Oh, and that weekly "all company" meeting where everyone is there but only the presenter camera is on?... you have no idea what is happening during the boring round of every team manager promoting the this or that which their team was up to.
Someone please explain to me why the downvotes so I can understand.
Is it some puritanical thing? I'm baffled.
Or is HN leaning toward the incel concept? If so, I would argue that nerds are especially well suited for pleasing mates. We live to understand systems and provide optimal solutions. So all we need do is find a partner and serve them. If that's your issue, be not dismayed.
My partner liked to do her work, boring documentation crap, while I did my work on her. It was fun for both of us, and it was certainly a new kind of thing which could not exist in the office space. No doubt, she did high quality work with some pauses. And I made the best of the opportunity.
Those of you downvoting, be real and explain your reasoning. Or fuck off.
Edited: too many typos :(... am I slipping?
Forcing 2 household incomes was/is awful for a healthy society. Women are the only humans that can produce children and they have to do it during a relatively short time window - especially if we want to reproduce at replacement level. Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do because they’re the only ones that can do it.
I’m not sure how western society will continue if we view raising a child instead of having a career as “stepping up”. It’s certainly disrespectful to all the mothers of our future.
This seems pretty reductionist to me. Men can absolutely raise children. Husbands in heterosexual couples should absolutely be raising their children and not leaving the entire task of raising them to their wives. Gay men can also raise children. I don't think you meant to be disrespectful, but when you essentialize like this you end up putting women in a box where their role in society is defined by their biology, and you put men in a box where they feel like they can't and shouldn't participate in certain kinds of labor, leading to women shouldering an unfair proportion.
An anecdote that helped this hit home for me was a story this father told about a neighbor of his. He'd be running errands at the grocery store or whatever, with his kids in tow, and he'd run into his neighbor (also a father) who'd say something like, "Oh, you're stuck babysitting again?" And he didn't have the words to tell him, "I'm not babysitting, I'm raising my kids." The neighbor viewed it as his wife's responsibility to be looking after the kids, and if he was participating in this, it was some sort of exception; and furthermore, a chore.
Personally, that's not the sort of father or husband I intend to be.
You know what says "This country values parents who choose to have children?" Actual replacement of lost income potential and career progression.
Yes, in the US there are tax credits, SNAP, etc. None of these even come close to replacing the life income changes.
If we were serious about it, we'd have something approaching equivalent income replacement, GI Bill-style college funding, and child care cost support in every state*.
Having children should be an income neutral choice, not a burden.
* Side note: On all of these programs, I'd be in favor of supply-side support, rather than demand side reimbursement, given how inflationary reimbursement has been in the education market.
Another great book that covers more of the science in depth is The Developing Mind by Daniel J. Siegel [2].
Sounds extreme? Read the books (and others) yourself and see what conclusions you reach.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Hold-Your-Kids-Parents-Matter/dp/0375... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Developing-Mind-Third-Relationships-I...
In such societies kindergartens are affordable and in the course of little over a year both parents have had a break from work, with full salary compensation, to get to know the new human.
This is massively insulting to men. I'm personally massively insulted by it, having shared custody 50/50 with my ex and certainly done as much to raise my son as she has.
> I’m not sure how western society will continue
Birth rates are below replacement everywhere in the world except sub-Saharan Africa, and declining in sub-Saharan Africa too. Any notion that the low birth rate is a phenomenon that can be ascribed to cultural factors in the west is not supported by data.
>Forcing 2 household incomes was/is awful for a healthy society
Who is doing the forcing here? Many women wanted to enter the workforce. Some didn't want to enter the workforce. Some were forced by their situation or by economic changes, but it isn't like someone on HN was holding a gun to their head telling them to get a job, so I'm a little unclear on your lamentation here.
>Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do
Um, say what? Yeah, biology is amazing stuff. I'm in awe of women on every level. But your comment here is a bit dogwistling - are you intending for this to sound as misogynistic as many of us are reading it? Women who choose to not have children are just as amazing when they choose whatever path they choose.
>I’m not sure how western society will continue if we view raising a child instead of having a career as “stepping up”. It’s certainly disrespectful to all the mothers of our future.
Dude, what? Read back what I wrote - my point, which is well documented in many places - is the way women in our modern era are not only the predominant child-care givers, but also most likely to attend to household duties (cooking, cleaning, etc), and more and more are also the primary breadwinners. If that isn't stepping up in a big way, I don't know what else to call it. Is being a stay-at-home-mom not also commendable and deserving of respect? Absolutely. But your message seems to be one of dog whistling for the bad-old days of the past.
This is as backwards as saying that women should not work and care for the house. If a woman wants to work and build a career let her, and if a couple wants to DINK, let them. Replacement level is a myth and a danger in a world choking up with our waste.
> Raising children should be regarded as one of the most important things a woman can do because they’re the only ones that can do it.
Yeah, you think of them as walking uteruses.
Yeah, it would be nice of society valued child raising more. But, it actually did not and instead the caregivers were often in bad or impossible situations.
Oh shove off. My dad by himself for years absolutely raised us without my biological mother in the picture at all. Men can and should be raising children too.
Basic human biology is not taught in schools.
My favorite question to ask is: "why you want a career?" to pretty much anyone who speaks in this manner.
Serious question to people, I don't get it. I love learning, I'm highly qualified in the academic space and enjoy picking at problems. I've written papers, patents, well paid, etc. Highly successful by most metrics.
That said, I don't work for a "career", I work to afford me opportunity.
A family is an investment in the future, it provides you happiness, but more importantly purpose. Sure, there's a lot of stress, and you have to invest a lot of time. That said, it pays off an order of magnitude in terms of life satisfaction and having future opportunities. Who's going to take you on vacation when you're 65 and have a bad hip -- if not your children? My proudest achievement are things my children have done, not the accolades, promotions, bonuses, etc I've received in my career.
If I work hard, slave at night to get my presentation(s) done, will our product be better? Maybe, but in all likelihood that just makes me look good enough to get promoted, but 5 years later I wont have anything but a pay check to show for it. Wealth without purpose is worthless.
Right - so imagine that you didn't have that opportunity to do that academic work because you have an elderly parent at home who needs care. You've got two little kids at home who aren't yet school age and thus needs care. You wouldn't be content with your work situation in that case, right? Sure, it might just be for a few years - but what if those few years block you from key promotions or research opportunities? Do you get it? I'm certainly not saying that everyone should be focused on their careers, I'm just observing that sometimes people are making tradeoffs between their careers and their personal life, and more often than not it is the female in the heterosexual relationship that is making more of those tradeoffs.
Financial independence.
Anyone who thinks SAH parents can free themselves of this worry is naive. You never get the time back, you never get the experience back, you never get the training or the raises or the bonuses. You never get the retirement savings. If you are unfortunate enough to live in the US you are entirely dependent on your spouse for healthcare.
It's an unfathomably vulnerable situation to be in but it gets brushed off. There is still an attitude that SAH is a 'gift' given to a parent, see how often a working spouse will say they 'let' their partner stay at home, that the working partner 'supports' the family. A SAH spouse is not an equal partner with a 50% contribution. More of an oldest child with extra responsibilities and a higher allowance.
Pre-nups are often advocated as a way to ensure fairness if the relationship falls apart. I'd rather see pre-SAH legal documents. The SAH spouse gets half the earnings, gets half the purchases, gets half the retirement savings. A working spouse who isn't willing to sign it is a working spouse who doesn't believe that being home and watching children is a 'real' job.
It’s important to remember that most people have “jobs,” not “careers.”
Weird, I never hear this. I never see discussions of about women wanting to be homemakers, especially as much as the opposite(women wanting to enter the workforce). I wonder if people with these opinions just find it more easily.
<cough> there are also some men out here with (how can I put this nicely?) less-than-stellar-careers precisely because of this factor, too.
