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This is such a low effort response. I worked on the board of Directors for my daughter’s daycare in the US for 8 years. Literally none of this is true. We are a non-profit and our audits are public. Feel free actually look for the accounting for a child or elder care facility and you’ll find plenty of them. You’ll find them anything other than horrendous. They’re boring and exactly what you’d expect them to look like.
Even without margin as a factor because we’re a non-profit we are still charging as much as my mortgage for an infant.
This might sound obvious but operating a care facility is expensive. Labor is the driving cost, by far, and what makes it so is legally mandated caretaker ratios. 4 infants per. 6 Toddlers per. 10 children per. Imagine if you were splitting just an infant caretaker’s salary four ways, without benefits or other costs. Literally federal poverty wages would be $700/month for you. Without benefits. Without facilities. Without supplies. Just a person’s full time supervision. And that person would qualify for SNAP benefits.
While there are definitely orgs focused on investor returns they’re not the root cause. Care is just expensive.
Don’t get all righteous at the people who dedicate their lives to caring for people in need. Even those in charge of the facilities can be doing it for the right reasons. Look at the government. Why aren’t we supplementing these critical services? In my state Medicare and education are already the top tax expenditures by far. You might be able to shift some $ between priorities but the real answer appears to be that we’re just not funding the government sufficiently for it to do all things for all people. If we don’t take advantage of the scale of government then we’re going to be paying for this stuff out of pocket.
It’s just expensive no matter how you solve the problem.
Productivity has soared since the 70s. Tax the fucking rich at 1950s levels. Then subsidize care work.
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Because it’s a scam. The people doing the actual work always make the least money.
There are certain jobs that people really want to do. No matter how little the job pays, there will be people willing to do that job. Often these are the most important jobs.
That’s not a good match for a purely capitalist system where someone can’t survive on their salary. Unions are one way to fight this. Traditionally nurses had strong unions, but these days no union seems to be particularly strong. The other way is for the government to get involved and say that certain jobs are important enough that they get special exemptions from the purely capitalist system. That could mean different minimum wages, special tax exemptions, or all kinds of other things.
The more I think about it, the more I realize daycare centers probably don’t make nearly as much money as people assume.
My three-year-old goes to daycare, and we pay around $1,000 per month. Sometimes they send home a list showing which children are assigned to bring certain food items, so we have a rough idea of enrollment. The last time we counted, there were about 18 kids in my son’s class. That’s roughly $18,000 in revenue from that classroom each month.
Now consider the costs. There are four employees plus a manager. Even if each one only makes $15 an hour, payroll alone consumes a huge portion of that revenue. Then there are utilities, insurance, food, equipment, building maintenance, transportation costs for the bus, licensing requirements, and everything else needed to keep the facility running.
If anything, they may not be charging enough.
The real issue is that the entire system seems broken from the start. Daycare is barely affordable for many families, yet many childcare providers are operating on razor-thin margins. Parents struggle to pay for care, workers aren’t highly paid, and daycare centers themselves often aren’t making huge profits. Somewhere along the line, the economics simply don’t work very well.
Only 1k? Where are you?
okay it’s easier for me to analyze if i annualize the numbers. 18k monthly revenue is 216k annual revenue. 15/hr is 30k/year (assuming a 2000 hour FTE year. it’s really 2080 but the math is so much easier at 2000) with four employees that’s 135k/yr. You’ve got 81k left for other expenses like food, cleaning supplies, advertising, legal bullshit and whatnot else that all comes out before you get to the owner’s cut.
the first two years of most businesses are where they fail. usually because they did not have enough cash on hand to cover two years of expenses when they opened, and it takes about that long on average for a business to break even.
even if that’s only 50k a year after all is said and done it’s 50k a year where you don’t have to do shit.
play a sad fiddle for all the daycare owners.
50k a year where you don’t have to do shit.
you really have no clue, do you
What’s funny in a sad-not-haha way, is that labor for caretaking of small human beings is the enormous untenable driving cost here.
Parents can’t afford the rates, daycares can’t afford living wages doe the caretakers. This is an endeavor, like many, that the Hand of the Market™ is OBVIOUSLY unsuitable for solving.
The “funny” part: Parents would gladly do this job for free as they have for centuries and millennia. This problem was already solved, and wouldn’t be an issue if every member of the household wasn’t forced into full-time 40+ hour work plus hunting for side-hustles, and being taken away from their loved ones for most of their waking friggin lives, just to survive.
How many generations deep are we now? Where so many kids spend so long in daycare from infancy that they never even get to form a decent bond with their own parents? How healthy is that, for anybody, much less larger society?
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
I agree with you - if you need to pay someone a full time wage to go out and earn a full time wage, the sum will be nearly zero. The same issue applies for long term care facilities where a team of multiple specialized providers is needed to care for someone around the clock. The assumption that care should be cheap implies that care work is less valuable than whatever the worker themself does.
