There's a reason that preschool is not a full day. That reason is that it's not appropriate at that age.
The discussion here presupposes that a parent who is able to earn six figures does not want to put their kid in inappropriate childcare. The discussion you are having is about living in a high income bracket and using really cheap childcare.
You get what you pay for:If you're in a high cost of living area, then the person earning $30K/year to take care of your kid fulltime would be living in poverty. And that would affect your child. So your preschool aged child would be in a group care situation for nine hours a day -- since the parent's job is eight hours a day -- and that's not appropriate for a child that age.
For anyone unfamiliar with Emily Oster I highly recommend looking at her content and her studies yourself before forming an opinion. I did not interpret any of her findings or content this way, and her claim to fame in my opinion is debunking myths based on nonsense about what mothers should and shouldn’t do that some old men came up with in the 1940s out of nowhere.. To each their own, but I’m pretty sure Emily Oster is not the enemy. Please just look at some of her content before you jump on the hate bandwagon.
No disrespect to the author’s opinion which they are entitled to. However, adopting other people’s opinions without any knowledge of the content yourself is how hate and misinformation spreads.. and there’s enough of that going around these days.
To be clear, I am not arguing with Oster's data. I'm using the exact same data she uses. I'm criticizing her for how she justifies choosing her work over her children. 'm criticizing her for writing an entire chapter about how she thinks children are more boring than work so she tries to only do the things with her children that interest her. A child is not an entertainment system. She specifically says she is not that interested in the data for this aspect of a mother's life. And it shows.
I wonder if these studies you refer to are like the big study that came out scarring many women off using HRT. If you broke it down into subgroups, the results were not the same. There are many scenarios for parenting and I’m guessing these studies did not take into account the myriad of scenarios. Or if they did, the sample size for the various sub groups was statistically too small to draw conclusions. Full-time parenting includes not working even if your children are at school? Step-parents acceptable? Soooo many possibilities.
And what are the parameters for determining better? Without actually doing research, I’m guessing the time period in history in which a parent was home to raise a child (as opposed to work the farm or sew for others or …) is very short, which could also pose some problems with this research and conclusions drawn.
I appreciate that you want to dissect the research, but the research I'm talking about is a 30-year study across 15 countries that just won a Nobel Prize: Claudia Goldin. Her research won because it's excellent, but also it demands that we rethink fundamentally the way we we talk about women. And people are so reticent to do that. Emily Oster is an example of someone who knows the resarch and can't handle integrating it into her work. People really really don't like to have to change how they think. Myself included. It's emotionally and intellectually difficult.
Nobel prize or not, it’s never too late to pull apart a study.
And, when it flies in the face of what I’m seeing and probably many many others, we should not just hop on board. I am fortunate to have a very large group of close women friends, most with children. And, I grew up in a very small town, so knew which parents worked and at what jobs for most of my classmates and also those of my siblings.
Soooo how I talk about it is really based on what I’ve experienced and seen. Close up and personal.
And maybe, just maybe this is why Goldin isn’t integrating it into her work, intentionally or not. Not that it’s difficult, but because something just doesn’t smell right. And relegating women who choose to have children to a very small and defined box just doesn’t smell right.
When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected.
It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.
If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.
An early example of this, we had metrics that showed our customers were waiting less than 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get phone customer service.
But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that.
And anecdotally it seemed longer than that… I would call customer service myself.
One day we’re in a meeting and we get to this metric in the deck.
And the guy who leads customer service is defending the metric.
And I said, OK, let’s call.
I picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number… and we just waited in silence…
It was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think.
It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren’t measuring the right thing.
"I wonder if these studies you refer to are like the big study that came out scaring many women off using HRT." and "I’m guessing the time period in history in which a parent was home to raise a child (as opposed to work the farm or sew for others or …) is very short, which could also pose some problems with this research and conclusions drawn."
Those are great points. I like Claudia Goldin but have not delved in deeply. I'm going to read the study Penelope mentioned in her comment back to you.
I agree to all of this, and I stayed home with my kids for 10 years. The one wrench in the works is worrying that you are becoming unemployable in case of divorce. We had large life insurance policies, which is a nice perk if you can afford it, but I was terrified about how to support myself if the marriage tanked. Luckily it didn't, but that's a major conundrum for nonworking parents.
In all my reserach, the biggest difference between women who could function as single parents and women who could not was child support. But there is also the fact that the divorce rate for college educated couples is 2% (not that that helped me...)
