It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits. Give people the money and let them use it how they like. When I lived in California I LOVED the parking cash-out law, it meant a few thousand more a year because I rode a bike to work and didn't need a parking spot.

Although, one challenge with things like childcare is that if you applied this on a society-wide level you wind up with childless people having more money, thereby being better able to outbid parents for essentials like housing (this is why a housing scarcity is so insidious). Of course, whether that's a bad thing or not depends on perspective. I have two kids myself and despite living in Europe childcare was so expensive we dropped to one income.

Yup, I don't have kids myself, but like that my company offers benefits to parents. It keeps the company more diverse and more enjoyable for me as well in a sense.

> It's weird, in some ways, that we offer benefits.

In some cases it also makes economical sense. It can cost a company $1000 to give you a benefit, but to buy it yourself would cost $2000 (and the difference is even greater if the benefit isn't taxed at the same rate as cash would be).

Or the $200 the company spends on beers for me each year, many would perhaps say that they'd rather have the $200 to spend as they please. But in a sense, I get more value than $200 by getting to know my co-workers better and having a better time every day at work.

Interesting, is this not taxed? In some places this sort of thing is taxed the same as "benefit in kind" or similar.

Look, I'm a DINK, don't have kids, never plan to have kids, don't even like kids. But child care is important to both the parents and society. Not subsidizing child care often means one parent has to leave the workforce, and that's almost always worse off for everyone than if they were able to afford child care and can contribute

Right, because raising kids isn't contributing to society.

That's exactly why child care workers who look after packs of 15 to 20 kids at a time should be highly valued and paid a decent wage.

It's how villages worked in the past, most adults did non child related work much of the time, some adults and some older children kept an eye on what the pooled group of kids were up to .. watching, sometimes educating, sometimes leading them in "work" building things, cooking, hunting, clearing fields etc. in small ways.

It's a better use of labour than splitting every pair of adults into one for this type of work, the other always does child care.

I always tell my wife, if she wants to have a lot of kids we have only two options.

1) We move close to my or her family.

2) We get a lot more money.

I don't see anyway around it, we need family support or money to pay someone else to help.

All teachers should be well paid and well vetted. Teaching shouldn't be a self sacrifial social justice position, it should be an honored and well rewarded position.

Careful, you might get yourself into edtech. >-D

The average career length for teachers (not job, career) is 5 years and trending down.

The reason is not a secret: teaching is a brutal experience with sub-poverty wages. In most cases parents, students and the school administration are your adversaries. If it’s a public institution, political campaigns come crashing in annually with “us vs them” battles that make it awful no matter what side you are on.

It is not a job anyone should pursue.

We should probably also redesign schools so that they need fewer teachers. For example, above certain age it is a waste of time if the teacher has to explain the same concepts over and over again to each class -- kids could instead watch a video, and then discuss it with the teacher.

Basically, the problem is that the current educational system doesn't scale well. It requires hundreds of thousands of teachers. Then people say "also, they should all be very smart, very empathic, well paid, etc." but good luck finding hundreds of thousands of people like that.

People understand why having a personal cook is expensive, so you either cook for yourself or you buy something mass-produced in a supermarket or you do a combination of both. Yet, we insist on everyone having a personal teacher. Not completely personal, but the ratio of teachers to students is something like 1:10, which is still too many teachers.

If we go even further, the school system has a dual purpose of cheap babysitting and education, but it is taboo to talk about the former, so we pretend that all teachers do it teach. If instead we admitted the dual purpose, we could have separate professions of babysitters and teachers, both operating at schools, but we would need fewer teachers, and the babysitters would not need to have university diplomas.

I'd guess they referred to the non-working parents contributing to the society by raising their children.

All contributions don't get paid, and all that get paid don't contribute.

raising wages doesn't equal better quality

But low wages certainly doesn't equal better quality.

Contributing to the household income. It takes 2 incomes to live anywhere but BFE in the US.

BFE?

I'm guessing this is some slur for rural areas. You know the ones that typically have large families?

Yeah but a big part of that is because both parents work.

You can buy double the house with 2 incomes instead of 1.