Much like mail delivery, daycare and elder care would be better as publicly funded services. They can’t necessarily turn a profit, but still need to exist for the betterment of society
The irony is that this causes birth rates to plummet, which eliminates the future workforce for the very companies forcing childcare to be untenable. One of the major contradictions of capitalism is that it does not reproduce its own labor force. I guess the resolution is to replace human workers with AI.
Society’s hyper-competitiveness to “get an edge” is ultimately self-cannibalizing.
This is something that drives me so mad, and it’s exactly why corporations need to be strictly regulated on a global scale.
If people are granted any voluntary dignity, someone out there is always willing to “undercut” their fellow workers to get an “edge” on the market or whatever and prove what a sweaty exploitable tryhard they can be, then it races to the bottom for all.
If a company wants to pay its workers a living wage, their competition will undercut them by stepping on their employees’ necks for an “advantage in the market.”
You’re right, it’s simply not a system that solves for human well-being, it solves solely for hoarding and growing large numbers of imaginary value.
no we just need to import workers from outside the environment.
On global level population is still growing. With globalization, companies couldnt care less if a worker is from US or Africa. ChatGPT’s training was supervised by kenia workers for laughable wages.
well we have that situation in germany right now where supposedly daycare is good because it allows women to work more hours (full time instead of half time)
it’s … let me tell you, it’s a shitshow. i have come to understand that the internet is largely a propaganda apparatus. they install the thought in you that a certain way of seeing things is “normal”, because everybody sees it that way. in other words, the other bots or paid influencers (idk which one) that the algorithm then pushes sothat everybody sees it.
you got 1 crazy person saying things like “actually, we should all work more, i like it, it’s fun” and you know what, they can say that. anyways, that’s 1 person in 1000. then the algorithm pushes it on everybody’s front page sothat now everybody thinks “ah, that’s a normal thing to think”. and since most people follow group-think, that’s now society’s opinion.
internet exists to cause a shift in public opinion by astroturfing. the illusion that the thought comes from within society organically.
WHO guidelines say children should stay with mother until 3 to bond and go to childcare from 3 to get social skills. But germany only pays up for like 1 yr and even that only limited. Grandparents have to work until they are barely fit enough to help too.
Makes you wonder, with all those technical advances we have, why we work more and more having worse living conditions down the drain.
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My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
And the poor kids! The caregivers are all burnt out by terrible management and shit pay, have no motivation to provide anything beyond the necessities, and God bless them, at least a few spend their own money on supplies to at least try and enrich the time the kids spend there.
I’m really proud of her, taking a huge step into somewhat unknown water. I know the kids she cares for are going to get so much more value from her, here in her space, on her terms, than they ever would have at the center.
My wife is starting her own home daycare Monday for many of the reasons you listed. Almost a decade at a YMCA run Montessori, ~18/hr.
good luck. the regulatory hurdles are not fun, but regulations are written in blood. they don’t go to the trouble of setting regs unless someone had been seriously harmed.
If you want to keep her employees (if she has any) happy, don’t push the limits of the caregiver:child ratios. I’m not sure what [the amount of money you want to have saved up so your business doesn’t fail] in early childhood education is, but a good rule of thumb is start with 2 years worth of expenses saved as most businesses take at least that long to break even. Restaurants, 5 years.
[BOILERPLATE CYA WARNING]
i did accounting for 25 years and virtually all of my clients were small businesses and their owners, so while this is arguably professional advice, it is not tailored to your specific situation. it is general advice and not intended for you to rely on. if you want advice tailored to you and your situation that is intended for you to rely on, hire an accounting consultant.
That sounds daunting but also incredibly noble of her. Prayers and well wishes to both you and your wife, especially in the early days of this endeavor!
I love hearing about when someone sees a need they can fill in their community and they’re passionate about solving it. That’s so awesome. :)
“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
bullshit
these are some strong opinions right there without much substance
i called my childcare guardians “comrade teacher” and i gladly pay half of my salary for a childcare in the “capitalist dream” now. neither has anything to do with the real reasons why we have childcare nor why it is expensive somewhere or free somewhere else.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
but of course, as with everything with life, things can be messed up by the people. parents or teachers can screw up in many different ways or even the whole childcare might be organised for an entirely wrong reason… that doesn’t mean childcare is a bad idea in general.
childcare enables parents to do more with their life than just have kids and as such is good both for parents and for the society in general. it also enables children to access early childhood education and community that their parents wouldn’t be able to provide otherwise so - if done right - is also great for the kids.
WAIT HOLD ON I GOTTA SHOW THIS TO MY WIFE (teaches kinder) she’s gonna love you
Woah there, friend. Aren’t we being a little bit aggro here? I’m happy to hear your perspective.
