Fair enough. I’d only add that freelancing is not necessarily risky or unstructured. When I did it, I pretty much always had 3-5 permalancing gigs, each of which hired me for 1-5+ articles every week. In many ways it felt *more* stable, because they wouldn’t all go under or cut me loose at once.
Depends a lot on the desired career! Like anything, it’s easier to have both if you make more money. As I’ve written here (https://bonniekristian.substack.com/p/the-answer-is-i-have-a-nanny), I do it by having a nanny. It’s also going to depend a lot on whether you feel like you’re missing out by going to work while someone else—even if it’s your spouse—cares for the kids. Another thing to consider is that many kinds of freelancing can be part-time without anyone knowing.
Guessing from your handle that you’re interested in library work, and if you don’t already have your master’s in library science, I’d recommend finding a remote degree program you can slow walk. Have kids in quick succession, and do the degree in the 5ish years it takes to get them to preschool. Then you graduate and have a resume without a “gap”—you weren’t staying home; you were in school!
But finally, the gap is not a career killer. I’ve worked with and hired people returning to work after their kids’ youngest years.
The good news - if there is any - is that $20K per year is a temporary expense until you're ready to send the kid off to school. (I'm assuming public school here.) I was the stay-at-home dad for much of my kid's pre-K years. We sent him off to part-time care for A) socialization and B) so I could have some semblance of a career on the other side of it. But the money I was making freelancing on a PT basis barely covered the care, if that. It was a temporary investment in his development and my own viability.
How temporary that is depends on how many kids you have, I suppose.
We deliberately spaced the kids only 2 years apart (ended up being a 22 month gap) so that I could stay home and take care of them. We worried about having two in college at the same time, but figured we’d cross that bridge…it ended up working out better than we imagined. The kids were close growing up, there were only a couple of years they were in different schools, and financial aid is calculated on a family’s total ability to pay so unlike daycare, if parents can only afford to pay, say $30,000 per year in college costs, that contribution is for both kids—meaning the parents pay $15,000 per kid if two are in college at the same time.
You are spot on that daycare costs (5-yr old and below) are what they are due to state/city-regulated teacher-student ratios usually around 1:4 - 1:6. Usually a head teacher makes $20-$30/hr, but the assistant teachers/helpers are closer to minimum wage... the mean is definitely close to the math you laid out (though I don't know if the teachers who make minimum wage are getting paid holidays and insurance...). And totally agree that just going from a ratio of 1:4 to 1:5 is a HUGE JUMP in causing more disruptions for the teaching and classroom -- the biggest complaint of parents in my child's daycare is that there aren't enough teachers. There are usually 2-3 administrators too, who are paid more than the head teacher.
Another big reason for high costs (not including aftercare costs and other supplementary costs) is that RENT can be very high for daycare in high-cost areas. I know the Gothamists' #s are for childcare in a year, but for DAYCARE in the NYC area (I live across the river from Manhattan), I am paying $3,000/month for 1 child. (I'm assuming it's close to $4,000+/month in Manhattan, at the very least.) I don't think the daycare is banking it with high margins, and I think rent is the highest cost factor.
Then there's summer camp -- for a 4-week summer camp that's 5-days a week (8:30 am - 5:00 pm), it's $1,250/week.
I have family in San Diego, and they are paying $2,200/month for daycare. The summer camp options are much cheaper there, though...like $600/week.
Whew, yeah, as I said, my facility costs estimate was conservative, and I'm sure laughably so if we're looking at NYC specifically. Summer day camps in my area are more in the $600 range or maybe even cheaper, I think. Demand is so high, though, that I honestly haven't even had the chance to decide if I'm willing to pay for that -- they're always already sold out.
On the summer camp note, definitely supply-demand dynamic in the NYC/NJ/CT areas as you note for your area...granted these camps have all the bells and whistles (pools, slides, fields, arts/crafts, etc.), but it's still a day camp at the end of the day. There are only like 5-6 of them trying to serve the whole Greater-NYC area so they have crazy waitlists and can charge what they want.
