This is fantastic! I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential. Families who were previously in poverty because the mom would struggle to pay for childcare to work can now have assurance kids are ok while the mom can pursue jobs, start her own small business (huge chunk of businesses are small businesses ran by women) and prosper. If you pose your child’s safety vs another dollar, most parents would vote for their children. But if the children are taken care of, parents can give the economy their best and the taxes paid and GDP gained will pay back for the expense manyfold.
Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare. Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers. This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
> Would make sense IMO to provide an equal value waiver to those who take care of their kid rather than send them to childcare.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
I'm not sure there is equal value, in economic terms at least. A stay at home parent caring for 1-2 children comes at the opportunity cost of a full time worker, which would typically be a lot more than 12-24 thousand dollars this is saving them in childcare costs. On the flip side, a childcare worker in NM can care for the children of ~6+ such stay at home parents (depends on randomness of ages and number of children each had).
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
In Sweden we value equality and everyone working. If someone is wealthy enough to have a stay-at-home parent it's their choice to do so, we shouldn't subsidize the rich.
It is good for children to go to a place where they learn to interact with others early. We give 480 days off to the parents to share (90 "mandatory" per parent), then they go to childcare.
Individualism breeds privileged shits, if you want your kid to be one of those then you pay out of your own pocket. We subsidize childcare so everyone can afford to work.
Depending on how they structure the childcare, women who want to stay with their kids can be childcare providers at one of the centers, so they take care of not just their kids but also others. Similar to the Israeli Kibbutz system.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
It does no such thing. If you could afford to be a stay-at-home mom before, this isn't going to make any significant difference to that.
Think of whether it would make sense if you applied your logic to other areas -- do public schools disincentivize people sending their kids to private schools? That would be absurd to say. Creating choice where there wasn't any before doesn't "disincentivize" anything. It gives people options to make the choices that are best for them.
I totally get the reasoning behind that, but the majority of women are not stay at home moms, and most families don’t have the resources to make it happen. Society is just not oriented to family creation, and both women and men (to a lesser extent) take a hit when they decide to start a family. The entire world is in a fertility crisis now that could easily endanger the very society we live in, with all the ideals and principles we take for granted, and that calls for solutions that may not end up being absolutely fair to everyone in it. If the tradeoff is between childcare that actually works versus a watered down version because we are also paying people who don’t avail of it, I think the former option will do most to support families.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
This is how it works in Finland, but with some adjustments based on family income. You are eligible for up to 500€/month if you take care of your child. The other option being childcare costing up to 300€/month.
In what way does this disincentivize anyone? If you want to stay home with your kids, stay home with your kids. This is literally not preventing anyone from being a stay at home parent.
I see benefits for stay at home Moms, universal childcare means she has somewhere safe to drop her kid off while she goes to her own doctor appointments, or when she needs a break, or if there’s a family emergency she needs to attend to or even if she’s going into labor to bring kid number 2 or 3 into the world. There are a lot of stay at home parents that don’t have family near by or a reliable sitter and this can help plug some gaps.
As a resident of New Mexico I can tell you that it is a miracle that we can afford to launch this program at all. Perhaps when the long-term economic benefits begin to pay out, we'll be able to pay people to support their personal preferences. As it stands, while I don't have kids at home anymore, I can see the long-term economic benefit to the state, and am very pleased that my tax dollars are helping to get this done.
Your taxes pay for the public service whether you use it or not. Take a look at your property tax statement and I bet you can find all sorts of things you may or may not use: parks fees, library fees, health/hospital fees, schools, etc. Should everyone who reads but doesn't use the public library get a book voucher? I'm a stay-at-home-reader, why shouldn't I get the government to subsidize my reading?
Nothing is free. This means less resources for something else, marketed as "compassion".
Mothers generally take much better care of their own children than childcare. Childcare was already previously available for low-income families. To incentivize women to work when they can afford to care for their children is very bad for a country in the long term.
> Stay at home moms do not provide a less valuable service than childcare providers.
They are strictly less efficient than commercial daycare because the adult-child ratio is much higher. How many women would be of out of the work for if they were taking care of children?
Also, it prevents trickle down and the lifting of the poorest in society.
Norway does this. Kindergartens are nearly free ($120/mo), but with a "cash-for-care" benefit for parents who choose to stay at home with the child ($750/mo).
While true, social policies do not need to provide an equal benefit to everyone. People who can afford to stay home with the kids are not the ones who need this sort of policy.
because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
Not sure about your point. I live in Europe, and State pays for the first 1 year or two. Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I was with you til the end, so now I need to ask what you really mean by "greedy jobs". I took it to mean jobs that are all-consuming, no fixed hours, high pressure, high stress. If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy. The vast majority of jobs are non-greedy by this definition, unless the US has really regressed so far from Europe as to be unrecognisable.
There are more important things women - and other people - can do than simply grow the economy.
One of the reasons you must have a two-income household to be economically middle-class in most American metros now is because two-income households became the norm. When I was growing up 25-30 years ago, that made you comfortable. Then people realized that there was "untapped" value in that extra income and raised prices accordingly. If you're looking to buy the things that make up the "American Dream", you are now competing to buy against people who are willing to throw two incomes at the problem.
Now that there are two incomes, the only way to grow is to start shedding other things that keep people from creating more value for their employers. Kids, home improvement, community involvement, all are - or have been - going by the wayside.
If I'm not mistaken, Elizabeth Warren has literally written a book about this problem, so it's not some reactionary desire to keep women in the kitchen.
This would solve a lot of Republican’s problems as well. Israel has the kibbutz system and they have the highest birth rate of developed economies. They also have amazing tech and women participation and excellent contributions even in the military. If you raise the country’s children well, you get more GDP and less prisons and less need for policing, and less need for welfare programs. Plus you get quality workers for those american-made factories.
Only about 1-2% of Israelis live on a kibbutz, and unsurprisingly that number has recently fallen.
You actually see the elevated birth rates even in Tel Aviv. There’s a broader cultural expectation that would be impossible to recreate elsewhere.
