This really hit home for me. Before the pandemic, I worked abroad in a kindergarten and that experience made me realize that I wanted to pursue a career in early childhood education. The only...
“I can’t compete with sign-on bonuses and paying $20 an hour at the amusement park,” said Ms. Mossefin, who provides care for children from infancy through age 12. “Even fast-food places are hiring at $12 to $15 an hour here. I can’t because I can’t raise prices on my parents because we are all hurting.”
This really hit home for me. Before the pandemic, I worked abroad in a kindergarten and that experience made me realize that I wanted to pursue a career in early childhood education. The only problem is I can't afford it. Preschools in my area pay minimum wage, maybe a dollar higher at best. If I get a master's degree and add another year of experience I can work as a head teacher and make a whopping $25/hr, the same rate I make as a fucking busser at a mid-tier restaurant.
Something's gotta give. Methinks part of it is a demon-ization of domestic work. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and so many judge based on that. But I couldn't afford to pay other people for all...
Something's gotta give. Methinks part of it is a demon-ization of domestic work. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and so many judge based on that. But I couldn't afford to pay other people for all the work she does, and I'm a fairly high earner.
Maybe I'm just seeing through a bad lens, but from looking back through the last century, the post 70's women-empowerment-in-workforce has not really helped de-stigmatize "women's work" (like childcare, housework, education). The focus has been on "Go enter a high-paying 'man' job (STEM, management, etc) if you wanna close the wage gap/inequality." Rather than "Hey we should probably treat the female-dominated jobs as important as male-dominated ones." And this continual stigma justifies keeping those who do work in those jobs (regardless of gender) underpaid.
I also want to make it abundantly clear that my quotes are to emphasize the stupidity of the perpetuation of masculine/feminine work.
The article seems to imply that the wages are low because most people in need of child care just can’t afford it. I know a fairly wealthy couple in San Francisco. They’re bending over backwards to...
The article seems to imply that the wages are low because most people in need of child care just can’t afford it.
I know a fairly wealthy couple in San Francisco. They’re bending over backwards to pay for child care. They want the best for their toddler and dedicate an absurd proportion of their income to a nanny. I don’t know what loving parent wouldn’t do that if they could.
The problem is the people that need child care the most, families with both parents working full time and still struggling, are the least able to pay for it.
Yup, that's what I was getting at. There's merit to the 1-parent-employed system, and that's one of them. The fact that is a logistical impossibility for many is just further evidence that wages...
The problem is the people that need child care the most, families with both parents working full time and still struggling, are the least able to pay for it.
Yup, that's what I was getting at. There's merit to the 1-parent-employed system, and that's one of them. The fact that is a logistical impossibility for many is just further evidence that wages are way too low.
One parent should be able to sustain a family of four on full-time minimum wage. Nobody will be ever be able to convince me otherwise.
Yeah, I think you, @Rez, and @teaearlgraycold are all making good points about the heart of this issue. In my opinion it is the combination of our current economic model that requires two wage...
Yeah, I think you, @Rez, and @teaearlgraycold are all making good points about the heart of this issue. In my opinion it is the combination of our current economic model that requires two wage earners for most families and the slow death of, for lack of a better term, traditional family/community values. When I say traditional family values it doesn't just have to be a parent who stays home with the kids, grandparents are just as important. When I was working in China, the overwhelming majority of kids in my school were picked up and/or dropped off by their grandparents. Having that kind of consistent support is extremely valuable but many families in the US don't have that, either because the families don't live close enough, or the grandparents also have to work.
I suspect this also has significant implications towards how we approach early childhood education in the classroom. Most ECE curriculums in the United States place a lot of focus on social-emotional development, and I think some of that (maybe a lot of it) is due to the fact that young kids are often deprived of the growth and stability they should be experiencing from their life at home and with their families. When you have two tired working parents with limited external support, they're going to take shortcuts and the child's development will suffer as a consequence. When I compare my classroom experiences in America with those in China, there are noticeable differences in the children's social-emotional development which is bonkers because our curriculum in China rarely addressed social-emotional development and our approach was essentially the opposite of what the NAEYC considers developmentally appropriate. That's not meant to be an endorsement of my former school - there were a ton of problems there - but I think it does speak to the importance of having a consistent source of guidance, love, and support in a child's life.
