I have heard that many western nations have ‘affordable child care’. How does that work? What makes it affordable?
Are the nurseries state run and anyone can send their kids there, or are they heavily subsidized private industries? Or do you get massive tax credits for sending a child there?
I know underpopulation (Ironically) is a major risk in western nations so incentivizing children is probably a good idea.
How much does child care cost in places like France, Germany, Japan, Canada, Netherlands, etc. etc.? How does it work?
One thing that a lot of developed nations do is have liberal parental leave policies and the concept of part-time professional work. The most expensive child care is at the start: in the US, at least, the law is generally that infants need a 1:4 caregiver/baby ratio. It’s incredibly expensive. Paying parents to stay home that first year eliminates one of the biggest hurdles to affordable child care.
Australia currently doesn’t have much child care assistance, but there is a new scheme coming in July that will increase affordability a lot. It is mostly in the form of subsidies to approved child care services (basically all of them). It can pay up to 75% (I think) of child care costs, though high income earners get less. Child care in Australia is heavily regulated, compared to the US, and all centres are assessed against the National Quality Standards.
And some countries also have have publicly funded preschools starting at the age of 3 or 4 - which is actually something that’s starting to happen in the US. Now, preschools won’t eliminate child care expenses entirely- but paying for a couple of hours a day of after-school care and for care during school vacations is a lot less expensive than paying for full-day care all year.
In Canada maternity leave and parental leave are both covered by Employment Insurance. New birth moms get one year worth of maternity leave. Dads and adoptive moms can get up to nine months. Parents can split it, as long as it’s not more than a year, and they get full EI. If they want to extend it to 18 months, they can, but the EI gets stretched out - it’s not 18 months of EI but 12 months payable over 18 months.
As MandaJo commented, infant care is the most expensive stage, and it’s sometimes hard to find a daycare that takes infants, so this kind of benefit helps the parents at the most expensive stage
Plus, your job is guaranteed by law for when you come back.
Norway has:
[ul]
[li]Extensive paid parental leave. (49 weeks 100% paid (unless your salary is very high) or 59 weeks at 80%. 9 weeks (3 before and 6 after birth) are reserved for mom, 10 weeks for dad[/li][li]A national goal of full daycare-coverage (no one who wants the service should be unable to get it due to lack of providers)[/li][li]Municipality owned daycare and subsidized privately owned daycare (non-profit only, but there are ways around that and a constant political battle about whether it’s happening or not[/li][li]$120 per child per month paid out to all parents. An additional $120 to all single parents who apply for it.[/li][/ul]
Day care is still not cheap, but the maximum price a subsidized provider is allowed to charge is $360 pr month, or 11 times that for a year.
There’s also a cultural expectation that taking 6 months to a year off after giving birth is perfectly normal, and I think also there’s maternity leave for all these days (?I could be wrong on this - there’s been a lot of movement on the subject after I finished having kids).
And then before that the Baby Bonus, so you could afford to take amounts of time off after having kids, and there’s Family Tax Benefit which can be paid fortnightly (not a hell of a lot of money, but it’s significant if you’re generally low income)
All this adds up to, like MandaJo was saying, not a lot of under-one’s in childcare of any sort. This graph seems to have about 8% of under-ones and maybe 35% of one-year-olds - not sure how that compares to US rates
In Australia paid parental leave is largely up to your employer, however you can take unpaid parental leave for up to two year and your employer must make your position available to you when you wish to return.
My partner and I work at the same place and we are allowed 6 weeks paid parental leave, this is about to increase to 8. This is pretty low, largely because there are very few female employees and so I don’t think anyone has been negotiating our employment contracts with women and families in mind.
There is a government paid parental leave scheme but I don’t know the details as we didn’t qualify.
Child care is subsidised by the government in two ways. If you meet income tests then you can get the child care benefit which is $4.30 per child per hour. You also get a 50% rebate on child care costs regardless of your income up to a total of $7600 per year.
Edit: Cost of child care is around about $100 / day and with the subsidies we pay about $55 / day.
I think Sweden has the most generous deals of any country. To start off, it’s all paid for through taxes, of course. TANSTAAFL, and all that.
For very child, the parents get 480 days of paid leave. 90 days are reserved for each parent and the rest of the 300 days they divide among themselves. Now, being on parental leave is not going to be like winning the lottery: you’ll get about $1700 after tax per month.
Day care for infants don’t exist. Most millenials tend do work it out this way.
Mom* stays home about a year, then dad takes three to four months. The rest of the time is saved and shared since the days can be used up to the child finishes first grade.
At 15 to 18 months, the child starts pre-school. Absolutely every family does this, for the simple reason that every family does this. Being a ‘home maker’ makes no sense here because your child would be very lonely indeed. This is pre-school, not day care, and there’s is a curriculum about skills and abilities the child is supposed to develop during their four years in pre-school. As of this fall, by law all pre-schools must teach ‘programming**.’
