No, the takeaway is that Quebec's universal child care provision correlates with life issues, but there's no information about the causes of those correlations - which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality, or some socioeconomic issues specific to Quebec, or for some other reason.
>which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality
This has "true communism has never been tried" vibes. When enacting a policy, you can't guarantee it will come out optimally, so it makes sense to factor in any potential negative effects, even you think you're not going to make them. After all, I doubt the people campaigning for childcare in quebec were expecting the results to be negative.
I've not read the article, and I expect it goes into this kind of thing, but...
Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
Speaking from my own Western Europe bubble, its the reverse. High-income individuals tend to partner with high-income individuals, both heavily invested in their career, and using more child care to facilitate 2 full time jobs. Parents using less child care tend to be less career focused part timers. Having one parent stay at home is a rare sight that I associate with a low household income.
>Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
No, the OP speculated a variety of reasons, which includes what you've suggested, but I'm specifically focusing on the "which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality", which is why I quoted that part specifically.
Affordability has little to do with it. The reality is neither parent actually wants to stay at home and watch and raise their own children. So they ship their babies off to full time daycare centers for someone else to do it. Then they both get to go to work instead!
Of course it has positive GDP on the parents: if two women each care for each others children rather than their own, GDP goes up even though the impact on both families is negative (due to lost travel time, as the mothers swap roles).
The more likely case is one person (most often women, but men do childcare as well) is taking care of the kids of at least 3 couples (6 people), and could be up over 10 couples (which happens though often isn't legal or a good idea). That is per year, the kids grow out of daycare in 12-15 years, but a person typically works for 40 years.
I walked home from school and calmly did homework util my parents arrived from work since age 8. This was the norm in Russia. Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
Each culture is a little different. What are you going to do with your kids when the parents are working is a problem? At what time do you trust them to stay home by themself?
In Soviet Union times in eighties in Belarus it was considered ok that a child could stay alone at home from age of 7 when they started a school. Some parents opted for after-school programs and some relied on grandmothers like it was for me but some of my schoolmates stayed at home alone for few hours until their mothers would be back from work (fathers typically worked longer and further away from home).
And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.
That was my experience and is my opinion, and I do try not to judge others, but 15 year olds are past the point where they can have jobs and are doing the babysitting. If my friend was treating their teenager this way—assuming their kid wasn't significantly mentally or physically handicapped—I'd ask them why they insist on maintaining such an absurd level of control as to infantilize said teenager on their way into secondary school. I wouldn't insult or suggest overall bad parenting—that's rude and not my place—but if they couldn't grapple with that, I'd probably question my relationship with them in much the same way I'd question my relationship with a parent who refused to let their kid learn about sex or evolution.
Based on their level of maturity and actual evident danger in the immediate surrounding area, 8 on the low end, 12 or maaybe 13 on the high end, anything higher and I'd say something's gone wrong, perhaps at the societal level.
Elder millennial here, though my sister was young GenX. I was born in '82, she was born in '79.
I'm pretty sure my parents stopped hiring baby sitters once my sister turned 12.
But even aside from that, I was allowed to play outside unsupervised at 7 years old. Though we did live on a Navy base at the time, so I wonder if that played a factor.
Where I live they are dismissed on their own as young as 8, and so long as they have a safe way home then a couple hours alone isn't going to hurt. There are enough electronic distractions at home now that they won't turn to delinquency.
15 is bonkers. There should be no need to keep your teenager on-leash for that long.
It is a rather surprising state of affairs that this is something that is not apparent to you. Why do you think I have to say the following; giving your child over to an absolute stranger to spend more waking/disposable time with that you, the parent, is NOT a good thing... neither in daycare or even school.
Yes, it's easy for me to say and the system is very much set up to facilitate extraction of profit from the neo-slave professional class while fostering their procreation to rear the next generation of neo-slave professionals; but we really need to break free of this spell that government (i.e., the ruling class' apparatchiks) do not have your child or even your won best interest in mind.
Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible and the youngest age possible, especially since the telescreen, aka, TV has fragmented so much and kids are seeing things like genocide being committed and by whom and they aren't hardened adults yet that can look the other way in order to keep their neo-slave "job" that gets them shiny stuff.
> Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible
This feels over the top/paranoid to me. But I also acknowledge that East Germany’s universal child care was dismantled after German unification for being exactly what you describe.
That's not why East Germany's universal child care was dismantled at all. East Germany's universal child care was dismantled after unification because West Germany didn't want to pay for it, and former East Germany couldn't. It was one of the most popular programs East Germany had, and was a source of quite a bit of consternation when it was taken away.
I was in Germany in those days and I sure remember the CDU and other more-right wingers using this argument, and convincingly. I’m sure there’s some long and worthy essay on the topic in the archives of die Zeit. Of course it was long ago now.
All of human history, children grew up spending lots of time under the supervision of older siblings, cousins, and other elders in the “village”.
Mothers (and fathers) had to be out getting water, foraging, hunting, doing laundry, farming, blah blah.
Obviously there is a middle ground between parents leaving kids for 10 hours straight and only seeing them 2 hours per day, but spending all day with parents and no one else is also another extreme (I would have gone nuts watching over them all day).
All these government actions don’t have an answer to the loss of the “village” that are inherent to economic mobility, having fewer children per family, and neighborhoods optimized for cars.
I am a father. I am an extremely involved parent and spend a ton of time with my son.
I also would go absolutely insane if we didn't have any childcare for him. It is better for my ability to function as a good parent that I can hand him off to somebody else for a period of time. It is not the case that every couple has a member who is built to be a stay-at-home-parent.
This study was limited to the program in Quebec, but this discovery is alarming
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself. It doesn't consider the familial impacts of outsourcing the raising of ones own offspring to another party.
Yes, this was the same thought I had. What about investing in children by making it easier for their own mother to actually care for them, instead of working outside the home and dumping the kid in an institution.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.
