The argument is that stay at home parents should get the same credit as childcare providers because they perform the same service to society. If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids. You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.

▲

SilverElfin 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If you're only caring for your own kids, you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids.

I disagree with this. Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.

> You want to focus on raising your own kids, that's fine, but do it on your dime.

Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.

▲

jjk166 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults). And that may be more of a benefit to society than a large number of people being incentivized to create large number of kids whose care is just outsourced to childcare centers where they receive less attention.

We're not talking about some vague value to society of kids. We're talking about the concrete value of the service being provided - an adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues, freeing up adults for other, more productive utilizations of their time. A stay at home parent who looks after only their own children does not free up any adults.

> Is this really an argument for anything? One could just say “if you want to raise kids you can’t afford, do it on your own dime” and undermine your perspective.

That doesn't undermine my perspective at all. Again the argument is that division of labor is more efficient. It costs society less to have one person raise multiple kids than it does for lots of people to raise their own kids. Even if you say only those who could afford to stay at home and raise their kids should have kids, they should still be utilizing this system to reduce total cost. If they choose not to participate in the cost reduction, they ought to shoulder the burden of the higher costs on their own. Recognizing that society kind of needs kids for the whole survival of the species thing, selfish actions that reduce cost savings for everyone ought not to be incentivized.

▲

ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent [-]

If you're trying to be efficient, you could also put 100 kids in a room with an adult to do whatever as long as the adult can keep them alive, but most people would recognize that the services are not equivalent. It's not more efficient; it's lower quality.

▲

jjk166 8 hours ago | parent [-]

That's literally the exact same argument. 100 being too many doesn't mean 1 is ideal. No one is saying there isn't some threshold beyond which quality drops, just that the threshold is higher than 1.

	▲	ndriscoll 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Your characterization of the service provided is "adult physically present in the vicinity of children to take care of issues". That sounds to me like a lower quality "service" than what e.g. my wife provides, which is actually raising them, teaching them, giving them emotional support, taking them on errands around town, etc. Even with your own kids it's way more difficult to give them as much attention when there's 1 vs 2, so I find the assertion that quality of care doesn't drop after 1 to be dubious as well.

▲

vidarh 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Perhaps caring for your own kids produces much better kids (and eventually, adults).

In places with universal childcare provisions, one of the arguments is often that children in childcare tends to benefit from the extra socialisation. I don't know to what extent that is supported by hard evidence, but it's at least by no means clear that caring for your own children is a net benefit for society even direct economic arguments aside.

▲

pbhjpbhj 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids

And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.

A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.

Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?

▲

jjk166 2 days ago | parent [-]

It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.

▲

somenameforme 2 days ago | parent [-]

In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care.

It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.

▲

jjk166 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker.

You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.

▲

somenameforme 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. An interesting one is that children who spend extensive time in daycare even end up less socially competent which is quite interesting since it runs contrary to one of the typical arguments in favor of daycare. But it's also not surprising if you think about it, because at home a child is getting vastly more attention and interaction than he would in daycare.

And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.

[1] - https://search.brave.com/search?q=long+term+outcomes+of+dayc...

	▲	jjk166 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization. > Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly. > Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim. [1] https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/learning-deve... [2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/measuring-the-long-term-effects-o...

▲

ndriscoll 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).

	▲	jjk166 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Would you mind providing a link to one of these studies?