[We live in a perhaps-somewhat-less-than-entirely-enlightened part of Europe] and our local "Mum and Baby" group finally got round to renaming itself to "Parent and Baby" group after I started attending the third time around... :)
Really? She traded one job for another or does corporate life really matter that much to her?
What's missing to link those women to matching jobs? There must also be many new mothers who would like to work but who haven't found a WFH job.
There's been this impression out there that Millenials (who are at child-bearing age now) are less likely to have children. It would be interesting to research if they are just sort of "late bloomers" who perhaps by virtue of WFH or maybe other TBD factors have decided it's now time to start a family.
The free market cannot sustain the day-care market and only government intervention is feasible in the long run. As they did during WWII and was axed by President Nixon. This single act drove the labor market during the war.
I love it, and I feel truly lucky that my life has given me the opportunity to focus on my kids.
Baby booms have previously been positively correlated with blackouts, snowstorms, hurricanes and power outages. Now, remote work is a covariate as well. We're heading into a prolonged 2023 recession, coupled with job cuts, energy shortage, remote work as cost-cutting recipe and climate-related catastrophes inducing major downtime => huge baby boom in 2024.
My boss works long hours and now has 2 kids under the age of 4. Pre-Covid he would have been out of the house from about 7-7 and only able to have moments of interaction at the edges of the day. Now, he works about the same hours, but when he takes a break, when he gets lunch or coffee, when his wife is busy, he can spend time with the kids. Play a little peek-a-boo, read some Dr Seuss, watch them grow. Our company is pushing back-to-work policies and he's pulling every string to get exceptions for our group. I think if push comes to shove then he's gone.
My brood is older but boy I like being there to help with the math homework. Even 10 minute to go though the process of "Here's the strategy, here's an example, here's why it works this way" makes a huge difference. I let them work out the problem by themselves, and 10 minutes later they come back with "I got it!". My partner, the scientist, is in his element. If we're not careful the kids are going to be going back to class and correcting their teachers.
It's redefined what it means to be a working parent. I hope it sticks. I'm old enough that I'm seeing the regrets from parents who quit their jobs to stay home and are in a unenviable situation post-divorce.
I will say, as a former teacher, I loved being corrected.
"Much of that cohort was able to work from home, which gave parents more time and flexibility to deal with the life changes and demands that pregnancy and a new baby bring."
I guess it's indelicate to say that when a man and woman are both stuck at home, more babies will be conceived. People who were unattached during the lockdown were probably less likely to find a mate, though.
It would be inaccurate to assume an increase in frequency of sex will lead to more babies, in the age of access to very effective birth control.
Many (most I assume?) choose when to have or try to have children.
Might sound a bit too cynical for this site, but plenty of people decided to get a dog in 2020. Why shouldn't they choose to have a baby for the same reasons?
Pardon the slightly off-topic comment but statements like these are misleading. It's economic growth in the true sense of having X and growing it into X+Y. At best, it's more like economic expansion.
The truth is, it's population growth. Instead of the abstraction why not simply report the population growth knowing that eventually the economy will expand to that population?
There's a difference between "the economy grew" and "more births." Maybe it's because politicians can't really take credit for the latter?
I went looking for this line in the article, and sure enough... "The increase in birth rates was more pronounced for first-time mothers..."
Take that for what you want.
Most babies spend a lot of time sleeping so you can probably get some work done, but if your child needs you you are going to have to drop what you're doing.
There is no problem if you are honest about this and your employer accepts it, but just as somebody can hold multiple jobs and not come clean about it, it seems like a parent could also dissemble about it.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/01/14/some-gender...
If you are a mother making near minimum wage (which, these days, is around $15 in most major metros, regardless of what the actual law is), and you need to be on the job site for 8 hours/day, you're barely if even covering the cost of child care plus commuting and other job related costs. And as a tradeoff you get to have the stress of the job plus the joy of having someone else raise your kids. It just doesn't make sense.
Also, importantly, your Earned Income Tax Credit will be reduced if you make more money (not 1-1, but just another reason why working in a low paying job doesn't really make sense if you have children and a spouse/partner that can support your family).
> What accounts for the larger labor force withdrawals among less-educated women than men during the pandemic? It is complex but there seems to be a consensus that it partly reflects how women are overrepresented in certain health care, food preparation and personal service occupations that were sharply curtailed at the start of the pandemic. Although women overall are more likely than men to be able to work remotely, they are disproportionately employed in occupations that require them to work on-site and in close proximity to others.
> It is less clear whether women’s parental roles and limited child care and schooling options have played a large role in forcing them to exit the labor market. The number of mothers and fathers in the labor force has declined in similar fashion over the past two years.
I'll bet most of the workers went and found other jobs and won't be coming back.
I was pretty jealous of stay at home dads (I know two) and the things they were able to for their kids. My kids are older now and that ship has sailed for me.
Fewer workers + fast economic growth = labor shortage.
Might work for first 6 months when all they do is sleep, eat, and lay around, but as soon as they are moving or aware that they can get things they want, predictability goes out the window. Although, I would not even bet on the first 6 months being easy due to sleep deprivation.
Definitely not an upgrade in my experience
People want to have their cake and eat it too, and I suspect by the animosity a lot of younger people have for the older generation that it isn't working out as well as they'd hoped.
And if a woman wants to be a homemaker and focus on molding the next generation?
or at least the process of making babies :)
Look at east vs west Germany. West Germany struggled with demand for social and child services during the pandemic, but the East never dismantled theirs, and it showed.
Care and support are jobs.
> Right - so imagine that you didn't have that opportunity to do that academic work because you have an elderly parent at home who needs care. You've got two little kids at home who aren't yet school age and thus needs care.
Many people will choose the elderly parents and little kids over academic work and promotions, given they have enough money to support themselves.
The academic work and promotions are just a means to an end, which for many is the ability to support and raise a family.
So that's 9 months + some amount of months breast feeding. What's the excuse after that? Couples of all types need to find the balance that is right for them, but the comments in this thread trying to use biology as an excuse to make 18 years (or life, as I see it) worth of child-rearing strictly a "women's issue" are living in the past.
>Many people will choose the elderly parents and little kids over academic work and promotions, given they have enough money to support themselves. The academic work and promotions are just a means to an end, which for many is the ability to support and raise a family.
Must be nice. Meanwhile, the people in my area have shitty low paying jobs and can't afford housing, and are still trying to support their kids and elderly parents, all while having eff-all in the way of access to quality, affordable health care.
The possibilities are endless to make having a child easier for both mothers and fathers and people are stuck on "women have to breastfeed so they have to sacrifice their careers".
Why not something like a GI-bills structure to reward having children? Blows my damn mind people think sacrifice is a necessary part of having a child from society's point of view.
Times how ever many children they decide to have. Generally during prime years of career development. That is not a trivial commitment.
> but the comments in this thread trying to use biology as an excuse to make 18 years (or life, as I see it) worth of child-rearing strictly a "women's issue" are living in the past.
Yes, that is why I did not make that claim.
> Meanwhile, the people in my area have shitty low paying jobs and can't afford housing, and are still trying to support their kids and elderly parents, all while having eff-all in the way of access to quality, affordable health care.
Yes, that's the part about money being a means to an end. Being able to commit one parent to child raising is a privilege requiring having basic economic needs met on one income. That used to be the reality in the US, but no longer.
> Who is doing the forcing here?
It's called the two income trap[1]. Back when it was traditional that one person worked, the market recognized this reality and prices of everything made it possible to live off of one income. Then, slowly we started seeing more and more two-income families. Two-income families could bear to spend more on everything, so the market responded by adjusting costs higher. Soon, it became difficult, then impossible for a family to survive on one income, so then everyone had to go two-income. Now, the same standard of living we once could achieve on one income, requires two incomes. We've doubled the workforce but gained nothing in terms of standard of living.
-- That the idea that if they could be SAHMs, every woman would pick that route is utterly misguided. Some women would choose that, others would choose careers, some would do both.
