Having managed 1 infant myself, even 1:4 seems like a lot of responsibility. I would not want my infant or toddler to be watched over by more lenient ratios.
In his daycare class there was one adult looking after up to 9 children. One adult that didn’t earn a living wage and didn’t have any kind of benefits. There is no way a reasonable person could possibly trust that adult to be both content and provide a decent quality of care.
The adults in the room were always visibly angry and frustrated and a reasonable person could not blame them.
We drove by his old daycare about a month after I pulled him out and he instantly starting having a breakdown in his car seat. I asked him what was wrong and he said "I don't want to go back to daycare." I told him we were simply driving by en route to the pool, but it took a while to calm him down.
I asked him why he didn't want to return and he said "because the teachers are angry."
And I believed him and it broke my heart. I myself have many negative memories associated with daycare from the 80s. It was not a pleasant experience.
In the US, it seems that we rarely take care of the caregivers to our two most vulnerable groups of citizens. Children and the elderly are cared for by individuals who don't even have the basics to take care of themselves.
Yet the owners of the establishments always make their money. I was seeing red and extremely angry when I learned that I had to pay for daycare when they were closed. Regardless of why they were closed. I had to pay for holidays and I had to pay for 3 entire weeks on 3 occasions when one of the staff members caught covid. Yet none of the employees were paid during those times. That was pure profit for the owners of the establishment.
If people got six months or a year, there would be far fewer babies in that labor-intensive category.
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/418-1...
The 1:2 ratio is for “family daycare”, whatever that means. That is on page 19 of this document:
https://www.ocfs.ny.gov/programs/childcare/regulations/417-F...
EDIT: I should've said "infants" and not "children" here, where the necessity of a 4:1 ratio really applies. As children get older this ratio can get higher.
I recommend https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/10/17/the-iron-math..., from someone who just assumed that child care costs were because of government intervention, and then did the math and found out this isn’t the case.
£1200 in my top 5 city would get you a newly built daycare, with all the modern gizmos, a kitchen built "especially for young children", a teacher with 10+ yr experience, and peer children who are the son/daughters of doctors and lawyers. ~£800 gets you an average daycare that is fully up to license / code and generally does a decent job. ~£600 will get you a caring but gray market (usually bilingual or limited english) stay at home mom with a home daycare business.
I would wager the vast vast majority are paying close to ~£800, either through the black/gray market with unlicensed caregivers or in licensed facilities in the vast majority of lower cost of living portions of America.
Half decent infant daycare in SF/SEA/NYC/LA/DC suburbs is going to be minimum $1,700 per month, in the cheapest of those metro areas.
In tier 2 cities, I would question the quality for anything less than $1,300 per month.
And in no major US city would I enroll my child in a $1,000 per month or less daycare.
You can even back into the max teacher pay based on monthly daycare costs since you know how much staff is required, and knowing the living wage in some of these cities.
And yes, it's likely subsidized; around here there's "free 4k" and some of the pre-4k daycares are subsidized in various ways.
Because it's hard to exactly define "daycares shouldn't have more kids than they can take care of" they institute fixed ratios.
I’m a stay at home dad or at least I was until my son started pre-k a few months ago.
There’s no amount of money that would make me feel comfortable also taking care of someone else’s children in my home. Just not worth the trouble or the risk.
I guess I assume that if you have a rapport with a neighbor, you can trust that they won't be out to screw you if a kid gets hurt, but maybe that's naive. Or maybe my parents were just lax; I remember my grandparents let us ride around on a moped that could do ~35 mph when I was probably under 10, and we'd go wander around in a forest near their house, or me and the neighbor kids would go play in the desert near my house growing up when I was probably ~6. Probably never more than .5-1 miles away, but still pretty much only "supervised" by older kids.
Of course, the poorer people have no choice and make it work, but I'm certain they get "caught" now and then.
The costs are the same as any other service industry - you have to pay more for higher quality teachers and you have to pay more for a location in more expensive areas.
So it seems strange to me that each child would cost ~$15/hr -- the full cost of a single low-skill resource, 1:1 with children; You're not seeing the scalability of groups kick in. Unless there's some overhead per-child I don't understand, it seems clear this isn't simply supply/demand. There are many who want childcare, but there are many more who should be capable of supporting it.
There are also of course difference in popularity/quality which will contribute to a price gradient, but if you're seeing $2k/mo/child as your "basic daycare" costs, there's something up -- there's no inherent reason to the job that I can think of that would stop someone from undercutting that price point.
Some people might be coming from a very different perspective on what constitutes a good price.