If you google "what happens to women financially in divorce," the data is grim. This message, true or not, was heavily pushed 20-30 years ago and it's still out there. Plus you have a LOT of non-custodial spouses who don't pay alimony and/or child support on time, or at all, and you have to go back to court to get a judgment to enforce. Half of the assets in a young family is a lot less than half of the assets after a 30 year marriage.
Yeah. I agree. Divorce is bad for women. And therefore bad for kids. I meant to make the point that continuing to work is not a remedy. I never stopped working and it sucked. It’s very very hard to single parent no matter what.
Ah. Yes, I agree with that. I am very glad I stayed home for as long as I did. Plus my husband worked at the kids' school, so it was nice to have him there when I went back to school.
The number one contributor to a kid’s outcomes in adulthood is parental income. Bar none. It’s not even close. The research on working vs sahm moms’ impact on kids, on the other hand, is mixed at best.
Yes. Totally agree. (And, so we could also have the conversation why put kids in school because income has way more impact than school.) But if you do the math for two parents working full time and paying for childcare, that second income would have to be extraordinary to put the family into a significantly different financial bracket in terms of outcomes.
As a data point: When I was making $250K/yr (more than a decade ago!) I had to have two nannies because I never knew when I'd have to work late or travel. Each family with two high-earners has two people without complete control over their time and two people who earn too much money to say "I'm taking off all school vacations and sick days."
But is this really the case? I live in a super HCOL area where full time preschool for one kid costs 2500/mo or 30k/yr. For a mid-level, not super intense, very phone-it-in tech job in my area, you could easily make 130-180k. Losing out on that income just to save 30k a year isn't a financial no-brainer.
There are so many things wrong about your premise. But the bottom line is that a four year old in group daycare for nine hours a day is so inappropriate that it's not worth the $150K you'd be earning.
Since you are usually the second earner that income is all taxed at a high federal rate (30%+ and also possibly an additional 10% in state tax for CA/NY/OR). Plus you have the additional expenses of possibly needing an additional car + clothes and stuff. If you are at 130k+ it probably clearly makes economic sense to work, but if it's 80-90k it's a much closer call. And 50k probably doesn't make sense.
I don't think it's a close call because if you earn enough money to cover childcare then you can't leave work at 5pm every day to pick up your kid. And you can't leave your work for all vacations and sick days. So you need to cover childcare beyond 9-5.
And there is a big difference at work between the people who have to leave like clockwork to pick up their kid and the people who can make work their highest priority and be more flexible. The people who can make work their highest priority are the ones who get promotions.
This is why people who have childcare responsibilities cannot compete with people who have a stay-at-home spouse. It just doesn't work.
but a clock-punch 9-5 office job is pretty doable, though like you say that person has to be realistic they will be outcompeted by more dedicated employees. (This is where I am haha).
I mean a lot of this comes down to preference, but agree it is more or less impossible to have two people in "greedy jobs" with kids 6 or under without basically a fulltime nanny doing a substantial share of the parenting.
Excellent points. I wanted to be a SAHM, but I married an abuser so now I'm a single mom. Trying to figure out the balance I'm always just losing on both sides. It sucks.
What?! I misspelled peddling. I'm so annoyed. In the headline. I tell myself to check spelling and typos but then I'm always changing things up to the last second. I can't stop myself. Anyway, thanks for letting me know. I fixed it.