-- That every family will make the choice of who is employed outside the home on their own. My ex-wife didn't work outside the home for many years (by her choice not mine). I know many couples with only a single breadwinner. So yes - the two-income trap is a real thing, but it isn't like it was suddenly law that every able-bodied adult had to enter the workforce.
No. Back when there was class power sufficient for working families to withdraw one partner from the labor market, they did so. Then that power eroded, and they were forced to send the second partner into the workforce. This also involved a wave of inflation that was never reversed for housing, healthcare, education, or energy prices.
So you answered your own question.
> Read back what I wrote - my point, which is well documented in many places - is the way women in our modern era are not only the predominant child-care givers, but also most likely to attend to household duties (cooking, cleaning, etc), and more and more are also the primary breadwinners.
That contradicts the data I've seen cited, which found that men perform more paid work and women perform more work in the home, but the total number of hours they work is basically the same.
For a little more cynicism, that fits with their finding that the "boom" was most pronounced for first-time parents, aka the ones that weren't stuck home with their kids...
I'll end that it doesn't really matter at the end of the day. Some people hated being trapped at home and others thoroughly enjoyed it.
Almost makes one think that they're not quite civilized, they just put economics above all and rely on exploiting other nations to prop the whole thing up.
We're supposed to be entering an age of automation. But now that the yoke of labor may be lifted from our shoulders finally, all anybody can talk about is "Full Employment".
I like your usage of "supposed." I feel like I have been seeing "Automation will replace <insert entity> in <made-up unit of time>" for the past 15 years or more.
I can't even get Siri to work 95% of the time let alone have her and her virtual brethren overtake society. I do not doubt it's possible one day, but assuming I am average, I have about 40 or so years left on this planet, and I doubt I will see it in that time.
I'm not trying to discredit the wonder innovations and milestones we have achieved so far, but it's the new "flying cars" to me.
The proof is that every state with paid parental leave and extended parental leave is led by Democrats.
And federal Republicans voted against paid parental leave in 2021’s build back better bill.
Exploiting this gap is how Trump got elected—remember that whole thing where the Republicans didn't even bother to generate an official party platform when he was running? That's because he threw theirs in the trash and just went with whatever ordinary Republicans chatting with other ordinary Republicans at a backyard BBQ say the government ought to do. Trying to come up with anything like their ordinary platform those years would have been pointless, or even harmful—explicitly adopt Trump's message, and you're in trouble if he ends up going down in flames and you have to backpedal, plus it'll piss off some donors; adopt your usual shit, and Trump's fans will be pissed off at you. So they just didn't make one, which was probably their best move under the circumstances.
Now, the follow-through may have been lacking and any lip-service toward that sort of thing by his hangers-on and imitators may be entirely disingenuous (as his probably was, too, at least most of it), but the gap between R voter and R official or de-facto official policy is real and it's big and Trump's messaging was laser-targeted at using that against his Republican opponents to get the initial nomination.
The "build a wall" stuff was lifted straight from that kind of actual-voter real-talk sort of thing. They literally want the government to just build a wall and assume they only haven't because of corruption and ill-intent among elected officials—it's obviously a good idea, from their perspective. On the campaign trail Trump even vaguely talked about "fixing healthcare" in ways that would surely have looked a lot like "socialized medicine"—because R voters support those policies when they're not being called "Socialist" or "Obamacare" or otherwise being demonized and mis-represented by their own media and politicians. Talk specifics, and they support them, talk about socialized medicine broadly and they tell you to fuck off to Venezuela with the other commies. That's another gap between R voter wishes and R party policy/actions.
Republican politicians also tend to support neo-liberal economic and trade policy, in deed if not in word, while their voters largely hate it (remember the tough-on-China talk and America-first trade policy and the trans-national trade regime skepticism and all that? That's Trump aiming at the party/voter gap, yet again)
"How can it possibly be that a major US political party can largely ignore the actual will of its own voters, for decades on end?" allow me to introduce you to our totally fucked-up electoral system and how it all but guarantees two viable parties at a time, both of which are also all but guaranteed to be disliked by a ton of their own voters. It's extremely bad. :-(
[EDIT] Hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if you could get a very high percentage—maybe not 51%, but a lot—of Republican voters to say they support a federal abortion law that's identical to Roe v. Wade's (maybe even without PP v Casey's modifications) effects—legalizing early abortion, but leaving laws about later-term abortion mostly up to the states—as long as you described what it did instead of short-handing it as "codifying Roe v. Wade" (indeed, you'd have to avoid mentioning that it had anything to do with Roe v Wade at all).
To be fair, we put it right in the name. It's not market-ism, or productivity-ism, or competition-ism, or higher-standard-of-living-ism. It's CAPITAL-ism.
Also, Zoom has gotten surprisingly good - the "high" setting on background noise for "barking dogs" actually works frighteningly well - people on calls have apologized for their exploding dogs because the UPS guy assaulted the doorbell and we've heard absolutely nothing.
You can make things more equal between men and women. But some unescapable biological realities still exist.
> Why not something like a GI-bills structure to reward having children? Blows my damn mind people think sacrifice is a necessary part of having a child from society's point of view.
Sounds something that Mitt Romney and moderate Republicans (if there are any other ones left) would be all in favor of. Would be a popular bi-partisan policy proposal in a sane US political environment.
It is insignificant. What does matter waaay more are years and years after pregnancy and breastfeeding. How the care is split during those years, how much the parent going to pick up kids is penalized in the workplace.
Sorry to go off topic, but I cannot believe my state is still $7.25 an hour. There hasn't been a single increase in minimum wage since 2008.
Shouldn't women be allowed to take the first year of their child's life to provide for their long-term emotional development without jeopardizing their careers?
1. in the evolutionary sense of what human psychology has been selected for, including the increase of maternal prolactin and oxytocin during breastfeeding
Yes. Men should be allowed the same right.
One might insist on equivalent policies for the biological sexes on ideological grounds, e.g., men's rights, which is perfectly fine. However, from a logical perspective, arguing for males to have time off for the first year is jointly dependent on the biological argument (which applies to females) AND the ideological argument. Alternatively, from an empirical perspective, the research around males may exist and I am simply not aware of it.
I can’t tell if it’s concern trolling, poor english comprehension, or tradwife enthusiasts tipping their figurative trilbys to one another. It’s funny nonetheless!
That's not an edge case, it's an inevitable consequence of being financially dependent. It happens 100% of the time.
Why, some women have even found working to be more enjoyable to being at home with kids.
All joking aside, my wife is extremely worried about the impact her career will take from having children and her life goals include executive level leadership as part of her career. So you could, in fact say that corporate life really does matter that much to her.
https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/contraception/uninten...
> In 2008, women reported that more than half of all pregnancies (51%) were unintended. By 2011, the percentage of unintended pregnancies declined to 45%. That is an improvement, but some groups still tend to have higher rates of unintended pregnancy. For example, 75% of pregnancies were unintended among teens aged 15 to 19 years.
I imagine this has continued to trend downwards since 2011, especially amongst women who had the option of remote work (more educated, more lucrative careers, higher degree of financial freedom, less religious, etc).
When people actively want not to have children, they tend to be fastidious about using their contraceptives as intended, but they're less careful when they are less opposed to the idea.
Even if someone gets pregnant earlier than they had actually "planned," many are quickly delighted after the first bout of surprise and the slight stress of moving up the related plans, though this is not always captured in surveys.
There's a vast range from "we cannot have children at all" to "we are intentionally doing every single thing possible to conceive" and many people end up in the "eh if it happens it happens" middle somewhere.
Not being combative but as someone who isn't up to snuff on this subject can you provide some examples? I haven't seen examples of this so I'd like to read more.
In 2020 there was a SCOTUS decision allowing employers to refuse insurance coverage for contraception for their employees for "religious or moral" reasons, aka "we don't like it". https://www.npr.org/2020/07/08/889112788/the-supreme-court-a...
At least twelve states have laws allowing institutions and healthcare professionals to simply refuse to provide contraception if they want. https://www.guttmacher.org/state-policy/explore/refusing-pro...