Unfortunately, when it comes to family structures, I don't think we are going to put that genie back in the bottle any time soon. I cant imagine a situation where one parent is willing or able to stay at home full-time, nor do I see a world in which grandparents live close enough and are able to retire early enough to care for their grandchildren. The only plausible way we can address this issue is to create a massive expansion in universal public pre-k/childcare, and make sure it is something that actually puts the needs of children first. That would also require qualified, dedicated professionals, so we should probably make sure those positions a little more valuable than, say, working at McDonalds.
I think we need less population growth than that but I agree that minimum wage shouldn't hinder people from having children or owning a home. We should have a minimum standard of living and a...
One parent should be able to sustain a family of four on full-time minimum wage. Nobody will be ever be able to convince me otherwise.
I think we need less population growth than that but I agree that minimum wage shouldn't hinder people from having children or owning a home. We should have a minimum standard of living and a maximum standard of living.
I think the desire for depopulation is overblown. We can feed everyone, and reducing consumption will do far more much faster. I do think we should not incentivize beyond 2 children. Especially...
I think the desire for depopulation is overblown. We can feed everyone, and reducing consumption will do far more much faster.
I do think we should not incentivize beyond 2 children. Especially since straight, equal replacement of workforce is something like 2.5 kids. You gotta account for premature deaths.
Yup. Capital is definitely part (most?) of the problem. I can't find it at the moment, but IIRC the feminist movements in the 1960's very much started out with a strong anti-capitalism core. That...
Yup. Capital is definitely part (most?) of the problem.
I can't find it at the moment, but IIRC the feminist movements in the 1960's very much started out with a strong anti-capitalism core. That was gutted over time, for better or worse. Things are better in many ways, but not in some very structural ones.
You say “capitalism” but this is all about what parents are willing to do. There is an opportunity cost that has nothing to do with any particular system: if you’re taking care of kids you can’t...
You say “capitalism” but this is all about what parents are willing to do. There is an opportunity cost that has nothing to do with any particular system: if you’re taking care of kids you can’t be doing something else. That would be true under any system. There is a direct conflict between parents and childcare workers that comes from both groups of people wanting to do something else.
Having more opportunities elsewhere means you give up more by choosing to take care of kids instead, whatever the specific arrangements. It’s not that more opportunities are bad, but they result in tougher choices.
In the presence of better opportunities, the only way we as a society can value childcare more is by sacrificing more to be able to do it. That might be expressed directly in terms of parents paying more money to childcare workers, or more fuzzily in terms of career options not taken by a parent who stays home, or socially via a tax on everyone.
I think UBI would make choosing to sacrifice income to take care of children less risky, so more people would do it. But it would still be a sacrifice. Maybe one worth making? How much do we really need table service in restaurants?
(Also, what’s wrong with a declining population? From an environmental standpoint it seems like a good thing?)
That's a pretty narrow view. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't declining populations come with higher amounts of education in that population, generally? In other words, the better able people...
f animals aren't reproducing despite ostensibly having their needs met - like pandas in a zoo - then on some primal level you know that something is fundamentally wrong with the situation those animals are living in if they can't get around to the act of reproducing.
That's a pretty narrow view. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't declining populations come with higher amounts of education in that population, generally? In other words, the better able people are to plan, the less likely they are to accidentally have kids when they didn't intend to. That seems like a positive, not a negative to me.
Although people are technically animals, I don't think people choosing whether to have kids are acting much like other animals and I'm hesitant about second-guessing their decisions. There is no...
Although people are technically animals, I don't think people choosing whether to have kids are acting much like other animals and I'm hesitant about second-guessing their decisions.
There is no master plan. Should there be? Isn't decentralized decision-making still valid?
I'm not too worried about this. I don't think people deciding to have fewer children is a sign of something wrong.
I think you hit it on the nose. The forces driving population decline don't seem benign. It'd be one thing if society collectively decided that fewer children would be good for the environment....
I think you hit it on the nose.
