Comment on Doesn't add up
partofthevoice@lemmy.zip 6 hours agoYet somehow a struggling mom can take on babysitting as a gig and watch four kids a day by herself, for like $50 each. That includes cooking, cleaning, changing, and a smile on your kiddos face when they come home.
My sister does this. Shes the cook, cleaner, janitor, and administration.
I think part of the problem is also the fact that entrepreneurial types have convinced us that the necessary architecture for a successful business also happens to be the architecture which makes us give up most of our proceeds.
You are capable and can make a difference by yourself. You don’t need them.
Concerning you did not list educator in her tasks, and instead focused on the least important aspects of “childcare”.
Children shouldn’t be a business model, but proper ECE is vital at that age where they learn more than any other time in their life.
Sure, I’m not saying that it meets every need prescribed to kids in our modern enlightened era. $25 extra a day (or rather, $500 extra a month) doesn’t sound like much for the professionalism, the standardized and trusted procedures, and the army of workers available to meet your kids needs.
Most daycare centers in my area don’t have a curriculum, they’re for profit, and the online reviews are utter trash. My sister worked for one and has plenty of stories about staff members cursing around children, being rude to them, … the whole “I just work here” treatment.
My sister isn’t a licensed educator, so I won’t be saying she educates the kids. She does play with them, though. They are learning more than they otherwise would; probably would be cooped up in a grandparents house with their tablet or something. Who knows? But she wouldn’t have customers if there wasn’t a problem.
Assuming a 9hr work day to cover another persons workday… Likely closer to 10hr due to commute… but I wouldn’t know.
200/9hr=22/hr
BSing utils at 300/mo is a mere 0.40/hr
BSing rent/mortgage at 1200/MO is 1.64/hr
So basically she’s getting $20/hr assuming she does all 3 jobs just within that 9hr.
Not terrible but it does raise more questions and definitely doesn’t scale well. Like presumably these are older kids that can be ignored while cooking and cleaning or that 9hr estimate is low… And prob isn’t caring insurance for this? And utils, rent/mortgage is quite possibly off considerably…
Comparing someone doing it out their house vs an actual business is always going to be silly.
There’s absolutely tradeoffs. Yet, the parents that take their kids to my sister have a different kind of tradeoff: don’t go to work, or find affordable childcare. My sister winds up in this halfway point, servicing those people.
It’s true she doesn’t stock a defib. She watches those kids well enough, though, and has a cell phone to call 911 in case of emergency.
It’s not the picture perfect setup. It is making sure plenty of families can continue putting food on their table, though. Sometimes that’s what’s important (imo).
It doesn’t scale. But, you could have a lot of nonscalable businesses — a “gig economy” as they call it. A gig economy can scale even if the independent pieces don’t.
Yes there are tradeoffs.
Your “yet somehow a struggling mother can take on babysitting” is wholly because of these tradeoffs… and depending on specifics, may be getting paid less than minimum wage.
She effectively is operating in the gig economy. That’s a whole can of worms itself.
As counterpoint, I know at least a couple home daycares, which were more convenient and less expensive for their customers but:
my aunt had an unhealthy basement rec room after multiple floods, and was not very mobile
an old college friend had gone conservative and refused to either get Covid vaccinations or to require any vaccinations of their customers. Can you imagine if you found out you were sending your kids to a germ factory where any kid could have anything?
Yeah, I don’t really disagree.
We could have nice things, but logistically it’s not feasible at an affordable cost. So a gig economy steps up to fill those gaps. Yes, that comes with risks. You will find horror stories, they’re valid. Nonetheless, this is closer to how childcare had been done for centuries. It’s a regression from the modern liberal way, but it certainly isn’t unfamiliar.
What would be more ideal is if the state could partner with gig workers to ensure adequate resources. Perhaps there’s a way to redraw the lines here, so that we don’t find ourselves in a situation where you work to afford childcare and are otherwise broke. That’s also not a way to live.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
True facts. The “missing” money in the equation is all the boring expensive stuff. Rent, property taxes, legal, administration (bookkeeping, compliance), insurance (child safety/liability is a convenient excuse for sky-high premiums).
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
We need to make it far easier for people to operate businesses out of their homes. So many of these costs disappear if you can use the structure you already have to pay for.
Flower@sh.itjust.works 4 hours ago
We had those for child care. Then government added additional regulations for safety after some incidents, and a lot of them quit because the additional costs made it not worth it anymore. Now the government complains about a shortage of child care places.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
It’s a hard problem. It’s also what prevents meaningful criminal justice reform. Some people just have a very hard time accepting that bad things are going to happen. If you make the justice system less punitive, yes, you’re going to get some number of extra crimes, as some people who should have stayed locked up will be freed. People have a very hard time grasping the concept that you need to do a cost benefit analysis for any policy. Sure, criminal justice reform will result in some small number of additional crime victims, but it will prevent orders of magnitude more people from being victimized by overly punitive laws and extreme jail sentences.
some_kind_of_guy@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
My state has a framework for at-home daycare operations, but good luck finding one that’s not already at capacity. I’ve heard of other states scrapping their programs or not creating one to begin with, citing imagined “potential for abuse”. It’s always easier to just sit on your hands instead of improving things, and “think of the children” does an insane amount of heavy-lifting while managing to hurt the children and families it claims to protect.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Yeah people fall for it. Hell, look at the mass downvoting of my comment here.
I’m a leftist myself, but folks on the left are just as vulnerable to knee jerk reactionary thinking as conservatives. They see someone saying that regulations can be bad, and their mind immediately jumps to the conclusion, “THIS PERSON MUST BE A REPUBLICAN!!!” and all thought ceases.
Regulations can just as easily be a tool of big business as they are a tool to protect the public. And the easiest way for governments to take away people’s rights or for big business to stifle competition via regulation is “think of the children.”