I feel like a lot of folks don't actually do this math, and don't realize that they're essentially just working to pay someone else to watch their kid.
It's not necessarily either one. If you do it yourself, you reuse the existing home instead of needing a separate building with its own rent, maintenance and security, the children and the adult watching them wake up in the same place instead of both having to commute to the childcare building, you have no administrative costs in terms of hiring, HR, accounting, background checks, etc. By the time you add up all the additional costs, you can easily end up underwater against doing it yourself even if each adult in the central facility is watching more kids -- and that itself is a cost because then each kid gets less attention.
Because when you buy that Egg McMuffin you're not just paying for it. You're paying for an entire building of workers, the rent on that building, their licensing fees, their advertising costs, their electric costs, and much more. When you make it at home you're paying for nothing but the ingredients.
So it creates a paradoxical scenario - you're getting charged way more for stuff than if you made it yourself, but yet somehow you're not getting ripped off.
Those facilities also often don't qualify for subsidies like this because it allows all the people doing it themselves to claim the subsidy. Either you take care of your own kids as before but sign up as a daycare that only your own kids attend to get the subsidy yourself, or you find someone else who takes care of their own kids and then each sign up to watch the other's kids when you each actually watch your own. And you rightfully should be able to get the subsidy if you're doing it yourself, except that then it gets a lot more attractive to actually stay at home, which the government doesn't like because it makes the program more expensive and corporations hate because it reduces supply in the labor market.
There are free ways for kids to expand their social lives (library, park, etc). Career needs can obviously only be met by working, but then the follow-up question is, building a career for what purpose? If the purpose is for self actualization then that's one thing, but if the parent has no desire to actually grow their career and just wants the money, then that's a different math problem.
