100%. We shouldn't be creating perverse incentives. Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone. For taxpayers, it's just more money out of their pocket and for the parents, you're being encouraged to leave your children with strangers so you can go and work a job that doesn't pay enough to cover the cost of paying those strangers.
We need to get past the ridiculous idea that staying home with one's children while their young is some sort of failure. It's not. It's valuable work, which coincidentally is why childcare is as expensive as it is. Frankly, given the importance of the work, I'm surprised childcare doesn't cost more.
It's not that it's a failure, it's that being taken out of the workforce for many years is damaging to careers. It's more than a matter of perception. Public school starts when kids are 5. If you have several kids, it could then take someone out of the workforce for a decade. While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult, especially at a point where you're past your prime years such as your 20 or 30s.
>While it's not impossible to recover from that, it's extremely difficult
On the other hand, it's impossible for your children to get back the time they could have spent in their most formative and vulnerable years around people that love them, rather than minimum wage daycare workers.
It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being. If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse? More or less memorable? I don't remember much before I was 5-ish. Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot? Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years? How about having more wealth to transfer to children when you're gone? What if the stay-at-home parent is desperately unhappy with staying at home? Is it better to have a happy, harmonious environment?
It's complicated, and just saying it's better to have a stay-at-home parent versus "minimum wage daycare workers" (who in my experience are actually often highly qualified), is an incomplete perspective (IMO).
Whilst none of those points are necessarily wrong, I think you have implicitly ignored the happiness of the parents in your arguments. Many parents who feel they have to work and then pay for childcare and not see their children in order to make ends meet are definitely not happy about that at all. That shouldn't be forgotten.
>It's extremely difficult to correlate this to long-term happiness or well-being.
Sure, as with any social science there are huge numbers of complicating factors, which makes it difficult to really study anything conclusively. No double blind studies, obviously.
>If parents can accelerate their time to retirement they get to spend more time with children as teenagers or young adults. Is that better or worse?
Studies would be great, but probably far worse. Teenagers and young adults are developing independence from their parents and would probably feel overly constricted.
>Do we really know that having stay-at-home parents during that time alters a lot?
No, we can't know it without running trials.
>Does having the extra money for "better" college outweigh time in "formative" years?
Maybe in some cases. The overwhelming majority of people aren't going to go to any college "better" than a state university and wouldn't benefit from it.
>"minimum wage daycare workers"
Why put that in quotes?
>who in my experience are actually often highly qualified
Qualified for what? To show children the love and care that their parents would show them? I don't think so, because I don't think you can fake that, and I don't think their love for the children can be genuine because any loving parent would be emotionally destroyed if they couldn't see their child any more because the child graduated from daycare and moved on to kindergarden.
Both my kids have been in nanny shares. That’s a bit higher end than minimum wage daycare, but, trust me, they’ve been better taken care of and more loved than if I’d had to take care of them. Comparative advantage works another way with daycare: you can benefit from hiring a professional.
I love my family, thanks, and am a competent father. I don't love, and am not good at, taking care of small children all day every day, and my children would suffer if I had to do that for an extended period of time. Your first post and, especially, this one come across as quite smug and holier-than-thou. And if you were to make that remark about my wife to my face, I'd politely ask you to step outside.
>I love my family, thanks, and am a competent father. I don't love, and am not good at, taking care of small children all day every day, and my children would suffer if I had to do that for an extended period of time.
I don't think that's uncommon for men, and I'm sure it happens for some women too. If both of you are that way, and you are convinced your children will suffer from being taken care of by you, and you can afford to pay people that will do a better job than you, then by all means.
>And if you were to make that remark about my wife to my face, I'd politely ask you to step outside.
Just to make it clear, I am not insinuating your wife is inadequate in any way, just that I would feel bad for her if you felt that love was something you could get from professionals. I am sure she's a wonderful woman and I hope you have a great relationship with her.
My point is that these daycare workers don't love your children anywhere near the amount that you and your wife do (I assume, I don't know you personally), and they aren't going to be able to fool your children.
> it's impossible for your children to get back the time they could have spent in their most formative and vulnerable years around people that love them, rather than minimum wage daycare workers
Professionally trained, well rested, day care professionals probably do that job just as well as me, or better. Also, there are 168 hours in a week and the kids still spend a large part of that with their parents.
