If you have more cildren, you'll pay 2% for the second (max 90 euro), 1% for the third (max 45 euros) and nothing for the fourth.
In London I pay £170 per day to have my two children in childcare. That's for private childcare, but you have little choice if you want to go back to work (because of the hours). There's a little give in the costs of different nurseries but most have a waiting list to get in where we're based (and the lowest I've seen locally is £75/day/child).
We now receive a £120(ish)/month government subsidy for our oldest child. That's something I guess - doesn't do much to help with the £1300 or so we pay per month.
It wasn't really worth it financially for my wife to go back to work, though it does give a much needed break from constantly looking after children (ironically, she's a speech therapist for small children). By the time you account for transport / lunch etc in London we're about breaking even.
It's pretty depressing when you're trying to get a company off the ground and all your money goes into childcare.
So it's not exactly 1/10th the amount, but still a lot less.
Also, this was limited to a 1 year period more or less. There is a 2 year age difference between the children, and from age 3, the oldest started going to kindergarten instead of daycare, which is quite a bit less expensive.
Minimum wage for an adult is 1500 euro per month working full time, so even if you're a single breadwinner family earning minimum wage, you're already exaggerating. You also fail to mention that the government pays for nearly all of this if you're making minimum wage. Calculate it here:
http://www.belastingdienst.nl/rekenhulpen/toeslagen/
I filled in the numbers for a single parent working full time for minimum wage who sends their two kids for the maximum number of hours per month to an expensive daycare which charges 7 euro an hour. The government subsidizes their daycare for €2894 per month.
A family making €40,000 in taxable income a year still gets a maximum of €2584 per month reimbursed for 2 kids going to that same daycare.
I filled in the numbers for a family making €100,000 in taxable income (about three times the median income) a year, and it looks like they still get about half the costs reimbursed.
It actually looks like the fewer hours you work, the lower the percentage covered by subsidies becomes.
People keep bringing up the cost of daycare as an excuse not to work more, but I don't think it's a very good excuse. I think the actual reason why the number of part time workers is so high, is that people can afford to do it. Outside the Netherlands, if you're not working full time, you're seen as lazy and unambitious. Unless you're doing it for an ambitious reason, such as studying for a degree, you can forget about a promotion or a raise, if your employer allows it at all.
In NL, for some reason, the right to work part time was championed as a women's rights issue. Unless you allowed women to work part time, you were oppressing them. The government also started stimulating part time work to reduce unemployment. Employers were limited in their ability to deny part time employment, to the point that it became very unusual for women to work full time. So unusual, that those working full time are now becoming somewhat socially stigmatized as workaholics or greedy. Some women are also putting pressure on men to start working less to do something about this very unenlightened looking wage gap between full time working men and part time working women.
You do have to be very careful your income doesn't change while claiming it, but it is quite a big subsidy, right?
(We don't currently claim it and have 1 child in childcare. You're right that it's freaking pricy!)
[1] http://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/b...
Basically the "stuff that isn't worth fighting an election over". See also: drugs (we're now falling behind, and even moving backwards), opening hours (most of the country still shuts down on Sundays), or to give a recently newsworthy example: insulting the royal family being illegal.
Mix that with the dominant right-wing urge to "privatise all the things", and subsidised child care gets happily thrown under the bus by various coalition governments, despite what the majority of the population actually wants.
But the UK doesn't have the same rat of part-time working.
My own kids are now all adults, but I remember how heart-breaking it was to leave a two-year-old to a day-care place where she did not want to stay. She'd cry all the way when going there, and stick to hug my legs "please don't go" though she could barely speak. It wasn't good.
Later on, she and younger brother were perfectly happy in another day-care place when they were a bit older.
Also, my daughter was all the time sick in her first day care place. She'd pick every infection there ever was around and we had horrible days with day care, horrible evenings queuing in the health center, and horrible nights without sleep. The daughter just had weak resistance as a 18-month-old, but was much stronger when she was 5 years.
My younger son on the other hand enjoyed day care tremendously from the very start, but he only went there at age of 4.
I would say that
1) there is variance in children, as individuals (some of them are naturally more dependent on their parents)
2) there is variance in day-care places (the first one we had was run by the council, the staff was inexperienced and they compensated for their insecurity by being rude; the other was a private one subsidised by the council, and the staff was really nice -- others have reported things being the other way round with very nice council-run places, so I conclude just that the human factor has a big impact).
3) there is variance in parents
(These experiences from the Finnish system which provides very extensive and affordable public service by North American standards).
