Young families face a variety of financial burdens. The cost of college is a major one. A second major life expense is health care. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average cost of employee health insurance per family is $23,968 per year. Cost-sharing and childbearing take a huge chunk of take-home pay, while simultaneously paying down student loans. Recently housing costs have skyrocketed, with the price of houses setting records and rent climbing.
Finally, young parents complain about the cost of daycare. Childcare is expensive. I have heard young families say childcare rivals their mortgage as their biggest household expense. I have had friends who made the decision that the wife would stay home with children because the after-tax cost of childcare made the mother’s job hardly worth the effort.
The role of daycare is to keep kids alive and safe while their parents work. This arrangement often lasts until the kids can go to school. If the kids learn something: social skills, cooperation, how to behave, count or print their name, that is a bonus. Teaching toddlers is more expensive than warehousing them. In my neighborhood there are numerous high-cost daycare / preschool providers, including KinderCare, The Goddard School, Montessori, Ivy Kids, Primrose School, Kids R’ Kids, and dozens more. The average cost to watch your child is approximately $20 per hour. Prices are lower for longer commitments but still $700 to $800 weekly and $2,200 to $2,500 monthly per child for high quality daycare.
As reported in Vox Media conservatives have a plan for cheaper day care. But is it safe? A tragedy from Idaho where an infant died exposes the risks:
A state investigation revealed that the provider had been caring for 11 children alone — far exceeding Idaho’s legal requirement of one staff member per six children, especially with infants present. (The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a maximum of four infants per staff member in day care settings, while some states like Maryland and Hawaii limit it to three.)
Republicans in Idaho have introduced legislation that would eliminate staff-to-child ratios. Other states are considering loosening childcare regulations.
The ensuing fight exposed a widening partisan gulf in American child care policy. Idaho’s bill represents the outer reaches of a growing national movement to deregulate the child care sector — a campaign that maintains that fewer rules might make child care more affordable, more accessible, and even boost birth rates. Wisconsin, Utah, and South Dakota have recently increased the maximum number of children each provider can legally supervise. And states including South Carolina, Iowa, and Kansas have all looked to relax their qualification requirements for child care workers.
Every daycare death is a tragedy, but they are relatively rare. The study is dated, but from 1985 to 2003 about 1,000 children died during daycare arrangements. That is about one a week, out of a population of 10 million. A back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests that is a yearly probability of death of about 1-in-200,000. More common but also rare is injury.
Regulations may make kids safer but deprive working families of affordable day care. How much is it worth for the average family to improve the odds from 1-in-200,000 deaths to 1-in-1 million deaths? Stated another way, what is the cost per life year saved due to regulations? That is difficult to answer but I suspect it is extremely high, well into the millions.
Many working families seek out informal daycare arrangements, such as was the case in the Idaho example. I have known a woman who operated a daycare out of her home, and it struck me as superior to the large commercial daycare centers. Restricting informal daycare arrangements also removes opportunities for budding entrepreneurs to earn a living using their home as a business asset. Some mothers who choose to stay home may be able to supplement their incomes by keeping an extra child or two. Regulations alone do not necessarily improve safety. A good compromise is to relax licensure but require registration subject to inspections with careful tracking of complaints. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration requires strict tracking of complaints as a feedback loop to assess risk and improve quality. Something like that could potentially improve daycare quality and reduce bad actors.
Vox Media: Conservatives have a plan for cheaper day care. But is it safe?