I know the typical answer is, "the government should just provide it". But is that really an ideal we should aspire to? Pay $56,000 a year so someone can work a $50,000 a year service job while strangers raise their children? The whole thing seems fundamentally broken. We've structured society as if the highest and best use of everyone's time is be a W-2 wage-earner.
I'm beginning to think it's all a "Death of God" thing; we still haven't found a non-religious meaning for existence so we just focus on getting the high score. I certainly feel it, and I think many others do too though they might not fully understand the feeling.
It looks like $56K is for a full-time nanny, so presumably there is more scale to be had at a daycare where it isn't one-to-one. I think the other issue is that leaving the workforce for years on end is very hard on a woman's career, so they may consider it worth it to pay the exorbitant costs for a few years if it means that they can maintain their employment.
I'm long past thinking that any of this will change in a way that meaningfully improves peoples'/family's circumstances; as we can probably agree, the financeliazation of everything just seems like an accepted aspect of American life (though I'm not a fan).
Actually, it's the opposite - this relentless capitalist grind peculiar to American society has its origins in the Protestant work ethic - the belief that capitalism is a divine expression of God's will, that physical labor is the religious meaning of existence (at least for the working class) and that poverty and wealth are the result of moral vice or virtue, respectively. It's the same perverse intersection of Christianity and Capitalism that created prosperity theology.
And the fear and hatred of government interventionism often derided as "godless socialism" which prevents the US from installing any real social safety nets or nationalized healthcare, out of the belief that suffering is inherently noble and the poor are inherently lazy is also rooted in the same religious belief.
Another aspect of this decline may be the "ideal" of the nuclear family. Family units used to be a lot more compact, so Grandma could watch the kids whenever necessary because she already lived with the family. All this seems to be doing is accelerating the falling birthrate and something like Social Security in the US was already forecast to be in trouble before people stopped having as many kids and supplying so many "replacement workers".
If it could give us our health back much faster and provide it to far more people, isn't that a reasonable trade off? Or the efficiencies could come from the non-human interaction parts of the day, such as insurance paperwork.
If someone feels financially overextended at 400k, they are the problem
Also, the title is misleading, a full-time in-home nanny is a luxury and has been since I can remember. When the average reader sees "child care", I doubt this is what they have in mind
