play outside unsupervised at 7 years old. Though we did live on a Navy base at the time, so I wonder if that played a factor.
15 is bonkers. There should be no need to keep your teenager on-leash for that long.
It's also unlikely that she will be convicted since VA passed a law in 2023 that makes it explicit that parents are allowed to let their children go places alone.
I walked home from school and calmly did homework util my parents arrived from work since age 8. This was the norm in Russia. Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
Just the unlucky kids.
This has "true communism has never been tried" vibes. When enacting a policy, you can't guarantee it will come out optimally, so it makes sense to factor in any potential negative effects, even you think you're not going to make them. After all, I doubt the people campaigning for childcare in quebec were expecting the results to be negative.
Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
No, the OP speculated a variety of reasons, which includes what you've suggested, but I'm specifically focusing on the "which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality", which is why I quoted that part specifically.
They do. Because the stay at home parent goes crazy from loneliness, boredom and deadly routine.
It's kind of sad.
Yes, it's easy for me to say and the system is very much set up to facilitate extraction of profit from the neo-slave professional class while fostering their procreation to rear the next generation of neo-slave professionals; but we really need to break free of this spell that government (i.e., the ruling class' apparatchiks) do not have your child or even your won best interest in mind.
Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible and the youngest age possible, especially since the telescreen, aka, TV has fragmented so much and kids are seeing things like genocide being committed and by whom and they aren't hardened adults yet that can look the other way in order to keep their neo-slave "job" that gets them shiny stuff.
This feels over the top/paranoid to me. But I also acknowledge that East Germany’s universal child care was dismantled after German unification for being exactly what you describe.
Mothers (and fathers) had to be out getting water, foraging, hunting, doing laundry, farming, blah blah.
Obviously there is a middle ground between parents leaving kids for 10 hours straight and only seeing them 2 hours per day, but spending all day with parents and no one else is also another extreme (I would have gone nuts watching over them all day).
All these government actions don’t have an answer to the loss of the “village” that are inherent to economic mobility, having fewer children per family, and neighborhoods optimized for cars.
1-4 years old were pervised by 10 years old. Not sure how that counts.
I also would go absolutely insane if we didn't have any childcare for him. It is better for my ability to function as a good parent that I can hand him off to somebody else for a period of time. It is not the case that every couple has a member who is built to be a stay-at-home-parent.
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
If you go back to 1800 you will discover that saying families had only one income was because history is generally blind to "women's work" and so you have no idea what women did. (for that matter what most men did is something history only barely mentions). In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely. (historians can give you a much longer and more complex answer - mine is a gross simplification)
Ultimately what I am trying to say is the household income now required for many is too high and often unobtainable without 2 full time incomes outside the home (and often that’s not enough). That’s not sustainable if we don’t want people offloading all their parenting outside their home.
The one working at home (domestic tasks and misc.) one working outside the home (direct income) model is basically impossible now for most people.
I am not an expert on this subject, I am not proposing changes and mostly just saying what I observe/my opinion on this issue. This is also a US-centric take so bear that in mind.
If I must voice a solution or something: Top of mind, in no particular order, is we need to talk about PTO being more universal (and not just a measly 10-20 work days a year or so) and, more importantly, we need to crack down on exploitative labor practices that lead to low incomes/too few working hours, compounded by (particularly in the shift work world) demands that people say “yes” to coming in to work at a moment’s notice.
Generally speaking we need more flexibility for families, instead of the current model where we basically demand people burn their PTO (or just lose their job) for basic childcare reasons (sick, early dismissal from school, etc).
This is all really dancing around the core issue though, which is that, despite our rhetoric about strong nuclear families, we’re culturally and economically hostile to families. Particularly those with young children. The support we offer is inadequate and many workplaces punish people for caring for their kids during work hours even when it isn’t really a choice. And when we talk about the cost or difficulty people often respond with “well, you shouldn’t have had kids. You’re irresponsible.” That’s just ridiculous when you think about it. We can’t say we want people to have families and then structure our society in a way that creates unnecessary barriers. Especially when those barriers depend on assumptions like “kids can’t demand anything during work hours.”
I understand it’s easy to complain and offer no solutions, but I feel like what I’m doing is a little more nuanced than that. I don’t know what the answer is but I know what we are doing is not working and needs to be interrogated. That’s often the point of discussion after all - working out a possible solution.
What do you propose we do?
I also think job hopping is probably related? think of the burden of having to move so often with the housing market and how it might compound things.
But cynically I really doubt we're ready to support and fund any of these kind of changes basically. The best anyone offers is a little more maternity leave (paternity if you're being cool) and some tax or economic incentives to try and reduce daycare costs. Which will not holistically solve anything. Also giving up on WFH probably really hurt us here - that could have helped with housing substantially.
Since these are unknown unknowns, we can't really effectively debate them right now and so all we can do is be very careful (because there are bad consequences that are predictable as well), very slow, and every time we make a change, watch to see what the result is and be ready to undo it if it's worse than the current situation.
Just to make it even harder, I'll remind you that we don't agree on what a good or bad thing is. so even after we see results, we may have a lot of hard debate on if this is actually a good compromise.
I’m not saying we need to blitz, but it’s amazing how we always have to exercise extreme caution when talking about social goods. And even that doesn’t work, because with the current state of politics you can’t even get this stuff done at the municipal level. Look at Mamdani. Whether you like him or not, he is actually trying some of the ideas in a granular way. And he is being crucified for it on the right regardless of the initiative and before we see the results.