Israel's current birthrate has more to do with the ultra-Orthodox and Arab communities and nothing to do with the kibbutz system. The ultra-Orthodox communities are also exempt from those "excellent contributions even in the military". While female ultra-Orthodox participation in the workforce is around 80%, that's largely due to males not participating (50%).[0]
The problem with more people entering the workforce is that the people never end up better off. Prices just go up and people end up working more for the same result.
Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
Making mortgages with a > 20 year term illegal, putting limits on the total principal allowed to loan as a multiple of income, and barring entirely non-human (i.e. any business entity) ownership of single family homes would do far more for families and children by removing the burden of ridiculous housing costs by removing the ability for people to compete for ridiculous housing prices.
> Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
You want to change what now? The dictionary definition does not specify any particular time. There is no legal definition for full-time. The IRS uses the term full-time, but they actually use it exactly like you wish: 30 hours per week.
People out on the street often casually use full-time to refer to 40 hours per week. I anticipate that is what you are referring to. But that usage is simply used to refer to how many hours they are working. 40 hours under that usage is an observation, not a commandment.
Worker productivity has consistently increased, yet workers are struggling to support their families or delaying having a family, because they cannot meet the cost of living. Instead of looking towards the inflation of the monetary base as a driver of price inflation, families are supposed to let the state raise their children. Pricing parents out of the house and into the workforce is instead marketed as "liberation". Liberty implies that a choice is given. Mothers or fathers should have the ability to choose to stay home and benefit from the increases in productivity.
Citing GDP growth is cute, but as nothing has been done to address the underlying drivers of price inflation, we can reasonably expect that socialized child care will become an economic necessity. Any potential benefits of productivity gains will continue to be eaten by those who are first to drink from the monetary spigot. While GDP and hours worked may increase, living standards may not.
And what choice do you have regarding rising cost of living?
There are many public services we already rely on and there are many countries that offer free child care already in some form. What you call (forced) liberation is just societal specialization and not bad per se.
Focusing on fiscal/wage issues is a big and important topic though. I bet over time, budget hawks will reduce this public service like others and like in many other countries too. We are so many humans on our plentyful earth, we could achieve many things, yet, "we" lack money.
I’m 100% on board that GDP is increasingly becoming a poor proxy for well-being. That being said I can’t really think of many other things a state can do. The trends you are describing are national if not global.
Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
I appreciate your optimism but I’m skeptical. I dated someone who worked in child care (with a degree in ECE). She was quite miserable caring for a dozen screaming babies all day. I think the burnout and turnover for such a job (which requires a degree but still paid minimum wage) is likely to be extremely high.
The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is the economics of it. The pay for the staff is very low but the cost of service to parents is very high. That means so much of the cost is overhead which would make the whole thing quite unsustainable, even when ostensibly covered by the government.
I live in Canada and a similar issue is occurring with our universal health care system. The costs are skyrocketing even as wait times are increasing.
Twelve is a quite high ratio of children to carer. In Sweden what is considered a healthy ratio is 5:1, and many places do meet that rate or are very close to it.
10:1 would be considered a very poor daycare, and most people wouldn't want to put their children on it — only if they have no other choice.
Regarding pay being bad this happens over here as well, unfortunately. Teaching in general is not paid as much as it is worth.
Maybe babies aren't meant to be cared for a dozen at a time? But no, we have to "scale" child-rearing, just like we have to scale everything for greater growth numbers. \s
> because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
This feels like the wrong goal. Why does it matter how much an economy can grow? Is that worth not having a parent raise the child? In my opinion, it’s important for kids to spend more time with their families not less. Having one parent at home is very useful for bonding, development, etc. And frankly no childcare, even one with good ratios of workers to children, can substitute for it. I think the notion that “if the children are taken care of” is perhaps not recognizing that there are different levels of “taken care of”.
> I hope they succeed and there is no abuse or other issues, because it will show how much an economy can grow
I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
It's similar with those studies showing hiring a diverse workforce is actually good for your business. It might be, but, like, it's also the right thing to do to not discriminate against minorities.
> I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
Unfortunately, this is how some people think, so phrasing things in this manner is a way to win them over ("paying a bit more in taxes is actually going to benefit you").
There will obviously be abuse and other issues. The question is, does New Mexico give up at the first sign of trouble like a bunch of losers, or do they push through, because of, or despite all the voters. It just takes one shitty person, in just the wrong place, and not enough good people fighting against him or her no matter, (or especially)
how righteous he or she thinks they're being, to fuck it up for everyone else.
How so? What do they have now that they will be losing under the new system? It seems like having childcare paid for would be beneficial to any single working parent.
Any system, program, or social group involving tens of thousands of people is going to have issues. But if you systematize it you can work to address them rather than ignoring them in search of the perfect system (which doesn't exist).
That’s great, but not every mom is your mom. You just lucked out. This is like saying “my dad was a doctor and we lived very well and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.” Some dads aren’t cut out to be highly paid professionals. Some moms aren’t cut out to be good stay-at-home parents.
Surely parents should be giving their child(ren) the best, no?
Giving the economy your best only makes sense in Communism, and since that has never gone well, I'll assume that what was meant was "self-fulfillment via work" or "better standard of living". The first just seems like one of these modern lies. I'm neither a mother nor a woman, but I've never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling, although I have generally more or less enjoyed it. I've met no father (or mother) who say they wished they had more time at work rather than their children. I have heard both fathers and mothers say that it is the most fulfilling part of their lives. The second is just prioritizing the self. I've never met a child who was excited that his/her parent(s) are working and/or making lots of money instead of being with them. I don't think a goal of career or comfort/wealth is compatible with flourishing children.
Second, are the children actually taken care of? Assuming everything is well-run, then sure, their physical needs and safety are taken care of. They aren't getting love from parents during that time. They aren't living in a loving community. Instead they are getting socialized into being atomized, like the rest of us, where loneliness is epidemic. I'm really thankful my mother stayed home with us. (She started teaching part-time once we all got into all-day school)
> I’ve never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.