Meanwhile, the push to classify some methods (morning-after pill & IUDs), which may prevent fertilized eggs from implanting, as "abortifacients" and therefore subject to the abortion bans now active in many states, has been going on for years but is picking up steam. Missouri's abortion ban in particular, now active, defines pregnancy as a fertilized egg, implanted or not.
It seems like the solution to that would be to pick a different insurance plan (Obamacare marketplace has no plans that restrict contraceptive coverage) or go through one of the hundreds of organizations like Planned Parenthood. Since any employee is free to pick an Obamacare plan by law, does that not ensure contraceptive coverage is always available?
This is a really depressing way of looking at things.
> This is a really depressing way of looking at things.
No, it's not depressing, it's total BS. Anyone who's ever been in a remotely serious relationship knows keeping score like "percent contribution" leads to the end of that relationship.
So given the fact that financially independent women do not have kids at similar rates as financially dependent women, perhaps it is an important part of a relationship.
And a disposable one at that!
It is possible for parents and grandparents to structure their lives around it being convenient for the traditional role. The fact that American society doesn't do this is a bit of a tragedy. I know families that engage the entire extended family, including grandparents, in raising the next generation.
(In fact, its an evolutionary thing. It answers the question of why does evolution keep grandparents around and healthy? Generally, when an organism no longer serves a useful purpose towards propagation of the species, it dies.)
That is, I wouldn't give too much credence to these kinds of "historical facts" on "traditional roles".
Our three kids are gonna cost us at least half a million dollars by the time they're all 18, between lost income, daycare costs, higher housing costs (not just a bigger house to maintain a similar comfort level, but also one in a much more expensive area than we might otherwise live in, since we have to care about school quality—an uncomfortably small house in a good school district still costs more than a huge house in a merely so-so district, let alone an actually-bad district, in our city), healthcare costs, transportation costs, plus all the smaller stuff like clothes, food, et c. And e.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g optional is also far more expensive, like vacations.
And that's if we don't chip in for their post-secondary education or, like, give them a few grand to get their feet under them when they leave. Or buy them cars or any of that (we're not there yet, thank god). It could easily end up being closer to a million than a half-million, without even going nuts.
The tax credits don't even come close to covering it. Worse, because many of those expenses are front-loaded and so hit in our relatively-young years, the opportunity cost of that money ends up being enormous. The shadow cast on our future savings is way bigger than what we spend on them directly. We'd be retiring by 50, 55 at the latest if not for having kids, and also be able to spend more freely. As it is IDK if we're gonna be able to retire until we just can't work anymore.
Kids are basically financial suicide unless you're crazy-rich. Like they're great and all but god damn do I understand why people choose not to have them, even if they like the idea of having kids.
Or if you're very poor, then the more kids you have, the more you receive in benefits. Many poor people manage to have more kids than middle class people.
The middle class parent thinks "if I have another kid how will I pay for their college?" The poor parent just sends their kids to community college or if they're amazingly brilliant and get into Harvard, then they'll get a free full ride because they're poor.
But, the result of all this psychology and zero-sum competition (as housing/schools are) is that kids tend to eat all available income up to a point—and, indeed, if you cross a certain income threshold and can afford top-tier private school, there's another entire tier of potential and hard-to-convince-yourself-not-to-do spending above that.
I always thought a low birth rate was a net-good: Something all countries are striving for. Like when your country drops below 2 births per woman, it has "made it" into the ranks of Developed Countries. Lower birth rate means fewer bodies to feed and a smaller environmental footprint. Sure, I guess it also means you have less "cannon fodder" both economically and militarily, but net net low birth rate countries are better off than high birth rate countries.
A lot of developed countries have done a lot of things about it. A long time ago. It's mostly just the US that doesn't really seem to care about families, as far as I can tell. It's one of only 3 countries in the world that doesn't even guarantee paid maternity leave.
An example of policy would be explicit subsidy of child support. Culture might be preferring to live in villages rather than cities. Economic structure might be lower housing costs for child-bearing families. More of France's immigrants may have been female, whereas Germany got mainly male immigrants/Gastarbeiters, etc.
France's total fertility rate fell below replacement around 1980 and it is still below replacement.[1] So if policy makes a difference, France is not trying hard enough.
1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/FERT/TOT/...
without placing a value judgement on the outcomes, this assertion is only true if the population decreases overall, which doesn't happen in the countries with permissive immigration policies. other countries with low birth rates and strict immigration policies have different problems, like declining property values, difficulty paying for pension/retirement obligations, shrinking gdp (even if gdp per capita is increasing), etc.
Consequently, future generations will always be paying for present day late life social support.
Because of this, negative population growth requires higher and higher present day tax burdens to continue paying equivalent benefits.
And population economics are not something you can paper over, because they're by definition on the order of your entire country's economic output.
Now that some countries actually have shrinking populations, everybody switched from panicking about overpopulation to panicking about having not enough working population to support too many elderly people. Immigration is the popular way out, but somehow I'd expect this shouldn't have been such a big problem in the first place. A couple of decades ago, women barely worked (paid, that is; they were probably overrepresented in unpaid elderly care).
I don't think a shrinking population should be this big a problem for a country. Sure, it probably requires some economic choices, just like everything does. But especially for densely populated countries dealing with housing shortages, a lower birth rate shouldn't have to be a bad thing.
Only if you're willing to starve the elderly.
I was helping a friend buy a car the other day. The salesman kept coming back with a "final" offer and "we can't go lower than that", etc., etc. But I advised my friend to hold the line, and he did till the offer got into his price range.
I knew about the term sheet ruse, it had been tried on me twice and on another friend of mine.
I also knew that I'd be up against a negotiator who does it all day every day, and so I expected game on.
Hard to hire experienced employees if no one in your industry (i.e. nail care) can change employers.
And then there's the latest 'you owe the (arbitrary) cost of your training if you leave before X' restrictions.
Also, car buying is the worst. The only working formula I've found is to deal with internet sales, confirm the number, show up, and say you're walking if they add anything but taxes to it.
Or a couple who has already had their desired amount of kids would not end up with more kids even though they are having more sex due to them using birth control.
Whereas a 30 to 35 year old couple who was already planning on babies in the next couple years would have opted out of birth control to take advantage of the increased time being spent at home.
If all else stays the same but the amount of sex goes up, the number of babies will also go up.
Are the 25yo couples who are having more sex making other changes to decrease likelihood of pregnancy? Realistically? Probably not. They probably use their birth control the same way they always have, since it previously worked fine for the amount of sex they were having before. They don't necessarily think, "Oh, I'm increasing the odds that I'll get hit by the failure rate," especially if the way they've been using it has been "successful" for years.
https://americanpregnancy.org/unplanned-pregnancy/birth-cont...
Even the pill is listed at 9%, which is low, and of course, abortion is the last resort to completely prevent a birth.
For couples who are finished having children, a vasectomy also basically has a 0% failure rate.
It's especially manageable if both parents are WFH.
Unless you and I have very different types of meetings, the ones I have are usually short and focused and I would be very annoyed if someone was constantly interrupted or distracted (just like I would be if someone is constantly checking their phone).
The vast majority of meetings are useless and unproductive, and if half the people on the call are muted the entire time nobody would ever notice.
I've worked with employees distracted by kids. Distracted by substance abuse. Distracted by mental illness. Distracted by video games, TV, something on their phone, or even just a basic disinterest in the job.
When we talk about the job market as a whole -- such as in the article above -- it doesn't help to focus on a hyper-selective section of capable, skilled software engineers. The vast majority of workers are in a much messier, less efficient and effective environment.
Maybe I should dig up some old IBM PCs, those things were tank-like, but likely the kids would start trying to beat each other with the keyboard.
Once they can crawl it's off to the races. Basically anything can hold their attention for half an hour while you take a short meeting.
I've worked from home with two infants, then toddlers, and now kids. Infants were the hardest.