Solution-wise to reduce costs, some school districts offer FREE Preschool for 3-5 year olds in my area (Pre-K3/Pre-K4) before Kindergarten. I don't know how the back end looks math/cost wise with taxes (guessing higher property taxes...my city has a lot of businesses/corporate companies, so that helps negate higher property taxes that i woukdve thiught we'd have with a free preschool program)....but up-front/per-person costs will probably seem a little cheaper...
I’m interested in the question of what people think their pastor should be able to tell them to do. I’m not thinking about questions of core doctrine or clear sin, like “You should stop committing adultery.” More like, if your pastor said “You need to quit Twitter,” would you do it? (Obviously there’d be denominational variation in any post-Reformation sources.)
Anecdotally, so much of those questions get scooped up under the heading of prudence, a kind of self-directed notion as opposed to someone speaking into your life from outside. But asking how spiritual direction (which is how this kind of deliberation occurs) happens in a post reformation context would be really interesting.
Yeah, I mean part of the question is: Is spiritual direction a separate job from pastor? I mean, I know it is and have benefited from a spiritual director myself, but is it supposed to be? Maybe all pastoring includes spiritual direction but not vice versa, I dunno.
This question is partially inspired by the comment I ran into from pastors over and over while writing Untrustworthy, which was that they got congregants one hour a week, but Fox News or Twitter or whatever got them 10, 20, 30 hours. There's an imbalance of influence (or you could say "discipleship" there), but it also very much has to do with authority.
Right, and the question of whether it should be in some sense binding is part of what interests me.
Obviously, post-Reformation, without an established church, nothing a pastor can say is "binding" in the way it would've been in a small, premodern village on the parish model. If you really disagree with pastoral guidance today, you can just bounce. But assuming you don't want to leave the church and don't think the guidance is theologically or ethically wrong -- but maybe it is unwanted, unpleasant, difficult, etc. -- should you feel some real obligation to heed it?
I was talking this over with Erica Ramirez (witter.com/EricaBryand), who is very sharp, and she suggested an analogy of a trainer at a gym which I think may be apt: They can't literally force you to take their exercise and nutritional advice, but when you hire them to be your trainer and help you work toward a mutually shared fitness goal, you have to do what they say if you want to remain their client.
Excellent analysis. I'm troubled by the entitlement I hear in calls for "universal daycare", and how it's framed as a requirement for female empowerment / feminism. The majority of daycare workers are grossly underpaid, as you note, but they are also disproportionately likely to be immigrants from poorer countries. It strikes me as deeply screwed up to out-source caring for your children on less privileged and exploited women ... I realize it's not financially feasible in many cases for families to have a stay at home parent, I'm lucky to have been able to make that choice, so not trying to "shame" anyone, just lamenting the situation. Studies find a majority of mothers would choose not to work or only work part-time when they have young children, if they could afford to. If a government investment were to go anywhere, I wish it would go to helping mothers (or fathers) be able to afford to stay home with their children.
Glad this popped up in my feed so I could follow you here! I read your review of Abigail Shrier's "Bad Therapy" a while ago and was relieved that SOMEONE ELSE noticed how sloppy, misleading, and questionable many of the citations and research were in that book. (I also wrote a review pointing this stuff out, and other problems, and mentioned yours in mine a couple of times -- https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/bad-journalism).
Is this is full time preschool though? They have part-time preschool here (I'm from Vancouver) and I thought 6 hours per week would have some benefits for 3-5 year-olds. I signed my daughter up starting at three (I mean, I have another one due to arrive around then so yes a little because it'll be easier on me!). I don't expect her to learn much (compared to at home), but she's loves playing with other kids, music, and crafts so I figure she'll have fun at least. I wouldn't do FT preschool though ... I don't even like the idea of FT elementary school! Wish they had a half-time, accelerated option (learn the same stuff in half the time).
It’s ironic to think the govt would invest in letting a parent stay home with their children when less privileged (poor) parents have work requirements just to be able to get Medicaid. I can’t imagine how they manage to find decent childcare gir their babies while they go work for $11 an hour somewhere.
