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.
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).