Note that "kid safe" and "kid unchangeable" are not the same, be sure to leave things that they can safely mess up (boxes of Duplo are great for this). It helps even more if you've told them not to touch the Duplo, heh.
And if they have visual line-of-sight to you, they'll often stay calmer, but if you move out of line of sight then the howling starts.
I have not seen or heard of many businesses that are completely asynchronous.
Nobody would even think to say "I hate when our meetings get interrupted because Suzy has insert medical condition here and has to go off-camera for a few minutes".
I would react similarly if somebody was playing a video game during a meeting.
They're usually (at least at Ford) compensated on volume-moved-above-minimum, not profit-per-vehicle.
Nine out of every hundred is a LOT to start out with. And if the "average amount of otherwise potentially procreative sex" part increases by, say, 11%, you get one new pregnancy out of every hundred.
If a car is in demand, it sells near MSRP. If it's a high volume commodity that's hard to sell in the required numbers, you can discount it heavily. If everyone wanted to buy a car at "the best possible deal you've done in the last 90 days" dealerships would basically be out of business by definition. So someone has to hold the line or the entire system doesn't even work.
Im a very frugal person and don't even buy new cars, but why some people think they deserve to pay less than their neighbor did blows my mind still to this day.
Deserve has nothing to do with it. It's about both parties negotiating for the best price.
That said, there may be very good reasons not to push too hard. You might want to do business with the other party in the future. You might want a good review on Google. You might not want to take advantage of an elderly person or an inexperienced wide-eyed kid.
But any party going on about what they "deserve" is not going to earn sympathy.
BTW, did you ever watch "King of Cars", a reality TV show at a car dealership? I found it both entertaining and instructive.
My basic summary of the entire absurdity of the common tactic of "what's the best price you can do?" is as follows..
The best price is a vague concept depending on where we want to draw the line.
Best price I can do and keep my boss happy with my performance?
Best price I can do if I want to be below average at this company?
Best price I can do if I want to ask for a personal favor from my boss to allow me to heavily discount this car beyond established metrics we have and sell it this one time?
Best price I can do if I want to be yelled at tomorrow morning?
Best price I can do if I want both my boss and I to be yelled at tomorrow?
Best price I can do if I want my boss to negatively impact his career by the owner seeing him make deals like this too often?
Best price I can do if I want to get myself or my boss fired the next day? I could probably somehow secretly sell a car $10k under what I should... Once.
Where do we stop? Some nice people pay MSRP. Some people ask for a gesture of a discount. Some people ask for what discount is fair to market and we'd be ok with, and take it. Some people want below market, and we try to stop it if the car is in demand or we have enough volume. Some people want prices so low they'd fall into the "negatively impact the salesperson or teams career". Sometimes we even take those, but it's always a calculation between taking a below market average offer or waiting for one of the earlier described people to walk in.
1. the final paperwork has an interest rate a full percentage point higher than the agreed upon number
2. the "new" car turned out to have 5,000 miles on it in the final paperwork
3. an extra $1000 charge magically appeared on the final paperwork
4. the total on the final paperwork was quite a bit higher than the sum of the figures above it
2. I assume the car was looked at and maybe test driven. I find it hard to believe this was a 'ruse' left for the final moments. I can imagine people getting confused or not hearing or understanding I suppose.. someone wants a discount, salesperson says we have a demo over here we can do a large discount on.. and somehow the miles or reason for discount were not discussed. I wouldn't call this a ruse, and once again not something I've done or seen since it's just a waste of time. Obviously the person will discover the miles at some point, so why have the drama.
3. Illegal to pad a term sheet and then stuff a $1000 'charge'. You'd atleast have to have the customer sign the contract for what they were getting for their $1000. Dealers attempt to add things often, but they can't be secretly padded into the initial payment discussions. It's superficially easy for a customer to snap a photo of a preemptive term sheet and burn a dealership at the DMV dealers office or back out a whole deal months or even years after purchase if this was documented. Again, not something I saw in 10 years.
4. I saw countless people get confused by the "total" on the contract, usually when selling a used car to a less mathematically and logical buyer for some reason. You can sell a Porsche to an accountant and all goes great everytime, but sell a used Corvette to someone that personally requested a 72 month loan and watch drama unfold as he wonders why the total of payments on his $50k car is $70k. Luckily I was good and could always explain reality of sales tax, registration, and interest to these people. But not everyone is so lucky.
Maybe the dealerships I worked at were above average in integrity, because they were high performers and high performers don't have time to fraud induced drama, but honestly if you land on a dumb salesperson that can't explain your confusion to you, you can end up thinking your confusion was their attempt at a scam.
The salesperson then attempts to discern which of the 3 the customer is actually paying attention to and optimizes that one at the expense of the others.
Because the input vars (e.g. interest rate, term length, MSRP) and dealership profit are concealed behind the displayed numbers, the deal can be "adjusted" to please the customer but keep the same sale profit.
Sometimes I worry that many parents focus in "teaching" or "instilling" a desired behavior at the expense of "role-modeling" it through personal lived demonstration. The latter can be far more powerful because of how kids are hardwired to mimic adults... at least up until a certain age where they go the opposite way. :P
> Maybe I should dig up some old IBM PCs
It's be great if there were more "child's version of adult thing" toys that focused on a realistic appearance rather than multicolored plastic. (Unless there's some research showing that actually helps?)
Beyond that, most women strongly want to be with their babies. There was a NYT article a few years back about the boom of internet baby monitors, and it was kind of heartbreaking -- a bunch of women sitting at their desks glued to their baby monitors wishing they could be with their babies.
I think we've really fucked up as a society when "women can have kids and be with them" is considered strange or a luxury -- it should be the most natural thing in the world.
No profit in it, though.
I then went on to quit work and stayed home to raise our daughter (she's now nearing 28 year old).
I'm a strong believer in having a stay-at-home parent, but this "women raise children" thing needs to stop.
But that doesn't change that the mother-child bond is a unique and special thing, and that there are real benefits to breast-feeding, straight from the breast.
And beyond, the simple fact is that many women really want to be with their babies.
It's misguided to pretend that there aren't biological realities underlying these preferences. We should try to tailor our policies to meet the desires of the most people possible.
(Not, of course, in a coercive way! If a mother would like to continue working and pump, then of course she should be supported in that. In past societies maybe this was the fight that needed to be fought, but now I think it's the opposite.)
It has always been a luxury.
Unless they were wealthy enough to hire domestic servants or happened to participate in the postwar economic boom in the West that reduced the intensity of household domestic labor via household appliances, women of the past also got limited time with their children.
They were doing intense labor at home, in the fields, and as domestic servants for wealthier people. The same scenario happens today, as anyone who has hired in-home childcare knows.
Historically, precious few women could afford not to work, whether that work was compensated or not.
I agree that we should strive for an economic system that gives more parents more options to spend time raising their children, but we shouldn't couch that in faux-naturalistic ideals of what the situation was in the past.
People living this way of life are not working themeslves to the bone; they spend lots of time just hanging out and socializing.
I think the gruling overwork that most of us experience is more a feature of fuedal and then industrial culture, than a natural state of existence.
But still we are in real terms actually super rich, so it should be possible to somehow rearrange things to get back to that ideal, I think.
(Of course there are deeper issues here too -- just having a mom sit at home all alone with her baby is actually not very good either. Really, you want mom and baby to be integrated into a meaningful, rich cultural environment. And I think it would be nice if kids were more integrated into normal life, in general.)
Our priorities as a society have been inverted in this area.
No, they have not. The states that protected abortion rights are also the states that offer paid parental leave and paid disability leave to new moms. And the states that restricted abortion rights are the states that offer zero parental leave.
A significant portion of US society supports helping new parents, and especially mothers. It does not have enough votes in the Senate though.
Just handwaving "but pumps!" really undermines how much effort this takes for women.
