Let me put this another way: Childcare Q&A

The basic argument is that we should have highly skilled, quality childcare available for every child under the age of five in America. We should ensure this by paying a high wage and good benefits to those workers.

Let's unpack this a little.

Let's call skilled childcare workers someone with a degree in early childhood education. Those degrees currently pay pretty well, actually--north of $35,000 a year, according to the best estimates I can find on the web.

There are about 20 million children between the ages of 0 and four in the United States--call it 4 million in each year group. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Child development experts generally recommend that a single caregiver be responsible for no more than 3 or 4 infants (less than 1 year old) and toddlers (1 to 2 years old) or 6 or 7 preschool-aged children (between 2 and 5 years old). In before- and after-school programs, workers may be responsible for many school-aged children at a time.

Say we pop the little beauties into daycare at six months and leave them there until they're five. By my math, we'd need the following:

650,000 people caring for the nation's infants.
1 million people caring for the nation's toddlers
2 million people caring for the nation's 2-4 year olds.

Call it 3.5 million people, conservatively. The pricetag on just their wages would be $140 billion a year. You generally estimate 30-50% on top of salary for payroll taxes, training, and a decent benefits package, so call it $200 billion a year. That's before you do anything like heat the daycare center, buy insurance, pay rent, put someone in charge of handling the administrative work, and so forth.

But of course, at the current price, we don't have anything like 3.5 million women* with early childhood degrees scrambling to work in daycare centers. In order to get those women, I presume we will actually have to raise the price of their labor. Why? Well, ask yourself why you want this fabulous childcare. Answer: you do not want to spend your entire day in the company of one or more toddlers. That's your fascinating, adorable toddler. Presumably even less do you want to spend your entire day in the company of someone else's snotty nosed brat, getting sick every month from whatever the children are passing around, changing forty diapers a day, toilet training seven or eight children at a time, and so forth.

There is something truly odd to me about highly educated people who simultaneously believe that they have something better to do than employ their degree in singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" seventy times a day, and also that there should be a large supply of bright, educated people who choose to do just that. There are very special people in the world who genuinely long to spend the rest of their days caring for small children. They are very rare. Most people do it because they have to, or think they ought to, not because it's their first choice of lives. I'm not talking about caring for your own children--even though I have yet to meet anyone under the age of sixty who has uttered both these sentences to me:

"I really loved my job."

"I decided to stay home with the kids."

But nature prepares you for the difficulties of caring for your own child by flooding you with neurochemicals that make you fiercely interested in its life. Very few people experience that same feeling for any random group of very small children. Childcare is extremely tedious. Bright, educated people rarely voluntarily seek tedious work. This is why even most people with degrees in early childhood care do not actually provide day-to-day childcare. You will have to spend a phenomenal amount of money on salaries to attract these high-quality workers you believe your children should have--indeed, in most cases, much more than either mother or father makes.

I love children, and wouldn't mind having some of my own, circumstances permitting. But the very mothers flooding my comments with angry dissertations on the appalling state of American childcare also dwell quite lovingly on all of the insane tedium of doing nothing but provide it to their own children. There is a pretty deep disconnect here.

* Since society is not going to magically alter overnight, I assume basically all these new workers will be women.

Update I should say I know a few people who chose to leave jobs they loved: the parents of special needs children. But as they certainly know, caring for a single very needy child is a full time job that commands an enormous wage premium, and arguably cannot be purchased at any price.

Comments

Since society is not going to magically alter overnight, I assume basically all these new workers will be women.

You'll also find that a lot of men who might be interested in caring for young children will instantly be suspected to be pedophiles and potential child molesters. This is anecdotal, but I've observed this tendency for men to avoid elementary education because of this perception. And charges of pedophilia strike male primary school educators more often than women -- also my own anecdotal observation.

FYI, I like kids like W.C.Fields: if appropriately cooked and seasoned! =)

Posted by MarkG | June 29, 2008 12:41 PM

Megan: "Blah blah blah numbers numbers it won't work." Megan, learn from the children. Unlike the physicists, they believe that Santa will bring them presents. You too must set aside your cynicism and believe. Believe that every child deserves the best of care, and that no mother should have to sacrifice either a career or income to provide that care.

Posted by Bambi | June 29, 2008 1:05 PM

The Air Force seems to have a pretty good program for childcare. The children are segregated by age; up to 6 months of age in one group for instance. Nevertheless when grandmother left, and the 2-3 month old went into childcare, they remarked, 'This child is used to being held!'

Posted by Michael | June 29, 2008 2:38 PM

Well, meet me! I loved loved loved my job, and yet I took a break to care for my kids. Whoopsie! Must be something wrong with me I guess.