Sure, and epecially when the child is a bit older then introducing a "preschool" situation for a few hours a day is probably valuable. But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
I would bet that approximately 100% of people advocating for funded childcare programs++ would want to avoid the "putting infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day" scenario.
In what way? I've seen many people advocate for universal childcare as a way to get mom back to working full time as quickly as possible. I've also seen it framed as a way of leveling the playing field, so women are less disadvantaged from men as a result of childbirth / care.
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
Then the working parent never gets a break for themselves? The couple never spends time together alone? (Or only after the kid's bedtime when they're both absolutely exhausted)
So what exactly does the working parent need a "break" from? Surely it's not their kids - as they've been completely absent from their lives during the entire working week.
I have a 12 and 9 year old, and I've been 750km from family since the oldest was one. We didn't really have anybody to watch them. Can confirm.
The excitement when school started was real. Same when my wife and I realized leaving them by themselves for short periods of time was probably doable.
I noticed I was pretty triggered when I heard a friend complain "it's hard to go a weekend without supports". She meant her parents. Sure, you should try a decade...
My kids are around so many other kids, interacting, playing, arguing, sometimes fighting (hands to yourself!), they are around so many caring adults that live nearby, we talk to them every time we see them. I know how lucky we are. I bet people that say dumping your kid at an institution have no idea how nice life could be in that regard.
Yes, community raising of children is how it "used to be" but dropping your kids off for 8-10 hours a day to be raised by absolute strangers with zero ties to your family and spending time with other kids who have zero familial ties to you as well and maybe even no community ties is not the same at all.
How well does the average person know their neighbors when they move to a new place? Maybe if you had a routine where you and your children meet other families that live close to you... hmmmm
I'm not a parent but my niece and nephew (different parents) both go to daycare. My sister knew many of the parents at her son's daycare already, they live in the same neighbourhood. My nephew knew the children of those parents too. He had his little daycare friends before he started daycare at 18mo. My sister has lived in the same city all her life, some of the parents involved she's known for 30 years.
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
On the first day? Barely, though in "good" daycares, you usually have a connection because placement is competitive and you got in through nepotism.
After a couple months? If you don't know the other kids by name and some other parents, you may have a bad daycare full of people who do not care.
My sister ran a fairly renowned daycare for over a decade. She ended up the caretaker for the children of many friends, and gained many friends of the children she helped raise. The daycare was a massive part of their community. It allowed the parents to function in modern society while ensuring their child was in the care of, essentially, an expert.
And your bias is that if institutionalized child care is shown to lead to worse outcomes than parents caring for their own children, you will feel a lot of personal guilt.
All of my friends' kids who are in daycare get sick frequently. I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
There is a broad spectrum between “extreme social isolation” and sending your very young children to be taken care of at a daycare with dozens of children every day just so both parents can work just because that's how society has decided to orient itself.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
I dunno man my wife takes care of our one-year-old not just staying at home but going to the library and stores and the nearby petting zoo and stuff, and he's only been sick once, after a long day of air travel where my wife and I got sick as well—whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and such. Just something I've noticed, is all.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
> whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and s
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
Chicken pox isn't a concern due to vaccines. Common colds especially for very small children are a bit more of a concern due to ear infections. I'd like to avoid putting tubes in my son's ears if possible.
Their own mother or father. This is important for multiple reasons. Some fathers are better parents (I undoubtedly was), if you assume mothers do childcare it limits choices for both men and women. It is a barrier to equal childcare which I feel is ideal.
Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.
Having had two kids go through nursery from an early age, they absolutely had a better time there, with more friends and a higher quality of entertainment, than they would have had at home with either of us.
You can take your kids to parents days out or parks where they consistently meet with other kids and become friends. The option isn't 100% daycare or 100% staying at home and never seeing anyone.
Ah, now the pearl clutching makes sense. Some of other children in daycare are from the bad and weird ethnicity. Would a 23andme be a good requirement for playdates then?
I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
actually, i strongly believe that the most benefits come from how (not how much) parents interact with and care for their children. i went to kindergarten too, and i grew up spending a lot of tome outside with other kids with plenty of opportunity to socialize, both supervised and unsupervised, but lack of my parents availability (to put it mildly) created an anxiety that completely ruined any social ability that i would have been able to acquire otherwise.
so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.
Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.
There is more to life than economics. Economics should put a floor on what you do in life - that is you need enough food to live, and enough shelter (including clothing)... However once that basics are met you need to ask about trade offs. Rice and beans are a nice meal once in a while, but sometimes I want "steak and caviar". Likewise, all I need to live is a "tiny house" shack with some heat - but I really like having more space. I wouldn't mind having the largest private house in the world complete with staff to maintain it - but the work I would need to afford is not something I'm willing to do (I'm not sure if I could get into the CEO suite if I tried, but I know enough of that CEOs do with their life that I'm not willing for that)
At what point will you decide that something other than economics matter? I can tell you now that I have kids time with the kids is more important than money. However I'm also a staff software engineer and so I'm making more $$ than most. You need to make your own decisions based on your own life.
You are either paying the mother (or father) to stay home, or paying for child care so they can work.
I don't think it has to be a completely level trade on an economic basis. A lot of parents would prefer to be able to stay home even if it's not a purely economic optimum. And staying at home doesn't necessarily preclude earning any income. A parent could still do part time work from home, or even outside the home, when the other parent is there etc.
We had a few decades in the US where it was pretty normal and comfortable to raise a family on a single income. What law of physics dictates that it’s impossible to construct such a society again?
We managed to have a society with a significant number of families living on one income for quite some time. 2 incomes shouldn’t be a requirement to keep a roof over a family’s head. The goal shouldn’t be “2 incomes,” it should be “1 income is sustainable and families can actually be a family.”
Really? What society? The 1950s got close in the US (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but I doubt it), but even then there were a lot of women working.
If you go back to 1800 you will discover that saying families had only one income was because history is generally blind to "women's work" and so you have no idea what women did. (for that matter what most men did is something history only barely mentions). In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely. (historians can give you a much longer and more complex answer - mine is a gross simplification)
> In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely
> Why can we no longer have the same economic productivity we had in the 1950s that allowed for more single income families?