The forces driving population decline don't seem benign. It'd be one thing if society collectively decided that fewer children would be good for the environment. But we're clearly not so enlightened. It's more than just financial insecurity — people were far poorer in the past yet still had many children: signs point to people feeling fundamentally insecure and uncomfortable about having children in our contemporary society.
Our hyper globalized economic model does not care about community or roots; it only sees us as units of labor to be moved and deployed only with regard to economic territory. Job tenures grow shorter and shorter.
because we have to rely on our bank accounts instead of our social bonds
In our model, what was traditionally rendered as care within a community has been abstracted as goods and services to be bought. I think there have been a few drawbacks:
As you mentioned, in order to afford goods and services we must work more and more, thereby displacing our available free time to give care to others.
The goods and services stop flowing when you can't pay up. Care given by a community only requires proportional reciprocation, the giving of time.
Giving and receiving care builds relationships and trust over time — a community strengthens itself over time through the exchange of care. Trading goods and services are largely transactional: the relationship only exists so long as the transaction does.
I'm not a parent... yet. But I'm wary of a world where I would have to work long and hard just so I can afford having strangers raise my own (future) child.
The child raising system isn't working. I don't have children but I think in the modern age the only really comfortable way to have children is to already be retired - and while you're still young...
The child raising system isn't working. I don't have children but I think in the modern age the only really comfortable way to have children is to already be retired - and while you're still young enough to raise children.
My heart bleeds for them. But really it's yet another issue where the workers aren't being paid enough, so they find a better job. It's a chain of people exploiting the market: facilities paying...
college degree
raised to $12.50/hr
My heart bleeds for them.
But really it's yet another issue where the workers aren't being paid enough, so they find a better job. It's a chain of people exploiting the market: facilities paying the legal minimum and workers going where the money is. It catches the parents in the lurch so the government has to step in and set a minimum wage because the market refuses to, or for whatever reason can't, adjust to fair pay.
It's weird how sticky the minimum wage is. The obvious solution is to pay above minimum wage. Yet even in the fast food industry, where paying a flat $15 wage would raise prices 5% there is an...
It's weird how sticky the minimum wage is.
The obvious solution is to pay above minimum wage. Yet even in the fast food industry, where paying a flat $15 wage would raise prices 5% there is an extreme reluctance to increase wages as fast as factory work.
Economic theory presumes that wages are sticky up, and refuse to go down. It seems like in practice, wages are sticky both ways.
Businesses know that once they give a pay raise, they can't take it back, and perhaps think this period of wage inflation is temporary.
Also, no one wants to be the first to increase costs. Child care also have to pass on the increased wage cost. They can't make a 5% smaller burger.
I wonder if at some point the wage inflation genie will be let out of the bottle, or if this is simply reallocation friction, the idea that the types of jobs in the economy are changing and workers are taking awhile to figure out what new jobs they want — or what skills they need for different roles.
This is why you're seeing signing bonuses of $1,000 for some low-wage jobs. They can take a one-time $1,000 hit if they keep the wage low until the "employee shortage" ends. Landlords do this with...
Businesses know that once they give a pay raise, they can't take it back, and perhaps think this period of wage inflation is temporary.
This is why you're seeing signing bonuses of $1,000 for some low-wage jobs. They can take a one-time $1,000 hit if they keep the wage low until the "employee shortage" ends. Landlords do this with "move-in bonuses" too, in order to keep rents high. Instead of lowering rent, they'll offset your first month's rent with a bonus. Or they'll give you one month rent free because it will cost us less than lowering your rent for 12 months.
Sorry, I meant fast food joints can shrinkflate (as was mentioned in my first link) but child care can't shrinkflate. Wages are more sticky in childcare, they are less able to pass the cost on to...
Child care also have to pass on the increased wage cost. They can't make a 5% smaller burger.
Sorry, I meant fast food joints can shrinkflate (as was mentioned in my first link) but child care can't shrinkflate. Wages are more sticky in childcare, they are less able to pass the cost on to the consumer.
This really hit home for me. Before the pandemic, I worked abroad in a kindergarten and that experience made me realize that I wanted to pursue a career in early childhood education. The only problem is I can't afford it. Preschools in my area pay minimum wage, maybe a dollar higher at best. If I get a master's degree and add another year of experience I can work as a head teacher and make a whopping $25/hr, the same rate I make as a fucking busser at a mid-tier restaurant.
