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April 23, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:30
The Truth About Daycare!
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Hi there, my name is Stefan Molyneux, I'm the host of Free Domain, the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world, and I am here to steal a few minutes from your day to just make your life pretty much infinitely better.
We're going to be talking about daycare, the effects of daycare, choices to stay home, to not stay home, the facts, the reasoning, the morals, and the effects of this most important choice.
We'll talk about the research, facts about daycare, we've got health and well-being effects on children and their cognitive development, What the result of intervention programs have been, the financial costs and benefits, and so on.
And the benefits of being a stay-at-home parent just, you know, by the by.
I spent a couple of years working in a daycare when I was younger.
I have really seen what goes on, the good and the bad.
I've been a stay-at-home dad now for 14 and a half years.
So I've really seen both sides of the equation, and it's kind of a bit of a personal topic for me.
And I myself was put in daycare when I was younger for quite a long time.
So I'm here to sort of give you the facts.
All right, so let's try and avoid that internet trend where the first third of any videos have no valuable information.
So this is labor force participation rates by marital status and presence of children, March 1948 to 2005.
The big line is this sort of brownish purple line where it's gone from like 17% to 70%.
That is wild stuff.
So women as a whole, of course, have been going into the workforce.
But married women with children under age 18, it's a massive, massive shift.
One of the biggest shifts in the history of the world.
In fact, people say, well, why did women go into the workforce?
I mean, we'll see the data later that 80% of working mothers would rather not work.
So why did they want to go or why did they end up going into the workforce?
Well, there's a lot of propaganda and so on.
But it wasn't because of the need for money.
Because when... Women go into the workforce, supply and demand.
All they do is they drive down the wages of men.
So that hasn't really done much.
You could say, well, women tend to vote for a lot of free stuff and therefore they had to work.
Maybe some truth I think it has a lot to do with propaganda.
Governments, of course, they prefer people to be working because you can't tax stay-at-home moms.
And so if you get women into the workforce, you take them from non-taxing to taxable.
And of course, if you can help women, quote, postpone having children or not have children, Then governments get the value of their tax dollars without having to pay for child education, child dentistry in many places, child healthcare and so on.
So governments make a lot of money if women put their children in daycare or don't have children at all.
And of course, then the governments also, through regulation and licensing of daycares, they will get their hands on children, which, you know, governments throughout history, this is all the way back to Plato's Republic, that governments like to get their hands on children as early as possible for purposes of enhancing social loyalty.
Let's just be as nice as possible.
If you want to know more about this, I'll link below to my...
Magnificent presentation called The Truth About Plato.
So we'll get into that.
So it's pretty wild.
1948, 17% of married mothers were in the labor force.
And in 1985, 61% of married mothers were working or looking for work.
By 1995, their labor force participation had reached 70%.
And married mothers account for much of the increase in total labor force participation during the post-war period.
Of course, this is a time when automation and robots and the internet and computers and email all began to reduce the need for labor.
But at the same time, we have a lot of labor going in.
And of course, a lot of this growth for women is in government employment, employment within the public sector.
All right. So this is kind of what we're facing and who is...
Who's going to be the most affected by this is the children.
So, daycare facts.
This is mostly focused on the U.S., although the data is fairly wide in other areas and covers those fairly well as well.
Most young children experience some non-parental care.
About 75% of children in the U.S. spend time in non-parental child care.
Over 80% of preschool-aged children, three to five years old, experience non-parental child care.
And non-parental childcare, of course, could be daycare, could be grandparents, aunts, uncles.
In my particular experience, I was in a daycare, but I was also, you know, some woman, I grew up in London, some woman down the road had a...
Gaggle full of kids in her house and threw juices at us and she had this game where she'd say, I want you all to play Dead Soldier!
And you'd just lie there quietly while she'd rub her temple slowly.
There's quite a lot of work with the gaggle of kids, very young.
So... In the US, 29.5% of infants and toddlers attend home-based childcare facilities.
That would be me, I guess.
And, of course, the daycare costs are rising.
So that's important as well.
A little bit more of a breakdown. You've got daycare or centercare, preschool.
It's often used interchangeably with daycare and centercare, but it generally doesn't serve children from infancy to about two years old.
Home-based care, this is operated in residential spaces from a private home.
A nanny, a professional who operates out of the child's home.
Informal care, you know, grandparents, relatives, friends, neighbors, that kind of stuff.
In most states, the price of childcare for two children exceeded annual housing payments by 28% to over 100% in 2021.
Isn't that wild? So, in 2021, the average annual cost of full-time center-based daycare for infants ranged from almost $6,000 in Mississippi to over $19,000 in Washington, D.C., In 2016, the average annual cost for an infant in center-based care was higher than a year's tuition and fees at a four-year public college in 28 states and the District of Columbia.
It is staggeringly expensive, and of course, this cost is in after-tax dollars.
So, in some places, you have to earn 25%, 35%, 45%, 50% or more extra just to get And we're going to break down the financial calculations in a little while.
A study on parents as childcare consumers found that nearly all parents rated their childcare as great.
Right now, for those of us who have a bare-bones knowledge of statistics, that's impossible because daycare exists as a bell curve.
Not all childcare is great.
So this was a hundred child care programs in each of the four participating states.
They did a review. So the parents of infants and toddlers gave an average rating of 6.07 Where observers gave only 3.47, and that's pretty rough, right? The parents of the preschool age group gave an average rating of 6.03, where observers gave only 4.27.
This is between 0 and 7, so I should have mentioned that.
So, of course, between 0 and 7, yeah, 3.5 is kind of in the median, so But 6.07 is not.
