It’s not that I don’t think the numbers add up. Just that there must be a more efficient way of doing things. You don’t need all that extra stuff. Toddlers should be cheaper than older kids.
I dunno, I’m an uncle and provide free remote childcare for my nephews. Mostly in the form of keeping them occupied on Minecraft and watching them over videophone.
I’m sorry but playing video games remotely isn’t child care in any meaningful sense. It’s rather insulting to imply it is.
Is there evidence that New York’s ratios have better outcomes than Minnesota’s?
When I say the costs are “crazy”, I’m including the fact that some locations may have laws that essentially mandate those high costs. It does not necessarily follow that locations with more staff or other requirements have better outcomes.
One. Parking toddlers in front of screens all day is not great for them.
Two …toddlers and preschoolers won’t do it.
Three … what they will do without adequate supervision? If you haven’t ever tried to supervise a group of them you can’t even imagine.
Which extra don’t you need - the director, the janitor , the person preparing food ?Benefits for the staff? You can eliminate all of that by using a home day care which is significantly cheaper than center-based care but has different issues - for example, if your provider closes down a week every quarter or for the whole month of August or needs random days off for their own lives. That doesn’t happen in centers.
Why would toddlers be less expensive when the you always need more staff for toddlers than for preschoolers and school aged children? . And again, plenty of those kids above toddler age do not need full time care.
It’s not childcare and it’s probably not full time.
Sure they do - have you ever tried to care for 10 kids under three? For 50 hours a week? Someone will be hurt on the regular.
Nope, but chitchatting with them as we build stuff together is a heck of a lot better than them watching YouTube all day.
Anyway, it was just an offhand comment prompted by annoyance at doreen’s implication that the men in the family don’t do anything. Not true. If I didn’t live 3000 miles away I’d do more in-person care. And when they or I are visiting in person, I do (or mostly did–they’re old enough now to not need constant supervision). Grandma does more, to be sure, but grandpas and uncles are expected to pull some weight.
That was not my implication - I meant exactly what I said. No one expects grandfathers to provide full-time child care for free. I said nothing about uncles or fathers at all, and I didn’t say grandfathers never help with childcare at all. I’ve never known a man who took care of his grandchildren full time, my coworkers expected their mothers to provide full-time free childcare, not their fathers, and you mentioned
rent-a-grandma
not rent-a-grandpa
The center should more efficient on most of that. The home still has to prepare food and clean up. That takes some relatively small fraction of the day. A dedicated cook can prepare food for hundreds; a janitor can clean up after hundreds as well.
At any rate, this diversion is getting pretty far afield of the OP. I’ll just say that even if every dollar is completely justified, it still means that large numbers of people are priced out of having kids. And that’s probably something that needs to be improved.
You’re reading way too much into my arbitrary choice there, especially since I mentioned “grandparents” elsewhere.
You also somehow went from “rent” to “free”.
Okay. I have not witnessed (or experienced) that degree of asymmetry.
To be fair, a number of minors already work for wages part-time. I found a Bureau of Labor Statistics report from 2008 (Allard 2008: downloadable but not linkable, sorry) saying that about 15% of high schoolers worked, for an average of 5 hours on a weekend day and an average of 3-4 hours on a weekday.
Nowadays, over one-third of teens are in the labor force, although that’s not really comparable to the earlier study because it includes teens employed only seasonally, as opposed to teens for whom paid work is part of their average-day time use. Still, that adds up to quite a bit of total economic productivity from people younger than 21.
Aah, yes, this is what I always prized most in the institutions I handed my precious descendants over to - maximum efficiency. \s
Which part? I mean, you’ve already said you do need the cook and janitor, so which part don’t you need.
Do you think childcare difficulty is directly proportional to the mass of the child, or something?
Have you ever actually had kids?
Like others have said, this is in no way childcare, remote or not. What exactly will you do if one of the kids has a medical emergency? Or just wets themself, as toddlers are wont to do. How are you feeding them, via teleprescence drone?
You’re not fixing boo-boos or changing pants or serving hotdogs from another city. That’s childcare.