Well interesting discussion here. I was raised as one of 11 kids. My mother was stay at home. But somewhere along the way she decided she needed to take on volunteer work. So at one point she had 5 kids under 5 and was president of 2 organizations and on the board of at least 2 others and then started an entire center (physical building and all) to help single mothers gain education and gain employment. The only fights (which lasted in front of us for about 3 minutes), my parents had was my dad being upset one of the kids was in trouble at school or with the law and he would yell for my mom to quit her committees and stay home with the kids. Which my mom ignored and went about her business. My mom basically said staying home and caring for children all day makes a person a boring conversationalist. She saw all her activities as a way to keep her husband because she had things to talk about that were not the kids and that were interesting. Conversely, I was a single mother from birth-no child support, no other in the relationship. 100% of the time I was very relieved to not have to worry if the child support check was coming or have to negotiate anything with anyone about raising my child. However, unless I wanted to live in abject poverty which studies will show is the MOST DETRIMENTAL TO CHILDREN OF ANY FACTOR MEASURED, I had to work and work a job that could support a family which usually means either long hours for greater income or bullshit unfulfilling job for standard hours. At one point, when my child was in 1st grade I became unemployed and due to US economics unemployable. Scary times but, I was able to get to know my child in an in depth way, that I was unable to while working. All the while thinking I wish I was a junkie because shooting something up to take me out of the horrible stress of losing the house, not being able to pay utilities, hardly any food because SNAP was giving me $135/month, having a garage sale so I could buy my child birthday gifts so they did not know how totally desperately poor we were. I felt after that experience that I could love being a stay at home mom but, ideally I would have a job and be a mother-like work part time just so I could feel accomplished or relevant. The common thread I see is that motherhood is so incredibly daunting when, you have aspirations for a healthy, well rounded, happy with being born child. No one believes they are doing a good job, no one believes they have done a good job and everyone is looking for ways to feel good about the job they have done.
I really love what you wrote at the end here. We have no societal agreement on what it means to be a good mom. We have agreement on what it means to be a good student, have a good career, be a good athlete. But something so fundamental as be a good mom has no definition. We need to face our fears of hurting women by defining what a good parent is. Women are more damaged by doing a job that has no definition of a job well done.
Wow, Penelope! You are on fire. I love this! Especially the last paragraph. (And I don't even know who Emily Oster is.) It's interesting hearing this from you since you have somehow balanced it all: raised successful kids as a single parent, worked, and managed your own businesses.
I apprecaite the compliment, but I did not balance it all. I would say I did a halfway job of both work and kids. I don't want anyone to hold me up as an example of someone who did everything. I am exhausted and my kids are exhausted from having a single mom trying to do everything.
There's a reason that preschool is not a full day. That reason is that it's not appropriate at that age.
The discussion here presupposes that a parent who is able to earn six figures does not want to put their kid in inappropriate childcare. The discussion you are having is about living in a high income bracket and using really cheap childcare.
You get what you pay for:If you're in a high cost of living area, then the person earning $30K/year to take care of your kid fulltime would be living in poverty. And that would affect your child. So your preschool aged child would be in a group care situation for nine hours a day -- since the parent's job is eight hours a day -- and that's not appropriate for a child that age.
For anyone unfamiliar with Emily Oster I highly recommend looking at her content and her studies yourself before forming an opinion. I did not interpret any of her findings or content this way, and her claim to fame in my opinion is debunking myths based on nonsense about what mothers should and shouldn’t do that some old men came up with in the 1940s out of nowhere.. To each their own, but I’m pretty sure Emily Oster is not the enemy. Please just look at some of her content before you jump on the hate bandwagon.
No disrespect to the author’s opinion which they are entitled to. However, adopting other people’s opinions without any knowledge of the content yourself is how hate and misinformation spreads.. and there’s enough of that going around these days.
To be clear, I am not arguing with Oster's data. I'm using the exact same data she uses. I'm criticizing her for how she justifies choosing her work over her children. 'm criticizing her for writing an entire chapter about how she thinks children are more boring than work so she tries to only do the things with her children that interest her. A child is not an entertainment system. She specifically says she is not that interested in the data for this aspect of a mother's life. And it shows.
I wonder if these studies you refer to are like the big study that came out scarring many women off using HRT. If you broke it down into subgroups, the results were not the same. There are many scenarios for parenting and I’m guessing these studies did not take into account the myriad of scenarios. Or if they did, the sample size for the various sub groups was statistically too small to draw conclusions. Full-time parenting includes not working even if your children are at school? Step-parents acceptable? Soooo many possibilities.
And what are the parameters for determining better? Without actually doing research, I’m guessing the time period in history in which a parent was home to raise a child (as opposed to work the farm or sew for others or …) is very short, which could also pose some problems with this research and conclusions drawn.
I appreciate that you want to dissect the research, but the research I'm talking about is a 30-year study across 15 countries that just won a Nobel Prize: Claudia Goldin. Her research won because it's excellent, but also it demands that we rethink fundamentally the way we we talk about women. And people are so reticent to do that. Emily Oster is an example of someone who knows the resarch and can't handle integrating it into her work. People really really don't like to have to change how they think. Myself included. It's emotionally and intellectually difficult.
Nobel prize or not, it’s never too late to pull apart a study.
