Also, the daycares typically have structured programs that are fun and helpful for toddler development.
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.
> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.
Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.
> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.
That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.
[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=long+term+outcomes+of+dayc...
These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization.
> Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more.
You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly.
> Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on.
Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim.
[1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/learning-deve...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...
> "Other reported benefits of attendance at high-quality child care include less impulsivity, more advanced expressive vocabulary, and greater reported social competence (Belsky et al. 2007)."
You probably thought they were comparing high quality daycare to parental care, because that's certainly what they're implying. Here [1] is the paper they're referencing, which unsurprisingly they chose to not provide a link to. They are comparing high quality daycare care against poor quality daycare! Both had overall negative effects relative to parental care! In particular all non-parental childcare was directly associated with lower social competence, poorer work habits, conflicted relationships with teachers (and their mother!), and so on.
That paper itself is based on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development series. You can find a more casual overview of that study's findings here. [2] And an opinion piece, 'daycare - yes or no', based on an overview of the available evidence (including the NICHD study) here. [3]
[1] - https://sci-hub.ru/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007....
[2] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/going-beyond-intelli...
[3] - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-matters/20...
I don't entirely understand the fetishism of expertise among a certain segment of society. Don't you realize that most of all teachers and other educational institutions are staffed by those who would be considered nominally experts? And this has even been taken to the next level by widespread adherence to a national curriculum (common core), again composed by even greater ostensible experts. And all of this has been complimented by the 5th highest spending per student in the world. And the result? Educational outcomes are falling off a cliff.
Obviously this isn't to say that anti-expertise is the answer, but rather that motivated people of reasonable intelligence and objectivity, regardless of expertise, are a [measurably] excellent source of value in just about everything. And, by contrast, expertise itself does not guarantee good results nor effective performance, especially in the context of other issues that might otherwise impair performance like large class sizes, minimal motivation, poor work environment, etc.
[1] - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291335232_The_Effec...