So the parents think, what the breakdown, the facts, is that parents think that their infants and their toddlers, the preschool age group, they think they're getting much better care than they're actually getting, right?
They think it's 6.07 out of 7, but the reality is 3.47, 4.27, and so on.
And now, of course, lots of sources.
I'll put the sources in the show notes.
So only 11% of childcare arrangements are considered, quote, high quality.
A 2016 meta-analysis of international childcare studies found the U.S. childcare centers to be of average quality.
Daycare does remain less influential than the home, as you can imagine, right?
I mean, so this is important.
It doesn't define your children from sort of soup to nut, start to end, but it is, of course, very, very important.
Most research showing significant gains from daycare are based on children from low-income homes put into high-quality, subsidized programs.
Of course, right? So the kids who are the most at risk, single moms, bad neighborhoods, bad social strata, and if you take those and you put them into high-quality, heavily subsidized programs, there are improvements.
No question. If you take the worst-situated children and you put them in the best-situated daycare environment, there are improvements.
Without a doubt. But it's not a fair or objective measure of the average result from daycare for children as a whole.
So here's the quote. An overarching finding in the literature is that daycare influences are less important than home influences, even for children who spend much time in daycare.
In other words, home and family variables account for more of the variance in children's developmental outcomes than daycare variables.
For example, results from the large longitudinal NICHD study of early childcare have shown that for cognitive outcomes, the typical effect sizes for non-parental childcare were approximately a half to a third as large as home environmental effects.
So here are the primary childcare arrangements in the U.S. And sorry, if you're just listening to this, you might want to skedaddle over to fdrpodcast.com, look up this presentation and watch it on the video links below.
So, a parent, 38%.
Home-based childcare, 29%.
Daycare is 12%.
And other is 21%.
These would be friends, relatives, grandparents, and so on, right?
58% of working parents rely on childcare centers.
That's about 6.38 million parents across the nation.
Today, the cost of hiring a nanny is only $14 more per week than the cost of having two kids in a childcare centre.
So that's kind of wild.
Here's something important as well.
And I was a manager in a sort of former life in the software field.
I managed a lot of people. I've seen this firsthand.
Working parents lose an estimated $8,940 each year in lost earnings, reduced participation in the workforce, and lower returns on professional experience, according to data reported by Ready Nation.
And when I was a software manager, I was a chief technical officer at a software company I co-founded.
Yes, the women in particular who had...
Infants, toddlers and children at home, 5 o'clock they were gone.
They had to pick them up from daycare, whereas some of the others we would stay later and get some work done outside of sort of regular office hours.
So not a good or bad thing, but it definitely is less productivity as a whole.
The National Association for the Education of Young Children recommends a staff-to-child ratio of 1 to 4 for infants, right?
So one staff for every four infants.
Okay, so this is some pretty wild math and I'll sort of break this down for you here.
Managing four infants a caregiver's day consists of four hours feeding the babies, two hours and 40 minutes changing diapers.
Those of us who've been home with babies know all about this, the conveyor belt of poop and pee.
So four hours feeding babies, two hours 40 minutes changing diapers, and 40 minutes sanitizing.
Because of course, particularly with fecal matter, you don't want to transfer bacteria from one baby to another.
Now, if they're extremely lucky, this would be like the planets aligning and the infants stay to a schedule, that's 7 hours and 20 minutes performing physical care tasks.
Physical care tasks.
Feeding, changing, sanitizing.
There's no time for play, cuddling, attention, connection, reading, singing, eye contact, and that kind of stuff.
So, that is pretty wild, right?
8.5 hour day.
20 minutes feeding babies every 3 hours.
10 minutes changing diapers every 2 hours.
Hand washing and sanitizing included.
This is a 16 diaper changes in 12 feedings or 4 changes in 3 feedings per baby, which is not excessive from the baby's viewpoint.
You are just maintaining the physical relative comfort of the baby.
It's not the same as playing and interacting and walking with your fingers up the belly and singing songs.
To the baby and so on.
And my daughter in particular just loved to use me as a sort of personal airplane.
She would just...
She never liked it when I sat.
She'd always want to have me carry her and point at things.
And she'd want to go and look at art and books and all of that.
So that's not really going on.
Even with one to four, which is a pretty good ratio.
Certainly the recommended one. So that's important to remember.
Oh, yes. Yes.
The childhood centers have a turnover rate...
As high as 25% to 30% per year.
It's often less, to be fair.
And I know I worked in daycare for a couple of years, and I worked with a whole bunch of other people who kind of came and went.
So, over half of early childhood centers have turnover rates above 5%, others as high as 25% to 30%.
Turnover rates were highest in private pay centers serving children birth through age 5.
So the turnover rates are the highest.
According to the great Suzanne Venker, Quote, a baby who spends five years at one center will lose one-third to almost half of her caregivers every 12 months or so.
At any given moment, a parent's baby could be in the arms of someone they don't know well or someone they've never met at all.
Children in daycare are frequently cared for by strangers.
Now, my gosh, can you imagine a less organic, less natural way of raising children than to have people cycle in and cycle out?
I believe that children are hardwired, of course, to physically bond emotionally, spiritually with their mothers.
And if there's this constant cycle of people coming in and out, different smells, different eye contact, different habits, different level of moodiness or temper or sanguinity and so on.
And so it's really, really tough for babies.
The average salary for a daycare teacher is currently $14.24 per hour in the U.S. Just for reference, which we'll touch on later, someone with a paper route makes $15 an hour.
So you, of course, want Super Nanny.
You want Nanny McPhee, or maybe somebody slightly less toothy.
You want all of these Mary Poppins.
But they're not there. They're not there as a whole.
