It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
If this is the criticism then it's a glowing endorsement of daycare and school.
"So I can provide for my family"
"Why do you want to provide for your family?"
"So my children can have happy and fulfilling lives"
"What makes your young children feel happy?"
"Spending time with me"
A strong parent-child relationship is the biggest determination of life-long child happiness even into old age.
Also people work due to other reasons unrelated to providing for their family. Individuals are allowed to have lives outside their kids.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
From what I’ve seen, the research leans the other way. For example:
Children from more advantaged families were actually more likely to view unfair distribution as unfair, while poorer children were more likely to accept it. [0]
Mother’s work hours show no link to childhood behavioral problems, it’s schedule flexibility that matters. [1]
For working-class families, more father work hours correlated with fewer behavioral problems.[2]
The idea that “well-off kids” end up with morality deficits because their parents work a lot doesn’t seem to hold up.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/desc.13230
- Kids need lots of time with their parents
- Kids need lots of time around other kids
You can do that by sending them to daycare, and ALSO spending lots of time with them when they're home.
You can also do that by taking time off work, and then taking your kid(s) to places with other kids.
Both work; and it depends on your context which works for you.
The market already has incentives to create them -- a ton of good places have waiting lists nationwide, showing unmet demand even at the current price. This suggests the price will need to go higher to attract enough people to do this job. It seems their "$12,000 value" estimate is based on an optimistic belief that they will be buying childcare for their citizens at current prices. When they realize there aren't that many slots available at current rates of pay, will they be okay significantly increasing the costs of the program?
So, my expectations for these facilities are very low and that's a big part of my concern.
How so?
Once you see it, you'll see it everywhere.
A realistic stay-at-home subsidy would max out around $30k. Your proposal only meaningfully shifts incentives for the bottom income quintile. For everyone else:
- Upper-income families can already afford to choose whatever setup they want.
- Middle-income families couldn’t take it because it’d mean too steep a drop in income.
So the alternative you proposed economically benefits the bottom quintile while leaving their kids worse off. For everyone else, it probably either doesn't matter or gives them cash they don't need as much.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
So the children that do well in daycare comes from poor homes? So kids from rich home don't do well in daycare?
Every interaction I've ever had says the opposite. The disruptive bully at school usually comes from a broken home.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
Real businesses subject to real inspections and real assessments, you mean? With "strangers" who need to have qualifications and background checks?
To each their own of course but I'd prefer somewhere I know is actually judged to be a safe environment than some under the table option.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect the former to have ADA compliant doors or hot water that meets state regulations but the "give a fuck factor" is just so, so, so much higher when someone is working out of their own home, one of their own kids is in the mix, the rest of them are kids of a friend or friend of a friend, etc, than it is when your kid is being looked after by some 20yo college kid who's doing this part time.
Yo, what the fuck HN?
I send my kid to the daycare run by foreigners to learn cultural values.
WeAreNotTheSame.jpg
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I have a toddler.
They are absorbing everything and gaining a personality from day one.
You are not the one doing it.
(In fact, judging by the way you conduct yourself online I’d say the more influences t your child has beyond you the better)
Really? You're starting your comment with that?
EDIT: my mistake, it's a troll account with negative karma.
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
Or did you have something else in mind?
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
Pick your poison.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
They cite government inefficiencies when they just want to "fix them" by pocketing the difference.
It's depressing how much capitalism propaganda is deeply ingrained in so many supposedly smart people.
Yeah the govt has its inefficiencies, but an inefficient program that helps people is better than no program at all. So what if it means that I pay a few extra (hundred, thousand) dollars a year in taxes? If that's the cost for housing people, I'd gladly pay it.
And as if the appeal to humanity weren't enough, how about the fact that it'll keep the streets of SF and other cities cleaner?
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
The really strong protections are the first three years after a child is born - you have to be allowed to work anywhere from 15 to 30 hours/week, and be allowed to change it with a few weeks' notice ("Elternzeit" - covers both parental leave and this part time working arrangement).
I had to give a reason for wanting to do the next five years part-time, but "child" resulted in no further questions. I had to commit to only being allowed to work part time, and for the weekly hours I requested for those five years; my employer could choose to accept a request to change them or to go back to full time before the five years is up, but they're not legally obligated to.
I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.