In Spain, a good private nursery ("guarderia") cost tops €250-350 per month anywhere outside of Madrid and Barcelona. Children of low income households have free public daycare. From the age of 3y, children go to "school" and it's 100% free from that point on. You have the choice between public (secular education), consertado (semi-private with more emphasis on Christianity, science is not discriminated), or private (usually bi- or trilingual). The last option isn't free and can cost €400-1000 monthly. Books aren't free unless, again, low-income. Giving birth, check-ups and the like is free.
In hindsight, it's quite perfect -- but the economy is currently in a terrible state.
Say you need 9 hr care every day from 9-6. That adds up to 45hrs/week. Even pooling 4 kids together, you are looking at ~700$/week cost per teacher at minimum wage. Have 1.5-2x factor for more experienced or more skilled teachers. Add another 2-3x for rent, insurance, utilities, admin expenses, backup teacher expenses etc. And you are looking at 2K-4K per teacher (or 500-1K per kid) expense per week, or 2-4K per month per kid. Completely aligns with my experience in SV, across childcare centers of various qualities.
[1] https://www.cdss.ca.gov/Portals/9/Regs/1cccman.pdf?ver=2019-...
It also means that couples making more than that each end up with an even bigger advantage, since they can stay in the workforce and continue to grow their careers.
Why? You can always subsidize childcare via taxes. You can see that happening in the rich countries with dwindling populations. It won't happen in the US yet because the population is still growing thanks to immigration and also due to the ideological opposition to any public spending by a major party.
Here in CA Daycare costs 1800$/mo and 3000$/mo in SF. Out in Houston, where the standard of living is much higher, I hear it's only 600$/mo.
$700-800/mo is about what I'd call the middle of the road for childcare here. You can pay less and get a sketchy center that basically gets your kid a bare room and an oversized class for 8 hours, or pay more for really premium preschool with cooking classes and such, or montessori for closer to $1200-$1500.
Children to teacher ratios do seem to be lower in California, which is probably what is (partially) increasing those costs.
She:
- Elected for a home birth, so the NHS put an ambulance on stand-by outside her house once the midwife said things were coming to a head, in case things went south.
- Had regular home-visits by the nurse after the birth until she was happy without them, which focus was both the child and my sister's well-being. no question too foolish to ask, practical advice, that sort of thing, you know ... support.
- Got 6 months paid off work (state + company perks)
- Got free daycare when the kid was young.
- Gets child-support payments from the government every 2 (?) weeks. Not much, but every little counts.
- Gets free-at-the-point-of-need healthcare, of course.
- Gets excellent free schooling, all the schools are rated above average where she lives, in a Northern city not known for its largesse.
I:
- was kicked out of hospital in 3 days because that's what the insurance would pay for
- had the nurses give me stuff to handle the first few days (bottles, nappies, etc.) under the table because they weren't actually allowed to.
- Got no support after we left the building
- Got 2 weeks paid leave.
- Almost had a nervous breakdown because of what we didn't know, had parents fly out to help and finally got some sleep after 2 weeks (he's an "active child"...)
- Had to bump up the insurance costs significantly from X+Spouse to X+family, because there's no X+Spouse+1, so we're indirectly paying for those with X+spouse+4
- Paid a fortune for daycare in the valley when it became time.
- Realised that our designated local school was bloody awful (3/10) despite being in a "good school district". Didn't win the lottery. So we pay for private school, currently about $15k/year
I can afford it, but the difference between the "people before profits" approach the UK takes, with its much more diverse social safety net, and the "profits über alles" approach the US takes is stark. The only reason I'm still in this country is because my partner wants to stay, if I had my way, I'd be living on the beach in the UK, probably retired...
Oh, and she's an air-hostess for BA, her partner works for telecoms companies doing their wiring at the top of poles. THey're not particularly well off (I have a lot more disposable income as a FANNG s/w engineer) but their actual life is a lot easier.
2. You mention that you are in the valley and a FAANG engineer. Between my partner and me, we have experiences of 4 out of those 5. All of them had far more generous parental leave policies than "2 weeks paid leave" like you claim. Can you please name your company? Because it honestly doesn't jive with our experience as an engineer in the valley.