I think the government could make it easier for parents to choose to stay home for the years their children are small by implementing Medicare for all, expanding the child tax credit, and a few other things.
But a lot of people choose to stay in the workforce not because of the immediate economic drawbacks but because what it means for a career to have a 3-10 year gap. Your current AND future wages are depressed when you go that route.
This probably depends on your social circle. Almost all of the women I know who are new moms wish they could take more time off (I'm in Canada so that's more than a year here), could go down to part-time, or quit working altogether. But this includes a lot of nurses and other healthcare workers (who will always have jobs to go back to, if they want) and women with jobs they weren't particularly excited about to begin with.
2) I think the idea that low wage women should use daycare is kind of crazy. You need to make a lot more then a daycare worker for it to make sense to do daycare.
3) I think the problem is non-wage costs.
a) Non-wage costs are 50% of the cost.
b) Parents have to pay for daycare with after tax earnings (again, non-wage costs). In our case taxes take 50% of wages
So your revenue is being cut in half and your costs are being doubled. That's mostly a government problem.
So today $75k * 50% = $33k - $20k = $13k. And -$7k with two kids.
If the cost were $60k / 4 = $15k and your marginal tax rate were closer to 20%, then a woman making $75k would have $60k after tax . $60k - $15k = $45k. Even $30k with two kids.
The dependent care FSA is only $5,000, and that's the same no matter how many kids you have. That's a deduction, not a credit, so you are maybe talking ~$2,000 and for many people less.
It is also a fucking bitch to use, I hate uploading receipts every few weeks.
Great breakdown of the costs of providing care for very young children. I think the larger problem is that daycare just doesn’t scale. For every four infants, you need one full time adult worker who is willing to take care of four infants. I am pro-baby all the way—they are great—and I loved my own babies more than life itself, and I was lucky enough to be at home with them for their first years. When I was an at home mom I participated in a babysitting co-op and a co-op preschool—both really cost effective ways of getting occasional child care. Taking care of other people’s children is a slog. Minutes seem like hours. A two or three hour stint felt like a lifetime. Not everybody feels this way, but be honest—how many people in this world are willing to take care of other people’s kids 40 hours a week?
The best thing the government could do is to give money to parents so that they can either use it to purchase child care, or use it to cut back on work and raise their kids. If you are in the top 20% or so of wage earners, you probably have a pretty interesting career and it makes sense to keep doing what you are doing and hire out child care while you do research or invent things or heal the sick. If you are the parts manager at an auto dealership, maybe raising your own kids for a few years is the more interesting and rewarding path. Not every job is a calling, and raising your own children and being part of a community of other parents is rewarding and has other social benefits.
I’d be curious to see good quality research on the costs over a lifetime of taking 5-10 years off and then going back into the workforce. If they expect people to work until they are 70, why not subsidize a break for parents so that they can take care of their kids for a few years?
My understanding is taking time off does result in long-term earning loss (this accounts for a lot of the make-female wage gap), but of course it will vary by line of work. For my work, stopping altogether might do more than lower earnings; I have a sense (maybe wrong, but I don’t think so) that if you drop out of “the conversation,” such as it is, it can be hard to get back in at all. But there are plenty of jobs where that wouldn’t matter.
(I had a longer reply about this half-written for another comment, then accidentally deleted it and couldn’t muster the effort to do it all over, so this is the short version.)
Fair enough. I’d only add that freelancing is not necessarily risky or unstructured. When I did it, I pretty much always had 3-5 permalancing gigs, each of which hired me for 1-5+ articles every week. In many ways it felt *more* stable, because they wouldn’t all go under or cut me loose at once.
Depends a lot on the desired career! Like anything, it’s easier to have both if you make more money. As I’ve written here (https://bonniekristian.substack.com/p/the-answer-is-i-have-a-nanny), I do it by having a nanny. It’s also going to depend a lot on whether you feel like you’re missing out by going to work while someone else—even if it’s your spouse—cares for the kids. Another thing to consider is that many kinds of freelancing can be part-time without anyone knowing.
