My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky.
So from my perspective, having both parents working is the root issue. It's an economic necessity for probably 80+% of the country, which I suppose is really the root issue.
Ultimately it all boils down to resources, time and money, and there is never enough to go around. I don't have an answer for that :(
Being a stay at higher parent is an incredibly difficult, stressful and under appreciated job so to many well educated couples, it's not appealing at all.
True, not all jobs can be offered as part-time, and working part-time limits your career growth if you work for a big corporation, but still, it is a viable option.
> a massive shift toward automation... in the next five years, 5 million jobs in 15 economies will be lost. (from YC post)
We don't have enough workers. We have too many workers. When will we realize that our current economic system is doing a lousy job of allocating human resources?
We can't get enough teachers, but we have tens of millions of people and hundreds of billions of dollars allocated toward things that add, to be generous, questionable value to the world.
There is TONS of work that needs to be done though. Teachers like you said, health care workers, psychologists to help us deal with the inevitable mental problems, mountain bike trail maintainers, pickers of plastic trash out of the ocean, people to design apis for distributing government transparency data, designers of infographics to help the rest of us make sense of that data, and on and on and on. There's so much to do, when you stop thinking of a "job" as something provided for you by the government or a company, and rather as value that you can contribute to the world. Another disruptive business is going to figure out how to make it possible to pay people for contributing that kind of value.
I think it goes back to what you said first. We need to agree on some core values.
I don't want any more of my money going to people who mocked the MSNBC host[0] when she said "children belong to the collective". It seems pretty obvious to me. If we are all paying for your children, I better have a say in how we raise OUR children.
Clearly, a lot of people do not see it that way. Why should we have tax deductions for people to have children? Why should we have tax breaks for people to put money away for their children to go to college? I for one support an end to these tax breaks. Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
I grew up in post-communist Europe. In the past, we had state propaganda that told children to turn in their parents[1], among other wonderful products of that line of thinking. So I'd be very careful with ideas like this one. (I still support mandatory vaccinations and/or sane defaults.)
>Lets send a clear message: If your children are your own and do not belong to the society, then you can raise them by yourself. If you can't afford to do so, we'll simply put you in a debtor's prison.
This would undo a lot of progress that has been made on the human rights front in the past century.
One possible model may be to enlarge the "nuclear family" to groups of friends. Get five couples who enjoy each other's company together, and everyone can work 80% (4 days) while two people are home each weekday for childcare/housework etc.
Many other models are possible and it would be best to make it as easy as possible to experiment. Relevant factors may be:
- a universal right to flexible work schedules, at least for larger companies (10+) where changes balance out
- Mixed-zoning housing allowing the creative use of space. Which also helps with:
- Neighbourhoods designed for street life, where you can actually meet neighbours and build these (real) social networks, and where children can explore. When I was 6 or so, I became friends with two families in my neighbourhood. One owned a bookshop which became my personal library. The other was a graphics designer and a racing car driver where I learnt computers and mechanics (and got to drive in a Formula 1 car). I was often invited for dinner at these families, or just hung out when they had guests, and I learned more from listening to adults debating the topics of the day than anywhere else.
Its not an economic necessity that both parents work, the incentive to do it is extremely large and probably pure conservatism had been keeping it at bay, if at all.
Especially for parents with multiple children, it is economically rational to have a parent at home to provide that customized 1-on-1 care with the child. The benefit is improved learning and opportunity for experiences (daily trips to museums, sports activities, classes) at the expense of less structured socialization with a peer group and a loss in net household profit.
Though the tax break afforded for day care should not be disregarded, there are plenty of situations where it makes sense to have a parent stay at home with children.
Most parents choose to have children so they can spend time with them. Maximizing this at the expense of some net household profit can be rational, given certain living situations. One could argue it is a luxury, and they would likely be right. Having children at all in advanced industrial societies is, in the individual case, usually a luxury.
If it were a productive investment it would be common because those that do it would easily outclass the rest.
Of craouse we would all like to have the option to take as much time as we want to take care of our own, its akin to wanting to amass enough wealth to never have to work again.
If the parent can earn a lot more income by delegating responsibilities he will do it, or rather, most will do it.
Children of school age DO NOT need babysitting. When I was a kid, everyone's mom worked and we kids just stayed at home or played together and were perfectly fine. There were zero kids who had a babysitter when they were 7 years old. Zero. Never heard of it. This was the late 80s / early 90s during the breakup of socialism. There was even a war going on for a few of those years.
I can't even imagine the level of ridicule a child would have endured if their friends had found out they had a babysitter.
Children don't just randomly burst into flames if they're left alone.
And I seriously doubt 30:1 is a significant part of the problem. Look at countries with successful school systems. Ours also used to be, but slowly got worse with time as we adopted western attitudes towards children and parenting. The schools themselves didn't change significantly, yet the outcomes became worse.
To be fair, it did go a bit lord of the flies on occasion, in the sense that we engaged in "wars" with kids from different streets and so on, sometimes someone would get a thrown rock to their head or get a beating, but nothing too serious. Also we were constantly getting injured while playing from falling, stepping on sharp shit, etc but kids are incredibly resilient, they recover from anything and quickly. The important thing is to teach the kid not to fuck around in traffic, that's where the real danger is. And if there is a war not to pick shit up that might be explosive.
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[1] I think schools teach much more than just what's on the national education plan. Making friends, making enemies, dealing with puberty etc are all valuable lessons that have less friction when the group of people you're around have similar amount of experience with those things. Thus being grouped with people with wildly different experience levels in these areas can be detrimental. While the primary grouping factor should be skill, there's probably a good case for secondary range limits by age, which is a decent estimative measurement of children's experience in these social areas.
[2] I understand that full isolation isn't possible, because physics requires math knowledge, which in turn requires writing & reading skills. Still, even with these dependencies we could do a lot more decoupling than what is being currently done.
Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alone educate them on how to be part of society. Schools are supposed to do this instead, but the primary goal is training the children to be manageable at a ratio of 30 to 1.
Before we can do anything else, we have to acknowledge that the first goal is getting the kids out of their parents hair. This is the fundamental truth that everyone knows but refuses to acknowledge when they're debating policy. After that, we can make other decisions that make more sense. The lecture-hall format really only makes sense when the number of students is unmanageable for a single adult. If was only 10 kids per teacher, they would actually have time for more useful activities, applying knowledge, giving guidance to students who are ready to strike out on their own.
Tripling the number of teachers is going to cost some money, and application-type lessons costs more than lecture-type lessons. Some ways to deal with this - as a society, acknowledge that creating educated, well informed citizens is not a fuzzy, feel-good liberal goal, but a necessary factor for everyone's safety, including the permanently child-free. I think most people agree with that already, but since many people voting are full grown adults who still aren't properly educated, not everyone will come to the same conclusion, and therefore a massive infusion of public money for this idea isn't likely to happen. So I think a successful, disruptive idea will be one that gets around the cost problem of a much lower student-to-teacher ratio. I don't think remote teaching is going to be the answer here.