Sadly the main consequence of moving to two income families seems to be making everything cost twice as much.

Elizabeth Warren warned of this in the two income trap in 2003.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but that wasn't my intention with the statement I made, I focused way too much on the "contributing to GDP" aspect of it.

Raising kids is absolutely contributing to society.

Not being able to have kids because you can't afford one parent to quit, isn't.

This is such a regressive view — a household that can only function on 2 incomes is more stressful than one that can operate on 1. Not saying earning potential needs to be the same — but claiming 1 is worse than 2 doesn’t hold water and is a pathological case.

In the US it’s a shame we so under/de value child rearing as somehow “less than”

It is better for everyone, and it does not devalue child-rearing at all.

It is better for the family: - it has more resources - it has more income diversification

It is better for the father: - he doesn't have to carry the weight of income-gathering alone

It is better for the mother: - she doesn't have to carry the weight of child-rearing alone - if things go sour, she can maintain herself and/or the family financially - sha has more choices in life

It is better for the child: - they get a wider variety of experiences - they socialize with other kids earlier, which helps in early school-life - they learn to socialize with more adults too - there are professionals who have seen many children, who will notice problems before the parents will

It is better for the childcare professional: - they have another job choice, helping them pick a job they enjoy

It is good for society: - father, mother and childcare professional can do something that matches their talents, instead of doing something suboptimal for them, thus delivering more value to society

It doesn't devalue child-rearing, it values it more, by having a professional help do it.

I'm always befuddled by that argument. I'm not devaluing plumbing work by hiring a plumber, nor am I devaluing medical work by hiring a doctor. Why would I be devaluing child-rearing by hiring a professional to help?

Half those arguments could be made for child labor. After all, if the child works too then the family has more resources, the father and mother don't have to carry all the weight, the child gets a wider variety of experiences, the father and mother can do something that matches their talents while the child picks up the slack. Right?

Who actually cares more about a child's well-being, an employee paid by the hour or their own parents?

I would not say that the child gets a wider variety of experiences in child labor compared to child care. Child care is explicitly designed to have a variety of activities for children. Child labor is the low skill kind with lots of repetitive actions. Child care also takes the child's needs into account, like having nap times and eating times designed around children, instead of around a production process.

As for caring about the child's well-being? The parents, which is why they should hire the best people they can afford to do various parts of taking care off them. Hire the best doctor for their medical care, hire the best dentists for their dental care, hire the best teachers for their education, hire the best child-care professionals for daycare.

For all these "it is better" points, it still doesn't even begin to outweigh the "you get to spend time with your children" point. This is the most important part of child rearing and once they've moved on you'll be thankful you spent your time with them instead of... whatever all that income/societal optimization stuff is. You get to raise your children once.

Who is 'you' in this context?

If one parent is working, the other home with the kids, chances are that the one working can't take as much time off or has a harder time setting a healthy work-life balance (increasing your pay requires working harder).

Using myself as an example: the only reason I can pick up my kid early from the kindergarten and spend quality time with him is because I can afford to not work 9-5 every day due to my wife also working.

Not sure I’d apply your situation to every parent.

As most things it is a balancing act. Children also need to socialize and learn to operate in a social setting independently from their parents. Day cares have an important role in this aspect in our nuclear family based societies. Confining children to be paired to their parents all the time is also not going to be good for their development.

I guess you missed the part where I said that it is better for the child. Reducing my argument to "income/societal optimization stuff" is arguing in bad faith.

You haven’t addressed the elephant in the room: housing.

Housing costs have risen to match the switch to double income households. Now instead of 1, it takes 2 incomes just to be able to afford housing. This makes the family more brittle since if either parent loses their job both will lose the house.

And with the rise in housing costs people move further afield. Commuting times go way up and people waste more time in the car or on the train. Everybody ends up more stressed than ever before and further behind economically (compared to those whose wealth grows without working).

> Kids can get plenty of social interactions and variety with a stay at home parent.

The keyword there is "can". They can, it's just less likely. Especially when a parent takes the "stay at home" part too literal.

