Considering Childcare

The editors of the Washington Post are very concerned about the condition of day-care and K-12 education:

Day cares say they are struggling to survive. Without enough teachers, they can’t serve as many students, especially infants and toddlers who require more supervision. In K-12 schools, teachers report having to pull double duty teaching their own classes and filling in for colleagues who are absent since there aren’t sufficient substitutes.

President Biden’s Build Back Better plan would make one of the largest investments in decades in the child-care industry and help increase pay for workers. But much of the funding, including for universal pre-K, expires after six years, making it unclear if it’s a permanent fix. And it wouldn’t solve the K-12 staffing issues.

Some states have made some clever attempts to try to help day-care staffing. Illinois recently offered a $1,000 bonus to day-care workers.

But the bottom line is it says something about America’s priorities when people get paid more to work at Target than with young kids.

It seems to me that there’s a relationship between the ills to which the editors draw attention and the minimal requirements for bus drivers, teachers aides, and day-care workers on the one hand and the press to increase teachers’ wages that has taken place over the last several decades. In the absence of a substantial increase in revenues, something that has proven elusive, when you increase the wages of one group of workers in a district over the market clearing price for such workers it will inevitably decrease the wages of the workers in the lower echelons of the district.

I recognize that the context of this editorial is “Build Back Better” bill and its childcare provisions. While I don’t have a problem with subsidizing childcare for those in serious need, I have reservations about extending such subsidies to people in the top quintile of income earners as appears to be the case. Isn’t there some point at which you are no longer helping those in need and instead are subsidizing lifestyles?

IMO the actual problem they are complaining about is the decline of wages per wage earner that has taken place over the last half century, something I attribute to shortsighted policy decisions over that period.

3 comments… add one
  • Grey Shambler Link

    Something happened tonight that changed my view.
    My 4 YO granddaughter brought me paper and crayons and asked me to spell words she dictated in a story about her doll, Elsa.
    Turns out she knows how to write the alphabet , at least in caps.
    We didn’t teach her, she’s had three months of half day preschool.
    She is learning so quickly at this age that I wonder if we’ve been missing a full year of a child’s most receptive life.

  • CuriousOnlooker Link

    This one is really hard.

    While parents put kids in childcare for many reasons; the main reason is labor arbitrage. That a parent makes more money by working and paying for childcare then not working and taking care of the child.

    The arbitrage only works if childcare is cheap in comparison to a parents wages (which goes against the desire of raising wages for workers). And the usual means to get out of the tradeoff (by raising worker efficiency) is impossible. For children 0-3, there is a limit to how many children a caretaker can provide for (no more than a large family i.e. 3-6 kids).

    There is also an elemental truth made in comments/post a while back. At a certain point, childcare is a form of non-investment in the future. Childcare providers in general do the best they can; but as countless parents discovered during the pandemic when forced to watch/teach their own (0-3yrs) children full time; parents teaching their own children 1:1 full-time will teach their children more.

    Governments can try to subsidize the arbitrage, but I suspect its not sustainable. The real issue is the modern “life-cycle” where dual-income is a requirement to middle class life.

  • The real issue is the modern “life-cycle” where dual-income is a requirement to middle class life.

    That’s another way of stating what I was alluding to in the post.

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