expensive child care, or being stuck by The Man

[jrtom]

Look, I know that Megan and I are fairly well off, as two-earner families (one of whom is a graduate student) go. And we're lucky to live in a state where Megan can take 3 months off work and still get some kind of pay (counting disability and family leave). Moreover, I do recognize, having been doing it (retail, not wholesale) for the past 6 weeks, that day care for infants is not an easy job, and deserves to be compensated.

But fer cryin' out loud, $900+ a month? Thanks, but we'd rather pay rent.

This is the non-subsidized cost for the UCI campus-provided full-time (10 hours/day) infant/toddler day care. The state of California does provide subsidies, but only if your household income is < ~$3000/month. Yes, that's right, they expect you to (be able to) pay as much as a third of your salary for child care.

(No options for part-time or occasional care, either--we asked. And in fact this is really what we wanted to have available. Guess it's time to check out the free-lancers.)

*sigh*

Comments

[red-frog.livejournal.com]

I think you're supposed to keep the kidling in a cardboard box under your desk. Perhaps in a file drawer.

Yep--sounds like time to talk to the freelancers.

[hypgnosis.livejournal.com]

OK, I'm confused.

Suppose there's 20 days a month where you want child care. Paying $900/month for this means paying $45/day. For a 10-hour day, that's $4.50/hour. Sounds like reasonable baby-sitting wages to me. I want to live in a world in which one can make a reasonable living at child care, because then good (bright, capable, decent, whatever) people will go into the business, and we won't have a lot of the really scary child-care horror stories we have now.

I know, I know. If you are doing child care wholesale, you don't have to charge that much to make a decent living. Even more importantly, a $4.50 hourly rate becomes easier to swallow if you only have to have the child care when you want it. As a freelancer, I'd say that that sounds like a freelancer to me. :-)

But I don't see a way out of this problem. People often cannot afford to pay child-care workers what they're really worth, so a lot of the workers get screwed. This is ungood. Some days, I just want society to go back to the one-career family (and then, how do you decide who stays home? give it up, we're just f@@ked).

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I should have said some of what you did--I did do the math, and as I implied, I do want people who work in child care to get compensated well for the reasons you state.

I actually think that if it were for taking care of one child, $4.50 is too low. I'd be willing to pay twice that, on an occasional basis, for an assurance of competence, reliability, and genuine appreciation for the job.

We're talking about 35 children, though. And they have a waitlist, so they can be assured of their revenue stream, as it were. So let's say they have, oh, 10 people working there. (Which is frankly more than I expect.) Before overhead and so forth (which I assume is nontrivial), that would be $15.75/hour, and even after overhead, it could easily be $10/hour. Which, like I said, I don't object to paying...but I can't afford to pay for 200 hours a month of it in order to get it at all.

What this tells us is that day care makes economic sense to do as a profession if you can attract a reasonable, consistent clientele. Which apparently this place can . . . but basically it's not feasible for students, which is a shame considering its supposed mission.

[darcydodo]

UC child care has always sucked shit, in terms of prcie. Now that it exists in the first place. When I was a baby, my parents simply took me into work with them; once I was more toddler-sized, my mom turned a room in her lab into a nursery and paid graduate students to take care of me. Admittedly, my parents were professors, not grad students, but still.