Three words: World War II.
The 1950s were a unique time. World War II had just ended, and much of Europe's manufacturing capacity was destroyed, while the USA had just spent several years building factories to produce everything needed to fuel that war. It put the USA into an extremely favorable position. Everyone needed manufactured goods, half the world needs to rebuild, and the USA happened to own tons of factories that nobody bombed.
Also, during the war, a lot of purchases were being deferred because factories were tooled for war. After the war, they retooled for consumer goods, and years of deferred purchases were suddenly being made.
People think America started to decline after the 50's, but the reality is that the rest of the world just caught back up. Factories rebuilt, economies recovered, and they no longer needed American products.
Bringing back the 1950's boom without a catastrophic war is going to require taking a lot of steps that are very unpopular among the rich though. Landlords especially. The pipeline of "Dad finishes high school -> Gets a union factory job -> supports spouse + 2 kids -> buys suburban house/car -> retires at 65" isn't possible when the factory job pays $11/hr and houses start at $500,000.
Part of the trouble is the gains from productivity growth go to shareholders, not workers. The increased automation in the last 75 years means fewer workers, while the remaining worker's wages remain stagnant, and only the owning class reaps the benefits of the corporate savings. Meanwhile, we keep cutting taxes on them, so they get hoard it all, rather than allowing the money to be reinvested into the next generation.
We can still produce more goods and services with single earner families than we could in the 1950s. But far more of that productivity goes to capital, resulting in multiple earners to support the same standard of living,
That’s a fair point I considered including but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds here so I opted for an overly simplistic description.
Ultimately what I am trying to say is the household income now required for many is too high and often unobtainable without 2 full time incomes outside the home (and often that’s not enough). That’s not sustainable if we don’t want people offloading all their parenting outside their home.
The one working at home (domestic tasks and misc.) one working outside the home (direct income) model is basically impossible now for most people.
I know many couples today living on one income so the other can raise the kids. They are a tiny minority but you can find them all over. They just have to make life style sacrafices that most are not willing for.
It's not a tiny minority; at least in the US, ~1/4 mothers stay at home, or for mothers with pre-school children, it's ~1/3. It's actually quite normal outside of maybe certain urban professional circles, and spans low to high income.
I’m actually familiar with the 31% statistic and a very important wrinkle to that figure is it includes people on disabilities, retired, unemployed but want to be employed, etc. so we really can’t say “1/3rd of Americans live an ok to comfortable life on one income.”
I didn’t answer the first time you asked because it strikes me as somewhat unproductive and frankly whenever people ask questions like this it’s usually bait, but I’ll assume good faith here.
I am not an expert on this subject, I am not proposing changes and mostly just saying what I observe/my opinion on this issue. This is also a US-centric take so bear that in mind.
If I must voice a solution or something: Top of mind, in no particular order, is we need to talk about PTO being more universal (and not just a measly 10-20 work days a year or so) and, more importantly, we need to crack down on exploitative labor practices that lead to low incomes/too few working hours, compounded by (particularly in the shift work world) demands that people say “yes” to coming in to work at a moment’s notice.
Generally speaking we need more flexibility for families, instead of the current model where we basically demand people burn their PTO (or just lose their job) for basic childcare reasons (sick, early dismissal from school, etc).
This is all really dancing around the core issue though, which is that, despite our rhetoric about strong nuclear families, we’re culturally and economically hostile to families. Particularly those with young children. The support we offer is inadequate and many workplaces punish people for caring for their kids during work hours even when it isn’t really a choice. And when we talk about the cost or difficulty people often respond with “well, you shouldn’t have had kids. You’re irresponsible.” That’s just ridiculous when you think about it. We can’t say we want people to have families and then structure our society in a way that creates unnecessary barriers. Especially when those barriers depend on assumptions like “kids can’t demand anything during work hours.”
I understand it’s easy to complain and offer no solutions, but I feel like what I’m doing is a little more nuanced than that. I don’t know what the answer is but I know what we are doing is not working and needs to be interrogated. That’s often the point of discussion after all - working out a possible solution.
I propose we be very slow and careful because everything I've seen anyone come up with has some unexpected unintended consequence. Some of them are absolutely awful and worse than the current situation. Others are on balance a good compromise.
Since these are unknown unknowns, we can't really effectively debate them right now and so all we can do is be very careful (because there are bad consequences that are predictable as well), very slow, and every time we make a change, watch to see what the result is and be ready to undo it if it's worse than the current situation.
Just to make it even harder, I'll remind you that we don't agree on what a good or bad thing is. so even after we see results, we may have a lot of hard debate on if this is actually a good compromise.
See this is the rub for me: we only like to “move fast and break things” in this country when there are promises of a lucrative IPO.
I’m not saying we need to blitz, but it’s amazing how we always have to exercise extreme caution when talking about social goods. And even that doesn’t work, because with the current state of politics you can’t even get this stuff done at the municipal level. Look at Mamdani. Whether you like him or not, he is actually trying some of the ideas in a granular way. And he is being crucified for it on the right regardless of the initiative and before we see the results.
When someone disagrees with something here, they are suddenly convinced it absolutely cannot work and you have to fight an incredibly uphill battle to even try it. And throughout that testing phase they will do everything in their power to dismantle it.
This is used so often but it’s true. Could you imagine proposing the idea of public libraries today? We literally know the benefits. It is clearly a sound investment, and yet…
That's basically all stuff I support for it. I also think socially something about extended families would be good - grandparents watching kids is good for cohesion and lightens burdens etc.
I also think job hopping is probably related? think of the burden of having to move so often with the housing market and how it might compound things.
But cynically I really doubt we're ready to support and fund any of these kind of changes basically. The best anyone offers is a little more maternity leave (paternity if you're being cool) and some tax or economic incentives to try and reduce daycare costs. Which will not holistically solve anything. Also giving up on WFH probably really hurt us here - that could have helped with housing substantially.
making housing affordable also sounds like a pretty hard problem in most of the developed West, yeah? like if you have a good idea definitely pursue it though
I have children that both went in a province subsidized kindergarten.