> I've never understood why women are so eager to go work
You're romanticizing it, that's why. Staying at home and not working makes you incredibly vulnerable. You're entirely reliant on the goodwill of someone else, and you can end up trapped, unable to leave a bad situation because you have no access to money. Or your husband just leaves you with kids to feed and no money to do it with.
It's fine if you choose to do it with a partner who treats you as an equal, but there's a reason why female suicides instantly dropped by 20%[0] when no-fault divorce was adopted by their state.
If you want another data point, ask your older female relatives what their mothers and grandmothers told them about money. Bet you more than a few will have a story where they were told to save money in a secret place and never, ever tell their husbands about it.
You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it so they can focus on bettering the economy, right?
> You realize a lot of people actually prefer to give their child their best instead of outsourcing it
My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.
The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
Even if you’re stay at home unemployed person, a daycare will do more for your child’s development than you would be able to. Kids need socialization, they learn from their peers as much as they learn from adults.
You don't understand how economics work if you think this is actually going to be helpful.
By providing "universal" child care, you just moved the cost of childcare from the individual to the tax base so now everyone has to pay an ineffifient system that often eats up 30-50% of the incoming money in bureaucratic inneficiencies before it will even reach the child care system.
On top of that the increased taxes are going to raise prices of everything because the businesses don't just eat the cost of taxes, they pass it off to the consumer. So all these families that get free childcare are going to be paying more for their groceries, rent, unilities and everything else.
To top things off, you now have random strangers with no bond with your children looking after them in a ratio of maybe 1:8 or 1:10. So your children are going to be stressed out and anxious and are going to act out both at the childcare place and at home, so you're just going to be getting phone calls all day about your children fighting other children.
All in all, you might feel like you're better off but once you do the math you're at about the same place if not worse off.
Yes, surely the hyper efficient free market is much better here, not like we have decades of proof of the perverse incentives there. We should instead ensure every mother is crippled with life-long medical debt if their kid needs any help!
Also if we care so much about these inefficiencies, why is it that I still have to subsidize drivers? Why aren't we investing in better public transport infrastructure, rather than letting drivers take up 1000x the space on roads that I'm forced to pay for?
Oh no, society will have to bear the cost of the infrastructure to maintain itself rather than reap the benefits of a population without putting back into. How terrible.
Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads? I know several stay at home dads who by all reports do a very good job of raising their kids while mom works. (granted the vast majority of stay at home parents are mothers). Fathers are people too, and they should be treated like the great parents they can be (until proven otherwise).
>> when women are allowed to work to their full potential
> Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads?
That's... not even remotely what the sentence said? Or are you offended because you believe childcare obligations have historically prevented men from working their full potential?
I mean, I’m a gay dad, so I get that what you are saying is a real problem, but I don’t think it’s a problem in this thread. If you had a goal of improving women’s ability to participate in the workforce you’d likely come up with a policy like this (that would also help some dads too, even if that weren’t the primary goal).
Women are far more likely to be the primary, stay at home caregiver if one exists and face a lot of discrimination in the workforce as a result of those expectations (on top of already facing other workplace discrimination issues).
> it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential
Why bring gender into it? There are plenty of families who choose to have stay at home Dads while the mother goes back to work full time. We are not in the 1950s any more.
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'm hopeful that the parent comment simply didn't think about Dads because it's not in their "worldview", and perhaps also not in many others'. Nonetheless, I think your point is completely valid.
Childcare doesn't end at 1 year though. If you look at public schools as child care, most don't start until kindergarten (about 5 years old). What do you do for the remaining 4 years? And during summer break? And after-school care? This program covers all of those.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
> This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
How is your solution any different from the US student loan policies that have increased the price of college in the US? Won't subsidizing demand with a stipend significantly increase the price of what it can be spent on?
We kind of do both in Germany. I say "kind of" becaue that year of parental leave (14 months total, shared between parents as desired) is capped at the lower of 1800 EUR/mo, or 2/3 of previous year's net monthly salary - that was significantly lower than either of our net pay, but we did it anyway.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
strong protections for parents choosing to work part time
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
This sounds like something I would have written before I was a parent.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
I think you're talking about parental leave which is a different thing and another area where the US falls short compared to other developed countries. This is to provide care for your kids after you would have gone back to work in any regular scenario until the kids are old enough to start school.
As a parent I’m going to disagree with your disagreement.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I wonder if there is room for disruption here. Like, a NextDoor for childcare. I guess that's just group chats with your neighbors who have kids, but many people don't even know their neighbors. Maybe this is something that needs to be solved organically, not with an app.
More importantly it would give parents options:
- stay home with your child and take the income
- hire a babysitter
- hire a better babysitter by adding a little cash
- take your child to daycare
- take your child to better daycare by adding a little cash
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
>I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
The western idea of individualism and the villification of the lower-class has really fucked American society. "I don't wanna pay taxes for [insert thing that doesn't benefit me]" or "if you're poor it's your fault" in a country where costs of basic necessities like medical care, insurance, food, housing, school, are skyrocketing is insane to me.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
It's a pretty nice consolation prize considering the almost total lack of parental leave in the United States. When someone throws me a lifeline I'm not going to complain that it isn't a certified life preserver.
> provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
These are complementary, not opposing policies. You can have funded childcare and longer parental leave funded by the state. I live somewhere that has both (not in the US, perhaps obviously).
Capitalism historically depends on the unpaid reproductive labor of women in the domestic sphere, work that is socially undervalued and made invisible, which supports capitalist systems rather than liberates women. Instituting a paid stipend for home parenting, while superficially supportive, risks reinforcing this systemic isolation by formalizing the separation of caregivers (mainly women) from the workforce and political arenas where power is exercised and negotiated.