Worth it to me. Life is long - early childhood is short. They spend tons and tons of years institutionalized; to me it's a huge gift to let them have freeform preschool years, as much as possible. I worked plenty of years before they were born; I'll work many years after my youngest starts school.

It goes by fast.

The ages of 3 through 5 can be difficult - it's not the tedium, it's the mental isolation, the constant needs, the little battles. The feeling that you haven't spoken to an adult, or had an uninterrupted thought, in forever.

The isolation of the SAHM/WAHM (or dad) is the worst thing. That is a new feature. It used to be you had neighbors, or better yet a family business or farm - you weren't all alone with three year olds all day long.

Posted by BlackOrchid | June 29, 2008 3:03 PM

I really loved my job, too and stayed home with the kids. I do have a special needs child, but it wasn't apparent until he was two. For us, childcare was too expensive in NYC, the academic market was too uncertain, and we wanted to do it ourselves.

But to your larger points about feasibility. You say that no families could afford good childcare. True enough. Hello, big liberal government fairy!

You say that no smart person would willingly do the work. (You do realize that you've now permanently offended pre-school teachers. Wait until the edubloggers find this post.) Capable, smart people like to make a decent salary. Some of them may like kids. Good childcare centers give their workers breaks and rotate them. They would with other people. It's flexible. In many ways, it's a better gig than raising your own.

From your posts, you clearly think that raising kids is important work and that parents do a better job of it than childcare systems. Yet, you also think that most smart women wouldn't really want to do it themselves. So, instead we should give our kids to underpaid, unskilled, demoralized workers.

Posted by laura | June 29, 2008 10:56 PM

Laura,

Megan did not say that "no smart person would willingly do the work." In fact, she specifically said that there are people out there who will do the work, with the caveat that they are fairly rare. However, given that the supply of labor is low and demand is high, the cost of high quality EC care is too high for most parents to afford. Thus, most people who don't wish to raise their own children give those children to underpaid, unskilled, demoralized workers.

I don't think Megan is necessarily happy with this situation; she's just attempting to explain why it exists.

For what it's worth, I'm a relatively young, male high school teacher. One summer volunteering at a Boys & Girls Club was enough to convince me to steer clear of elementary levels, for pretty much all of the reasons in the original post & comments.

Posted by Unactuality | June 30, 2008 12:44 AM

"even though I have yet to meet anyone under the age of sixty who has uttered both these sentences to me: 'I really loved my job.' 'I decided to stay home with the kids.'"

TR: Considering other things you say in this post I'm guessing such people would be loathe to admit such a thing to you.

In my experience women who do have this combination are less likely to admit it to many career women than they would to other women or men. They usually get the feeling that the career woman will judge them in some way. Or just treat them as some kind of strange creature they found in their yard one Sunday morning.

I'm not saying this "feeling" is always right. I think some who stayed home with the kids are a bit too quick to believe career women look down on them. I think some of them do worry they'll get isolated from other adults so might have a stronger than average fear of being "frozen out." However I think many times they are more or less correct. White-collar working women do look down on them and do treat them like morons in a way many blue-collar women wouldn't.

Posted by Thomas R | June 30, 2008 1:40 AM

Great article. In Canada where I live the cost of childcare for every preschooler would be $20 billion a year and the daycare lobby is asking all taxpayers to provide it free to those who use it. The state's even most lavish promises for funding amount to $5 billion over 5 years however so there's a bit of a shortfall. We have as a result winners and losers in the system- those who get free daycare and all others. The all others category is huge and many are very clever educated women or men who prioritize their kids and actually, gasp, are willing to be home with them or to arrange tag-team care or grandma or other care so the child is not in impersonal care by a series of changing faces.
The ultimate solution many of us are asking for is revolutionary and not in the 'universal daycare' mode. It is to redefine work itself in the economy, to recognize unpaid caregiving as work, to have benefits the state provides' flow with the child' so every single child in the nation gets equal financial support - and then parents can choose where best to provide care. Some will choose daycare but others will not. The money the others get offsets the costs including opportunity costs and foregone salary - of the other arrangements. That's fair. And that's the solution for child poverty and the solution for valuing all work women do. It untilts the balance economists currently have to favor only traditional male roles. It opens up the definition. All mothers work.

Posted by Beverley Smith | June 30, 2008 9:03 AM

The question, I guess, is why should daycare workers have an early childhood degree? That seems like a ridiculous amount of education for something which is, as you've said above, not skilled labor.

Posted by JS Bangs | June 30, 2008 9:26 AM

I agree w/JSB, and would add that I don't think, in practice, that most childcare workers have 4-year degrees. The 35k/yr works out to roughly $20/hr which would be considered high in the child care industry. Also, from the depiction, Megan doesn't have kids.