Yes, the simple fact that older kids have learned to dress themselves, feed themselves, use a bathroom by themselves… makes them cheaper to care for them toddlers.
Here in England the government mandates a ratio of 1 adult to 3 kids under 2, 1 to 5 for 2 year olds, 1 to 8 or 1 to 13 for age 3+, depending on the qualifications of the adult (and they have to have qualifications). Childcare can’t help but be expensive if you are paying 1/3 of someone’s entire salary, plus a share of all the other expenses involved in running a nursery.
Maybe those ratios are OTT, but one adult is absolutely not going to be caring for 10 babies. And toddlers have a deathwish and require close supervision. Older kids can feed and entertain themselves; very young ones need hands-on adult care.
Which is what I’ve been saying. It’s triply bad because it takes young people out of the workforce, puts them a few years further back in their careers, and lumbers them with huge debt. My parents both left school at 16 and started working - maybe that’s not ideal, but nor is a Red Queen’s race where everyone has to spend more and more years in education because everyone else is doing the same.
According to sources I’ve looked at, this isn’t true. Even if you built enough solar panels and installed them (or did the same for other sustained energy sources), they wouldn’t last forever. Everything breaks down eventually. You would have to build new solar panels occasionally. You would have to build new buildings, vehicles, furniture, appliances, electronic devices, and everything else occasionally. The sources I looked at said that the maximum number of people the Earth could hold is something like 4 to 10 billion, even if you did everything as efficiently as possible.
Curiously, Your Local Epidemiologist, who made her name reporting on covid, just ran an article on increasing the birth rate.
Also, I am interested to see that she’s moved from Texas to California.
Her what TO DO list boils down to this:
In some studies, a 1% increase in childcare coverage led to a 0.2–1% increase in fertility.
“Some studies” comes off a bit glib but let’s that at face value, and assume the high end. A 1% increase from the current not horrible US 1.66 get us to … under 1.68. Not exactly solving the problem. And I would not expect any of those studies show any sort of linear relationship.
I support what she wants because I think they are pro social goods. But they are not going to solve the issue.
Meanwhile the allegedly pro natalist Trump budget plan apparently has Operation Head Start to be eliminated as too woke.
Funny thing is that
in rural America, one in three child care centers are Head Start programs. A report from the Institute for Child Success points out that 86 percent of rural counties have a Head Start center. In some communities, it’s the only source of child care available
Child care isn’t the be all and end all quick fix, but eliminating it for your base probably isn’t serving any of your goals too well?
Um, I think you may have missed the forest for the tree there: I very much doubt that the YLE article is advocating for increasing childcare coverage only by 1%.
The point is, ISTM, to point out a (presumably, based on existing evidence) strong positive correlation between childcare coverage and fertility rates. So, presumably, if we bumped up support for childcare by a really considerable amount, like 25% or 30%, we’d expect to see a correspondingly sizable increase in fertility.
I agree with you that the exact nature of the relationship between those two variables is very far from clear, and may not even attain linearity. But it seems plausible that we would in fact get a fertility-rate increase of considerably more than 1%, if we increased coverage of childcare by significantly more than 1%.
So the negligibility of a fertility-rate increase from 1.66 to 1.68, based on the assumption that we’re increasing childcare coverage by only a measly 1%, is not really the issue here.
I wasn’t impressed by that article, but she had a bit more than that in it.
She linked to an actual study:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/padr.12431?utm_medium=email&utm_source=substack
That study found that cheaper childcare and increased maternal leave and medical coverage for infertility all increased fertility. Interestingly, the study claims that nordic birth rates were the first to drop, and partially recovered after parental benefits were increased. It also found that an increase in the retirement age in Italy decreased fertility rates, because grandparents were less available to provide childcare.
It says that cash transfers may have only a transitory effect. That access to health care in the US increased intentional births and decreased unintentional ones.
It’s kinda a slog to read, but quite interesting.
And yet there is no evidence that it does. There are countries that offer free child care and … they have not significantly increased their birth rates. It is admittedly a hard experiment to run with other factors swamping things.
Earlier in this thread I shared a study out of Israeli kibbutzim which documented that even large changes in childcare subsidies had at most a very modest impact.