Of course none of this stuff is critical, but I think for most people, the ideal scenario really is breastfeeding, straight from the breast -- and it's a shame that's so hard for so many to do in our society.
Both my sibling and I, along with my wife and her siblings were formula fed. My kids were 100% formula-fed as well, because my wife decided she didn't want to waste her time pumping. Both generations are perfectly normal and healthy. We all caught COVID with only minimal symptoms.
Not having to breastfeed took an enormous amount of stress off my wife, and allowed us to split the work of raising our kids more efficiently
In Canada, I've heard that breastfeeding has been taken to a religious morality war, where some parents had to sneak in formula into the hospital because the mother couldn't either breastfeed properly or weren't producing enough, or simply didn't want to.
There are some advantages to breastfeeding and some disadvantages. I think the narrative of companies in the 3rd world trying to hook low-income families on formula should be considered a crime. But there's nothing inherently wrong with formula and it raises perfectly healthy children.
Unfortunately, they had a hard time getting their daughter to cooperate.
At their first post-natal checkup with their doctor, their daughter had not gained any weight since leaving the hospital. He told them to just feed her formula and don't worry about it. Apparently, the "lactation consultant" was not affiliated with the hospital in any way and this sort of thing was very common.
It also seems certain that there are advantages to being breast-fed. Exactly how strong these are is hard to stay -- as far as I know, all the research is observational, and so it becomes hard to tease out what is the effect of breast-feeding and what is just coming along for the ride (correlated w/ the type of person that prioritizes breast-feeding).
It's still a worthy goal to have a society that makes it easy for women who want to breast-feed to do so.
(And I hear you on the moralizing, which is obnoxious. Let the parents decide what is best for their baby and life situation; it is not anyone else's business.)
I find this to be a bizarre metric to use.
Is this true in all societies, or just societies like USA where most people live in car-centric suburbs isolated from any sense of community?
In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
Beyond that, yes, men are perfectly capable of performing child rearing tasks. Note, of course, this does not negate the argument against a two income family. Having a society where one income can support a family means fathers can devote themselves to raising their children, and so can mothers. Or alternate roles. Or one full time career and one part time career.
Why not (even if only partially)? Biology at the individual level has physical consequences, which necessarily affects the available roles and roles chosen. It makes no sense to expect that this relationship is different in aggregate.
And until you can find a way for biological males to have a baby, biology is going to determine the role of childbearing.
Just look at the amount of suspicion that men draw in elementary teaching roles.
This may seem reasonable but it also often ends marriages, which is arguably a worse outcome for the child(ren).
Still, the approach presumably should be more, not less, support for women who want (need?) to try this?
> In Africa there are women who go back to work selling things in the town market shortly after their babies are born - with the baby strapped to their back and breast fed on demand. No need for daycare but mom can still work!
I genuinely know much less about social structure in Africa. But I do know that 1 month old being strapped to back in the town market is more likely to get seriously sick - their immune systems are not strong yet. Meaning, this situation happens in places that have much bigger and serious social and health problems. And also, one other question is whether this mom would not picked daycare if she had that option. Moreover, while you can strap baby, you wont strap 4-5 years old and that means they spend a lot of time without supervision too.
Which is by the way origin of kindergarten - many 4 years old being unsupervised in German streets as both parents worked 12 hours a day in a factory. Which is default state whenever place is not rich, moms having a lot to do while kids do what they do (and it gets them into problems).
2. A "new" car doesn't have 5,000 miles on it. They told me it was new. There was no ambiguity there. They pushed the papers at me hoping I wouldn't notice it.
3. Illegal or not, that's what they did on the next day final paperwork. Of course, they said it was just a clerical error and they'd fix it. The original deal was not documented.
4. When you have a column of numbers and a total, the total should match the sum. There's no excuse for this.
These issues were from multiple dealerships, so I figure it is common practice. One was from a friend of mine, who I warned to check the numbers on the final next day paperwork. He laughed at me, saying nobody would do that. The next day he called and thanked me, as he discovered a $1,000 error in the dealer's favor. He said he'd have never checked it if I hadn't warned him.
2. A new car is new as long as it hasn't had a registered owner. You can even have a new car with an already started warranty sometimes. I still wonder how you made it to the paperwork stage without seeing the car and noticing it wasn't exactly 'new new', but if you landed on a very shady salesperson it could be covered up (simply leaving the dashboard display on a trip meter instead of odometer could do this I suppose)... But once again.. I STILL think it's more of an accidental miscommunication than deception since everyone knows it will eventually be discovered. Dealerships sell many "demos" year round, and I've also never seen this drama in person even though demo sales are common industry wide.
3. Clerical errors do happen when a salesperson gives management a summary, a salesmanager loads a deal into the system, and a "finance manager" (I hate them) finished loading things so that the DMV and banks are happy. It does happen. It isn't a tactic because once again, people rarely miss a $1000 line item, or the payment going up suddenly.. so why have the drama, potential deal blow up, yada yada.. the salesperson doesn't get paid on non vehicle adds ons or fees, and management gets such a small cut of gross profit I just don't believe it's done on purpose since it has a high threshold of drama.
4. I have never seen this, and I can't even imagine how we'd get the computer system to do this. Also, the banks would reject a contract later that doesn't add up and send the deal back. And finally, who is intentially commiting this kind of fraud on a document that will forever exist in your hands and the banks hands. Would there be an easier way to get caught for some crazy fraud than having numbers not add up on a final contract?
But when they always err in favor of the dealer, I get suspicious.
> I still wonder how you made it to the paperwork stage without seeing the car and noticing it wasn't exactly 'new new'
I foolishly had not checked the odometer. I assumed that if the salesman said it was new, that it was new. Anyhow, on noticing the mileage on the final documents, I pointed it out, said I wanted a new car, and walked out. They watched me go, and when I was backing out of the parking lot, came running out and said they'd make buying it worth my while. And they did.
A car is designed for 200,000 miles. 5,000 is a significant chunk of that, and also the new car warranty is based on absolute mileage, not miles since buying it.
4. The various printed sheets that were not the final documents were printed separately and had no signature block. "I can't even imagine how we'd get the computer system to do this" You can probably do it with Excel. The idea is to focus the customer on the bottom line, and then he likely won't notice the column numbers were different on the final sheet because the total would be the same.
My dad said the manager's expression was priceless.
No, I am not confused about things like compound interest, what the sum of all the payments would be, etc. I often tell kids who complain "who needs math" that failing to learn about compound interest is going to cost them plenty.
Sure, but so are a lot of other features like modern medicine, communications, transportation, that come with industrial culture.
Assuming that you are talking about making the privilege of being a stay-at-home parent universal (independent of one's financial means), then I agree with the goal, but that is only realizable via industrial culture coupled with an income and wealth distribution that makes it possible for only 1 parent in the house to work.
It would also probably require people to live with less. When mothers were staying at home in the 1950s, the median home size was 983 square feet. Today it's about 2700 square feet.
All that extra space and the stuff it is filled with costs a lot, which is another reason that both parents need to work.
Plus, technology has made us way more capable -- productivity has increased a lot since the '50s, but wages have not kept up.
Which makes me think it's more of an organizational / incentives kind of thing, rather than a pure amount of wealth kind of thing.
(Something similar going on to the way in an purely competitive market, profits tend to get driven to 0, but with wages and quality of life, perhaps?)
Unsold cars on the lot are burning cash, as they're there on borrowed money.
BTW, he had to get the manager's signoff on the final price, so I'm sure he wasn't getting fired for it. A savvy manager isn't going to let a salesman underprice a car to sell to his buddy.
You mention a lot of considerations, all perfectly valid. That's what makes the game interesting and fun :-) I'm sure the salesmen also size of the customer based on his clothes, the car he arrived in, his demeanor, etc. I remember shopping for a new car long ago, arriving at the dealer with my usual worn out jeans. None of the salesmen would talk to me. So I bought the car from the dealer's rival. These days, Seattle is full of millionaires wearing jeans, and the salesmen know that, and don't make that mistake.