Something's gotta give. Methinks part of it is a demon-ization of domestic work. My wife is a stay-at-home mom, and so many judge based on that. But I couldn't afford to pay other people for all the work she does, and I'm a fairly high earner.
Maybe I'm just seeing through a bad lens, but from looking back through the last century, the post 70's women-empowerment-in-workforce has not really helped de-stigmatize "women's work" (like childcare, housework, education). The focus has been on "Go enter a high-paying 'man' job (STEM, management, etc) if you wanna close the wage gap/inequality." Rather than "Hey we should probably treat the female-dominated jobs as important as male-dominated ones." And this continual stigma justifies keeping those who do work in those jobs (regardless of gender) underpaid.
I also want to make it abundantly clear that my quotes are to emphasize the stupidity of the perpetuation of masculine/feminine work.
The article seems to imply that the wages are low because most people in need of child care just can’t afford it.
I know a fairly wealthy couple in San Francisco. They’re bending over backwards to pay for child care. They want the best for their toddler and dedicate an absurd proportion of their income to a nanny. I don’t know what loving parent wouldn’t do that if they could.
The problem is the people that need child care the most, families with both parents working full time and still struggling, are the least able to pay for it.
Yup, that's what I was getting at. There's merit to the 1-parent-employed system, and that's one of them. The fact that is a logistical impossibility for many is just further evidence that wages are way too low.
One parent should be able to sustain a family of four on full-time minimum wage. Nobody will be ever be able to convince me otherwise.
Yeah, I think you, @Rez, and @teaearlgraycold are all making good points about the heart of this issue. In my opinion it is the combination of our current economic model that requires two wage earners for most families and the slow death of, for lack of a better term, traditional family/community values. When I say traditional family values it doesn't just have to be a parent who stays home with the kids, grandparents are just as important. When I was working in China, the overwhelming majority of kids in my school were picked up and/or dropped off by their grandparents. Having that kind of consistent support is extremely valuable but many families in the US don't have that, either because the families don't live close enough, or the grandparents also have to work.
I suspect this also has significant implications towards how we approach early childhood education in the classroom. Most ECE curriculums in the United States place a lot of focus on social-emotional development, and I think some of that (maybe a lot of it) is due to the fact that young kids are often deprived of the growth and stability they should be experiencing from their life at home and with their families. When you have two tired working parents with limited external support, they're going to take shortcuts and the child's development will suffer as a consequence. When I compare my classroom experiences in America with those in China, there are noticeable differences in the children's social-emotional development which is bonkers because our curriculum in China rarely addressed social-emotional development and our approach was essentially the opposite of what the NAEYC considers developmentally appropriate. That's not meant to be an endorsement of my former school - there were a ton of problems there - but I think it does speak to the importance of having a consistent source of guidance, love, and support in a child's life.
Unfortunately, when it comes to family structures, I don't think we are going to put that genie back in the bottle any time soon. I cant imagine a situation where one parent is willing or able to stay at home full-time, nor do I see a world in which grandparents live close enough and are able to retire early enough to care for their grandchildren. The only plausible way we can address this issue is to create a massive expansion in universal public pre-k/childcare, and make sure it is something that actually puts the needs of children first. That would also require qualified, dedicated professionals, so we should probably make sure those positions a little more valuable than, say, working at McDonalds.
I think we need less population growth than that but I agree that minimum wage shouldn't hinder people from having children or owning a home. We should have a minimum standard of living and a maximum standard of living.
I think the desire for depopulation is overblown. We can feed everyone, and reducing consumption will do far more much faster.
I do think we should not incentivize beyond 2 children. Especially since straight, equal replacement of workforce is something like 2.5 kids. You gotta account for premature deaths.
Yup. Capital is definitely part (most?) of the problem.
I can't find it at the moment, but IIRC the feminist movements in the 1960's very much started out with a strong anti-capitalism core. That was gutted over time, for better or worse. Things are better in many ways, but not in some very structural ones.
You say “capitalism” but this is all about what parents are willing to do. There is an opportunity cost that has nothing to do with any particular system: if you’re taking care of kids you can’t be doing something else. That would be true under any system. There is a direct conflict between parents and childcare workers that comes from both groups of people wanting to do something else.