>day care professionals probably do that job just as well as me, or better.
If you are truly so terrible at taking care of children that you cannot care for your own flesh and blood better than minimum wage workers can simultaneously care for multiple children to which they have no personal emotional attachment, then please, get your children away from yourself as often as possible.
>Also, there are 168 hours in a week and the kids still spend a large part of that with their parents.
70+ are lost to sleeping, and more for younger children, so no, they don't spend a large part of that time with their parents in any meaningful way.
If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.
The kids spend 70 hours sleeping and 40 hours at day care... That's still 58 hours to spend with their parents. That's plenty of time! Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.
No, it's really not 58 hours to spend with their parents.
If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.
>Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.
I don't really know what the point in this comment is. Do you think kids outside of daycare don't do unstructured play with other kids?
Cooking is what, 1 hour a day? And it's something you can often involve your kids in, same with the other household errands (let's say that's another hour). That's 14 hours gone. We still have 34 hours left. So basically 5 hours PER DAY still to spend with your kids. That's still a lot!
>Cooking is what, 1 hour a day? And it's something you can often involve your kids in
If you want it to take three times as long, I guess. It's good to do with them sometimes obviously but most people are not going to have time for that on a regular basis.
>That's 14 hours gone. We still have 34 hours left. So basically 5 hours PER DAY still to spend with your kids. That's still a lot!
Assuming the child sleeps 10 hours per day, which is well below what's recommended for 0-3 year olds, and you magically get all household chores done in two hours per day as you suggest, 24 of those 34 hours are going to be on the weekend.
Parents who both work full time are essentially weekend parents, and the weekend is when the parents have to catch up on everything they couldn't take care of during the week.
Also, 34 is less than half of the hours they would have with a stay at home parent.
No way! The training after high school for day care professionals in my country takes 4 years and is much better paid than minimum wage.
If nothing else, I could never hope to beat them on experience.
There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.
>If nothing else, I could never hope to beat them on experience.
That's fine. Unless you are emotionally stunted, they could never hope to beat you on love.
>There are Nordic countries where a minimum of one day of day care a week is actually government mandated because it's been proven to be good for the kids.
If so, that's quite a bit different from what you described. That sounds like it's more about forcibly integrating foreign populations. They're not targeting Danish children with that.
Love is not a quantity linearly dependent on the contact hours I spend with them. Having other people involved in their upbringing does not mean they receive less love.
Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.
>Love is not a quantity linearly dependent on the contact hours I spend with them. Having other people involved in their upbringing does not mean they receive less love.
OK, I don't know what that means. What I do know is that if you're dropping them off to be raised by people that don't care about them nearly as much as you do, and who aren't going to miss them very much if they never see them again, they're not going to get the kind of love that they get from you during those hours. The longer those hours are, the longer they go without getting that kind of love, and the more they become convinced they aren't worth the full attention of a person that loves them. I don't think that's good for them.
>Mandatory day-care is in Sweden [1] (not my country), because interaction with other kids is good for them.
From your link, it looks like this affects children of age 6. When people in the US talk about day care or child care services, they're taking about children up until the age of 5 at most, and usually actually just up until the age of 3. For children aged 3 and 4 it's usually called pre-school rather than day care or child care service.
In the US, children at the age of 6 are entering their second year of school, which if they attend a public school is free from kindergarten (age 5) to the end of high school (age 18). This article is about the expense of child care in the US. The law you've linked is entirely inapplicable to this discussion.
> Subsidizing a low-wage job is a net loss for everyone.
Subsidizing a dead-end low-wage job is a net loss for everyone.
But low-wage jobs are often an important part of the route to other jobs for those entering or re-entering (even with previous higher-wage work) the workforce.
The US Dept of Labor had a paid family leave report out a few years ago that convincingly argued that paid family leave—which is typically measured only in weeks—had a measurable improvement on women’s retirement savings, because it meant they were more likely to stay in the workforce and save more for retirement.
A large part of the reason it doesn't cost more is that a day care working can watch 5+ children at once, whereas a parent is probably only watching 1-2 kids.
We need to get past the ridiculous idea that staying home with one's children while their young is some sort of failure. It's not. It's valuable work, which coincidentally is why childcare is as expensive as it is. Frankly, given the importance of the work, I'm surprised childcare doesn't cost more.