My thinking? If I'm polite and verbally confirm that I'm good for the amount and the salesperson treats me poorly? Not someone I'd want to do business with anyway.
Actions >> appearance
What we do screen for a bit is basically time wasters. It is possible to be accidentally picked up in this net, and then say "they sure missed out, I bought a car at the next place". That's unfortunate for the salesperson sure, but you're ignoring the countless hours saved by quickly dismissing the true time wasters.
I sold cars and was very good at it (better than top 1%) and would sometimes get in a mood when I would ignore intuition for a few weeks and just do an amazing job with everyone. Doing an amazing job works well, and you can get people to buy a car who swear they stopped with ZERO intention of actually buying a car that month even, very often. But you almost never even get CLOSE to selling a car to someone you have a bad vibe about, even if you go all in.
If you're good at car sales, you have more people to follow up with and do a good job with than you have time. I sold 34 cars a month average over years. National average is 11. Eventually you have to trust your judgement to save yourself 10+ hours a week, even if once a month it costs you a sale.
Having managed 1 infant myself, even 1:4 seems like a lot of responsibility. I would not want my infant or toddler to be watched over by more lenient ratios.
In his daycare class there was one adult looking after up to 9 children. One adult that didn’t earn a living wage and didn’t have any kind of benefits. There is no way a reasonable person could possibly trust that adult to be both content and provide a decent quality of care.
The adults in the room were always visibly angry and frustrated and a reasonable person could not blame them.
If people got six months or a year, there would be far fewer babies in that labor-intensive category.
EDIT: I should've said "infants" and not "children" here, where the necessity of a 4:1 ratio really applies. As children get older this ratio can get higher.
I recommend https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-math..., from someone who just assumed that child care costs were because of government intervention, and then did the math and found out this isn’t the case.
The costs are the same as any other service industry - you have to pay more for higher quality teachers and you have to pay more for a location in more expensive areas.
This also means that there is concerningly high variance in the quality of individual care providers, since it's a difficult job and pays awful you get the usual mix of "passionate about kids" and "I can't find any other work". Even the best facilities you have to be very observant to make sure your kid doesn't end up in a bad situation. I recall one care provider fondly telling me how much she loves riding her bike to work only to later find out she had her license taken away by repeated DUIs and another that fled the country after too many parents complained about situations that looked a lot like abuse.
Ultimately they're very much like nursing homes for small children. Very frustrating to pay so much only to have to remain vigilant that you don't pick up your kid only to find they've been sitting in some other kid's pee for an hour.
They'll nag you endlessly about when you'll be having more kids though.
Shit I have to do this too? I’ve already started saving for the unreasonable cost of college, and the cost of childbirth, and the unreasonable cost of a large (enough) house in my metro. But now this?!
But there's a reason people pay so much attention to schools when buying houses - a good school district will almost certainly have good daycares, and it can be totally worth moving to get those.
Check if your state's 529 covers daycare or preschool, it can be useful.
/parent of two and went through it all
But yes, above the table daycare is ungodly expensive.
Wondering whether I can see any similar signs…
He walked out, went to the other Ford dealer, and drove out with a new truck.
I can see not wasting time if there are many customers in the place, of course you triage them. But if you're chatting around the coffee machine because there are no customers in the showroom ... !
Because it's hard to exactly define "daycares shouldn't have more kids than they can take care of" they institute fixed ratios.
I'm not going to bother responding to the rest as it's clear there's some misremembering or exaggeration going on here.
In my experience, the things you are describing are very rare, and even more rarely intentional. Why they keep happening to you, idk.
We drove by his old daycare about a month after I pulled him out and he instantly starting having a breakdown in his car seat. I asked him what was wrong and he said "I don't want to go back to daycare." I told him we were simply driving by en route to the pool, but it took a while to calm him down.
I asked him why he didn't want to return and he said "because the teachers are angry."
And I believed him and it broke my heart. I myself have many negative memories associated with daycare from the 80s. It was not a pleasant experience.
In the US, it seems that we rarely take care of the caregivers to our two most vulnerable groups of citizens. Children and the elderly are cared for by individuals who don't even have the basics to take care of themselves.
Yet the owners of the establishments always make their money. I was seeing red and extremely angry when I learned that I had to pay for daycare when they were closed. Regardless of why they were closed. I had to pay for holidays and I had to pay for 3 entire weeks on 3 occasions when one of the staff members caught covid. Yet none of the employees were paid during those times. That was pure profit for the owners of the establishment.
I was looking around for some day care for my kid, and everything here seems to work out to ~$20/hour. I was thinking "Well, I guess that's about what I'd have to charge if I quit working at $FAANG and ran a day care out of my house.." and considering signing up.
If it's just some rich prick getting richer while an overworked person in front barely scrapes by, though, that is really infuriating. I guess that fits with every other customer-facing business in the bay area though. I feel lucky any time I make it out of a store without getting punched in the face around here
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/418-1...
The 1:2 ratio is for “family daycare”, whatever that means. That is on page 19 of this document:
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/417-F...
From 413: https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/413-D...
In general it usually refers to a family taking on a few extra kids vs a schoolroom/office taking on kids. Requirements are usually different for the family care ones, not necessarily less.
I’m a stay at home dad or at least I was until my son started pre-k a few months ago.
There’s no amount of money that would make me feel comfortable also taking care of someone else’s children in my home. Just not worth the trouble or the risk.
I guess I assume that if you have a rapport with a neighbor, you can trust that they won't be out to screw you if a kid gets hurt, but maybe that's naive. Or maybe my parents were just lax; I remember my grandparents let us ride around on a moped that could do ~35 mph when I was probably under 10, and we'd go wander around in a forest near their house, or me and the neighbor kids would go play in the desert near my house growing up when I was probably ~6. Probably never more than .5-1 miles away, but still pretty much only "supervised" by older kids.
Like a lot of things, informal, regular babysitting got ruined by a few people trying to hustle it into a business. This seems to be happening to everything that can be gig-ified:
1. People once did X informally for friends
2. Someone realized they could charge for X
3. People start doing X over and over for strangers, turning it into a business
4. Some disaster happens because X is now a hazardous unregulated business
5. Finally, the government steps in with heavy handed regulation, and now only licensed businesses are technically allowed do X.
At age 5, I was driving my BMX around Montgomery Co, Alabama with a single shot Remington .410 bungee strapped to the handle bars. I was a latch key kid from the day I started kindergarten. I was cooking for myself and dressing myself starting then as well.
I won't allow my own child to experience any of that.
Of course, the poorer people have no choice and make it work, but I'm certain they get "caught" now and then.
We should be adovcating for more parent-child bonding, however that happens; for more opportunities for parents to make whatever choices they wish to regarding the work/parenting issues during their child's early (entire?) life; for the normalization of public breastfeeding; for better parental leave policies; and more.
None of these things require pushing some point that raising children is naturally women's work (even if breastfeeding itself is).
The evidence is not at all overwhelming, and flies in the face of a couple of generations of formula fed people who turned out fine.
All anyone does by repeating that line is make people feel bad when they can’t or don’t want to breastfeed. Especially women.
It should be easy for women who wish to be with their babies and breast-feed them to do so.
It should also be easy for dads!
BTW, I'm about two weeks out from becoming a father. I only get 2 months paternity leave, but if I were the mother, I'd get 4! This seems unfair to me, but it's certainly better than if the policy were reversed.
It seems like there's just some built-in conflict between an intensely competitive capitalist society and the human needs of a family. I might do something like mandatory 4 years leave (in 1 year chunks) for all people, spread out from 20 to 40. You can spend that being with your kid, doing some sort of civic-project, or serving in the military.
Just spitballing'. Always fun to try to design a utopia. :-)
I have 2-month old and before he was born lot of people said to me that "dads can't do much in the first 6 months". I was like ok, we'll see how it goes.