Guessing from your handle that you’re interested in library work, and if you don’t already have your master’s in library science, I’d recommend finding a remote degree program you can slow walk. Have kids in quick succession, and do the degree in the 5ish years it takes to get them to preschool. Then you graduate and have a resume without a “gap”—you weren’t staying home; you were in school!
But finally, the gap is not a career killer. I’ve worked with and hired people returning to work after their kids’ youngest years.
The good news - if there is any - is that $20K per year is a temporary expense until you're ready to send the kid off to school. (I'm assuming public school here.) I was the stay-at-home dad for much of my kid's pre-K years. We sent him off to part-time care for A) socialization and B) so I could have some semblance of a career on the other side of it. But the money I was making freelancing on a PT basis barely covered the care, if that. It was a temporary investment in his development and my own viability.
How temporary that is depends on how many kids you have, I suppose.
True! Our 4-year gap just about doubled our costly years, alas. It is what it is.
We deliberately spaced the kids only 2 years apart (ended up being a 22 month gap) so that I could stay home and take care of them. We worried about having two in college at the same time, but figured we’d cross that bridge…it ended up working out better than we imagined. The kids were close growing up, there were only a couple of years they were in different schools, and financial aid is calculated on a family’s total ability to pay so unlike daycare, if parents can only afford to pay, say $30,000 per year in college costs, that contribution is for both kids—meaning the parents pay $15,000 per kid if two are in college at the same time.
You are spot on that daycare costs (5-yr old and below) are what they are due to state/city-regulated teacher-student ratios usually around 1:4 - 1:6. Usually a head teacher makes $20-$30/hr, but the assistant teachers/helpers are closer to minimum wage... the mean is definitely close to the math you laid out (though I don't know if the teachers who make minimum wage are getting paid holidays and insurance...). And totally agree that just going from a ratio of 1:4 to 1:5 is a HUGE JUMP in causing more disruptions for the teaching and classroom -- the biggest complaint of parents in my child's daycare is that there aren't enough teachers. There are usually 2-3 administrators too, who are paid more than the head teacher.
Another big reason for high costs (not including aftercare costs and other supplementary costs) is that RENT can be very high for daycare in high-cost areas. I know the Gothamists' #s are for childcare in a year, but for DAYCARE in the NYC area (I live across the river from Manhattan), I am paying $3,000/month for 1 child. (I'm assuming it's close to $4,000+/month in Manhattan, at the very least.) I don't think the daycare is banking it with high margins, and I think rent is the highest cost factor.
Then there's summer camp -- for a 4-week summer camp that's 5-days a week (8:30 am - 5:00 pm), it's $1,250/week.
I have family in San Diego, and they are paying $2,200/month for daycare. The summer camp options are much cheaper there, though...like $600/week.
Whew, yeah, as I said, my facility costs estimate was conservative, and I'm sure laughably so if we're looking at NYC specifically. Summer day camps in my area are more in the $600 range or maybe even cheaper, I think. Demand is so high, though, that I honestly haven't even had the chance to decide if I'm willing to pay for that -- they're always already sold out.
On the summer camp note, definitely supply-demand dynamic in the NYC/NJ/CT areas as you note for your area...granted these camps have all the bells and whistles (pools, slides, fields, arts/crafts, etc.), but it's still a day camp at the end of the day. There are only like 5-6 of them trying to serve the whole Greater-NYC area so they have crazy waitlists and can charge what they want.
I am clearly in the wrong line of work, dang
Solution-wise to reduce costs, some school districts offer FREE Preschool for 3-5 year olds in my area (Pre-K3/Pre-K4) before Kindergarten. I don't know how the back end looks math/cost wise with taxes (guessing higher property taxes...my city has a lot of businesses/corporate companies, so that helps negate higher property taxes that i woukdve thiught we'd have with a free preschool program)....but up-front/per-person costs will probably seem a little cheaper...
I loved Apostles of Reason. What do you mean by "pastoral authority"? I may be able to help you out.
also now I want a sandwich.
I’m interested in the question of what people think their pastor should be able to tell them to do. I’m not thinking about questions of core doctrine or clear sin, like “You should stop committing adultery.” More like, if your pastor said “You need to quit Twitter,” would you do it? (Obviously there’d be denominational variation in any post-Reformation sources.)