55% of infants are in non-parental care prior to one year, spending an average of 30 to 40 hours per week in such care.
I mean, we can imagine what this does to breastfeeding, to pumping, and so on.
And breastfeeding is good for the immune system.
It helps to raise IQ in some cases.
And of course, that skin-on-skin contact, that eye contact helps develop empathy and all these wonderful things.
I mean, you know what parenting is.
Parenting is the most specific and vivid example in life of pay me now or pay me later.
It's like, oh, I put my kid in daycare and they have a whole bunch of different...
Carers and so on, and then they maybe fail to thrive, they fail to bond, maybe they have attachment disorders, and babies in daycare for not a huge amount of time experience the same symptoms as babies who've been abandoned by their mothers, the same symptoms as victims of maternal abandonment.
So if you have those issues in children, in infants, toddlers, what happens when they become teenagers?
Pay me now or pay me later.
It's like the worst deal of the universe, in my opinion.
So, what happens?
Daycare children experience increased stress and anxiety.
Sure, because, I mean, if you're a kid, you know what kids like.
Kids play better in fenced fields than in open fields.
They're happier. Children need predictability.
They need consistency and so on.
And that's just really hard to get.
In these kinds of situations.
And of course, you know, we say to kids, oh, don't fall to peer pressure.
But in daycare, the children have far more interaction with other children than they do with adults.
If you can imagine, maybe there's some books in the room.
Would you expect the other children to teach your kid how to read or how to do math?
Of course not. It's just chaos and grabbing and fighting.
And I was in a classroom with one other daycare worker, and we had 25 to 30 kids aged 5 to 10.
And it was, I mean, it was a lot of chaos, a lot of fun.
I enjoyed it, particularly when I got to do it full-time over the summers.
But it's a lot of managing, a lot of wrangling.
I remember sitting around the kids and spending a whole week telling them the story of the Silmarillion by talking, getting them interested in that kind of stuff, which was a real blast.
But yeah, it's a lot of stress and anxiety.
People say, well, I want my kids to be socialized.
It's like, no, no, no. Kids learn socialization from interacting with their parents, and only then should they go to peers.
They can't learn socialization from their peers any more than they can learn math or reading from their peers.
So adjusting to new environments and separation from primary caregivers is very challenging and disruptive for infants and toddlers.
Who do they trust? Who can they predict?
And everyone has different standards.
Everyone has different moods. Everyone has different levels of temper and so on.
So it's just impossible to navigate.
Daycare contains the risk of attachment issues with parents and primary caregivers.
And boy, does that ever show up over the course of your life.
Research has found that some infants, this is a quote, particularly those who began daycare in the first year of life, who spent more than 10 hours a week in daycare, and whose mothers provided less sensitive care, had an increased risk of developing insecure infant-mother attachments.
For a child put into daycare as an infant on for 40 hours a week, while their mother is at work, they would be spending 2,000 hours a year in daycare under someone else's care.
It's wild. And of course, again, with the high turnover rate, the babies would have spent roughly 23% of their life in this person's care, never to see them again, statistically.
Now, we say attachment issues, but attachment issues are your ability to trust, your ability to be vulnerable, your ability to fall in love, your ability to bond with your own baby.
I mean, we are social animals and anything that flays or corrupts or diminishes our capacity to genuinely and deeply bond with others, it really strips us of something essentially human, elementally powerful and positive like love itself.
So this is one of the charts I'm frankly least pleased to show you.
In fact, it's brutal.
It's horrible. This is mean cortisol changes mid-morning to mid-afternoon for children at home versus children in childcare.
Now, of course, cortisol is a stress hormone as a whole.
It indicates tension stress.
So they both start off at about the same.19.
Over the course of mid-morning to mid-afternoon, The children who are at home have diminished levels of stress from 0.19 to about 0.16.
Their stress levels go down.
Ah, but for the children in childcare, it's quite the opposite and it's quite significant.
From starting off about the same place, the children in childcare, their stress levels, their cortisol levels go way up from 0.19 to a little under 0.22.
Now, this is an effect more on older children.
Here's from the study.
For child age, the studies that included younger children, infants, toddlers, or a combination of both infants and toddlers, did not find a higher cortisol increase over the day at child care.
While the studies that included older children, preschoolers, or a combination of both toddlers and preschoolers, did.
Now, why? Why?
I don't know, obviously. But what I've seen, again, years working in a daycare, what I've seen, and this relates to earlier, well, we want our children to be socialized, is no.
When you are in childcare, and I'm going to take daycare as the most primary example of this, although, of course, it's not the only one, but in daycare, You're playing with your block, some other kid comes along, knocks them over, grabs your pen, you know, takes your book or whatever.
It's generally the, you know, the least stable, least functional, craziest children, the lowest common denominator, who end up dominating the social environment.
And so babies and toddlers don't really experience that so much, older children do, so this is the effect of letting Unstable peers raise your children.
Interact with your children for the most part.
Kids they don't know very well.
Kids who kind of come and go.
Kids who might be dropped off sick.
Kids who are bad-tempered.
It could be any number of things.
But at home, if one sibling kicks over the blocks of another sibling, the mother will come in and talk about it and try and fix it.
In daycare, I mean, I know this.
You're just kind of wrangling these kinds of conflicts and doing your best, but it's very hard to be in any kind of control of this kind of stuff.
So that would be my theory. Again, I'm not saying that that's proven.
The more hours a child spent at childcare per day, week, or month, the higher the cortisol increase from mid-morning to mid-afternoon.
Huh. Children who are raised in these very stress-increasing environments, boy, I wonder how they do when it comes time to focus in school later on.