Mandatory schooling starts at age six.
The fees for pre-schools vary depending on how many kids you have matriculated:
1st kid is about $150 per month, 2nd child and beyond is about $50. Meals are included. It makes no difference if this is a privately owned outfit or public*** (free choice of placement for parents).
Gee! Taxes in Sweden are really high, right?
It’s difficult to compare. I pay about 25 per cent income tax, and taxes on corporate profits is a flat rate of 22 per cent. I guess this is quite higher than the U.S. but not steeply so.
However most Americans would not like the national 25 per cent sales tax on basically everything but food, or the $5.50/gallon gas price.
*I’m being hetero-normative here for sake of easy explanation. The same rules apply to people with whatever gender identity.
**This is of course not coding python, it’s using a tablet to make a toy robot do different stuff. Kids love it. But it does prepare for heavier tasks once they reach primary school.
***The same goes for primary and secondary school, pick the school you want, private or public, the nanny-state will pay out to whoever runs it.
One of the items which helped many of my Swedish coworkers was generous work-from-home policies. Of course it only works for jobs which don’t require presence by their very nature, but still, being able to work on your documents or your slides while watching your sick toddler makes life easier. One of the Brits made the mistake of making a rude joke about it in front of the two women in our team… the Swedes pretty much had to rescue his sorry ass, Boss and I were taking turns reaming him.
In Spain it varies a lot by region or even by town, as those levels of government may or may not have public guarderías (for below age 4); the private networks tend to work around the public system, covering those ages and situations the public system doesn’t as well as those children who didn’t get a spot in the public system. Some private guarderías offer part-time slots: two of my nephews attended one of these when their usual caretaker (the maternal grandmother) and the replacement (paternal grandmother) weren’t available. If grandmothers drew salaries conmesurate with the work they do, they’d be making more than those thieves we’ve got in the official government.
The UK is nowhere near the Scandi countries when it comes to this kind of thing, but I was quite shocked on a call to a pregnant colleague in the US recently when she said she’d be taking about 6 weeks off for the birth of her child.
Here, a year is pretty normal. It isn’t on full pay, but you do get 39 weeks statutory (which is a government mandated amount your employer must pay), and your job must be kept open.
We have a ‘tax free childcare system’, which effectively means you get a tax rebate on what you pay for in child care, up to a maximum amount (so they won’t pay for your au pair). This benefit is capped at workers earning under £100,000 per year.
It’s a bit more complex than that, but that’s it in a nutshell.
That depends on the type and size of the business. But in general it’s just another part of the job market and the “temporary worker pool” is people who just graduated, or are moving to a new place, or have decided to try a new career, or haven’t yet gotten their dream job and have to pay the bills anyway, and so on.
There are a lot of public nurseries, in France. And basically, school starts at 3 for most children.
The cost of nurseries is highly dependent on the parent’s income, but I tested for Paris with a very low and a very high income, and the monthly cost ranged from €50 to about € 500. I think an average middle income family would pay around € 300/month.
ETA : and yes, there’s a parental leave too. Up to 3 years.
The Piper Cub arrived a bit before the daughter of one of my work colleagues, so the employer hired a young lawyer to handle my parental leave and then the young lawyer took over when my colleague took parental leave.
Overall, the employer got to bring in a new hire, and saved money on salary, because the new hire was lower on the salary grid. The new hire got his “foot in the door”, and has been with us ever since. And both my colleague and I got to take paid parental leave. It worked well for everyone.
It was a bit funny when my colleague took parental leave, because he’s in a very traditional marriage: he’s the breadwinner, she’s the stay-at-home mom. He wasn’t planning on taking any leave, until another colleague who had been on maternity leave sat him down and did the math for him: he was eligible for nine months EI, plus our office tops up to a certain percentage based on salary. He couldn’t believe at first how little a salary loss it would be, and concluded he would be foolish not to take the 9 months parental leave. “They’re paying me to stay home and look after my kids!” he said more than once, in a disbelieving tone of voice.
My girlfriend is a pilot and it’s not the sort of position that can be just filled on the spot. Even if someone has all the qualifications including recent experience on the aircraft type, it can take several months to go through the company specific training. It is an expensive process and given that the parent on leave is able to come back to work pretty much whenever they like, it’s not a great proposition for the replacement pilot. So she basically doesn’t get replaced. More accurately, the total pilot numbers in the company are calculated to account for annual leave, sickness, maternity leave, long service leave, etc. One pilot off work for a while means a small increase in workload for everyone else.
Other jobs requiring less specific skills can be filled with temp workers or people on short term contracts.
You should know its coming months in advance. Normally you hire a recent graduate to cover the position. A lot of people get their first job on the CV that way. Since they are less experienced the start at the bottom of the pay ladder, so you save a bit of money on it.