It’s a familiar paradox to every parent who works outside the home – childcare costs so much that sometimes it just makes more sense to stay home, even if that’s not what you would really prefer to do –and that’s if you can find a spot in a halfway decent center.
So I thought this brief blog post from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Working Dad, Paul Nyhan, to be interesting. He stated that on average, child care center directors – that is, the people running the show – make 35 percent less than kindergarten teachers. You know the people who have the most direct contact with the kids make much less. And 17 percent of all family-owed child care centers have closed in the last five years.
Something like half of all kids are regularly in child care, he states – although I don’t know if that number includes just kids who are in full time daycare or those who go to Grandma’s every afternoon or preschool two mornings a week.
He points out a fundamental disconnect between supply and demand – that child care workers often don’t make a decent wage, but parents struggle to pay for it. I wonder why that is, although I have a few theories.
One is that child care has traditionally been women’s work, and we generally undervalue anything traditionally done by women, like teaching and clerical work and so on.
And I think it’s also a fundamental discomfort in this county with the idea of women’s economic power. There’s a strong cultural bias against middle class women who work outside the home if they have young children, but the feds mandate only a paltry three months unpaid maternity leave. Other countries offer one year, paid, minimum, so mothers of babies don’t have to go back to work right about the time they are beginning to feel somewhat good at the baby care gig.
All I know is, I envy my friends who have on site child care at their jobs, or free and loving grandma care. Because for the rest of us, the choices suck.