It's really, really, really rough.
Results showed, this is from the study, results showed that both the mid-afternoon cortisol values and the cortisol increase from mid-morning to mid-afternoon were higher on childcare days than on days that the children were at home.
So when they're at home, it doesn't really happen as much.
On average, from the study, on average, an increase in cortisol over the day was found for the child care setting as opposed to a decrease for the home setting.
Quote, furthermore, the within-child differences between settings were moderated by child age, country, and method of saliva collection.
Regarding the correlates, we found a positive association between hours at child care and cortisol change over the day.
Child care stresses children out enormously.
Some general explanations for this higher cortisol secretion in child care compared to the home setting are the potential stressfulness of the separation from parents and the complex interactions with peers and professional caregivers as being separated from their parents and navigating at a room full of varying adults and peers are major developmental tasks for all young children.
I mean, come on. You know that you have trouble with your peers at work.
You have trouble with your peers sometimes in your family.
You have trouble with your peers sometimes in your friend group.
And those are all chosen environments.
Imagine being dumped into some random environment with a bunch of other people.
Of course it's going to be kind of stressful.
Think of what it's like going to a party and not knowing anyone and trying to break into conversations and figure out who's not nuts.
You're asking a three-year-old to do this?
God. All right.
So another quote, another related explanation might be that higher cortisol levels in the afternoon and the accompanying increase over the childcare day may be attributed to child allostatic overload, which is the physiological accumulation of exposure to stress when the demands exceed what the body can cope with.
Since all mentioned factors are inherent to out-of-home childcare and therefore difficult to disentangle and avoid, these explanations remain tentative and do not truly add to our understanding.
Therefore, it is interesting to look at correlates and moderators now that we have confirmed the difference in cortisol secretion between the childcare and home setting.
Well over 90% of all the health ailments are stress-related.
Not stress-caused, but stress-related.
I view chronic stress as a form of environmental toxin, and I think the data is pretty clear to support that.
You can, I'm sure, come to your own conclusions.
What else? Childcare is associated with an increased risk of obesity.
Early informal care, earlier commencement age, and longer hours in daycare represent
risks for childhood obesity.
So when studies find risks involved with daycare, they're almost always greater the younger
The younger the child is when the child goes into daycare.
On average, infants spend more time in daycare than four-year-olds.
And I quote, infants who are receiving center-based care for at least eight hours a week, as is the case for older age groups in the sample, are in center-based care For many more hours a week than older children.
For example, median weekly hours for such infants is 40 hours, where it is 24 hours for 4 year olds.
Now, why?
Is there increased risk of obesity?
Well, I don't know. Maybe it's extra snacks.
I assume it has something to do with stress.
Stress has been known to provoke either stress eating or retention of calories and weight gain.
It could be that you're not outside playing as much.
I mean, I used to take the kids out all the time to play, but I'd It wasn't really the case with the other daycare workers that I was working with.
They tended to stay in.
And, you know, if you gain weight as a child, I mean, for most people, it ends up a lifelong battle.
And it's just brutal on your system as a whole.
So, again, environmental toxins.
To me, what increases the risk of obesity must be a kind of environmental toxin.
At least it could be viewed in that kind of way.
Of course, I say this as a pure rank amateur and outsider, so take it all with a grain of salt, and if you have further questions, please consult the notes with the sources.
What about cognitive development?
So there is data showing lower IQ outcomes for children who attend COVID. Daycare, look, come on, you're just going to get less one-on-one time, explanations, attention, and conversation.
It's just going to be the case.
And saying, again, I need my children to be socialized.
Children don't know how to socialize, particularly children in daycare.
If you've raised kids, you know, they're kind of gregarious when they're younger.
They go through a bit of a shy phase from maybe four or five to maybe seven or eight or eight or nine.
And that's when they're observing their parents, how their parents socialize, and you learn how to socialize from watching their parents.
You do not learn how to socialize from this mad, Lord of the Flies chaos with other children, often whom are, you know, kind of upset and maybe traumatized from parental absence.
You're just not going to learn how to socialize effectively from those children.
I mean, to take a ridiculously extreme example, well, I think it's important that people go to prison so they learn how to socialize.
It's like, no, no, no, you just learn how to socialize in an involuntary environment.
But that's not how your adult life is going to be.
You don't just have the government assign your friends as an adult.
So, this is from a study from 2018, and I quote, Exploiting admissions thresholds to the Bologna daycare system we show, using RD, that one additional daycare month at age 0-2 reduces IQ by 0.5% or 4.7% of a standard deviation at age 8-14 in relatively affluent population.
The magnitude of this negative effect increases with family income.
Right? So, the more money you make, which is a rough proxy for IQ, the more money you make The more IQ cost comes out of putting your kids in daycare.
So the study goes on to say similar negative impacts are found for personality traits.
These findings are consistent with the hypothesis from psychology that children in daycare experience fewer one-on-one interactions with adults with negative effects in families where such interactions are of higher quality.
According to psychologists, these interactions should be particularly relevant for girls who, at this early age, are more mature than boys and thus more capable of benefiting from the cognitive stimuli generated by adult-child contacts.
I'll tell you this, I mean, as the father to a truly wonderful and a very bright daughter, I was amazed at what she could do at an age where I was still trying to figure out which end of my pencil to hold.
It's just wild watching the different development rates between boys and girls.
So the study goes on to say, therefore, if daycare from 0 to 2 is associated with less frequent one-on-one interactions with adults than those offered by family care, then daycare should have more negative effects on girls than on boys.