When someone disagrees with something here, they are suddenly convinced it absolutely cannot work and you have to fight an incredibly uphill battle to even try it. And throughout that testing phase they will do everything in their power to dismantle it.
This is used so often but it’s true. Could you imagine proposing the idea of public libraries today? We literally know the benefits. It is clearly a sound investment, and yet…
Ultimately, 69% (more really) don’t.
This was true for my grandparents in 1970s
Why can we no longer have the same economic productivity we had in the 1950s that allowed for more single income families?
Three words: World War II.
The 1950s were a unique time. World War II had just ended, and much of Europe's manufacturing capacity was destroyed, while the USA had just spent several years building factories to produce everything needed to fuel that war. It put the USA into an extremely favorable position. Everyone needed manufactured goods, half the world needs to rebuild, and the USA happened to own tons of factories that nobody bombed.
Also, during the war, a lot of purchases were being deferred because factories were tooled for war. After the war, they retooled for consumer goods, and years of deferred purchases were suddenly being made.
People think America started to decline after the 50's, but the reality is that the rest of the world just caught back up. Factories rebuilt, economies recovered, and they no longer needed American products.
Bringing back the 1950's boom without a catastrophic war is going to require taking a lot of steps that are very unpopular among the rich though. Landlords especially. The pipeline of "Dad finishes high school -> Gets a union factory job -> supports spouse + 2 kids -> buys suburban house/car -> retires at 65" isn't possible when the factory job pays $11/hr and houses start at $500,000.
Part of the trouble is the gains from productivity growth go to shareholders, not workers. The increased automation in the last 75 years means fewer workers, while the remaining worker's wages remain stagnant, and only the owning class reaps the benefits of the corporate savings. Meanwhile, we keep cutting taxes on them, so they get hoard it all, rather than allowing the money to be reinvested into the next generation.
We can still produce more goods and services with single earner families than we could in the 1950s. But far more of that productivity goes to capital, resulting in multiple earners to support the same standard of living,
I don't think it has to be a completely level trade on an economic basis. A lot of parents would prefer to be able to stay home even if it's not a purely economic optimum. And staying at home doesn't necessarily preclude earning any income. A parent could still do part time work from home, or even outside the home, when the other parent is there etc.
At what point will you decide that something other than economics matter? I can tell you now that I have kids time with the kids is more important than money. However I'm also a staff software engineer and so I'm making more $$ than most. You need to make your own decisions based on your own life.
Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
As if there was no choice other than both parents continuing to work full time jobs.
This is a long way from 10 hours a day of outsourcing when the kid is only awake for 12 hours.
Childcare is for the benefit of the companies who can then extract value from more workers.
I was lucky with my kids, we don’t live somewhere like London, we could book 4 hour periods a couple of times a week and didn’t need two full time workers.
Of course some people do this. But it's hard.
Trying to raise an infant or toddler without other people caring for them at least some of the time will make most people slowly go insane.
The excitement when school started was real. Same when my wife and I realized leaving them by themselves for short periods of time was probably doable.
I noticed I was pretty triggered when I heard a friend complain "it's hard to go a weekend without supports". She meant her parents. Sure, you should try a decade...
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
After a couple months? If you don't know the other kids by name and some other parents, you may have a bad daycare full of people who do not care.
My sister ran a fairly renowned daycare for over a decade. She ended up the caretaker for the children of many friends, and gained many friends of the children she helped raise. The daycare was a massive part of their community. It allowed the parents to function in modern society while ensuring their child was in the care of, essentially, an expert.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.
But, that was part of my point above. My sister to this day feels like she never had the supportive and attentive relationship with our late mother that she needed. (For what it's worth, I agree with her.) In my imaginary reality, at least, if she'd been the only child at home for a few days a week, while I was at day-care and then school, maybe she'd have grown up feeling differently.
I see good parenting and good institutions - that's schools, but also parks and pools and little leagues and libraries, and, hell, even good policing - as mutually supportive. It's unfair to expect one side of the individual / community matrix to make up for all of the shortcomings of the other, but each can strengthen the other side.
Both are interesting and useful, but I think they need to be separate studies.
It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents. Any man who has been an equal or primary carer for their kids will tell you that.
Is this a complaint against bottle feeding? If so, fuck right off. In the real world there are a lot of reasons not to breast feed, even though most people would love to be able to do it.
Why don't you tell your boss to fuck right off instead? Then you don't have to pent up your frustrations and then blow up on strangers online. Do you dare?
Other than that, what evidence do you have that there is a "biological instinct"?
Because this is typically true, even in cases where both parents work.
It's always wives, mothers, grandmothers.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
I think it's more about whether the investment pays back and defrays the costs.
I live in Québec.
I have children that both went in a province subsidized kindergarten.
By the way, there are different types of such kindergarten. «Milieu familial» which is literally sending your children to a private house of someone to have them babysit your children during the day. They can have a maximum of 6 children with them.
And there are the CPE or «Centre de la petite enfance». There you have highly qualified personnel, way more resources than a "family environment" can provide. They have many more children. The children can socialize much more.
But, being able to have a place for your child in a CPE is akin to winning the lottery. I wouldn’t be surprised some families have paid bribes to get a place.
(EDIT: unless of course these extra earnings were mostly transfers so-to-speak from non-mothers to mothers)
From a societal and human perspective, unclear that it’s worth it.