After he was born, I quickly realize dads can absolutely do everything except feed the baby directly from the breast. Breastfeeding itself, depends on the baby and mom, is fairly quick, maybe like takes 15mins every few hours. That leaves about ~22 hours each dad can be part of the activities, like changing diapers, bathing, soothing, having the baby sleep on you, putting the baby to sleep, reading, changing clothes, singing etc.
This "dads can't do much", "there is just this bond with the mom" and "it's biology" seems like bullshit or an easy out from taking responsibility. The bond happens if you just spend time with the baby.
The book “Lactivism” provides an entertaining account of recent history: https://www.amazon.com/Lactivism-Fundamentalists-Physicians-...
Only 30 years ago, the pendulum was fully swung in the direction of formula.
Having gone through the pregnancy gauntlet recently I've found
- There are many studies posited but no one ever talks about the 'n' or the replicability. The studies are almost always asking you to do something uncomfortable or be scared (amnio may cause a miscarriage; the best brain developing breastmilk is the feed btwn midnight and 6am; blah blah blah)
- There are so many people happy to tell women they should just stay home or if they dont they'll miss crucial moments or not develop their children's potential or even ability to love correctly. Oddly this is crucial for society and yet the US society provides near 0 support to make this happen
People happy to sit on their fat fannies and "supervise" the folks busting their asses to do all the work...yeah. That was old before the first pyramid was put built.
Not to mention that society is really hypocritical about it; demanding that women breastfeed, but also criticising them when they actually do so. Can't we give each other a bit more freedom to make our own decisions and trust that most people will be doing a pretty good job at it? Provide info, not judgement.
Dad, when he actually spends time with kid is exactly the same bond. Really. I have seen that. There is nothing magical about mother-child bond. It is something that was unique in social setting where men are penalized for spending too much time with their kids. Or where men are expected to be disciplinarian after spending all the day outside of house. Or where dads were killed in a war.
Ideally, mothers would receive ample maternity leave to cover the breastfeeding period, fathers would receive ample paternity leave to cover the weeks immediately after birth and the period after the breastfeeding period ends, and both parents would be working part-time most of their careers.
Ultimately, dual-income has turned out to be an ugly bait-and-switch. The point was that women were more free, more independent, more able to develop themselves professionally, and families would be able to live more comfortably with the added income. Instead, it has often lead to families requiring two incomes to even be able to afford a house, mothers having to mix raising children while working while fathers still didn't do their part.
We should all be working a maximum of 24 hours a week by now. We were screwed out of these benefits and all the benefits of this increased productivity has gone to the rich instead of to working families.
So it seems strange to me that each child would cost ~$15/hr -- the full cost of a single low-skill resource, 1:1 with children; You're not seeing the scalability of groups kick in. Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand, it seems clear this isn't simply supply/demand. There are many who want childcare, but there are many more who should be capable of supporting it.
There are also of course difference in popularity/quality which will contribute to a price gradient, but if you're seeing $2k/mo/child as your "basic daycare" costs, there's something up -- there's no inherent reason to the job that I can think of that would stop someone from undercutting that price point.
> Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand
I would start with liability costs, it must be massive for a professional daycare facility given how emotionally invested people are with their kids. Next would be redundancy of employees. Babies and toddlers transmit tons of germs, and so the adults around them would get sick too. Plus legally mandated ratios means there has to be adequate coverage for vacations, sick days, emergencies, turn over, etc.
And the population of working age people continues to decline, so I would not associate low skill with high supply of labor. I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a daycare employee.
I also would not describe managing multiple babies and toddlers properly as low skill, or at least not low effort. It seems to be very strenuous, and I do not think I could do it.
Some people might be coming from a very different perspective on what constitutes a good price.
Society is making way too many excuses for men to avoid raising their children, and it really needs to stop.
£1200 in my top 5 city would get you a newly built daycare, with all the modern gizmos, a kitchen built "especially for young children", a teacher with 10+ yr experience, and peer children who are the son/daughters of doctors and lawyers. ~£800 gets you an average daycare that is fully up to license / code and generally does a decent job. ~£600 will get you a caring but gray market (usually bilingual or limited english) stay at home mom with a home daycare business.
I would wager the vast vast majority are paying close to ~£800, either through the black/gray market with unlicensed caregivers or in licensed facilities in the vast majority of lower cost of living portions of America.
Half decent infant daycare in SF/SEA/NYC/LA/DC suburbs is going to be minimum $1,700 per month, in the cheapest of those metro areas.
In tier 2 cities, I would question the quality for anything less than $1,300 per month.
And in no major US city would I enroll my child in a $1,000 per month or less daycare.
You can even back into the max teacher pay based on monthly daycare costs since you know how much staff is required, and knowing the living wage in some of these cities.
And yes, it's likely subsidized; around here there's "free 4k" and some of the pre-4k daycares are subsidized in various ways.
Whoever wants to feed their baby breast milk or formula, do what you want. There’s enough anxiety in raising a child, we should be aware of when we might be increasing it in others for no good reason. GP could’ve supplemented their baby’s diet with formula while his wife was gone and everyone would’ve been fine.
At age 6 I wasn't quite strong enough to saddle our horses by myself so I would just hop on my quarter horse every afternoon after school and ride her bareback. She threw me once because of a snake and I spent ~3 hours hanging upside down with my leg tangled in a barbed wire fence because my ma wasn't at home. The horse was just standing there staring at me the entire time while our 3 dogs took turns licking me in the face as blood dripped from my leg.
I can't imagine my own son coming away from such a scenario unscathed, but maybe there is a good bit of development between 3.5 years and 6 years. I honestly don't know as this is our first child.
More free kids probably means more dead kids. Get a bad dice roll and the kid is dead and now you're in jail for some form of neglect induced manslaughter. Get a good dice roll and the kid gets life experiences, confidence, and more ability to navigate the world. Don't roll the dice at all -- maybe the kid locks up and can't rise to the challenge later in life when they meet challenges that threaten their life.
Life is a gamble. What I find ever more frustrating is the legislation and the child welfare organizations and courts increasingly take it out of the parents hands to determine what level of freedom and risk is appropriate for their children. I'm not sure there is any 'right' answer, but if there is a threshold I think we've long past moved beyond it towards the point of paranoia.
I would have expected Phoenix to be more expensive, but it is probably cheaper due to more lax staffing ratios.
Because there’s a low barrier to entry, people want money, and unless it were particularly horrible or life-threatening, if you’re going to find a high supply of labor anywhere, it’s going to be in a low-skill job?
> I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a daycare employee.
I have never heard anyone tell their child to aspire to become a McDonald’s employee, or a bank teller, or a pool cleaner, or a gardener, yet I seem to find quite a few of them.
It’s low-skill — you don’t need a 4-year degree and aspirations to get into it. You just need to want money, and have no better options.
> I would start with liability costs, it must be massive for a professional daycare facility given how emotionally invested people are with their kids
But that’d be the same with anything taking responsibility over handling kids — eg summer schools, camps, extra-carriculars, etc. I’m sure they have good margins (parents throw money at anything supporting children), but I don’t think they’re getting barraged by insurance premiums for it.
Legal ratios might help explain it, but that’s part of the “something is going on outside of labor supply/demand”.
So there is your answer. People have better options.
And prices for labor at the bottom have increased for almost all jobs at the bottom of the pay scale. Fast food, landscaper, bus driver, daycare worker, etc.
The obvious cause would be a reduction in supply of labor willing to do the jobs at the bottom of the pay scale.
I would expect the trend to continue as the labor force participation rate continues to decline, partially due to decades of lower and lower birthrates not offset by immigration and automation.
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
Low skill, yes - perhaps not for the life-saving training needed, but I suspect most any able-bodied adult can be trained how to care for an infant or toddler in a week or so (after all, parents get zero training beyond "you need a car seat" when sent home from the hospital).
Whether there are people able and willing at the price listed, I don't know. It seems a job that could be done by teenagers (at least as assistants, supervised) but I suspect they are prohibited.