By the way, there are different types of such kindergarten. «Milieu familial» which is literally sending your children to a private house of someone to have them babysit your children during the day. They can have a maximum of 6 children with them.
And there are the CPE or «Centre de la petite enfance». There you have highly qualified personnel, way more resources than a "family environment" can provide. They have many more children. The children can socialize much more.
But, being able to have a place for your child in a CPE is akin to winning the lottery. I wouldn’t be surprised some families have paid bribes to get a place.
That is correct. While I too would like to see what it looks like if one parent staying home is subsidized, this still shows that subsidizing child care is a net benefit for everyone, and as such it's a good idea to keep the program going.
It doesn't show that. Subsidies will shift the margin of who can afford to have a stay at home parent, so if being raised by a parent is better than childcare, you expect people on the margin to lose out. This is in contrast to something like a child subsidy that could be used for childcare or to support a parent raising the child (e.g. in the US, increasing the refundable child tax credit).
Women entering the workforce eroded the ability to maintain a household on one income because of depressed wages and housing competition. There's no absolute cost to housing, people will pay what they afford and making more money means the housing cost rises, it doesn't make people "richer" just everything else more expensive.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
I made the same point in a less snarky way in my previous comment in this thread.
It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents. Any man who has been an equal or primary carer for their kids will tell you that.
Men cannot breast feed. In the first years, the mother is the primary parent, by biological instinct of the child alone. After that, both are parents and it depends if the mother or the father is the better parent. But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
Very few women breastfeed for years. When breastfeeding they can express milk and keep a bottle in the fridge. The father can do literally everything else.
Other than that, what evidence do you have that there is a "biological instinct"?
No, I want evidence that this means they have a "biological instinct" to regard the mother as the primary parent. One is a instinctive physical behaviour, the other is emotional, but you are claiming that the first proves the second.
Many women can not either. And some children simply will not. I have two boys. One would only breastfeed and never take the bottle. The other would only take a bottle and never breastfeed.
> But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
Is this a complaint against bottle feeding? If so, fuck right off. In the real world there are a lot of reasons not to breast feed, even though most people would love to be able to do it.
It's a complaint against dumping infants into daycare when it's the time of development that they are most dependent on being near their mother.
Why don't you tell your boss to fuck right off instead? Then you don't have to pent up your frustrations and then blow up on strangers online. Do you dare?
It's always the same thing with these people. The women have to take care of the kids, and stay at home, never go kind and never complain. They should do all the work then the fathers should get to stumble in drunk, entertain their kids for 10 minutes and then force their wives into sex.
The rich were so successful in manipulating people with culture wars like "women shouldn't work" that the people who fell for it still don't realize the real war was them losing the economic standing in which it was viable for the typical family to have one working parent.
The same authors saw some evidence of development problems among the children in the same cohort. https://www.nber.org/papers/w21571
So is the takeaway that universal child care has a positive impact on GDP of the parents, but a negative impact on the overall life of the child?
No, the takeaway is that Quebec's universal child care provision correlates with life issues, but there's no information about the causes of those correlations - which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality, or some socioeconomic issues specific to Quebec, or for some other reason.
>which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality
This has "true communism has never been tried" vibes. When enacting a policy, you can't guarantee it will come out optimally, so it makes sense to factor in any potential negative effects, even you think you're not going to make them. After all, I doubt the people campaigning for childcare in quebec were expecting the results to be negative.
I've not read the article, and I expect it goes into this kind of thing, but...
Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
Speaking from my own Western Europe bubble, its the reverse. High-income individuals tend to partner with high-income individuals, both heavily invested in their career, and using more child care to facilitate 2 full time jobs. Parents using less child care tend to be less career focused part timers. Having one parent stay at home is a rare sight that I associate with a low household income.
>Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
No, the OP speculated a variety of reasons, which includes what you've suggested, but I'm specifically focusing on the "which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality", which is why I quoted that part specifically.
> families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care.
They do. Because the stay at home parent goes crazy from loneliness, boredom and deadly routine.
Affordability has little to do with it. The reality is neither parent actually wants to stay at home and watch and raise their own children. So they ship their babies off to full time daycare centers for someone else to do it. Then they both get to go to work instead!
It's kind of sad.
this leap is like jumping over to jupiter from earth
The more appropriate aphorism would probably be “correlation doesn’t equal causation”.
If you're going to toss out that aphorism for the bad outcomes you have to do it for the good outcomes as well.
Of course it has positive GDP on the parents: if two women each care for each others children rather than their own, GDP goes up even though the impact on both families is negative (due to lost travel time, as the mothers swap roles).
The more likely case is one person (most often women, but men do childcare as well) is taking care of the kids of at least 3 couples (6 people), and could be up over 10 couples (which happens though often isn't legal or a good idea). That is per year, the kids grow out of daycare in 12-15 years, but a person typically works for 40 years.
12-15?
I walked home from school and calmly did homework util my parents arrived from work since age 8. This was the norm in Russia. Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
>Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
Just the unlucky kids.
daycare at say 14 sounds suboptimal
Each culture is a little different. What are you going to do with your kids when the parents are working is a problem? At what time do you trust them to stay home by themself?
In Soviet Union times in eighties in Belarus it was considered ok that a child could stay alone at home from age of 7 when they started a school. Some parents opted for after-school programs and some relied on grandmothers like it was for me but some of my schoolmates stayed at home alone for few hours until their mothers would be back from work (fathers typically worked longer and further away from home).
And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.
8-12 unless they have serious developmental issues. 15 is ridiculous
That is your opinion. Which is fine. However try not to judge others.