Historically speaking (the world pre-WWII), would mothers with only one or two children confine themselves to their own homes, or were more community care type situations common, where one person might care for more than just their own kids, and the other mother might engage in other useful behavior?

Posted by winstongator | June 30, 2008 11:57 AM

Childcare is skilled labor. Even for 1-2 year olds, it requires a non-trival amount of education to organize a room with enriching things for children to use and to plan a day that gives children variety and healthy experiences. I've toured centers with more and less skilled labor and the difference is obvious.

That said, the key flaw in your numbers is that not all people within a day care center need this level of education and, if you did some basic research, you'd find out that few rarely do.

In a typical day care center, each room has multiple teachers and children scaled to the numbers you list above. In an ideal day care center, each room has at least one skilled teacher with a early childhood education background (or at least enough years of experience to pick up that knowledge). The other teachers in a room are less skilled and get paid less. In a slightly less ideal situation, there would be one skilled expert who guides several rooms. In either case, many fewer skilled people are needed.
Using your #'s and assuming 2/3 of the employees make $25K instead of $40K, this knocks over $20billion off of the total cost and also alters the issues with labor supply.

Posted by bsci | June 30, 2008 1:40 PM

I'm having a hard time following the logic here.

You postulate that childcare is crappy work that few want to do. Shouldn't that mean that both (a) supply is low and (b) demand is high? Which should lead to high wages, right? So how come wages are low?

The problem is that, actually, childcare is a highly desired job; lots of (young) women would love to spend all day caring for kids. That's why there is no shortage of elementary-school teachers. So, supply is high = wages are low.

All this blather about how terrible it is to care for kids is completely wrong and argues against reality - jobs that actually do suck pay quite well. See garbage collectors, etc. You're just displaying your single-childless-urban blinders for everyone to see. Don't extrapolate from yourself!

Posted by Bob Montgomery | June 30, 2008 2:51 PM

getting sick every month from whatever the children are passing around

In my anecdotal experience, this is literally correct. My wife quit her part time job at a daycare because she got sick every month and I got sick every month from her and the amount of time I was losing at work wasn't worth the job. Most of her coworkers were out with something about once a month too.

Posted by tre | June 30, 2008 3:22 PM

Bob Montgomery:

I think her argument is not that supply of childcare workers is low, but rather, the supply of highly educated or prepared childcare workers.

Her point is particularly focused on the pre-school ages. As for beyond that age, there are in fact shortages for teachers in elementary school and above, depending on specialty and geographic location: many teachers leave the industry and there is a huge base of older retiring teachers.

Her argument makes perfect sense in terms of why there is not a high level of quality childcare.

Nor is it proveable on a consistent basis that jobs that really do "suck" pay well. Which is why highly educated people (and with the school loans to back that education) try not to take awful jobs.

Posted by Finn | June 30, 2008 7:38 PM

--There is something truly odd to me about highly educated people who simultaneously believe that they have something better to do than employ their degree in singing "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" seventy times a day, and also that there should be a large supply of bright, educated people who choose to do just that.

AND AND AND! These highly educated folks think it should be done for LITTLE MONEY!

They typically whine about the high cost of childcare! That's the real disconnect. They expect a large supply of bright educated people to do this for peanuts, because if it's not for peanuts, then it's not financially beneficial for them to keep their own day job. But if you told them you could hire a bright, educated person for 120k a year to entertain the child, they don't seem willing to jump on the idea.

Posted by Allison | July 1, 2008 11:28 PM

Megan -

For what it's worth - I'm in complete agreement with you -- and I am a stay-at-home mother of two who's trying to juggle a freelance writing job at the same time. How do I do it? I do freelance financial writing, which takes like 10% of my brain capacity, and I don't sleep much. One of my children is also special needs, which complicates any decision I have to go back to work. But my decision to leave work well preceded that -- I was overjoyed to have an excuse to leave a job I cared nothing about. Of course, I also thought I'd somehow draft a ground-breaking novel while at the same time providing high level parenting to my children, which hasn't quite worked out. Nontheless, I don't regret my decision -- and it also helps that I had children in my late 30s, after living the high life for nearly two decades.

That said, I do believe we need affordable, even government-sponsored child care. Not for me. I'm the first to admit I have hopelessly high standards for my children that I can't even begin to meet myself, and I have the extra incentive that I love them. But for parents who are truly strapped economically, I think we should at least provide a decent child care option -- though not necessarily the kind of face-to-face constant attention that members of my socioeconomic group may think children require. But minimal TV, a clean and bright environment, simple toys, lots of stories and outdoor play seem a good place to start. But I think a PhD in this calling may be more of a detriment than a requirement.

Posted by K Walsh | July 2, 2008 3:14 PM