No, the takeaway is that Quebec's universal child care provision correlates with life issues, but there's no information about the causes of those correlations - which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality, or some socioeconomic issues specific to Quebec, or for some other reason.
>which could be in the details of how care is provided and its quality
This has "true communism has never been tried" vibes. When enacting a policy, you can't guarantee it will come out optimally, so it makes sense to factor in any potential negative effects, even you think you're not going to make them. After all, I doubt the people campaigning for childcare in quebec were expecting the results to be negative.
I've not read the article, and I expect it goes into this kind of thing, but...
Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
It is a rather surprising state of affairs that this is something that is not apparent to you. Why do you think I have to say the following; giving your child over to an absolute stranger to spend more waking/disposable time with that you, the parent, is NOT a good thing... neither in daycare or even school.
Yes, it's easy for me to say and the system is very much set up to facilitate extraction of profit from the neo-slave professional class while fostering their procreation to rear the next generation of neo-slave professionals; but we really need to break free of this spell that government (i.e., the ruling class' apparatchiks) do not have your child or even your won best interest in mind.
Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible and the youngest age possible, especially since the telescreen, aka, TV has fragmented so much and kids are seeing things like genocide being committed and by whom and they aren't hardened adults yet that can look the other way in order to keep their neo-slave "job" that gets them shiny stuff.
Of course it has positive GDP on the parents: if two women each care for each others children rather than their own, GDP goes up even though the impact on both families is negative (due to lost travel time, as the mothers swap roles).
The more likely case is one person (most often women, but men do childcare as well) is taking care of the kids of at least 3 couples (6 people), and could be up over 10 couples (which happens though often isn't legal or a good idea). That is per year, the kids grow out of daycare in 12-15 years, but a person typically works for 40 years.
Each culture is a little different. What are you going to do with your kids when the parents are working is a problem? At what time do you trust them to stay home by themself?
Where I live they are dismissed on their own as young as 8, and so long as they have a safe way home then a couple hours alone isn't going to hurt. There are enough electronic distractions at home now that they won't turn to delinquency.
15 is bonkers. There should be no need to keep your teenager on-leash for that long.
In Soviet Union times in eighties in Belarus it was considered ok that a child could stay alone at home from age of 7 when they started a school. Some parents opted for after-school programs and some relied on grandmothers like it was for me but some of my schoolmates stayed at home alone for few hours until their mothers would be back from work (fathers typically worked longer and further away from home).
And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.
I walked home from school and calmly did homework util my parents arrived from work since age 8. This was the norm in Russia. Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
This study was limited to the program in Quebec, but this discovery is alarming
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
This assumes that mothers in the workforce earning (taxable) income is a benefit in and of itself. It doesn't consider the familial impacts of outsourcing the raising of ones own offspring to another party.
That is correct. While I too would like to see what it looks like if one parent staying home is subsidized, this still shows that subsidizing child care is a net benefit for everyone, and as such it's a good idea to keep the program going.
It's not like the family is compelled to send the mother out of the home. If it were not advantageous from their point of view, they would choose to stay at home. But for many people the value of potential money-saving labour they could do at home is far inferior to the amount they could earn outside. My wife's post tax income is more than our whole discretionary spending and it's unrealistic that we could even halve that with lots of housewife labour.
Yes, this was the same thought I had. What about investing in children by making it easier for their own mother to actually care for them, instead of working outside the home and dumping the kid in an institution.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.
Sure, and epecially when the child is a bit older then introducing a "preschool" situation for a few hours a day is probably valuable. But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
I would bet that approximately 100% of people advocating for funded childcare programs++ would want to avoid the "putting infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day" scenario.
In what way? I've seen many people advocate for universal childcare as a way to get mom back to working full time as quickly as possible. I've also seen it framed as a way of leveling the playing field, so women are less disadvantaged from men as a result of childbirth / care.
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
My kids are around so many other kids, interacting, playing, arguing, sometimes fighting (hands to yourself!), they are around so many caring adults that live nearby, we talk to them every time we see them. I know how lucky we are. I bet people that say dumping your kid at an institution have no idea how nice life could be in that regard.
And your bias is that if institutionalized child care is shown to lead to worse outcomes than parents caring for their own children, you will feel a lot of personal guilt.
Yes, community raising of children is how it "used to be" but dropping your kids off for 8-10 hours a day to be raised by absolute strangers with zero ties to your family and spending time with other kids who have zero familial ties to you as well and maybe even no community ties is not the same at all.
I'm not a parent but my niece and nephew (different parents) both go to daycare. My sister knew many of the parents at her son's daycare already, they live in the same neighbourhood. My nephew knew the children of those parents too. He had his little daycare friends before he started daycare at 18mo. My sister has lived in the same city all her life, some of the parents involved she's known for 30 years.
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
All of my friends' kids who are in daycare get sick frequently. I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
There is a broad spectrum between “extreme social isolation” and sending your very young children to be taken care of at a daycare with dozens of children every day just so both parents can work just because that's how society has decided to orient itself.
