Recently, I took a peek into daycare costs, especially for age 0-5, and I was very surprised. I knew it was bad but this is like costs more than mortgage or college education bad. People report paying like $2k+/month just for daycare for one kid!
Given those finances, it makes a lot of sense for one parent to just be the isolated stay at home parent. But then they lose 5 years of career advancement.
Part of it seems institutionally broken between caregiver-child ratios of 1:4 and extremely high insurance costs, there's no way out of this trap. Four families are paying the bare minimum salary for one caregiver plus all the land/insurance/utilities costs. Say if the caregiver is making $40k/yr then that's $1k+ for each family just to pay that person's salary.
It's no surprise then that many people are discouraged from having kids at all given these costs.
Many of my friends are talking about how to raise kids more communally but there's not really good models for this outside of like Amish/Mormon communities or other strong traditional Christian families.
Other countries subsidize the cost of daycare. Canada piloted a $10/day.
New Mexico just launched this year universal daycare. Wash DC has had universal free preK for some years.
My brother had three kids but his wife watched them the whole time and he worked 7 days/week to provide enough.
How are y'all managing this?