That was my experience and is my opinion, and I do try not to judge others, but 15 year olds are past the point where they can have jobs and are doing the babysitting. If my friend was treating their teenager this way—assuming their kid wasn't significantly mentally or physically handicapped—I'd ask them why they insist on maintaining such an absurd level of control as to infantilize said teenager on their way into secondary school. I wouldn't insult or suggest overall bad parenting—that's rude and not my place—but if they couldn't grapple with that, I'd probably question my relationship with them in much the same way I'd question my relationship with a parent who refused to let their kid learn about sex or evolution.
Based on their level of maturity and actual evident danger in the immediate surrounding area, 8 on the low end, 12 or maaybe 13 on the high end, anything higher and I'd say something's gone wrong, perhaps at the societal level.
> At what time do you trust them to stay home by themself?
As a GenXer, ~12 (?):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchkey_kid
Elder millennial here, though my sister was young GenX. I was born in '82, she was born in '79.
I'm pretty sure my parents stopped hiring baby sitters once my sister turned 12.
But even aside from that, I was allowed to play outside unsupervised at 7 years old. Though we did live on a Navy base at the time, so I wonder if that played a factor.
> Elder millennial here, though my sister was young GenX. I was born in '82, she was born in '79.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xennials
Where I live they are dismissed on their own as young as 8, and so long as they have a safe way home then a couple hours alone isn't going to hurt. There are enough electronic distractions at home now that they won't turn to delinquency.
15 is bonkers. There should be no need to keep your teenager on-leash for that long.
If I might ask, where do you live? In America a woman was arrested for letting her child walk in her own neighborhood. https://people.com/va-mom-convicted-for-letting-5-year-old-w...
Canada. No gated suburb necessary, just a walkable neighbourhood.
It is a rather surprising state of affairs that this is something that is not apparent to you. Why do you think I have to say the following; giving your child over to an absolute stranger to spend more waking/disposable time with that you, the parent, is NOT a good thing... neither in daycare or even school.
Yes, it's easy for me to say and the system is very much set up to facilitate extraction of profit from the neo-slave professional class while fostering their procreation to rear the next generation of neo-slave professionals; but we really need to break free of this spell that government (i.e., the ruling class' apparatchiks) do not have your child or even your won best interest in mind.
Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible and the youngest age possible, especially since the telescreen, aka, TV has fragmented so much and kids are seeing things like genocide being committed and by whom and they aren't hardened adults yet that can look the other way in order to keep their neo-slave "job" that gets them shiny stuff.
> Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible
This feels over the top/paranoid to me. But I also acknowledge that East Germany’s universal child care was dismantled after German unification for being exactly what you describe.
That's not why East Germany's universal child care was dismantled at all. East Germany's universal child care was dismantled after unification because West Germany didn't want to pay for it, and former East Germany couldn't. It was one of the most popular programs East Germany had, and was a source of quite a bit of consternation when it was taken away.
I was in Germany in those days and I sure remember the CDU and other more-right wingers using this argument, and convincingly. I’m sure there’s some long and worthy essay on the topic in the archives of die Zeit. Of course it was long ago now.
All of human history, children grew up spending lots of time under the supervision of older siblings, cousins, and other elders in the “village”.
Mothers (and fathers) had to be out getting water, foraging, hunting, doing laundry, farming, blah blah.
Obviously there is a middle ground between parents leaving kids for 10 hours straight and only seeing them 2 hours per day, but spending all day with parents and no one else is also another extreme (I would have gone nuts watching over them all day).
All these government actions don’t have an answer to the loss of the “village” that are inherent to economic mobility, having fewer children per family, and neighborhoods optimized for cars.
They spent a lot of time just being entirely unsupervised, cause adulta had other duties.
If we are discussing 1 to 5 year olds, I doubt they spent a lot of time unsupervised. At the least a chain of older kids was probably around them.
5 years old were unsupervised in my grandma generation.
1-4 years old were pervised by 10 years old. Not sure how that counts.
There were literally toddlers walking into the fire they were so unattrnded
I am a father. I am an extremely involved parent and spend a ton of time with my son.
I also would go absolutely insane if we didn't have any childcare for him. It is better for my ability to function as a good parent that I can hand him off to somebody else for a period of time. It is not the case that every couple has a member who is built to be a stay-at-home-parent.
This study was limited to the program in Quebec, but this discovery is alarming
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself. It doesn't consider the familial impacts of outsourcing the raising of ones own offspring to another party.
Yes, this was the same thought I had. What about investing in children by making it easier for their own mother to actually care for them, instead of working outside the home and dumping the kid in an institution.
Your phrasing betrays your bias.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.
Sure, and epecially when the child is a bit older then introducing a "preschool" situation for a few hours a day is probably valuable. But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
8-10 hours a day in a daycare is a bad idea for much longer than just the infant stage.
I would bet that approximately 100% of people advocating for funded childcare programs++ would want to avoid the "putting infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day" scenario.
In what way? I've seen many people advocate for universal childcare as a way to get mom back to working full time as quickly as possible. I've also seen it framed as a way of leveling the playing field, so women are less disadvantaged from men as a result of childbirth / care.
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
Why do you think that?
It's absolutely bonkers how normalized infant and toddler daycare has become in today's society.
I kinda think at least some form of part-time toddler daycare is necessary. For the stay-at-home parent's sanity.
If it were more common than you’d have your Neighbours kid for a few hours while they have some sanity and vice versa.
This is a long way from 10 hours a day of outsourcing when the kid is only awake for 12 hours.
Childcare is for the benefit of the companies who can then extract value from more workers.
100% agree if you have suitable neighbors (parents with similar age children) this is an ideal arrangement. Not everyone is so lucky.
Can't this just be the other spouse? When they are home from work then the stay-at-home parent can have a break. What's so difficult about this?
Then the working parent never gets a break for themselves? The couple never spends time together alone? (Or only after the kid's bedtime when they're both absolutely exhausted)
Of course some people do this. But it's hard.
So what exactly does the working parent need a "break" from? Surely it's not their kids - as they've been completely absent from their lives during the entire working week.
Is it shocking people may want to do things other than their job and spending time with their children?
Some kind of infant and toddler childcare is necessary, whether it’s daycare, friends, family, or neighbors.