In line with this interpretation, we find that girls attending the BDS, where the adult-to-children ratio is 1 to 4 at age 0 and 1 to 6 at age 1 and 2, they experience a larger IQ loss of 0.7% for every additional month in daycare 0 to 2.
while the effect for boys is smaller, 0.4% and not statistically significant.
One 2022 study associated pre-K attendance with lower test scores later.
Several studies have shown the positive association between breastfeeding, higher IQs and higher incomes later in life.
Breastfeeding and, of course, non-mother child care will always be a challenge in this way.
Here's another study. This is a 2022.
One 2022 research team found the short and long-term effects of a state-supported pre-K program through a randomized control study involving almost 3,000 low-income children.
Data collected up to sixth grade revealed that children who attended pre-K scored lower on state achievement tests from third to sixth grade compared to the control group.
With the most significant negative effects in the sixth grade, the study also found negative effects on disciplinary infractions, attendance and special education services, while there was no impact on retention.
It's not just IQ. It's not just obesity.
It's not just stress levels.
It is, in fact, negative, troubling, or destructive personality traits that also seem to be impacted by attendance in daycare.
Alright, so let's look at one of the most powerful sources of data, the Quebec Universal Child Care Program.
Quebec is a giant province in Canada, French speaking of course, and heavily Catholic, or at least used to be.
And let's look at this study.
A bit of background, this program began in 1997 and by 2011 to 2012, Quebec's $2 billion a year program subsidized about 80% of family child care costs.
The province was unique in Canada for developing this very comprehensive policy.
So from the mid-90s to 2008, Quebec children in center-based childcare increased from 10% to 60%, while the rest of Canada saw only a 10% to 20% rise.
So it went up six times in Quebec with subsidies.
It went up only double in the rest of Canada without as many subsidies.
So in other words, the mothers in Quebec were bribed to hand their children over to government daycares, and they signed up for this proposal.
So you have, to some degree, a control group, the rest of Canada, and let's see what happened.
Quote, the Quebec program led to a substantial increase in the use of childcare and increases in children's level of anxiety and aggression.
According to the paper, the Quebec universal childcare program had striking negative impacts on children's non-cognitive scores and family outcomes.
The negative effects on young children and family outcomes were measured shortly after the program was introduced and persisted on newer cohorts of children as the program matured.
The study also found that the negative impacts on child outcomes were larger for younger children who entered the program and varied by the sex of the child.
The estimates are generally consistent with the graphical evidence.
Exposure to the Quebec program leads to higher rates of crime.
This is astounding.
Increases in crime to continue from the study.
Looking first at all crime counts, the estimates from the Simple Difference in Differences specification indicate increases in both the rates of accused and convictions that is statistically significant.
The coefficient of 514 for accused is a 27% increase on the overall mean of 1,872 accusations per 100,000.
27% increase.
So there were positive outcomes in many ways for children in single-parent families, worse for two-parent families.
Here's a quote. But this is the Head Start program.
You can fix things for a little while.
They tend to fade out. I assume it's something like being on one of those biggest loser programs where you have trainers yelling at you for 18 hours a day.
Yes, you can lose weight when you return to your life.
It tends to fade out.
Not always, but tends to.
Alright. So, let's look at the financial impact.
So, daycare costs are already significant and only growing.
Especially for high quality daycare, which is found to be less likely to be harmful to childhood outcomes.
There are potential long-term savings from having a stay-at-home parent, as families can avoid paying for childcare, extracurricular activities, and transportation costs.
Also, there are enhanced financial planning and budgeting opportunities for stay-at-home parents who can devote more time and attention to managing household finances.
We'll get into that in a little bit more detail as well.
Alright, this is a study from 2009.
If a woman gives up a $50,000 paycheck to stay at home with the babies, most people would say, oh my gosh, we're down $50,000.
Wrong answer. I'm so sorry that intelligent home ec was not taught in your school.
So the couple is still going to file taxes jointly.
This reduces taxable income, which reduces the household's tax.
Just taking into account federal taxes, of course, back in 2009, the real loss of income to the family is only $39,300, not the $50,000 gross income.
Just federal taxes. Not other required contributions.
Stay-at-home parents can fund IRAs, individual retirement accounts, if their spouse works and the couple file taxes jointly.
More savings. Such retirement savings may be tax deductible.
So, I mean, to get a real idea of what the annual income loss the family will see, you know, you get paid monthly, multiply the net income on your pay stub by 12 months.
But there's more.
There's more. We'll get to this.
Okay. Here's some math information.
that we have done just for you.
Okay, a mother of two kids earning $100,000 a year.
That's a lot of money. Not many people earn that much, but let's say, let's give the best case scenario.
$100,000 a year, say, oh my gosh, if she quits to stay home with the kids, we're down $100,000.
You are not.
So per month that works out to, and there's some brownie stuff here, but about $8,333 per month.
Okay, state and federal taxes take off $2083.
High quality infant care, $1,013.
High quality toddler care, $963 a month taken off.
Extra car, minus $600.
Car maintenance, minus $83.
Car insurance, minus $168.
Work clothes, minus $150.
Work lunches, minus $417.
Well, how does that play out?
What is her take home from $100,000 with all of these expenses?
It is $32,804, right?
So, again, this is another way of looking at it, right?
Hourly wage after the cost of high-quality daycare.
After accounting for daycare and work expenses, a mother making $100,000 a year brings home only $32,804, or $16.40 per hour.
And there's more.
There's more that you have.
You have to do more makeup when you go to work.
There's a lot of things.
If you're driving and commuting, there's more risk for accidents and so on, right?
So you don't get to think, if you're rational, that you're giving up $100,000 if your wife quits to stay home with her children, with her babies and toddlers.
Just not how it works.
All right. Let's go to a big city.