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Kids are social and like playing and learning from other kids. Daycare lets them do just that. It’s a great thing and every toddler I’ve met who wasn’t in daycare was behind in something. Especially verbal skills.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
I'm just gonna throw this out here: Well-off kids who barely know their workaholic parents have different but equally bad issues for society, than the poor kids do.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
> Hate to break it to you, but many kids actually do better away from their parents than with them.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
Perhaps there is something about the environment of an economically disadvantaged household that could be improved by a stipend which allows at least one parent the breathing room to dedicate full time attention to the child instead of a job (or multiple jobs). I don't think the findings you mentioned cut against that idea at all.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
My daycare was called preschool. It allowed my mother to focus on my infant brother during the day while I was literally two blocks away running around, coloring and learning shapes. Show and tell was my favorite.
Worse. Not just a "stranger" but a subset of strangers running "real businesses".
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Those are still options? The state isn’t going to force parents to use public daycare. However you might keep in mind that not everyone has an available spouse, and grandparents might not always be available either.
It's easy to promise things, but hard to deliver them. How can the state "guarantee no-cost universal child?"
Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I drive on roads, I use libraries, I have police and fire protection. My children go to school. My city and state provide services to me and fellow citizens. This is no different, and we pay for it with taxes.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
As someone who grew up homesteading and seeing the benefits of it, I find it wild that people want to not only send their kids away to school full-time but also institutionalize them afterwards just so they can spend seemingly excessive amounts of time at work. The economic machine demands sacrifices apparently.
Portland OR is trying to do something similar ("Preschool for all") and is running into the exact problems OP identified, to the point that the Democratic governor is sending warning messages to the county: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
I don't understand how many other developed countries are able to avoid the supposedly unavoidable perils of social services, but we act like this is a wild experiment that has never been tried anywhere in the world aside from the USSR or something.
It's amazing how much of the opposition isn't a specific conceptual problem with the rightness or wrongness of the ideal behind the policy but re-litigating assumptions that are already accepted and baked into routine investments we already make to service and infrastructure.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
> Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result?
Paid for child care frees up some stay at home parents to enter the labor force; it's kind of circular, but some of those parents will work in child care. This won't fill the whole gap, but it will fill some of it.
We're likely 5-10 years out from a world where tappy-tap computer keyboard jobs are in a death spiral and caregiving jobs are one of the only fields untouched by automation.
You could've answered 80% of these questions for yourself by just reading the linked press release.
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
+1. That being said, universal k-12 schooling works because it is publicly run. A subsidized private sector model has a lot of bad incentives and issues to work out. As an example, I've sent my kids to a private school for the past five years, and last year our state introduced a voucher program to help subsidize private education. The school responded by raising the prices by almost the amount of the voucher, just for the age groups that it covered.
I would've thought we'd eventually move past the point of accusing people of "concern trolling" whenever they have a legitimate counterpoint, but here we are.
>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.
How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care
child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.
State + local tax burden in NM is 10.2%[1]. Revenue neutral would mean those taking the child care would instead take a job with average salary $120,000. But as another comment points out this policy attracts new jobs to the state, which complicates the math
This is actually kind of smart: any other kind of social welfare like free housing or free healthcare could be gamed by people moving in state to exploit it without providing much in return. But free child care...this could genuinely attract jobs and people to work them for the benefit of the state as a whole.
They already have an income limited program. This is just going to cover the remaining kids. Honestly, programs like this are usually a net benefit for the entire state. Just like public schooling, housing, and transportation programs.
I wouldn't take these Truth in Accounting reports too seriously. They're linked to ALEC and take a very hard-right stance on fiscal issues, and in particular, this report on NM (which is also nearly five years old) seems to ignore the permanent funds---as best I can tell they are lumping them all under "restricted" and ignoring them, even though the land grant permanent fund, the largest of them, is totally at the discretion of the legislature and the others are very broad. The permanent funds are also now significantly larger than that report shows.
While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.
One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).
Childcare is a great way to kick this off - it's politically hard to fight against anything "for the children" and it's not a stretch at all to extend coverage gradually, as people see the benefit and want it elsewhere / just one more year / etc.
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
If you want a quick response, you need either dedicated quick-responders (how are they paid when not responding) or you need a lot of slack in the system (caregivers are allowed 4 kids, say, but most have two or three).
“This time will be different!” announce the proponents. Watch now, class, as the economic calculation problem works out as predicted in yet another instance.
The majority of New Mexico is either not employed or only barely employed enough to count towards employment participation. The states employment participation rate is like 58%.
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
markets have criticism too. this is why we have nothing, neither roads nor businesses, and are currently hallucinating this conversation while scratching at the ground with sticks.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
If I look hard enough, I can find a study that ranks New Mexico at every single ranking from 50th to 1st.
In particular, the study you linked ranks on a lot of factors outside the control of the school - which is largely affected by the huge number of poor people in New Mexico (#1 in the country... Which is why they got the rating they did).
New Mexico is filled with poor people, news at 11. But seriously, a lot of things go into your state's education outcomes: state of the kids coming into the system is actually very important, as is parent participation, before we even get to funding by the state. As the only poor blue state, New Mexico has a lot to make up for, and it can't just magic its problems away.
We have something similar in Quebec, $7 CAD per day. It's one of the coolest societal things in the province. Yes we pay a lot in taxes, but we have stuff like this.
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
Apparently until now they've been providing this only to families below 400% of the Federal Poverty Level. FPL is $32,150 for a 4-person family, so $128,600 combined family income (2 people working for $64,300 each -- and that's before fed and state taxes are deducted). Since that is far from being wealthy enough to "just" spring for expensive care, I'm glad to see this.
My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.
Not sure where in California you are, but the SF Bay Area’s economy is heavily distorted by intentionally bad roads and artificial housing shortages.
Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.
That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.
For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.
Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.
On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)
Providing such benefits to those below poverty level doesn’t make sense to me. People are that level of economic value need to improve their situation before taking on the burden of children. Taxpayers should not be subsidizing the poorest to have large families they can’t take care of. The opposite should be happening - we should subsidize households with demonstrated capability to be successful (which in our society does mean economically) to have more children.
That might sound attractive at first[1], but when we consider that there isn't a practical way to stop those poor people from having children anyway, what such a policy amounts to is that we punish such kids[2] for their parents' "sins" -- which is a great way to breed a generation of sociopathic miscreants bent on destroying your society.