Having more opportunities elsewhere means you give up more by choosing to take care of kids instead, whatever the specific arrangements. It’s not that more opportunities are bad, but they result in tougher choices.
In the presence of better opportunities, the only way we as a society can value childcare more is by sacrificing more to be able to do it. That might be expressed directly in terms of parents paying more money to childcare workers, or more fuzzily in terms of career options not taken by a parent who stays home, or socially via a tax on everyone.
I think UBI would make choosing to sacrifice income to take care of children less risky, so more people would do it. But it would still be a sacrifice. Maybe one worth making? How much do we really need table service in restaurants?
(Also, what’s wrong with a declining population? From an environmental standpoint it seems like a good thing?)
That's a pretty narrow view. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't declining populations come with higher amounts of education in that population, generally? In other words, the better able people are to plan, the less likely they are to accidentally have kids when they didn't intend to. That seems like a positive, not a negative to me.
But isn't modern education built around industrialization? It seems like there's a need to prove the direction of causality.
Although people are technically animals, I don't think people choosing whether to have kids are acting much like other animals and I'm hesitant about second-guessing their decisions.
There is no master plan. Should there be? Isn't decentralized decision-making still valid?
I'm not too worried about this. I don't think people deciding to have fewer children is a sign of something wrong.
I think you hit it on the nose.
The forces driving population decline don't seem benign. It'd be one thing if society collectively decided that fewer children would be good for the environment. But we're clearly not so enlightened. It's more than just financial insecurity — people were far poorer in the past yet still had many children: signs point to people feeling fundamentally insecure and uncomfortable about having children in our contemporary society.
Our hyper globalized economic model does not care about community or roots; it only sees us as units of labor to be moved and deployed only with regard to economic territory. Job tenures grow shorter and shorter.
In our model, what was traditionally rendered as care within a community has been abstracted as goods and services to be bought. I think there have been a few drawbacks:
I'm not a parent... yet. But I'm wary of a world where I would have to work long and hard just so I can afford having strangers raise my own (future) child.
The child raising system isn't working. I don't have children but I think in the modern age the only really comfortable way to have children is to already be retired - and while you're still young enough to raise children.
My heart bleeds for them.
But really it's yet another issue where the workers aren't being paid enough, so they find a better job. It's a chain of people exploiting the market: facilities paying the legal minimum and workers going where the money is. It catches the parents in the lurch so the government has to step in and set a minimum wage because the market refuses to, or for whatever reason can't, adjust to fair pay.
It's weird how sticky the minimum wage is.
The obvious solution is to pay above minimum wage. Yet even in the fast food industry, where paying a flat $15 wage would raise prices 5% there is an extreme reluctance to increase wages as fast as factory work.
Economic theory presumes that wages are sticky up, and refuse to go down. It seems like in practice, wages are sticky both ways.
Businesses know that once they give a pay raise, they can't take it back, and perhaps think this period of wage inflation is temporary.
Also, no one wants to be the first to increase costs. Child care also have to pass on the increased wage cost. They can't make a 5% smaller burger.
I wonder if at some point the wage inflation genie will be let out of the bottle, or if this is simply reallocation friction, the idea that the types of jobs in the economy are changing and workers are taking awhile to figure out what new jobs they want — or what skills they need for different roles.
This is why you're seeing signing bonuses of $1,000 for some low-wage jobs. They can take a one-time $1,000 hit if they keep the wage low until the "employee shortage" ends. Landlords do this with "move-in bonuses" too, in order to keep rents high. Instead of lowering rent, they'll offset your first month's rent with a bonus. Or they'll give you one month rent free because it will cost us less than lowering your rent for 12 months.
They absolutely can and do. Well maybe not when you name a burger a "quarter pounder" because that would be a lawsuit waiting to happen, but in general, businesses do this all the time. It's been happening all over the grocery store and is called shrinkflation
Sorry, I meant fast food joints can shrinkflate (as was mentioned in my first link) but child care can't shrinkflate. Wages are more sticky in childcare, they are less able to pass the cost on to the consumer.
Ah sorry for the misunderstanding!