I don’t know this answer! I’d start with Martin Luther’s table talk- but I’m going to send this to Myles, he might know
Anecdotally, so much of those questions get scooped up under the heading of prudence, a kind of self-directed notion as opposed to someone speaking into your life from outside. But asking how spiritual direction (which is how this kind of deliberation occurs) happens in a post reformation context would be really interesting.
Yeah, I mean part of the question is: Is spiritual direction a separate job from pastor? I mean, I know it is and have benefited from a spiritual director myself, but is it supposed to be? Maybe all pastoring includes spiritual direction but not vice versa, I dunno.
This question is partially inspired by the comment I ran into from pastors over and over while writing Untrustworthy, which was that they got congregants one hour a week, but Fox News or Twitter or whatever got them 10, 20, 30 hours. There's an imbalance of influence (or you could say "discipleship" there), but it also very much has to do with authority.
I was sort of thinking the framing might be “pastors have always given circumstance specific guidance, it is just not usually binding”
Right, and the question of whether it should be in some sense binding is part of what interests me.
Obviously, post-Reformation, without an established church, nothing a pastor can say is "binding" in the way it would've been in a small, premodern village on the parish model. If you really disagree with pastoral guidance today, you can just bounce. But assuming you don't want to leave the church and don't think the guidance is theologically or ethically wrong -- but maybe it is unwanted, unpleasant, difficult, etc. -- should you feel some real obligation to heed it?
I was talking this over with Erica Ramirez (witter.com/EricaBryand), who is very sharp, and she suggested an analogy of a trainer at a gym which I think may be apt: They can't literally force you to take their exercise and nutritional advice, but when you hire them to be your trainer and help you work toward a mutually shared fitness goal, you have to do what they say if you want to remain their client.
Excellent analysis. I'm troubled by the entitlement I hear in calls for "universal daycare", and how it's framed as a requirement for female empowerment / feminism. The majority of daycare workers are grossly underpaid, as you note, but they are also disproportionately likely to be immigrants from poorer countries. It strikes me as deeply screwed up to out-source caring for your children on less privileged and exploited women ... I realize it's not financially feasible in many cases for families to have a stay at home parent, I'm lucky to have been able to make that choice, so not trying to "shame" anyone, just lamenting the situation. Studies find a majority of mothers would choose not to work or only work part-time when they have young children, if they could afford to. If a government investment were to go anywhere, I wish it would go to helping mothers (or fathers) be able to afford to stay home with their children.
If you haven't read it already, you might find this essay by Laura Wiley Haynes on the negative impact of daycare on babies / toddlers interesting -- https://wesleyyang.substack.com/p/universal-early-childhood-daycare. Erica Komisar also has good work on this.
Glad this popped up in my feed so I could follow you here! I read your review of Abigail Shrier's "Bad Therapy" a while ago and was relieved that SOMEONE ELSE noticed how sloppy, misleading, and questionable many of the citations and research were in that book. (I also wrote a review pointing this stuff out, and other problems, and mentioned yours in mine a couple of times -- https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/bad-journalism).
Thank you! I'll take a look at that essay and am intrigued to see your thoughts on the Shrier book, too. And yes, I'm all about part-time work becoming a much more normal thing; I mostly don't want it myself, but I wish it were a widely feasible option for everyone, as I wrote a few years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20210602052025/https://theweek.com/articles/982118/normalize-parttime-work-parents
Thanks for sharing, will read now :-)
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2022/02/03/a-new-study-finds-preschool-can-be-detrimental-to-children. I found this article to be helpful. At the end of the day, preschool is not mandatory, so if you don't want to send your kids to it, then you don't have to.
Is this is full time preschool though? They have part-time preschool here (I'm from Vancouver) and I thought 6 hours per week would have some benefits for 3-5 year-olds. I signed my daughter up starting at three (I mean, I have another one due to arrive around then so yes a little because it'll be easier on me!). I don't expect her to learn much (compared to at home), but she's loves playing with other kids, music, and crafts so I figure she'll have fun at least. I wouldn't do FT preschool though ... I don't even like the idea of FT elementary school! Wish they had a half-time, accelerated option (learn the same stuff in half the time).
