Isn't it economically more efficient to have kids go to daycares (which benefit from economies of scale) and have both parents work and pay taxes?

Of course some people prefer to raise their kids themselves, but that seems more like an expensive lifestyle choice than a necessity.

Yeah. Lets become drones and all live in a giant hive. Good plan.

>which benefit from economies of scale

The economy of scale isn't as big as one might like. Child care staff ratios for infants and toddlers are something like 1:3 to 1:4. Between that and the cost of compliance, licensing, insurance, and the inevitable scandals when deployed at scale, (If you have 1 million caregivers, you absolutely will have some number of murders or molestations. Unfortunate when a parent does it to their own child, but A Public Scandal when a government employee does it) you have got to start wondering if it's worth the hassle.

Or you can have mothers take care of their own children. Which has been the default of every human society for tens of thousands of years.

There are lots of studies showing that being raised by your own parents is far more beneficial than a day care. But as you point out, that's a privilege reserved for the wealthy.

Paying people to be stay at home parents would make it a viable choice for a lot more people. It would also help reverse the trend of the fertility rate dropping below 2.1

Please share those studies.

That proposal runs into issues. In particular, the income replacement flavor implicitly suggests that the positive externality of a stay at home parent is exactly equal to the market rate pay in a wholly unrelated profession. That seems very unlikely to be true.

Presumably it would be a fixed amount for everyone, and not based on the job you've left.

In that case I’m tentatively for it. But I don’t think it will be useful in the kinds of situations being discussed in the blog post and comments.

The ARPA past today does have child allowances in it. They're projected to end half of child poverty in the US (because it turns out you can unironically end poverty by giving people money.)

Well, until they run out anyway.