> To somehow claim that childcare comes at no cost for kids is naive.

Well, my experience with my kids was that their daycare was beneficial for them. They did not always want to go, but they definitely enjoyed all their days there. And especially for the first one, they had a lot of experiences that my wife and I would never have even considered as an option.

Comparing them to their classmates when school started, they were way ahead in lots of things. Absolutely in language development, socialization and being able to focus. They were also just way less, for lack of a better term, worried about everything. They knew that the world does not revolve around mommy and daddy, and that they'd be fine in new environments.

I'm not sure I'd use your kids alone as a representation of the experience of day care for the entire population.

And you're only counting the benefits of daycare, but ignoring the opportunity cost of less time with parents and the benefits that come from that.

I don't disagree that there are benefits to daycare, but where is the optimum? A few hours a day? Or the kids in daycare from 8am to 6pm, so they see their parents for maybe 2 hours a day before bed time?

We like it or not 1 person in the household taking care of the kids skew the relationship between 2 adults into dependentship as the one working outside perceived to be the one bringing the income (while both should) and the one taking care of the kids and household end up feeling dependent. Some may try to be objective and tell yourself the other one is contributing as much, that is not the way it works in our guts, we like it or not and leads to inequality.

This not optimal for many reasons:

- once the kids are going to school, regular "office hours" daycare is not needed and it skew the relationship even more by removing one task to one party. If that time is used for personal instead of household chores activities, that person not bringing the income is eventually seen as a partial freeloader by the one bringing the income.

- relationship can go sour quickly and if it doesn't work, the "dependent" one doesn't feel as free to end that relationship

- the person taking care of the kid's social life is usually not as rich

The elephant in the room being that in most case it ends up being the woman staying at home in an heterogender relationship in a society with an historically patriarcal model because of income levels which further increase the inequalities and dependentship.

The situation you describe has been happening for most of humanity.

IMO society is worse now with dual income + strangers raising children.

The only major benefits I've seen are 1) Woman have access to birth control 2) Women have equal rights. Everything else is debatable as "better".

I wouldn't call that strangers raising children. Obviously it depends on the amount of hours per day but it is not like you are sending them to boarding school and you only see them during the week-ends.

I also felt that putting my daughters to daycare helped them socially.

A household with 1 income is almost impossible for most households, they have to compete in a housing market with other families that do have 2 incomes. This automatically raises real estate prices for everyone.

You are making an argument in favor of Warren’s thesis in “The Two Income Trap”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two-Income_Trap

It's not that we as a society devalue childcare. We just don't live in an economy where it is safe for families to put all their eggs in one basket like that.

In post-WWII US, it was generally easy for fathers to find stable, lifelong careers with a low risk of layoffs and a low risk of an untimely death, which allowed families to thrive on single incomes. But that was an outlier, not the norm.

In most places and in most periods of history, mothers have had to work (sewing, gardening, spinning, knitting, brewing, laundering, midwifery, etc., etc.) because fathers have not had widespread access steady, well-paying, low-risk work. Unless she was independently wealthy, a mother who did not bring in income was playing a very risky game with her children's lives.

The biggest difference is that, today, most work must be done outside the home, which is very difficult for mothers. Childcare helps close the gender pay gap and is necessary for a fairer, less sexist society — at least until/unless our economy returns to primarily home-based work.

In the past extended family would usually live close by, so they could assist the mother inside the home. Today, both parents need to work outside the home, and family is usually too far away to assist.

That is very true. And even in cases where it was not true, families tended to have more children, so older siblings could help look after younger siblings while the family worked.

For single parents, this is the choice between working or not working.

For the people that want the childcare, it’s better than more money, because it’s tax free

It's better for the company - they can pay less and the employee gets the same equivalent amount in their pocket.

E.g. if the company were going to pay $2k extra but it would be taxed $1k, they would have to pay $3k to get the equivalent "happiness" boost. The employee gets $2k / year either way.

$2k tax free -> $2k in your pocket

$3k + $1k tax -> $2k in your pocket

In the USA, you can get up to $5k or so without tax (it’s your money, but you can spend from a tax free account) to fund child care, which works out to almost half for one kid in a HCOL.