[1] (if you can avoid thinking of the class-based eugenics that such a policy would amount to, if it were actually obeyed)
[2] punish by impoverishing them further, or by making it more likely they'll be neglected by those parents that you already suspect aren't responsible
Readit News
My wife is a stay-at-home mom. We are lucky that we can afford to do this. Most of our kid's friends have both parents working and they pay for child care. If suddenly they were able to have that childcare paid for, that would be wonderful! It doesn't affect our situation at all. Why would we oppose it? I don't need to have my own "waiver" payment in order for me to be in favor of my neighbor's burden being lifted.
It's like free school lunch. We pack our kid a lunch every day, but some families rely on the school-provided free lunch. It's never even occurred to me that we should get a $3/day payment because we don't take advantage of free lunch. Having free lunch available is unequivocally a good thing, regardless of whether we personally partake.
This is a great way to kill a policy.
It would technically be most fair if every parent was given the same amount of money per child, period. Then they could do what they needed or wanted with it.
But doing so would not only increase the costs dramatically (by a multiple) it would give money to many parents who didn’t need it for child care.
That’s great in a hypothetical world where budgets are infinite, but in the real world they’re not. The more broadly you spread the money, the less benefit each person receives. If you extended an equal benefit to parents who were already okay with keeping their children home, it’s likely that the real outcome would be reduced benefits for everyone going to daycare. Now you’re giving checks to parents who were already doing okay at home but also diminished the childcare benefit for those who needed it, which was the goal in the beginning.
Breastfeeding doesn't move money around, but formula does; things like that.
Cooking your own meal doesn't raise GDP beyond the cost of supplies, but door-dashing from a restaurant does.
None of that is a statement that it wouldn't be nice for everyone to be able to be paid as a full time parent, just that the economic value is not necessarily equal with a waiver.
It is good for children to go to a place where they learn to interact with others early. We give 480 days off to the parents to share (90 "mandatory" per parent), then they go to childcare.
Individualism breeds privileged shits, if you want your kid to be one of those then you pay out of your own pocket. We subsidize childcare so everyone can afford to work.
I don't know how can anyone arrive at that conclusion.
> This policy appears to disincentives children staying with their mother even when it is preferred.
This assertion is baffling and far-fetched. There is only one beneficiary of this policy: families who desperately needed access to childcare but could not possibly afford it. With this policy, those who needed childcare but were priced out of the market will be able to access the service they needed. I don't think that extreme poverty and binding a mother to homecare is a valid incentive cor "children staying with their mother".
It does no such thing. If you could afford to be a stay-at-home mom before, this isn't going to make any significant difference to that.
Think of whether it would make sense if you applied your logic to other areas -- do public schools disincentivize people sending their kids to private schools? That would be absurd to say. Creating choice where there wasn't any before doesn't "disincentivize" anything. It gives people options to make the choices that are best for them.
From the government's point of view, they want more people out in the workforce, so it probably doesn't make sense that way.
Ideally we could just increase the tax credits so it's large enough to cover the childcare expenses (and other necessities), and let the families decide what is best. And yes, some people are going to do a bad job taking care of their kids and spend the money on something else. But my understanding is that it generally works well to just give people money, rather than pay for specific things.
Nothing is free. This means less resources for something else, marketed as "compassion".
Mothers generally take much better care of their own children than childcare. Childcare was already previously available for low-income families. To incentivize women to work when they can afford to care for their children is very bad for a country in the long term.
They are strictly less efficient than commercial daycare because the adult-child ratio is much higher. How many women would be of out of the work for if they were taking care of children?
Also, it prevents trickle down and the lifting of the poorest in society.
https://www.nav.no/kontantstotte/en
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
If the economy is what you're trying to optimize for.
https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
Unfortunately late capitalism made sure we went in the opposite direction.
One of the reasons you must have a two-income household to be economically middle-class in most American metros now is because two-income households became the norm. When I was growing up 25-30 years ago, that made you comfortable. Then people realized that there was "untapped" value in that extra income and raised prices accordingly. If you're looking to buy the things that make up the "American Dream", you are now competing to buy against people who are willing to throw two incomes at the problem.
Now that there are two incomes, the only way to grow is to start shedding other things that keep people from creating more value for their employers. Kids, home improvement, community involvement, all are - or have been - going by the wayside.
0. https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredi-mens-employment-growth-...
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Changing the definition of full-time hours to 30/week would do far more for families and children than giving free childcare so mothers can work more.
Making mortgages with a > 20 year term illegal, putting limits on the total principal allowed to loan as a multiple of income, and barring entirely non-human (i.e. any business entity) ownership of single family homes would do far more for families and children by removing the burden of ridiculous housing costs by removing the ability for people to compete for ridiculous housing prices.
You want to change what now? The dictionary definition does not specify any particular time. There is no legal definition for full-time. The IRS uses the term full-time, but they actually use it exactly like you wish: 30 hours per week.
People out on the street often casually use full-time to refer to 40 hours per week. I anticipate that is what you are referring to. But that usage is simply used to refer to how many hours they are working. 40 hours under that usage is an observation, not a commandment.
Citing GDP growth is cute, but as nothing has been done to address the underlying drivers of price inflation, we can reasonably expect that socialized child care will become an economic necessity. Any potential benefits of productivity gains will continue to be eaten by those who are first to drink from the monetary spigot. While GDP and hours worked may increase, living standards may not.
There are many public services we already rely on and there are many countries that offer free child care already in some form. What you call (forced) liberation is just societal specialization and not bad per se.
Focusing on fiscal/wage issues is a big and important topic though. I bet over time, budget hawks will reduce this public service like others and like in many other countries too. We are so many humans on our plentyful earth, we could achieve many things, yet, "we" lack money.
Also “having the state raise your children” sounds dystopian until you realize the alternative was them not being taken care of in many cases. Handing a kid an iPad is not raising them.