A big city mother of two, earning $100,000 a year.
Okay, so per month we're back to $8,333.
State and federal taxes.
$2,232 down.
High quality infant care is more expensive in a big city, $1,743.
High quality toddler care, $1,258 down.
Extra car, $600. Same car maintenance, $83.
Car insurance, $168.
Work clothes, $150. Work lunch, $417.
So this is... Boston was the example that I'm using here.
Okay. Again, more expenses we could go into, but these are the major ones.
Boom! How does this play?
Hourly wage after the cost of, quote, high quality daycare.
After accounting for daycare slash work expenses, a mother in a big city making $100,000 brings home only $18,722 or $9.36 per hour.
Which is below minimum wage.
Why didn't I see you?
When I was a kid, Mom, well, I had to go out and make $9.36 an hour.
How do people make these deals?
I mean, this is a deal with the devil.
How do they make this deal?
All right, so here's what I did.
I wanted to get more specific about this.
Let's really break this down. So we've got a $100,000 a year woman with two kids in a big city.
So I looked up the kind of jobs that pay $100,000 a year.
One of them is an investment banking analyst.
They analyze companies and create presentations for potential investment.
And they make $108,527 per year.
Okay. Now, If you've ever had a relatively high-paying job, you know it ain't a 40-hour work week, to put it mildly.
I mean, think of lawyers and accountants and doctors and so on, right?
So I looked this up.
For $100,000 and change per year, how much are you working?
The quote is, on average, you'll be in the office 70 to 85 hours per week, though you won't necessarily be, quote, working that entire time.
However, you will be on call 24-7, and you'll have to respond to urgent requests and emails all the time, making it difficult to have a life or plan regular work.
Activities. I've seen this actually.
I once dated a woman who was a purser on a plane and she had to be on call and it was, you know, kind of tight.
So, let's look at this.
Remember, in the big city, $100,000 brings home only $18,722.
Now, in the interest of complete fairness, stacking the decks against my argument, instead of 70 to 85 hours per week, let's just make it a 60-hour workweek.
She's doing 60 hours to make her $100,000.
Okay, but it's two hours commuting on average on a big city, five days a week, that's 70 hours a week.
Let's give this woman a tasty three-week vacation.
So, 70 hours a week times 49 weeks in a year gives 3,430 hours per year.
So we take our $18,722 of after expense income, and we divide that by 3,430 hours.
And you get a grand total of $5.46 per hour.
And, of course, this doesn't include all of the higher clothing and childcare expenses.
I mean, come on.
You're working for nothing.
You're working for... It's a giant con.
It's a complete con.
I mean, are you really going to tell your kids, I'm sorry, mommy abandoned you to high-stress daycare because mommy really wanted to make one-third the pay of your average kid with a paper route?
Ah, well, but maybe the husband can stay home.
Maybe the wife makes so much money that it makes more sense for the husband to stay home.
All right? Well, statistically, hello, divorce.
In the U.S., about 38% of wives earn more than their husband, according to the BLS. The risk of divorce is nearly 33% higher when a husband isn't working full-time.
So, yeah, maybe the woman can be the bread-earner and the husband can stay home, but your risk of divorce goes up.
Well, it would be more than 33%.
So, okay, maybe make your five bucks an hour, but how much does it cost you to get divorced?
Here's a Canadian example, and this is a great woman.
She put all the spreadsheet together, and you can actually download the spreadsheet and so on.
So this is in Vancouver, Canada, savings realized with one stay-at-home parent.
Per year, you save almost $13,000 in childcare.
You save over $12,000 in food expenses.
Almost $4,000 in vehicle expenses.
$2,200 in change for income taxes.
Investment fees, because you can manage your own investments if you have the time.
Over $6,000 a month.
Recurring expenses, $4,479.
Credit card rewards, which you can manage.
$1,000. Discretionary spending, you cut down by A little over $1,000, you save $800 a year on work clothing.
A total is you save $45,021.
Now, in order to earn after-tax income of $45,021, the second parent would need to earn a salary of over $58,000 per year.
In other words, if you make $58,000 a year, you're being taxed at 100%.
You're making zero money compared to if you stayed home.
And this is what she says. Based on the average assumptions I use for each category, a four-person family living in the Vancouver area could save an average of $45,021 per year with one parent at home full-time.
But once we factor in the opportunity cost of lost income and benefits, the same family loses $13,973 per year in income if one parent stayed at home full-time, assuming a $60,000 salary if the stay-at-home parent were to work full-time.
One important thing to consider is that the second parent would need to make $58,150 per year in order to earn an after-tax income of $45,021.
This is the break-even point where the second parent's earned income matches what they could save as a full-time stay-at-home parent.
Shockingly, a family with the second parent making $30,000 per year in part-time income actually nets an extra $220 per year compared to a family where the second person earns $60,000 per year at a full-time job.
On top of all that, the part-time $30,000 earning family would still realize most of the lifestyle benefits of having a stay-at-home parent, right?
It's not two parents working full-time.
It could be one working full-time, one working part-time.
Still, most of the benefits, particularly, of course, when the kids are in school, assuming that you don't, in my view, do the right thing in homeschool, but that's how it plays.
And again, the roots of all of this will be below.
So, financial impact.
Decreased work-related expenses for the stay-at-home parent.
Commuting costs, work attire, and meals.
Reduce stress and financial strain for the entire family as childcare expenses are eliminated or greatly reduced.
Stay-at-home parents are more present in their children's lives, providing educational and social support, which can reduce future expenses related to academic or behavioral interventions.
It's pay me now or pay me later.
There's no other deal in parenting.
80% of working mothers said they work because they believe they have to.