And, when it flies in the face of what I’m seeing and probably many many others, we should not just hop on board. I am fortunate to have a very large group of close women friends, most with children. And, I grew up in a very small town, so knew which parents worked and at what jobs for most of my classmates and also those of my siblings.
Soooo how I talk about it is really based on what I’ve experienced and seen. Close up and personal.
And maybe, just maybe this is why Goldin isn’t integrating it into her work, intentionally or not. Not that it’s difficult, but because something just doesn’t smell right. And relegating women who choose to have children to a very small and defined box just doesn’t smell right.
Your comment reminded me of this:
Jeff Bezos: “I have a saying which is:
When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right.
It’s usually not that the data is being miscollected.
It’s usually that you’re not measuring the right thing.
If you have a bunch of customers complaining about something, and at the same time your metrics look like they shouldn’t be complaining, you should doubt the metrics.
An early example of this, we had metrics that showed our customers were waiting less than 60 seconds when they called a 1-800 number to get phone customer service.
But we had a lot of complaints that it was longer than that.
And anecdotally it seemed longer than that… I would call customer service myself.
One day we’re in a meeting and we get to this metric in the deck.
And the guy who leads customer service is defending the metric.
And I said, OK, let’s call.
I picked up the phone and I dialed the 1-800 number… and we just waited in silence…
It was really long. More than 10 minutes, I think.
It dramatically made the point that something was wrong with the data collection. We weren’t measuring the right thing.
https://articles.data.blog/2024/03/30/jeff-bezos-when-the-data-and-the-anecdotes-disagree-the-anecdotes-are-usually-right/
"I wonder if these studies you refer to are like the big study that came out scaring many women off using HRT." and "I’m guessing the time period in history in which a parent was home to raise a child (as opposed to work the farm or sew for others or …) is very short, which could also pose some problems with this research and conclusions drawn."
Those are great points. I like Claudia Goldin but have not delved in deeply. I'm going to read the study Penelope mentioned in her comment back to you.
I agree to all of this, and I stayed home with my kids for 10 years. The one wrench in the works is worrying that you are becoming unemployable in case of divorce. We had large life insurance policies, which is a nice perk if you can afford it, but I was terrified about how to support myself if the marriage tanked. Luckily it didn't, but that's a major conundrum for nonworking parents.
In all my reserach, the biggest difference between women who could function as single parents and women who could not was child support. But there is also the fact that the divorce rate for college educated couples is 2% (not that that helped me...)
FWIW, we did get divorced, but only after the kids were up and out and I had a career. It still throttled me financially.
If you google "what happens to women financially in divorce," the data is grim. This message, true or not, was heavily pushed 20-30 years ago and it's still out there. Plus you have a LOT of non-custodial spouses who don't pay alimony and/or child support on time, or at all, and you have to go back to court to get a judgment to enforce. Half of the assets in a young family is a lot less than half of the assets after a 30 year marriage.
Yeah. I agree. Divorce is bad for women. And therefore bad for kids. I meant to make the point that continuing to work is not a remedy. I never stopped working and it sucked. It’s very very hard to single parent no matter what.
Ah. Yes, I agree with that. I am very glad I stayed home for as long as I did. Plus my husband worked at the kids' school, so it was nice to have him there when I went back to school.
The number one contributor to a kid’s outcomes in adulthood is parental income. Bar none. It’s not even close. The research on working vs sahm moms’ impact on kids, on the other hand, is mixed at best.
Yes. Totally agree. (And, so we could also have the conversation why put kids in school because income has way more impact than school.) But if you do the math for two parents working full time and paying for childcare, that second income would have to be extraordinary to put the family into a significantly different financial bracket in terms of outcomes.
As a data point: When I was making $250K/yr (more than a decade ago!) I had to have two nannies because I never knew when I'd have to work late or travel. Each family with two high-earners has two people without complete control over their time and two people who earn too much money to say "I'm taking off all school vacations and sick days."
But is this really the case? I live in a super HCOL area where full time preschool for one kid costs 2500/mo or 30k/yr. For a mid-level, not super intense, very phone-it-in tech job in my area, you could easily make 130-180k. Losing out on that income just to save 30k a year isn't a financial no-brainer.
The preschool is part-time and the tech job is full-time. So. No.
The preschool is full time, that’s the cost for 8-5:30.
There are so many things wrong about your premise. But the bottom line is that a four year old in group daycare for nine hours a day is so inappropriate that it's not worth the $150K you'd be earning.