It’s ironic to think the govt would invest in letting a parent stay home with their children when less privileged (poor) parents have work requirements just to be able to get Medicaid. I can’t imagine how they manage to find decent childcare gir their babies while they go work for $11 an hour somewhere.
I think the government could make it easier for parents to choose to stay home for the years their children are small by implementing Medicare for all, expanding the child tax credit, and a few other things.
But a lot of people choose to stay in the workforce not because of the immediate economic drawbacks but because what it means for a career to have a 3-10 year gap. Your current AND future wages are depressed when you go that route.
This probably depends on your social circle. Almost all of the women I know who are new moms wish they could take more time off (I'm in Canada so that's more than a year here), could go down to part-time, or quit working altogether. But this includes a lot of nurses and other healthcare workers (who will always have jobs to go back to, if they want) and women with jobs they weren't particularly excited about to begin with.
1) I think your basic math is right.
2) I think the idea that low wage women should use daycare is kind of crazy. You need to make a lot more then a daycare worker for it to make sense to do daycare.
3) I think the problem is non-wage costs.
a) Non-wage costs are 50% of the cost.
b) Parents have to pay for daycare with after tax earnings (again, non-wage costs). In our case taxes take 50% of wages
So your revenue is being cut in half and your costs are being doubled. That's mostly a government problem.
So today $75k * 50% = $33k - $20k = $13k. And -$7k with two kids.
If the cost were $60k / 4 = $15k and your marginal tax rate were closer to 20%, then a woman making $75k would have $60k after tax . $60k - $15k = $45k. Even $30k with two kids.
Are dependent care FSAs not available in all states? I live in MN and we paid our daycare costs pre-tax, which helped a lot!
The dependent care FSA is only $5,000, and that's the same no matter how many kids you have. That's a deduction, not a credit, so you are maybe talking ~$2,000 and for many people less.
It is also a fucking bitch to use, I hate uploading receipts every few weeks.
Yeah, it's not nearly enough for full-time care. Idk the history there, but it feels like a number that was appropriate in 1985.
Great breakdown of the costs of providing care for very young children. I think the larger problem is that daycare just doesn’t scale. For every four infants, you need one full time adult worker who is willing to take care of four infants. I am pro-baby all the way—they are great—and I loved my own babies more than life itself, and I was lucky enough to be at home with them for their first years. When I was an at home mom I participated in a babysitting co-op and a co-op preschool—both really cost effective ways of getting occasional child care. Taking care of other people’s children is a slog. Minutes seem like hours. A two or three hour stint felt like a lifetime. Not everybody feels this way, but be honest—how many people in this world are willing to take care of other people’s kids 40 hours a week?
The best thing the government could do is to give money to parents so that they can either use it to purchase child care, or use it to cut back on work and raise their kids. If you are in the top 20% or so of wage earners, you probably have a pretty interesting career and it makes sense to keep doing what you are doing and hire out child care while you do research or invent things or heal the sick. If you are the parts manager at an auto dealership, maybe raising your own kids for a few years is the more interesting and rewarding path. Not every job is a calling, and raising your own children and being part of a community of other parents is rewarding and has other social benefits.
I’d be curious to see good quality research on the costs over a lifetime of taking 5-10 years off and then going back into the workforce. If they expect people to work until they are 70, why not subsidize a break for parents so that they can take care of their kids for a few years?
My understanding is taking time off does result in long-term earning loss (this accounts for a lot of the make-female wage gap), but of course it will vary by line of work. For my work, stopping altogether might do more than lower earnings; I have a sense (maybe wrong, but I don’t think so) that if you drop out of “the conversation,” such as it is, it can be hard to get back in at all. But there are plenty of jobs where that wouldn’t matter.
(I had a longer reply about this half-written for another comment, then accidentally deleted it and couldn’t muster the effort to do it all over, so this is the short version.)