The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is the economics of it. The pay for the staff is very low but the cost of service to parents is very high. That means so much of the cost is overhead which would make the whole thing quite unsustainable, even when ostensibly covered by the government.
I live in Canada and a similar issue is occurring with our universal health care system. The costs are skyrocketing even as wait times are increasing.
Yeah, I dated someone that was a teacher and didn't like her job. Doesn't mean that we shouldn't provide education to kids.
Regarding pay being bad this happens over here as well, unfortunately. Teaching in general is not paid as much as it is worth.
This feels like the wrong goal. Why does it matter how much an economy can grow? Is that worth not having a parent raise the child? In my opinion, it’s important for kids to spend more time with their families not less. Having one parent at home is very useful for bonding, development, etc. And frankly no childcare, even one with good ratios of workers to children, can substitute for it. I think the notion that “if the children are taken care of” is perhaps not recognizing that there are different levels of “taken care of”.
Our kids are fine.
Turns out kids need a lot of time with other kids.
I know you are meaning well, but while the economy growing can be a nice side effect of this (and probably is), I always find it a bit sad when economic profit is used as a reason to justify to create a more fair and equal society.
It's similar with those studies showing hiring a diverse workforce is actually good for your business. It might be, but, like, it's also the right thing to do to not discriminate against minorities.
Unfortunately, this is how some people think, so phrasing things in this manner is a way to win them over ("paying a bit more in taxes is actually going to benefit you").
Surely parents should be giving their child(ren) the best, no?
Giving the economy your best only makes sense in Communism, and since that has never gone well, I'll assume that what was meant was "self-fulfillment via work" or "better standard of living". The first just seems like one of these modern lies. I'm neither a mother nor a woman, but I've never understood why women are so eager to go work. Work has never been particularly fulfilling, although I have generally more or less enjoyed it. I've met no father (or mother) who say they wished they had more time at work rather than their children. I have heard both fathers and mothers say that it is the most fulfilling part of their lives. The second is just prioritizing the self. I've never met a child who was excited that his/her parent(s) are working and/or making lots of money instead of being with them. I don't think a goal of career or comfort/wealth is compatible with flourishing children.
Second, are the children actually taken care of? Assuming everything is well-run, then sure, their physical needs and safety are taken care of. They aren't getting love from parents during that time. They aren't living in a loving community. Instead they are getting socialized into being atomized, like the rest of us, where loneliness is epidemic. I'm really thankful my mother stayed home with us. (She started teaching part-time once we all got into all-day school)
Understandable, but the thing is, staying home with kids is work. It’s a vocation. Everyone should get to choose what work is fulfilling for them personally. In the absence of reliable child care, parents don’t get to make that choice freely. It sounds like in a perfect world, you might have enjoyed staying home with kids, if that seems more appealing than the work you ended up doing. I can tell you I tried it for 18 months and I just about went crazy. I am a much better software developer than I am a stay-at-home parent. I feel for women who don’t get to make choices the way I did.
> are the children actually taken care of?
There is a lot of data by now comparing outcomes for children in childcare versus with stay-at-home parents. Both groups do fine.
> I’m really thankful my mother stayed home with us
It sounds like she did a good job of it; it was probably a vocation for her. You do need to understand that not every woman is cut out for that.
You're romanticizing it, that's why. Staying at home and not working makes you incredibly vulnerable. You're entirely reliant on the goodwill of someone else, and you can end up trapped, unable to leave a bad situation because you have no access to money. Or your husband just leaves you with kids to feed and no money to do it with.
It's fine if you choose to do it with a partner who treats you as an equal, but there's a reason why female suicides instantly dropped by 20%[0] when no-fault divorce was adopted by their state.
If you want another data point, ask your older female relatives what their mothers and grandmothers told them about money. Bet you more than a few will have a story where they were told to save money in a secret place and never, ever tell their husbands about it.
[0] https://www.nber.org/papers/w10175
bleak
My wife and I staggered our work schedules to minimize the time spent at daycare.
The one thing we didn’t expect: The kids absolutely loved daycare. It was a great place with excellent caretakers. Most of all, it was socialization with their friends.
From reading sneering interment comments (like the one above) I was led to believe that daycare would be an awful experience and I should feel guilty for sending our kids away. Instead, it turned out to be a very fun thing they looked forward to that was also great for their development. Our kids still hang out with friends they made early in daycare days.
For a single parent, providing the needed money to survive and eat requires working, and child care can be impossibly expensive.
50% do child rearing, and the other 50% do literally all other professions.
If you did have such a large cohort engaged in that activity, there should probably be some kind of education where one could learn 'the best'.
Of course people with kids would be too busy to attend.
And the ones who did attend wouldn't have any kids to look after.
On top of that the increased taxes are going to raise prices of everything because the businesses don't just eat the cost of taxes, they pass it off to the consumer. So all these families that get free childcare are going to be paying more for their groceries, rent, unilities and everything else.
To top things off, you now have random strangers with no bond with your children looking after them in a ratio of maybe 1:8 or 1:10. So your children are going to be stressed out and anxious and are going to act out both at the childcare place and at home, so you're just going to be getting phone calls all day about your children fighting other children.
All in all, you might feel like you're better off but once you do the math you're at about the same place if not worse off.
Also if we care so much about these inefficiencies, why is it that I still have to subsidize drivers? Why aren't we investing in better public transport infrastructure, rather than letting drivers take up 1000x the space on roads that I'm forced to pay for?
> Why the sexist word "women"? Do you really mean to imply that men/fathers should not be stay at home dads?
That's... not even remotely what the sentence said? Or are you offended because you believe childcare obligations have historically prevented men from working their full potential?
Women are far more likely to be the primary, stay at home caregiver if one exists and face a lot of discrimination in the workforce as a result of those expectations (on top of already facing other workplace discrimination issues).
Why bring gender into it? There are plenty of families who choose to have stay at home Dads while the mother goes back to work full time. We are not in the 1950s any more.
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I think it would be much better to provide a one year paid stipend so that a parent can be home with the children during their tender years.