Trying to raise an infant or toddler without other people caring for them at least some of the time will make most people slowly go insane.
I have a 12 and 9 year old, and I've been 750km from family since the oldest was one. We didn't really have anybody to watch them. Can confirm.
The excitement when school started was real. Same when my wife and I realized leaving them by themselves for short periods of time was probably doable.
I noticed I was pretty triggered when I heard a friend complain "it's hard to go a weekend without supports". She meant her parents. Sure, you should try a decade...
"Local man shocked that human child rearing is communal"
It's honestly very sad to me.
The saddest part to me is when families feel "forced" into full time daycare.
As if there was no choice other than both parents continuing to work full time jobs.
My kids are around so many other kids, interacting, playing, arguing, sometimes fighting (hands to yourself!), they are around so many caring adults that live nearby, we talk to them every time we see them. I know how lucky we are. I bet people that say dumping your kid at an institution have no idea how nice life could be in that regard.
That certainly doesn’t sound like an institution to me.
What is an institution if not a collection of people?
Family, community, nation are all collections of people that are not institutions.
Yes, community raising of children is how it "used to be" but dropping your kids off for 8-10 hours a day to be raised by absolute strangers with zero ties to your family and spending time with other kids who have zero familial ties to you as well and maybe even no community ties is not the same at all.
How do they have no community ties? Did you drive the children 20 miles away from home?
How well does the average parent know the other parents and children on the first day dropping their kid off at daycare?
How well does the average person know their neighbors when they move to a new place? Maybe if you had a routine where you and your children meet other families that live close to you... hmmmm
I'm not a parent but my niece and nephew (different parents) both go to daycare. My sister knew many of the parents at her son's daycare already, they live in the same neighbourhood. My nephew knew the children of those parents too. He had his little daycare friends before he started daycare at 18mo. My sister has lived in the same city all her life, some of the parents involved she's known for 30 years.
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
On the first day? Barely, though in "good" daycares, you usually have a connection because placement is competitive and you got in through nepotism.
After a couple months? If you don't know the other kids by name and some other parents, you may have a bad daycare full of people who do not care.
My sister ran a fairly renowned daycare for over a decade. She ended up the caretaker for the children of many friends, and gained many friends of the children she helped raise. The daycare was a massive part of their community. It allowed the parents to function in modern society while ensuring their child was in the care of, essentially, an expert.
We did, yes. You either pick a daycare close to home or work, with the deciding factor being which daycare is better.
And your bias is that if institutionalized child care is shown to lead to worse outcomes than parents caring for their own children, you will feel a lot of personal guilt.
All of my friends' kids who are in daycare get sick frequently. I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Same will be true of in person school.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
There is a broad spectrum between “extreme social isolation” and sending your very young children to be taken care of at a daycare with dozens of children every day just so both parents can work just because that's how society has decided to orient itself.
Yes, kids pass germ to each other. This will happen any time lots of kids are in one place.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
I dunno man my wife takes care of our one-year-old not just staying at home but going to the library and stores and the nearby petting zoo and stuff, and he's only been sick once, after a long day of air travel where my wife and I got sick as well—whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and such. Just something I've noticed, is all.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
> whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and s
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
Chicken pox isn't a concern due to vaccines. Common colds especially for very small children are a bit more of a concern due to ear infections. I'd like to avoid putting tubes in my son's ears if possible.
Their own mother or father. This is important for multiple reasons. Some fathers are better parents (I undoubtedly was), if you assume mothers do childcare it limits choices for both men and women. It is a barrier to equal childcare which I feel is ideal.
Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.
Having had two kids go through nursery from an early age, they absolutely had a better time there, with more friends and a higher quality of entertainment, than they would have had at home with either of us.
You can take your kids to parents days out or parks where they consistently meet with other kids and become friends. The option isn't 100% daycare or 100% staying at home and never seeing anyone.
That has to be true for the preservation of your own emotional well being and self image as a good person.
Children being cared for solely by their parents isn't "natural": children used to be raised by entire villages
Yes but a daycare isn't your village raising your kids, it's random people, most aren't from your community much less your own country.
How far away are people traveling for daycare?!?
Ah, now the pearl clutching makes sense. Some of other children in daycare are from the bad and weird ethnicity. Would a 23andme be a good requirement for playdates then?
I didn't say anything about ethnicity - are you kidding me? My community has nearly all ethnicities.
The worry about people from other countries kinda implies it, but maybe I'm misreading.
I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
actually, i strongly believe that the most benefits come from how (not how much) parents interact with and care for their children. i went to kindergarten too, and i grew up spending a lot of tome outside with other kids with plenty of opportunity to socialize, both supervised and unsupervised, but lack of my parents availability (to put it mildly) created an anxiety that completely ruined any social ability that i would have been able to acquire otherwise.
so sure, each case is different, and you are not wrong, but you are putting to much value on good institutions. the heavy lifting still comes from the parents. your children are doing well because you care that they do.
You are citing the results of an experiment that is impossible to perform.
Oh, absolutely! But, so are most of the lessons we draw from life experience, instead of, like, science. That doesn't make them unimportant to talk about, so long as we approach them - and each other - with appropriate degrees of humility and good will.
how would that work? replacing her lost wages to be sure it's not an economic disadvantage sounds hard
There is more to life than economics. Economics should put a floor on what you do in life - that is you need enough food to live, and enough shelter (including clothing)... However once that basics are met you need to ask about trade offs. Rice and beans are a nice meal once in a while, but sometimes I want "steak and caviar". Likewise, all I need to live is a "tiny house" shack with some heat - but I really like having more space. I wouldn't mind having the largest private house in the world complete with staff to maintain it - but the work I would need to afford is not something I'm willing to do (I'm not sure if I could get into the CEO suite if I tried, but I know enough of that CEOs do with their life that I'm not willing for that)
At what point will you decide that something other than economics matter? I can tell you now that I have kids time with the kids is more important than money. However I'm also a staff software engineer and so I'm making more $$ than most. You need to make your own decisions based on your own life.
