The limited supply of child care is directly linked to the fact that the people doing the hands on work of providing care to children tend to make less money than the person serving you your McDonald's hamburger. Taking care of four infants all day is far more stressful and still somehow significantly less lucrative than most food and re…
The limited supply of child care is directly linked to the fact that the people doing the hands on work of providing care to children tend to make less money than the person serving you your McDonald's hamburger. Taking care of four infants all day is far more stressful and still somehow significantly less lucrative than most food and retail service jobs. Making the job prestigious and lucrative are necessary to solve the lack of day care spots to serve children. Raising the cost is the point because nobody is going to "apprentice" to earn terrible wages in a high stress environment. It might not need to be college credits but the field and incentives need to change dramatically.
The reason it's so expensive is that the ratio of workers to "customers" is so low. For infants, you need an adult for every three or four kids, which means that the parents of each kid need to pay (at least) 1/3 to 1/4 of the salary of a child care worker. So if you want child care to be affordable to the average worker, it's basically required that child care workers be paid below-average wages. Requiring workers to go to college doesn't help with this at all. A day care center staffed with college graduates is going to face the same tight financial constraints.
One alternative is for the government to subsidize workers' wages, which I am not opposed to. But in that case a college requirement doesn't help either—the government can just directly pay to raise child care workers' wages.
The solution is that daycare isn't economical for about 80%+ of mothers after the tax wedge if they have 2+ kids. It's just an iron law of math. Rather than pay expensive subsidies to avoid this we should just have more moms stay home.
If we want to subsidize childcare we should subsidize the mother for each child with cash and let her make the work/SAHM decision in neutrality.
The limited supply of child care is directly linked to the fact that the people doing the hands on work of providing care to children tend to make less money than the person serving you your McDonald's hamburger. Taking care of four infants all day is far more stressful and still somehow significantly less lucrative than most food and retail service jobs. Making the job prestigious and lucrative are necessary to solve the lack of day care spots to serve children. Raising the cost is the point because nobody is going to "apprentice" to earn terrible wages in a high stress environment. It might not need to be college credits but the field and incentives need to change dramatically.
The reason it's so expensive is that the ratio of workers to "customers" is so low. For infants, you need an adult for every three or four kids, which means that the parents of each kid need to pay (at least) 1/3 to 1/4 of the salary of a child care worker. So if you want child care to be affordable to the average worker, it's basically required that child care workers be paid below-average wages. Requiring workers to go to college doesn't help with this at all. A day care center staffed with college graduates is going to face the same tight financial constraints.
One alternative is for the government to subsidize workers' wages, which I am not opposed to. But in that case a college requirement doesn't help either—the government can just directly pay to raise child care workers' wages.
The solution is that daycare isn't economical for about 80%+ of mothers after the tax wedge if they have 2+ kids. It's just an iron law of math. Rather than pay expensive subsidies to avoid this we should just have more moms stay home.
If we want to subsidize childcare we should subsidize the mother for each child with cash and let her make the work/SAHM decision in neutrality.