Believe they have to.
If you do the math, it could be quite different.
A British study in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that children whose moms stayed at home ate healthier and were more likely to play in organized sports.
Yes, and of course organized sports, great for socializing, great for team building, great for negotiation, and fantastic for avoiding childhood obesity.
Alright, benefits of a stay-at-home parent.
Bing, bing, bing! Greater opportunity to develop strong and secure attachments contributing to improved emotional well-being and self-esteem for your children.
Consistent caregiving practices creating a stable and nurturing environment that promotes healthy development.
Tailored care and attention to the unique needs of your child allowing for personalized support and guidance.
Come on, nobody can protect and care for a child like their birth mother and or birth father.
And here's an interesting example.
One mother used coupons And saved a staggering amount of money, buying a bulk, using coupons intelligently.
And she said, we plan $300 a month for groceries.
That's the same amount I used to spend in just one week when I was working.
So she's saving $900 a month.
A little pitch for homeschooling, a 2003 paper by Brian Ray found that homeschooled students are significantly more likely than average to report being very happy, finding life exciting, and being very satisfied in their work.
This was not a randomized sample group, so again, be aware or alert of these kinds of things.
From the article, New Harvard Study, homeschoolers turned out happy, well-adjusted, and engaged.
This is from 2021. Quote, The picture of the homeschooled student that emerges from the data doesn't resemble the socially awkward or ignorant stereotype to which Miss Bartholet, a 2020 critic of homeschooling, and others appeal.
Rather, homeschooled children generally develop into well-adjusted, responsible, and socially engaged young adults.
Stay-at-home parents and, you know, keeping your kids out of, to me at least, increasingly dysfunctional and sometimes creepy public schools.
Professor Carol Shakeshafter for the Virginia Commonwealth University found that There is, quote, scant data on school employee sexual abuse and misconduct of students, for example, on the percentage of school staff who abuse.
Of what is available, 5.6 million public and independent students are subject to sexual misconduct by an employee of a school sometime between kindergarten and 12th grade.
It's old data. There's no nationwide recent studies.
In reality, I mean, we hear about, of course, the Catholic pedophilia scandals, sexual abuse scandals, molestation scandals.
You are far higher.
Statistically, per capita, you are far more likely to be molested by a schoolteacher than a priest.
So let's compare hours spent in a week Working mothers compared to stay-at-home mothers.
So, working mothers get less sleep than stay-at-home mothers.
They have significantly less leisure.
Of course, stay-at-home mothers perform more childcare, as you can imagine, and more housework.
But beholden to a boss, beholden to...
See, everyone thinks, oh, you know, I want to be an independent woman.
I want to have my own career. Everybody serves somebody.
I serve you, the audience.
Everybody serves somebody. The question is, are you going to serve your children, your family, yourself, your future interests, your lineage, your heritage, your virtue?
Or are you going to serve some boss who doesn't care about you and will replace you if you take too many sick days?
Without really a second thought.
Who's going to be hanging around with you when you get old?
Your boss or your children and your grandchildren?
It just seems kind of strange to me.
So, according to Pew Research, stay-at-home mothers get more sleep, time to themselves, time with their kids, and time caring for their family.
And they're not beholden To a boss for 40, 60, 80 to 85 hours a week.
Here's a quote. College-educated women among the most likely to say children are just as well off if their parents work outside the home.
Which is wild to me, because college-educated women are supposed to know how to do research and look things up.
And I guess when I was in college, I got a graduate degree...
We were told to be skeptical and take nothing at face value, take nothing for granted and look up the data and so on.
White evangelical Protestants are the group most likely to say children are better off when a parent stays home to focus on the family, which is, I guess, another reason why media sort of hates white evangelical Protestants, because they're kind of interfering with the power grab of the state.
Hang on to your kids like grim death.
Alright, more benefits being a stay-at-home parent.
Enhance opportunity to pass on family values, traditions, fostering a sense of identity and belonging.
Yes, your culture probably goes back hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands of years, and the people in daycare may or may not share your values, probably don't in the same way that you would, and so what really was the point of developing all that culture if you just kind of toss it away so that you can go and make your five to ten bucks an hour after costs and expenses?
Strong communication between parent and child, allowing for a better understanding of the child's needs and facilitating prompt problem solving.
Yeah, people, they still don't believe me sometimes when I say that my daughter has never had a temper tantrum.
She's never had a temper tantrum in her life because we have conversations about things and we work to keep her reasonably happy and, of course, still have standards and rules, but she knows that we're there for her and she knows that Our life is organized around what is best for her and therefore us in the long run as a family.
So she doesn't need to scream and kick to be heard and to be listened to.
Increased resilience and coping skills in children as a result of a strong bond with the primary caregiver who is present to help navigate life's challenges.
A 2014 paper discovered that the advantages of having a parent at home are not limited to a child's early years.
The investigation evaluated the academic performance of 68,000 children and determined an improvement in their educational outcomes up to high school age.
Notably, the most significant impact was observed in children aged 6 to 7.
I do sometimes wonder whether the avalanche of, quote, medications pumped into the bloods and brains of children might have something to do with a lack of parental bond.
Home-educated kids typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public school students on standardized academic achievement tests.
Now, it is important to note that for women who have more education, who have more complex careers, who are paid more money, and therefore often might have higher IQs, that They're more likely to put their kids in daycare because they get paid more money and there's this delusion, this mirage. Oh, $100,000 turns out to be $5,000, $10,000 or $16,000 an hour after taxes, but this is mirage of $100,000.
So I think it's interesting that some of the most negative outcomes come from the most educated and intelligent parents who both work well.