You are either paying the mother (or father) to stay home, or paying for child care so they can work.
I don't think it has to be a completely level trade on an economic basis. A lot of parents would prefer to be able to stay home even if it's not a purely economic optimum. And staying at home doesn't necessarily preclude earning any income. A parent could still do part time work from home, or even outside the home, when the other parent is there etc.
We had a few decades in the US where it was pretty normal and comfortable to raise a family on a single income. What law of physics dictates that it’s impossible to construct such a society again?
We managed to have a society with a significant number of families living on one income for quite some time. 2 incomes shouldn’t be a requirement to keep a roof over a family’s head. The goal shouldn’t be “2 incomes,” it should be “1 income is sustainable and families can actually be a family.”
Really? What society? The 1950s got close in the US (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but I doubt it), but even then there were a lot of women working.
If you go back to 1800 you will discover that saying families had only one income was because history is generally blind to "women's work" and so you have no idea what women did. (for that matter what most men did is something history only barely mentions). In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely. (historians can give you a much longer and more complex answer - mine is a gross simplification)
> In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely
This was true for my grandparents in 1970s
Yes the 1950s is the existence proof. I don’t see the relevance of the 1850s, our economic productivity has greatly increased since then.
Why can we no longer have the same economic productivity we had in the 1950s that allowed for more single income families?
> Why can we no longer have the same economic productivity we had in the 1950s that allowed for more single income families?
Three words: World War II.
The 1950s were a unique time. World War II had just ended, and much of Europe's manufacturing capacity was destroyed, while the USA had just spent several years building factories to produce everything needed to fuel that war. It put the USA into an extremely favorable position. Everyone needed manufactured goods, half the world needs to rebuild, and the USA happened to own tons of factories that nobody bombed.
Also, during the war, a lot of purchases were being deferred because factories were tooled for war. After the war, they retooled for consumer goods, and years of deferred purchases were suddenly being made.
People think America started to decline after the 50's, but the reality is that the rest of the world just caught back up. Factories rebuilt, economies recovered, and they no longer needed American products.
Bringing back the 1950's boom without a catastrophic war is going to require taking a lot of steps that are very unpopular among the rich though. Landlords especially. The pipeline of "Dad finishes high school -> Gets a union factory job -> supports spouse + 2 kids -> buys suburban house/car -> retires at 65" isn't possible when the factory job pays $11/hr and houses start at $500,000.
Part of the trouble is the gains from productivity growth go to shareholders, not workers. The increased automation in the last 75 years means fewer workers, while the remaining worker's wages remain stagnant, and only the owning class reaps the benefits of the corporate savings. Meanwhile, we keep cutting taxes on them, so they get hoard it all, rather than allowing the money to be reinvested into the next generation.
The last paragraph is the only relevant one.
We can still produce more goods and services with single earner families than we could in the 1950s. But far more of that productivity goes to capital, resulting in multiple earners to support the same standard of living,
1950 proves it is possible. It doesn't prove it was ever common.
That’s a fair point I considered including but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds here so I opted for an overly simplistic description.
Ultimately what I am trying to say is the household income now required for many is too high and often unobtainable without 2 full time incomes outside the home (and often that’s not enough). That’s not sustainable if we don’t want people offloading all their parenting outside their home.
The one working at home (domestic tasks and misc.) one working outside the home (direct income) model is basically impossible now for most people.
Why was economic productivity high enough to allow single income families in the 1950s but not today?
I know many couples today living on one income so the other can raise the kids. They are a tiny minority but you can find them all over. They just have to make life style sacrafices that most are not willing for.
It's not a tiny minority; at least in the US, ~1/4 mothers stay at home, or for mothers with pre-school children, it's ~1/3. It's actually quite normal outside of maybe certain urban professional circles, and spans low to high income.
I’m actually familiar with the 31% statistic and a very important wrinkle to that figure is it includes people on disabilities, retired, unemployed but want to be employed, etc. so we really can’t say “1/3rd of Americans live an ok to comfortable life on one income.”
Ultimately, 69% (more really) don’t.
what economic program or change would you like to fix this?
I didn’t answer the first time you asked because it strikes me as somewhat unproductive and frankly whenever people ask questions like this it’s usually bait, but I’ll assume good faith here.
I am not an expert on this subject, I am not proposing changes and mostly just saying what I observe/my opinion on this issue. This is also a US-centric take so bear that in mind.
If I must voice a solution or something: Top of mind, in no particular order, is we need to talk about PTO being more universal (and not just a measly 10-20 work days a year or so) and, more importantly, we need to crack down on exploitative labor practices that lead to low incomes/too few working hours, compounded by (particularly in the shift work world) demands that people say “yes” to coming in to work at a moment’s notice.
Generally speaking we need more flexibility for families, instead of the current model where we basically demand people burn their PTO (or just lose their job) for basic childcare reasons (sick, early dismissal from school, etc).
This is all really dancing around the core issue though, which is that, despite our rhetoric about strong nuclear families, we’re culturally and economically hostile to families. Particularly those with young children. The support we offer is inadequate and many workplaces punish people for caring for their kids during work hours even when it isn’t really a choice. And when we talk about the cost or difficulty people often respond with “well, you shouldn’t have had kids. You’re irresponsible.” That’s just ridiculous when you think about it. We can’t say we want people to have families and then structure our society in a way that creates unnecessary barriers. Especially when those barriers depend on assumptions like “kids can’t demand anything during work hours.”
I understand it’s easy to complain and offer no solutions, but I feel like what I’m doing is a little more nuanced than that. I don’t know what the answer is but I know what we are doing is not working and needs to be interrogated. That’s often the point of discussion after all - working out a possible solution.
What do you propose we do?
I propose we be very slow and careful because everything I've seen anyone come up with has some unexpected unintended consequence. Some of them are absolutely awful and worse than the current situation. Others are on balance a good compromise.