This entire structure is set up to keep the boss happy while a stranger raises your child during their most formative and vulnerable years.
Forcing parents back into the workforce early is unfortunate and does need to be addressed. However, this program seems to be addressing a different and still vital issue.
I can agree. I had grandparents to take are of me. During a family emergency I stayed with a friends family for a few weeks. We had a lot of people in our family and friends to step up who were all located in the same city.
Now everyone moves a thousand miles away from their existing support networks for a tech job.
And once the little guy was a year old, daycare for not quite enough hours to work full time (7am - 4pm) was a mere 500 EUR/mo, and would have been less had we not been a 1.5 engineer couple. It drops to 200 EUR/mo when the kids turn three. For awhile, Bavaria was considering giving a rebate to families who didn't use preschool, but then I think they realized that the people whose minds would be changed by an extra couple hundred Euro per month in their pockets were a lot of the people who this rather conservative state really, really wanted to have send their kids to preschool as soon as possible.
This goes hand in hand with very strong protections for parents choosing to work part time. My employer had to allow me to drop to part time for up to three years (prorated salary, of course), with an option to extend it until my kid is eight.
Result? I'm still working in the same department and position I was before the kid, but spend several hours a day with him.
He took to daycare like a duck to water and still loves preschool; it turns out that my little guy is way more social than either of his parents.
how long ago was that? i thought i read that the right to work part time is now universal, that is after some time in a job you can just request it, and it can't be denied, unless there are some special circumstances (and i think small companies are exempt too), children or not.
And please remember: not everyone's family situation is the same. There are single parents, all kinds of employment scenarios, chronic illnesses or disabilities, sick parents, income differentials, and on and on and on.
Your single data point about what worked for your situation does not necessarily apply to everyone else's situation.
I was lucky enough to get months of parental leave initially. I am glad I got it but at the same time I don't buy the tender, formative, vulnerable stuff too deeply. They're poop and vomit machines that nap and have very, very little interaction with the world around them. The primary benefit was for me to not have to work while deeply sleep deprived.
As my first got a little older I felt incredibly guilty dropping them off so I could go to work but that feeling very quickly subsided when I realised just how much they were thriving with the company of knowledgable teachers and bunch of peers their own age to interact with.
I still get plenty of time with my kids and we enjoy our time together immensely. And they also enjoy their time with their friends at nursery/preschool. “Stay at home with parent” isn’t actually that common when you look back historically. Childrearing has almost always taken a village.
I have a toddler.
They are absorbing everything and gaining a personality from day one.
You are not the one doing it.
If the government also runs daycare centers that adds another option of taking your child to gov daycare. It also forces the gov and private daycares to compete.
The current policy penalizes people on the margin-- maybe an extra $500/mo would get your child much better daycare, but you're stuck between (likely) low quality government care, or losing a huge chunk of income to solve the problem yourself.
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Or just learn from the best proven strategy -- 3 years maternity leave, free childcare from the year of 3, early retirement for grandparents who can be bothered to stay with kids so parents can have some time off.
That of course would be totally haram and communism, so instead the policy is to have immigration from places, but that is also totally haram and communism.
Pick your poison.
I thought everyone had the right to life, liberty, and property, but it seems like if one can't afford to live then they are just left by the wayside.
That is also several times more expensive. With child care, you can divide one worker’s salary over multiple kids. You are talking about paying a salary for each kid.
Or did you have something else in mind?
Women confined to domesticity become disconnected from their own potential and larger societal participation.
It's extremely sad, but a consistent finding in early childhood education is that the children who thrive most in daycares tend to come from the least advantaged backgrounds.
So a policy of paying parents to stay home would mostly benefit kids who are already well off.
Plus daycare allows women to continue their career progression. It’s soo important. Not every woman wants to end their career as a mother to a young kid. Daycare enables successful women to thrive and still have families.
Those poor kids have learning deficits. The "well-off" kids often have morality deficits.
A mom or dad raising them properly might help them more than being Student #642 in a government childcare facility.
This isn't an argument against childcare. My children attended preschool for 3 years before Kindergarten. But I'd rather that people got equal support to have a stay-at-home parent so that people can choose.
Is this based on something?
There's research left and right shows that children under 36 months at group nurseries are linked to increased aggression, anxiety, lower emotional skills, elevated cortisol (stress hormone), which is associated with long-term health and developmental risks.
Infants and children do better with one-to-one care at home by their parents and familiar faces, rather than strangers in a group setting.
I hear you saying the benefit of dedicated caregiving for children mostly helps families with less economic advantage. I'd agree with that, and suggest that OP's proposal capitalizes on exactly that. I'm not convinced of what may be implied in your argument that low-earners make for bad parents and that children should be separated more from their parents for their own good. Let the internal dynamics of a family be solved first, before saying we need to separate parents from children more.
Moreover, those with more economic advantage are unlikely to take a stipend in exchange for staying home. That's not a good deal when keeping the job pays so much that they can afford to pay for childcare.
It is precisely those with less advantage who will take the deal.
So I don't agree with your prediction that such a stipend mostly benefits those who are already well off.
So the children that do well in daycare comes from poor homes? So kids from rich home don't do well in daycare?
Every interaction I've ever had says the opposite. The disruptive bully at school usually comes from a broken home.
How so?
I would rather my kid be raised by a) spouse b) grandparents c) no-habla cash only daycare (who are catering to customers who's average values are much closer to mine than an above the table business). Only after all those options are exhausted do I look toward a "real business".
So basically this is a subsidy of the 4th place option.
Real businesses subject to real inspections and real assessments, you mean? With "strangers" who need to have qualifications and background checks?
To each their own of course but I'd prefer somewhere I know is actually judged to be a safe environment than some under the table option.
Yo, what the fuck HN?
Will the state provide the child care itself? Or will the attempt to provide funding, relying on the private market to provide the service. Are there a bunch of underworked child care providers just waiting around for new customers? Or would they expect the child care industry to go on a hiring spree?