> But having an infant in a daycare for 8-10 hours a day is probably not.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
I dunno man my wife takes care of our one-year-old not just staying at home but going to the library and stores and the nearby petting zoo and stuff, and he's only been sick once, after a long day of air travel where my wife and I got sick as well—whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and such. Just something I've noticed, is all.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
> whereas, friends' daycare'd kids are sick all the time, constantly having runny noses and s
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
Their own mother or father. This is important for multiple reasons. Some fathers are better parents (I undoubtedly was), if you assume mothers do childcare it limits choices for both men and women. It is a barrier to equal childcare which I feel is ideal.
Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.
Having had two kids go through nursery from an early age, they absolutely had a better time there, with more friends and a higher quality of entertainment, than they would have had at home with either of us.
You can take your kids to parents days out or parks where they consistently meet with other kids and become friends. The option isn't 100% daycare or 100% staying at home and never seeing anyone.
I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
There is more to life than economics. Economics should put a floor on what you do in life - that is you need enough food to live, and enough shelter (including clothing)... However once that basics are met you need to ask about trade offs. Rice and beans are a nice meal once in a while, but sometimes I want "steak and caviar". Likewise, all I need to live is a "tiny house" shack with some heat - but I really like having more space. I wouldn't mind having the largest private house in the world complete with staff to maintain it - but the work I would need to afford is not something I'm willing to do (I'm not sure if I could get into the CEO suite if I tried, but I know enough of that CEOs do with their life that I'm not willing for that)
At what point will you decide that something other than economics matter? I can tell you now that I have kids time with the kids is more important than money. However I'm also a staff software engineer and so I'm making more $$ than most. You need to make your own decisions based on your own life.
You are either paying the mother (or father) to stay home, or paying for child care so they can work.
I don't think it has to be a completely level trade on an economic basis. A lot of parents would prefer to be able to stay home even if it's not a purely economic optimum. And staying at home doesn't necessarily preclude earning any income. A parent could still do part time work from home, or even outside the home, when the other parent is there etc.
We had a few decades in the US where it was pretty normal and comfortable to raise a family on a single income. What law of physics dictates that it’s impossible to construct such a society again?
We managed to have a society with a significant number of families living on one income for quite some time. 2 incomes shouldn’t be a requirement to keep a roof over a family’s head. The goal shouldn’t be “2 incomes,” it should be “1 income is sustainable and families can actually be a family.”
making housing affordable also sounds like a pretty hard problem in most of the developed West, yeah? like if you have a good idea definitely pursue it though
Really? What society? The 1950s got close in the US (I'm not sure about elsewhere, but I doubt it), but even then there were a lot of women working.
If you go back to 1800 you will discover that saying families had only one income was because history is generally blind to "women's work" and so you have no idea what women did. (for that matter what most men did is something history only barely mentions). In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely. (historians can give you a much longer and more complex answer - mine is a gross simplification)
> In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely
That’s a fair point I considered including but it’s easy to get lost in the weeds here so I opted for an overly simplistic description.
Ultimately what I am trying to say is the household income now required for many is too high and often unobtainable without 2 full time incomes outside the home (and often that’s not enough). That’s not sustainable if we don’t want people offloading all their parenting outside their home.
The one working at home (domestic tasks and misc.) one working outside the home (direct income) model is basically impossible now for most people.
Women entering the workforce eroded the ability to maintain a household on one income because of depressed wages and housing competition. There's no absolute cost to housing, people will pay what they afford and making more money means the housing cost rises, it doesn't make people "richer" just everything else more expensive.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
I made the same point in a less snarky way in my previous comment in this thread.
It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents. Any man who has been an equal or primary carer for their kids will tell you that.
Men cannot breast feed. In the first years, the mother is the primary parent, by biological instinct of the child alone. After that, both are parents and it depends if the mother or the father is the better parent. But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
> But you have to really hate your child (which many parents of course do) to try to force them to live against their biological instincts when they are infants.
Is this a complaint against bottle feeding? If so, fuck right off. In the real world there are a lot of reasons not to breast feed, even though most people would love to be able to do it.
Many women can not either. And some children simply will not. I have two boys. One would only breastfeed and never take the bottle. The other would only take a bottle and never breastfeed.
The rich were so successful in manipulating people with culture wars like "women shouldn't work" that the people who fell for it still don't realize the real war was them losing the economic standing in which it was viable for the typical family to have one working parent.
This has "true communism has never been tried" vibes. When enacting a policy, you can't guarantee it will come out optimally, so it makes sense to factor in any potential negative effects, even you think you're not going to make them. After all, I doubt the people campaigning for childcare in quebec were expecting the results to be negative.
Perhaps it's something like: families that earn enough to have one parent stay at home don't use child care. Therefore children in child care are more likely to be from less affluent families than those who are not in child care. So it's not the child care that causes the difference in outcomes, but just general income scale.
Yes, it's easy for me to say and the system is very much set up to facilitate extraction of profit from the neo-slave professional class while fostering their procreation to rear the next generation of neo-slave professionals; but we really need to break free of this spell that government (i.e., the ruling class' apparatchiks) do not have your child or even your won best interest in mind.