2. I am in the valley. I work for Apple, and 9 years ago when the kid was born, Apple's policy on paternal leave was in fact 2 weeks paid leave, you could opt to use your vacation (which I did) after those 2 weeks, and you could cash in a week's accrued sick leave as well as a bonus if you had it, but that was it. It's better now, but that doesn't make my experience any different.
2(a) My wife worked for Chevron at the time, and their policy (who knows what it is now) was similarly 2 weeks of paid leave, then you can take accrued vacation, then you're back at work. She quit.
Reading back my original post, I can see it's confusing where I'm saying "I" and talking about being in hospital - I was trying to continue the "My sister":"Me" but it was of course my wife giving birth, not me.
Thanks for clarifying. I interpreted your original comment as the current state of affairs. From my first-hand experience, Apple's parental leave policies are far more generous now than just 2 weeks of paid leave.
Now my salary is higher in the US than it was in the UK (despite the fact I owned the company in the UK, and I work as a software engineer over here) but that just makes things comparatively worse for the US. I used to get a larger percentage of my wages tax-free than I do here.
The lower cost of living in the UK helps out here - just comparing the dollar:pound ratio using currency exchange metrics doesn't make sense when I sold my (owned) house in the UK and used that to get a 15% down-payment on a house out here in the valley. Fifteen years later and I've finally (this week actually :) paid off the mortgage on my home here. That's 15 years of mortgage payments that I wouldn't have had to make, and my house in the UK was (almost) twice the size of the one I now own here.
In the US if you're someone that works for a living you pay a lot of taxes once you add all the various ones up. In return the government provides you nothing at all. Where in places like the UK you pay a lot of taxes and you get public benefits in return. Like healthcare, decent schools, maternity leave, things like that.
One year in SF as a single man I calculated my total tax rate was about 45%. Add Federal taxes, withholding, state income tax, and 8% sales tax. Then add $800/mo health insurance.
I'm assuming that's because of your salary bracket. For a similar level compensation in the UK would most likely be at least 60%-65% if not more.
I talk to friends that have families that have lived in Europe and the US. And it's much easier in Europe. All the smoke and mirrors doesn't change that.
Basically yes if you have a lot of passive income then the US is much better. If you have middle class amounts of earned income it's worse to terrible.
To be fair, you can also get a nanny for about that (going rate is $20/hr or so) which works out with two kids.
Still though, my point is that high costs of child care in the city are a wedge that furthers the gap between rich and everyone else.
Is this true? When I was a kid my daycare was like 30 kids per teacher. It was called "Mother's Day Out". I can't remember the cost but judging by the amount of time I spent there it was basically free.
Fundamentally, it is a business that does not scale, as you need a set number of providers per n children, and low values for n are probably going to be associated as better value. There's really no way to get efficiencies or scale, as the personal interaction and attention is what parents are really paying for.
So it come down to a question of local real estate prices and prevailing wages for the area, so I'm assuming mindvirus lives in a city with a very high cost of living and real estate costs.
Comparing just dollar value of services is not of much use across countries.
It's like saying, interest rate in India is 6% while in US it's 1% why Americans are not putting their money in India. The info you are missing is inflation.
5k is not a lot in mega US cities and these guys will not move to some cheap city because they'll not find a job that pays that well and gives them ability to support such a high quality of life in smaller/cheaper cities.
Unsurprising, because only king would be earning this kind of income per month.
If you had an adult who watched just 6 kids they'd make 180k a year which seems like an insane amount of money to make sure a kid doesn't stick his/her finger in a socket.
If instead they made closer to the median salary then childcare would be closer to $500/month per kid which seems much more reasonable.
We can afford it, but think of what this does to the income gap and GDP. If either of us made less than $100k/year, it'd make sense for one of us to stop working for a while to look after the kids. This means that already well off people have a big advantage of being able to have a double income, while that's denied to everyone else.
It feels like COVID makes this even worse - at least daycare is only a few years before public school takes its place. With that gone, kids need full time care for longer. Does this mean we'll see people dropping out of the workforce in big numbers? What does that mean for recovery?
How do other places and countries manage it?