Regardless who provides it, more workers would be required to deliver the service, and new facilities as well. What industries will those workers come from, who will now see reduced services and higher prices as a result? What doesn't get built while the construction workers are building new child care facilities?
Child care tends to be highly regulated. Is the government doing anything (aside from funding) to make it easier to open and run a child-care facility?
It's so easy to spend money. The hard part is the real-world actions and tradeoffs required. Everything comes at the cost of something else we could have had instead.
What you will see is: The funding will go to the people who are already receiving child-care services today, along with big price increases immediately and over time as government money chases supply that is slow to grow.
I like taxes, with them I buy civilization (which I also am fond of).
(The evidence also shows economic benefits of enabling parents to work when they want to by providing childcare)
https://illumine.app/blog/how-much-childcare-costs-by-state-...
https://childcaredeserts.org/
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064...
They aren't just theoretical concerns.
How can any state “guarantee no-cost schooling for all children”? Well, they do, so it’s clearly possible. Why would early childhood be any different?
> everything comes at the cost of something we could have had instead
Of course. That’s the nature of spending money. Your talking points here don’t really amount to much beyond “better things aren’t possible”.
The way that the Gell-Man Amnesia effect is the term for instantly forgetting what you know about the gulf between popular narrative and expert familiarity, there should be a name for the phenomenon of newly re-discovering and re-litigating the social compact that undergirds basic services as if it was being proposed for the first time.
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Paid for child care frees up some stay at home parents to enter the labor force; it's kind of circular, but some of those parents will work in child care. This won't fill the whole gap, but it will fill some of it.
I actually really like this idea (even though I'm red leaning) but hope they are able to effectively administrate it. I have my doubts they are.
Tech.
Edit: other user called what you're doing here concern trolling and I agree. If you disagree on principle with government assistance for childcare you're free to make the case, but this gish-galloping faux-naive JAQing off adds no value.
See also: US healthcare.
>average annual family savings of $12,000 per child.
How is NM paying for this? They currently have a 'D' grade from Truth in Accounting[1] with a $9.8 billion debt burden driven by unfunded obligations of pension and retiree health care
[1]https://www.truthinaccounting.org/library/doclib/NM-2020-2pa...
[1]https://taxfoundation.org/location/new-mexico/
While NM has debt it has been servicing it fine and state revenue has increased year over year pretty much since that report was produced in 2020 (either 2020 or 2021 were the worst years for the state's financial position). It's projected that 2025 will close out with nearly $3.5 billion in unspent revenue, and the state has about $50 billion saved in various permanent funds. The state's financial situation is currently so good that it has allowed things like universal free college tuition in a largely revenue-neutral way due to the significant balance of the invested funds.
One of the main criticisms you will hear of the NM legislative on the fiscal front is that they are too hesitant to spend money, since NM has serious issues with underperformance in areas like education while also having billions of savings that could be spent down in an effort to address those issues (and in fact the state supreme court more or less mandated the state to start doing so several years ago). However, since NM's revenue is so tied to the oil and gas industry and its boom-and-bust nature, the legislature likes to keep a substantial cash reserve to manage the bust years. That may be particularly important right now as the Trump administration is radically reducing the amount of federal funding that NM receives, which has always been a critical revenue source due to the state's high level of poverty (third highest in the US or so, depending on year and how you measure).
Just gotta hope it stays funded enough to avoid descending into a bureaucratic death spiral with months of delays for everything.
Private childcare is also filled with months (often years) of delays. Expanding on this a bit: if you have a sudden need to get childcare, in much of the country you are not likely going to be able to find something that is convenient and of any quality that is also available within a week or two. If you are willing to spend 2x+ the local median childcare expense, you may have better results.
And that also needs to be paid for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Without making any judgement on whether the economic calculation is "efficient" or not, it's not really something the majority of voters have to worry about as it's essentially entirely OPM to get the votes to get there.
do we really need to point to how badly private healthcare has been working?
2. What if not everything in life is about the economy?
The entire incel and tradwife spectrum hates these policies.
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https://www.aecf.org/interactive/databook?l=35
You can research for yourself and see other evidence that the educational outcomes for children in New Mexico is generally very, very poor.
Expect similar results with New Mexico's "universal" child care.
Quartz ranked New Mexico 5th: https://qz.com/early-childhood-education-by-state-ranking-20...
If I look hard enough, I can find a study that ranks New Mexico at every single ranking from 50th to 1st.
In particular, the study you linked ranks on a lot of factors outside the control of the school - which is largely affected by the huge number of poor people in New Mexico (#1 in the country... Which is why they got the rating they did).
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/24/quebec-unive...
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
My only question is who the heck is going to be working in these childcare centers?? Right now (granted, I don't live in NM so this is in California) most places that are decent have waiting lists - indicating that they could expand but are unable to, instead they're already leaving money on the table. I don't think there are enough people willing to work a very grueling job for a wage that the current costs are enough to support. So, if this is a new entitlement program the state may find its costs doubling soon as they try to force the market to provide, or are forced to directly provide, care.
Pretty much any blue collar or service worker is either living in a prop 13 house, has roommates, or is driving well over an hour to get to work.
That’s not true in many other places on earth. California could fix it, but the politicians keep actively making the problem worse.
For instance, there’s a statewide mandate to reduce commute miles (not carbon, and not time). If towns don’t comply, they get in trouble with the state government.
Similarly, construction permit departments are adversarial, and “affordable housing” initiatives routinely block market rate housing from being built.
On top of all that, the ‘08 housing crisis put a bunch of contractors out of business, and so did covid. Those people largely moved out of state. The result is that there’s no one to train new workers, and even if there were, there’s no reason for those new workers to locate here, since the pay scale doesn’t make up for housing costs. (This would be a huge opportunity if we fixed the roads so they could drive to work sites quickly, or allowed new housing construction, but we don’t.)
[1] (if you can avoid thinking of the class-based eugenics that such a policy would amount to, if it were actually obeyed)
[2] punish by impoverishing them further, or by making it more likely they'll be neglected by those parents that you already suspect aren't responsible