Since these are unknown unknowns, we can't really effectively debate them right now and so all we can do is be very careful (because there are bad consequences that are predictable as well), very slow, and every time we make a change, watch to see what the result is and be ready to undo it if it's worse than the current situation.
Just to make it even harder, I'll remind you that we don't agree on what a good or bad thing is. so even after we see results, we may have a lot of hard debate on if this is actually a good compromise.
See this is the rub for me: we only like to “move fast and break things” in this country when there are promises of a lucrative IPO.
I’m not saying we need to blitz, but it’s amazing how we always have to exercise extreme caution when talking about social goods. And even that doesn’t work, because with the current state of politics you can’t even get this stuff done at the municipal level. Look at Mamdani. Whether you like him or not, he is actually trying some of the ideas in a granular way. And he is being crucified for it on the right regardless of the initiative and before we see the results.
When someone disagrees with something here, they are suddenly convinced it absolutely cannot work and you have to fight an incredibly uphill battle to even try it. And throughout that testing phase they will do everything in their power to dismantle it.
This is used so often but it’s true. Could you imagine proposing the idea of public libraries today? We literally know the benefits. It is clearly a sound investment, and yet…
That's basically all stuff I support for it. I also think socially something about extended families would be good - grandparents watching kids is good for cohesion and lightens burdens etc.
I also think job hopping is probably related? think of the burden of having to move so often with the housing market and how it might compound things.
But cynically I really doubt we're ready to support and fund any of these kind of changes basically. The best anyone offers is a little more maternity leave (paternity if you're being cool) and some tax or economic incentives to try and reduce daycare costs. Which will not holistically solve anything. Also giving up on WFH probably really hurt us here - that could have helped with housing substantially.
WFH was amazing. I’m now in a hybrid environment and i just want to wfh. It made parenting way, way easier.
making housing affordable also sounds like a pretty hard problem in most of the developed West, yeah? like if you have a good idea definitely pursue it though
It’s an easy problem but our political system is just really stupid, here in the US.
You have to pick what you want to measure. I think that is a different study; measuring the mental and emotional impact of two working parents.
Both are interesting and useful, but I think they need to be separate studies.
This doesn’t even show the family is better off economically — they only measure their earnings, but not lost labor while at home.
You are taking things to the extreme.
I live in Québec.
I have children that both went in a province subsidized kindergarten.
By the way, there are different types of such kindergarten. «Milieu familial» which is literally sending your children to a private house of someone to have them babysit your children during the day. They can have a maximum of 6 children with them.
And there are the CPE or «Centre de la petite enfance». There you have highly qualified personnel, way more resources than a "family environment" can provide. They have many more children. The children can socialize much more.
But, being able to have a place for your child in a CPE is akin to winning the lottery. I wouldn’t be surprised some families have paid bribes to get a place.
That is correct. While I too would like to see what it looks like if one parent staying home is subsidized, this still shows that subsidizing child care is a net benefit for everyone, and as such it's a good idea to keep the program going.
It doesn't show that. Subsidies will shift the margin of who can afford to have a stay at home parent, so if being raised by a parent is better than childcare, you expect people on the margin to lose out. This is in contrast to something like a child subsidy that could be used for childcare or to support a parent raising the child (e.g. in the US, increasing the refundable child tax credit).
> This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself.
I think it's more about whether the investment pays back and defrays the costs.
Women entering the workforce eroded the ability to maintain a household on one income because of depressed wages and housing competition. There's no absolute cost to housing, people will pay what they afford and making more money means the housing cost rises, it doesn't make people "richer" just everything else more expensive.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
And the simplest way to do that is build more housing.
Usually what people mean by this is "build smaller living spaces closer together"
It also assumes having fathers in the work force earning taxable income is a benefit, but you seem totally fine with that assumption.
I made the same point in a less snarky way in my previous comment in this thread.
It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents. Any man who has been an equal or primary carer for their kids will tell you that.
> It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents.
Because this is typically true, even in cases where both parents work.
That is a circular effect. Its true because people assume it and behave accordingly. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Men cannot breast feed. In the first years, the mother is the primary parent, by biological instinct of the child alone. After that, both are parents and it depends if the mother or the father is the better parent. But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
Very few women breastfeed for years. When breastfeeding they can express milk and keep a bottle in the fridge. The father can do literally everything else.
Other than that, what evidence do you have that there is a "biological instinct"?
You want me to give you evidence that infants have a biological instinct to suckle their mother's milk?
No, I want evidence that this means they have a "biological instinct" to regard the mother as the primary parent. One is a instinctive physical behaviour, the other is emotional, but you are claiming that the first proves the second.
Many women can not either. And some children simply will not. I have two boys. One would only breastfeed and never take the bottle. The other would only take a bottle and never breastfeed.
> But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
Is this a complaint against bottle feeding? If so, fuck right off. In the real world there are a lot of reasons not to breast feed, even though most people would love to be able to do it.
It's a complaint against dumping infants into daycare when it's the time of development that they are most dependent on being near their mother.
Why don't you tell your boss to fuck right off instead? Then you don't have to pent up your frustrations and then blow up on strangers online. Do you dare?
That is something we need to fight.
It's always the same thing with these people. The women have to take care of the kids, and stay at home, never go kind and never complain. They should do all the work then the fathers should get to stumble in drunk, entertain their kids for 10 minutes and then force their wives into sex.
It's always wives, mothers, grandmothers.
Agreed the argument should be about single income or dual income families, regardless of gender.
The rich were so successful in manipulating people with culture wars like "women shouldn't work" that the people who fell for it still don't realize the real war was them losing the economic standing in which it was viable for the typical family to have one working parent.
This is just rent. Land Value Tax fixes this.
Agreed, the mother and father should take off from the work force for 18 years to raise their kids and not have to earn a taxable income.
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So from a fiscal perspective, it more or less pays for itself through greater career taxable earnings of the women, according to the study.
(EDIT: unless of course these extra earnings were mostly transfers so-to-speak from non-mothers to mothers)
From a societal and human perspective, unclear that it’s worth it.