Alright, I probably don't need to make these conclusions.
I'll go through them very quickly. Look, to have kids is to raise kids.
It doesn't mean just giving birth and giving them to other people.
Of course the government wants you paying taxes.
They don't want you to have too many children because children are an expense to a government.
And of course the government in general, like most places, wants to get a hold of your kids because those with the worst ideas seem to be the most keen to inflict them on children.
When you get old, you know, there's kind of a deal.
There is a deal between the generations that goes something like this.
Well, I take care of you when you're young, and maybe, just maybe, you'll take care of me when I get old.
You put your kids in daycare, you don't spend much time with them, And this gets pretty rough.
You know, kids, you put them in daycare, they're going to focus on their peers rather than you as parents.
When they get older, they're going to be more peer-oriented.
They're going to have less time for you.
They're going to be running out the door.
And when they get older, they're going to have homework and hobbies and other things going to take.
That time, that precious time from birth to five years old, birth to six years old, that is the time where you really create those lifelong bonds and joy in each other's presence and existence.
So if you break the deal and you don't do as much to take care of your kids when they're young, There is kind of a boomerang effect that they'll look at you when you get old and say, well, good luck.
And here's the thing. Let me give you an analogy here.
I did this on the Joe Rogan show many years ago.
Let me give you this analogy.
It's your 10th wedding anniversary.
And you say to your wife, oh, we're going to go to the best restaurant in town.
It's going to be fantastic.
I've got a private violinist to serenade us, right?
And your wife is looking forward to this for months.
It's going to be wonderful. And then that day, you call her and you say, listen, yeah, I'm not going to make it to the anniversary dinner.
But listen, don't sweat it, man, because I hired a guy named Raul.
Who speaks, you know, pretty good English, and he's going to join you for dinner instead of me.
So you still have your dinner, you still have conversation, and it'll be a wonderful anniversary.
I won't be there, but it's going to be a great anniversary for you.
Now, can you imagine? Can you imagine what your wife would say if you backed out of your anniversary dinner, but instead hired a relative stranger, a complete stranger, to spend time with her on her anniversary?
I mean, she would be incensed.
She would say, no, I'm not going to dinner with a stranger when it's our wedding anniversary.
What on earth are you talking about?
Right. I'm sure you understand the analogy here.
Yeah. You as a husband are not replaceable.
In an anniversary dinner, and you as a mother are not replaceable in your children's lives.
You can't just pay somebody else $14 and change to take care of your children and have it be the same.
Any more than your husband can pay Raul $14 and change an hour to join you for an anniversary dinner, and it's going to be just the same.
It's a simple thing in life.
Very simple thing in life.
You have kids. It's no longer about you.
And it won't be for a long time.
It's just no longer about you.
It's about what's best for your kids.
It's a great thing. You know how you organize your day around, say, the existence of gravity or the need to go to the bathroom or the need to eat food or breathe air?
These are just things that you organize your life around and you don't really say, well, maybe I can find a way to exempt myself from gravity this afternoon when I want to go trampolining.
You just accept that.
And if you just organize your life around, okay, what is best for my kids?
What is empirically, materially, spiritually, morally, emotionally, what is best for my kids?
Just organize your life around that.
It's simple. It's wonderful.
It clarifies so much and you end up with a much better life.
And here's the other thing too.
Ask yourself this question.
If your kids choose not to have kids...
Was it really worth going through all of that?
I mean, aren't you part of a circle of life, the great chain of being going all the way back to the primordial ooze and the single-celled organisms who decided to get it on with each other in the goop?
Yeah. If your kids see you stressed, racing from place to place, always on your phone, worried, upset, tired, snappy...
Why would they want to have kids if it's not fun for you as a parent, if you're not really enjoying being a parent?
And, you know, the whole point is to enjoy it.
I mean, there are times when it's tough, but for the most part, like 98% of my parenting time is really, really, really fun.
So if your kids see you stressed, why would they want to have kids?
It means you may get kids, but you won't get grandkids probably.
So you kind of need to have fun as a parent in order for your kids to want to have kids.
I just read this terrifying thread.
I'll link it below. This woman in South Korea just saying, yeah, my parents just, it was a nightmare.
And there's no way I'm having kids.
And here's the thing, right?
Ladies, you're going to live for over 80 years.
A couple of kids, taking them to at least five or six years of age, it's like 10% of your life.
It's 10%. Nobody's asking you to go and join the Foreign Legion for 40 years or become a nun.
It's like probably less than 10% of your life as a whole to be home with your kids.
And, I mean, come on.
You're not going to look back over the course of your life and say, you know, I just spent way too much time with my kids, had way too much fun with my kids when I could have been out there staring at a screen working spreadsheets for a snappy boss.
I'm trying to sort of give you a view back from the later part of your life.
And again, you don't get to be without a patriarchy or massively independent if you work.
You just have a boss.
You're organizing your life around what's best for your boss rather than what's best for your kids, which is fine.
But if you choose to have kids, shouldn't you organize your life around what is best for your children?
Because they're not there by choice. You chose to have them.
They can't stay by choice.
I mean, for heaven's sakes, don't put your children on the auction block of your own ambition.
Don't sell them for nothing, trading your hours for a handful of dimes, trading your love and your connection and your joy with your children for chump change.
I mean, it isn't really a bit of a devilish statement to say, you know what's really more important than love and connection and happiness?
Money. You get that money, you'll be fine.
And it's like, no, no, that's...
Gold is the same color as a desert.
Money will not lead you to that kind of joy.
And I'll just tell you this.
I mean, I've made some money in my life.
I've been a stay-at-home dad.
I'll tell you straight up, man.
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