Political Memes

I do volunteer office work for a non-profit childcare center, and have looked at their budget and their books. It's basically impossible to efficiently do at the scale of a single center in a high cost of living city.

If you're paying teachers an average of $30/hour and maintaining a ratio of 4 kids to 1 teacher at all times, and covering 50 hours per week of operational time (for example, operational hours between 8am and 6pm 5 days per week), and you actually have enough staff to not pay overtime, that's $1500/week in wages per teacher, or $375/week per student. Throw in taxes, healthcare, paid vacation, and staffing in redundancy so that you can handle illness and the unexpected, and each kid might be at $400-450/week in labor costs of the direct work of watching and teaching the kids.

But in reality, childcare is in crisis now because a qualified worker could probably get a higher paying nanny job for 1 or 2 kids at a time, so there's a severe shortage of workers even at that $30/hour average wage. And so there needs to be overtime, and that creeps up to $450-500/week for workers.

And then you have the ongoing overhead: rent, utilities, furniture/equipment, toys, books, other supplies, etc. Most centers provide food, and have to contract out for that, too.

And then there's the cost of management. Someone needs to run the place, there might need to be something like a receptionist, and these centers often have to contract out their bookkeeping, electronic records, or even basics like running a website. Most have extra features like electronic reports and maybe even pictures/video for parents, and that costs money, too.

So even on the non-profit side, without a profit motive or distributions to shareholders, the industry as a whole has a mismatch between the prices parents are able to pay versus the bare minimum acceptable cost of providing that service. (In fact, the nonprofit I'm thinking of has donations coming in to cover things like tuition assistance for parents who need it, or a lot of the supplies, and volunteers like me who can provide specialized labor for no cost to the center.)

Childcare should be subsidized by the government, and there's basically no way this industry can continue to exist based purely on revenues from parents alone. Otherwise the industry will enter a death spiral and the number of people simply unable to afford kids will grow out of control.