Ironically, if we do get "investment in mothers" and "universal childcare", it will be for the profit and benefit of the ruling class that will want to make sure your child is indoctrinated in the regime's propaganda as early and deeply as possible and the youngest age possible, especially since the telescreen, aka, TV has fragmented so much and kids are seeing things like genocide being committed and by whom and they aren't hardened adults yet that can look the other way in order to keep their neo-slave "job" that gets them shiny stuff.
15 is bonkers. There should be no need to keep your teenager on-leash for that long.
And from the age of 9 there was no after-school options at least in my school.
As a GenXer, ~12 (?):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latchkey_kid
I walked home from school and calmly did homework util my parents arrived from work since age 8. This was the norm in Russia. Y'all's kids need daycare till 15?
> and also that cohorts with increased child care access subsequently had worse health, lower life satisfaction, and higher crime rates later in life.
There are a lot of early childhood studies that can find differences for early school years that later disappear as kids get older. It’s different when the correlations continue to older ages and even start correlating with health outcomes.
There could be some major selection bias effects, but that’s just as true for the positive fiscal outcomes noted in the submitted study.
Both are interesting and useful, but I think they need to be separate studies.
Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.
Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.
It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.
Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.
Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.
That's a different problem that would be better addressed by mandatory paid parental leave and universal healthcare - so new parents can afford not to work while their child is an infant.
I find that, if anything, there is little to no stigma to getting your child in daycare ASAP after maternity leave ends and going back to working full time. That's "infants in daycare for 8-10hrs/day".
I'm not as close to my sister in law as I am my sister, but I know that when my niece started daycare they knew some kids and parents from the playground already.
It doesn't strike me as bizarre that someone would know people in their community who are in a similar life stage.
I think Covid showed pretty definitively that avoiding illness through extreme social isolation is not worth the costs in emotional and social development.
Unless the child is immunosuppressed, outside of a novel pandemic scenario, a vaccinated child is not likely to contract a very serious infection beyond the common cold or flu by being in childcare. Much of that can be mitigated by giving parents the flexibility (sick leave) to keep their children home while ill.
> I work on the top floor of a building that has a YMCA daycare on many of the bottom floors, and I often get sick passing through there on the way to work.
Perhaps you are uniquely susceptible? I don't think this generalizes to most people if they practice public hygiene habits like washing your hands when arriving at the office.
Outside of society being oriented around having my wife work and sending our son to daycare rather than having her raise him at home, everything's going great so far, one year in.
Probably just the common cold most of the time. My nose was runny through most of my childhood too. And kids are snotty - always have been - it's not necessarily a condition that needs to be fixed. If it's bothersome to you, then of course avoid group childcare.
Also, some diseases like chicken pox are preferable to contract as a child and gain immunity to then - since they are far worse symptomatically to contract as an adult.
Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.
Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.
Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.
[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.
At what point will you decide that something other than economics matter? I can tell you now that I have kids time with the kids is more important than money. However I'm also a staff software engineer and so I'm making more $$ than most. You need to make your own decisions based on your own life.
I don't think it has to be a completely level trade on an economic basis. A lot of parents would prefer to be able to stay home even if it's not a purely economic optimum. And staying at home doesn't necessarily preclude earning any income. A parent could still do part time work from home, or even outside the home, when the other parent is there etc.
If you go back to 1800 you will discover that saying families had only one income was because history is generally blind to "women's work" and so you have no idea what women did. (for that matter what most men did is something history only barely mentions). In 1850 a lot of people were more self sufficient - the whole family was growing their own food and making their own cloth - and so saying there was even one income is false - there mostly was no income but they only bought a few things and so only need a small income rarely. (historians can give you a much longer and more complex answer - mine is a gross simplification)
Why can we no longer have the same economic productivity we had in the 1950s that allowed for more single income families?
This was true for my grandparents in 1970s
Ultimately what I am trying to say is the household income now required for many is too high and often unobtainable without 2 full time incomes outside the home (and often that’s not enough). That’s not sustainable if we don’t want people offloading all their parenting outside their home.
The one working at home (domestic tasks and misc.) one working outside the home (direct income) model is basically impossible now for most people.
I think it's more about whether the investment pays back and defrays the costs.
This isn't an argument that women shouldn't be allowed to work or anything ridiculous like that. We ALL should work less.
Unfortunately just about everything ends up being an unintentional subsidy to the ever growing real estate price.
You want to invest in mothers and do a million other societal benefit things? Do everything you can to damage the ability of people to profit from owning residential real estate.
It is a very deeply embedded assumption that women are primary parents. Any man who has been an equal or primary carer for their kids will tell you that.
Is this a complaint against bottle feeding? If so, fuck right off. In the real world there are a lot of reasons not to breast feed, even though most people would love to be able to do it.
(EDIT: unless of course these extra earnings were mostly transfers so-to-speak from non-mothers to mothers)
From a societal and human perspective, unclear that it’s worth it.