There was one place that my daughter was never really happy to go to. It was fine, and she was safe - she was just never happy there. We moved her to a new place and she loved it from the moment she walked in (though she knew some of the other kids from her first nursery).
I think sickness and childcare just go hand in hand. It flowed on to the rest of the family too. I've been sick so many times in the last few years - though I think we're through the worst of it now. Nothing like the happy embrace of a snotty child to make you ill.
But in Holland, its even more worse. The Dutch send them into Day Care after 3 month. Some kids can't even roll around at that time. Then you have a day-care-mommy/kid ratio of 6:1. If you are lucky. Can't see them changing all diapers in time.
And about being bored: Well, if more mommies would be at home, they would eventually socialise more during the day and therefore the kids would have all the social interaction. But at least under the supervision of their own blood. Which loves them and doesn't see them as 'products' for their 'customers'.
Our daughter was in daycare full time after 4 being 4 months old and she became able to verbally express wants and needs using words at around 12 months. Now at 2 she is using full sentences.
When I dropped my 1 yo off at nursery this morning she literally ran with open arms and screeches of joy to one of the careers.
Germany: 300 EUR+
Seems like highly dependent on geography and underlying real estate prices. The private market for child care is fairly open to anyone who's willing to go through proper training and safety rigor.
But let's say you plan a home-based childcare business, an it's in Bay Area, and the first thing you need to take care of is to buy real estate for it (in $2 million range) and child-proof it.
What you then have to charge for it to cover the mortgage, the property taxes, the insurance, the salaries to the employees quickly results in some unrealistic numbers.
Which is why no child-care provider would choose an expensive place to live as launchpad for their business, and expensive places to live have exorbitantly high childcare costs.
Is child care as expensive as he says? Absolutely, it can easily be €600 per kid.
Thing is, if you make €20k, so €1600 household income, you get €520 or so per kid from the government for every €600 or so you spend. So you end up with €80 per month per kid, very doable for a single parent. No parent in the Netherlands makes €800 on full-time work, so we have to assume €1600 household income is for a single parent.
Even if your household income is €80k, i.e. 6-7k monthly income: typical for both parents working solid office jobs in their mid-late 30s, you still get a little over €200 per kid out of €600 expenses per kid, so €400 out of your more than €6k.
There are various caveats, and paying €80 for a single parent is no joke. But it's not nearly as bad as saying a median salary goes wholly to child care of two children, far from it. And it's unlikely to be the sole or even main reason for child care. In fact, I'd make a cautious bet that you'll see significant part-time statistics for people who have no children.
At the end of the day, the costs per working day per kid after subsidy is anywhere from €4 to €20. So the notion that this prevents people from going to work in order to be with their kid so as not to have to pay childcare, is false.
As on the low-end an individual makes like €13 per hour stacking shelves at a supermarket by age 25, working a 9 to 5 in a low-end job easily nets you €80, easy easy easy, at which point you make €1600 a month and pay the €4 a day rate. If you make say €40k and your spouse does, too, then you make more than €160 a day each, and so the notion that you'd rather stay home to save €20 and earn 0 than to pay €20 and earn €160 is unlikely. Even with two kids or three kids, it still pays off in a huge way to go to work.
Now there are some situations in which it could make sense. e.g. a parent who, somehow, has a 9 to 2 contract (5h a day), and picks up the kid from school. That can make a lot of sense in a family where the husband makes €60k and the wife could make €30k full-time, and €20k part-time in a 9 to 2 job. In this case the household income is such that it costs €20 per kid per day and it can make sense to work the $20k parttime job that allows you to pick your kids up from school (€80 income a working day) instead of the €30k parttime job (€120 income per working day), because if you have two kids, then childcare costs €40 per day, the difference in your working hours. And then it's probably more fun and useful to be with your kids than to pay for someone else to, if it's financially all the same. But 9 to 2 working days barely exist, and this is in the context of a cliched family where the man earns €60k and the woman has €30k max earning potential full-time. In more realistic scenarios the financial incentives are definitely such that it pays off for both parents to work full-time.
For example, I have two children in day care three days a week, and we pay 1200+ euros per month. My friends in Belgium (where I'm from) pay literally 1/10th of that. Those in France and Germany also pay much less than we do, although I don't know by heart exactly how much.
The reason child care is not subsidized (much) is the same as that mentioned in the article though - conservative popular opinion on how parents should be home with their children, and that having children in day care 5 days a week is tantamount to neglect.