Since you are usually the second earner that income is all taxed at a high federal rate (30%+ and also possibly an additional 10% in state tax for CA/NY/OR). Plus you have the additional expenses of possibly needing an additional car + clothes and stuff. If you are at 130k+ it probably clearly makes economic sense to work, but if it's 80-90k it's a much closer call. And 50k probably doesn't make sense.
I don't think it's a close call because if you earn enough money to cover childcare then you can't leave work at 5pm every day to pick up your kid. And you can't leave your work for all vacations and sick days. So you need to cover childcare beyond 9-5.
And there is a big difference at work between the people who have to leave like clockwork to pick up their kid and the people who can make work their highest priority and be more flexible. The people who can make work their highest priority are the ones who get promotions.
This is why people who have childcare responsibilities cannot compete with people who have a stay-at-home spouse. It just doesn't work.
but a clock-punch 9-5 office job is pretty doable, though like you say that person has to be realistic they will be outcompeted by more dedicated employees. (This is where I am haha).
I mean a lot of this comes down to preference, but agree it is more or less impossible to have two people in "greedy jobs" with kids 6 or under without basically a fulltime nanny doing a substantial share of the parenting.
Excellent points. I wanted to be a SAHM, but I married an abuser so now I'm a single mom. Trying to figure out the balance I'm always just losing on both sides. It sucks.
PS: She's not pedaling; she's peddling.
What?! I misspelled peddling. I'm so annoyed. In the headline. I tell myself to check spelling and typos but then I'm always changing things up to the last second. I can't stop myself. Anyway, thanks for letting me know. I fixed it.
Shit happens! I just knew you'd want to know
Well interesting discussion here. I was raised as one of 11 kids. My mother was stay at home. But somewhere along the way she decided she needed to take on volunteer work. So at one point she had 5 kids under 5 and was president of 2 organizations and on the board of at least 2 others and then started an entire center (physical building and all) to help single mothers gain education and gain employment. The only fights (which lasted in front of us for about 3 minutes), my parents had was my dad being upset one of the kids was in trouble at school or with the law and he would yell for my mom to quit her committees and stay home with the kids. Which my mom ignored and went about her business. My mom basically said staying home and caring for children all day makes a person a boring conversationalist. She saw all her activities as a way to keep her husband because she had things to talk about that were not the kids and that were interesting. Conversely, I was a single mother from birth-no child support, no other in the relationship. 100% of the time I was very relieved to not have to worry if the child support check was coming or have to negotiate anything with anyone about raising my child. However, unless I wanted to live in abject poverty which studies will show is the MOST DETRIMENTAL TO CHILDREN OF ANY FACTOR MEASURED, I had to work and work a job that could support a family which usually means either long hours for greater income or bullshit unfulfilling job for standard hours. At one point, when my child was in 1st grade I became unemployed and due to US economics unemployable. Scary times but, I was able to get to know my child in an in depth way, that I was unable to while working. All the while thinking I wish I was a junkie because shooting something up to take me out of the horrible stress of losing the house, not being able to pay utilities, hardly any food because SNAP was giving me $135/month, having a garage sale so I could buy my child birthday gifts so they did not know how totally desperately poor we were. I felt after that experience that I could love being a stay at home mom but, ideally I would have a job and be a mother-like work part time just so I could feel accomplished or relevant. The common thread I see is that motherhood is so incredibly daunting when, you have aspirations for a healthy, well rounded, happy with being born child. No one believes they are doing a good job, no one believes they have done a good job and everyone is looking for ways to feel good about the job they have done.
I really love what you wrote at the end here. We have no societal agreement on what it means to be a good mom. We have agreement on what it means to be a good student, have a good career, be a good athlete. But something so fundamental as be a good mom has no definition. We need to face our fears of hurting women by defining what a good parent is. Women are more damaged by doing a job that has no definition of a job well done.
Wow, Penelope! You are on fire. I love this! Especially the last paragraph. (And I don't even know who Emily Oster is.) It's interesting hearing this from you since you have somehow balanced it all: raised successful kids as a single parent, worked, and managed your own businesses.
I apprecaite the compliment, but I did not balance it all. I would say I did a halfway job of both work and kids. I don't want anyone to hold me up as an example of someone who did everything. I am exhausted and my kids are exhausted from having a single mom trying to do everything.
*peddles*