Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.

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JPKab 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.

Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.

A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.

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tuna74 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Interesting that you only seem to think that mothers should take care of their kids.

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eptcyka 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.

	▲	JPKab 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit. We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.

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monero-xmr 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.

The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West

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40 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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9x39 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, they know the middle will work no matter what, so they may as well squeeze them.

	▲	SoftTalker 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		George Carlin had a bit on this. Went something like: The rich people take all of the money, do none of the work and pay none of the taxes. The middle class does all of the work and pays all of the taxes. The lower class is there to scare the shit out of the middle class. He was wrong about the taxes, the rich do pay most of them but in proportion to their wealth it can look like not much.

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tahoeskibum 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.

	▲	piva00 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Where though? It isn't the case here in Sweden, it's pretty great.
	▲	eptcyka 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		This hasn’t been my personal and 2nd hand experience.
	▲	tirant 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Not in Germany, though.
	▲	polski-g 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		That sounds like a distribution problem. They should mail out checks and let the parents decide how to utilize it: au pair, group childcare home, professional daycare facility, paying grandma to stay in the third bedroom.