I'm going to take the reverse position. I don't like this policy.

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.

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?

This isn't just for babies. My coworker's 12yo is covered by this because he's got cancer and is too immunocompromised to go to school.

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.

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.

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.

Pick your poison.

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).

It's not one or the other. Scandinavian countries provide ample parental leave and also universal childcare.

The most formative year is not 0-1. My daughter is 2 and it’s just now starting to be formative.

So, maternity/paternity leave in line with European systems?

Or did you have something else in mind?

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.

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.