I suppose that depends on location. In the UK, it would count as a benefit in kind, and is taxable in exactly same way as regular income.

depends on the form, amount and also income: https://www.litrg.org.uk/benefits/childcare/employer-support...

workplace nurseries are tax free as is any child care for lower incomes. other benefits are tax free up to a certain amount.

Can company provide a choice for employees where they can either get facilities or a raise?

IANAL, but I'll bet the answer is "yes-ish, in most-ish circumstances and jurisdictions, if the company is willing to pay enough lawyers & taxes & stuff.

(If $Company is not big global retailer like IKEA, then things would probably be far simpler.)

In the US, and presumably elsewhere, no way. My wife tried to negotiate a higher salary in exchange for forgoing health insurance a few times, to no avail.

Individually it usually doesn't work unless you're at a level where there is "only one of you" - think C-level exec.

But collectively it can work; the company may talk to the union and offer either X benefit which costs $Y or $Y applied to salaries.

It won't save as much as you might expect, though, because the insurance provider also knows that the people opting out of the scheme would have (on average) cost the provider less to provide healthcare for.

I’m pretty sure it isn’t up to the company, they have to provide health insurance if certain criteria are met, it doesn’t matter if your partner already has health insurance.

> In the US, and presumably elsewhere

In every other developed country everyone has healthcare, irrelevant of job - even people that don't have a job.

Healthcare is not tied to your job, it is a basic human right.

So this discussion makes no sense outside the US.

>Subsidizing childcare is also "more money", but only for some workers. If the others don't notice or don't care that they're getting paid less for the same work that's great for the company.

Such an american thing to say.

No, we don't mind having the company pay colleagues' children childcare on top of our (equal to theirs) salary. We'd hate to be in a society where such a petty mindset would be common, that would be living in some kind of social hell.

Considered "valued" vs considered "useful" is probably the analogy that should be used here. Subsidizing childcare signals "we value you", while flat increae is signaling "you are useful to us", which can make a lot of impact on moral.

The message of subsidized childcare is not generically "we value you", but "we want you to have children while you work for us", which for most employees is more important than money. Compare to companies that avoid hiring women to avoid dealing with maternity leave.

I live in a country with generous maternity leave. I have a family, and we're grateful we could access it. But maternity leave is tricky for businesses.

My anecdote: I worked for a company whose long-time CEO retired. After an involved search, the company found a replacement. She was onboarded and started getting in a groove, then 6 months in it was announced she would be leaving for a year of maternity leave. So we had to find another CEO. 10 months later the original hire decided she would not be returning to the role (she's under no obligation to). No problem, except the replacement CEO assumed this was a temporary position, so she already had another job lined up after her term. Once again, we were searching for a new CEO...

All of a sudden you're working for a company that's had 5 CEOs in 3 years. That's a hard thing for a company to deal with. People will say, "that can happen anyway!". Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong, and yet an incredibly destabilizing environment resulted and the business suffered.

If the company doesn't have someone ready for a promotion to CEO, and needs an "involved" search for a replacement, and doesn't get work done without one, it is an understaffed, unprepared and unattractive company.

> Sure, but the strange thing here is nobody did anything wrong

And if anyone did anything for the business...

Is there really a perceived difference on the employees side?

If anything subsidized childcare feels like charity and I don't want charity, I want to be paid well for my work, so I can take care of my family.

> Is there really a perceived difference on the employees side?

Only if we could generalize all the employees! I am sure there are some who feel better to have holiday gifts, holiday parties, token recognition rewards etc. And there would be some who just evaluate everything on the basis of cold hard numbers. A good company should have policies to cater to as many employees as possible.

For some people there is no percieved differnce, some would think employer is trying to save on taxes, while for some (many?) there is a real percieved difference as being seen a member of family rather than a disposable hired hand.

For an analogy, one can be given money instead of being invited to a social gathering. One might feel offended, while other may feel happier.

If the childcare is on site, then it's not just money, but also time. When a place I worked at had on site child care it saved me 30 minutes per day.