I never meant to come off that childcare is bad as a concept! That was never the point.
What I am decrying is the requirement of families being coerced to put their children into a very expensive facility, because if everyone else in the house isn’t working a 5x40+ fulltime job, they can’t afford a reasonable quality of living. THAT is where it’s broken.
Childcare as an option is fantastic for all the reasons you mentioned. Childcare as “the market raises your children with underpaid and exhausted, overhelmed wageslaves unless you’re insanely privileged” is not cool.
I’m happy you’ve had a good experience though, and hope we can reach a solution where it’s done right for more folks.
well if childcare as an option is fantastic and all you are angry about is the childcare as an unaffordable necessity then we are totally in agreement…
the way you wrote your original comment didn’t entirely hit me that way though. it definitely gave me more of an impression that you consider childcare as bad (see the quote) and your solution to people struggling is traditional family values and housewives.
Sorry, no I don’t believe I conveyed myself in that way, updoots seem to agree.
I do think we’re in alignment here, but also I understand nuance is often lost over Internet posts so let me clarify my position. “Family values and housewives” as you put it being a great example:
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Women having the opportunity to leave the home of their own volition and be in a career the same as a man? Awesome. Progress.
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Women AND men alike, in a family unit, forced simultaneously into the career-style workforce or multiple garbage jobs because the family goes bust and destitute otherwise? Bullshit.
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Programs for kids to safely socialize and learn as a community? Fantastic!
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Overwhelmed daycares staffed by burned out underpaid care workers, costing half of everyone’s salary, because otherwise the only alternative is literally child abandonment, thanks to everybody needing to leave the home and devote a majority of their time to wage labor? Capitalistic nightmare.
That’s basically a systemic form of indentured servitude to pay ransom for one’s own children. It isn’t right.
Parents should be free to choose parenting their children over creating shareholder value without starving. Parenting is already a full time job, and outsourcing it entirely to someone else’s employees every “business day” sounds like a great way to wreck a society’s future adults.
Especially in the U.S when maternity leave is laughably short for many, and paternity leave is a fanciful myth from faraway lands, and those early years spent with one’s family are CRITICAL for a child’s early development.
So when I satirically said “parenting as a service” (mocking ‘software as a service’ / rent-seeking behavior), I wasn’t referring to “Watch our kids and enrich them a little occasionally.”
I literally meant “A paid service has to raise our children because we aren’t rich enough to spend much time with them besides breakfast and bedtime.”
That sounds pretty horrible to me.
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“Parenting as a Service” is peak capitalistic hellscape…
JFC, I could see someone unironically marketing this.
Nursing homes are often owned by investment trusts who have to pay out to their investors based on profits, so the managers of the trust take it upon themselves to outsource the maintenance, management, and labor to other entities they control. At a healthy upcharge, the menials who perform the tasks associated are not even an afterthought. They work for a faceless corporation that is puppeteered by the same people who own the nursing home, who rents it’s facility from a real estate trust they also own, allowing them to extract as much value as possible from each level of the operation while limiting liability.
Worked in them for about 7 years.
You are correct.
We had one where could never get ANY supplies 1 year in despite a 25k lump sum buy in by residents. even before paying month to month rent.
My expeince is management will play the “heroes work here” type behavior and take advantage of people’s passion for elderly to then underpay then and mistreat them to the degree they do.
Why don’t good people start nursing homes
It takes enormous capital as property prices are high due to real estate speculation (the priority with real estate is not use but financial value), regulatory capture (excessive regulations are pushed by the largest companies to make it impossible to start a competitive business), and high insurance costs (very appealing to the biggest investors as they mean the largest investors can be self insured).
They’re run out of business if they even start. Otherwise it has to be a non-profit, which is reliant on fundraising and outside funding.
Remember the people running these are the landlords. Owners of commercial properties and the only entities with resource rights to able to develop. You know: the same entities that have been capable for generstions, but unwilling, to construct adequate housing.
This is what they build instead.
The daycare analysis is a bit different: that’s mostly just sheer insurance liability. Childcare centers need so much licensing and insurance, so it’s mostly done by backyard operations and church basements.
Because it’s capitalism! Every service exists for profit to be made and you can only make enough profit by paying workers so much.
for some reason, people working in healthcare don’t stand up for their rights, and rather accept a very shitty pay. it’s … because they do it “for the people who need help” without looking at economic issues (especially their own) at all.
they are being exploited. moreover, since they don’t stand up for themselves, we should stand up for their rights instead. we should be protesting sothat they get better treatment. because otherwise they burn out and won’t do the job anymore in 5 years. which would be bad for all of us.
In our society, if you don’t have a job, you die. A shit job is better than no job and standing up for your rights could lose you your job. The solution is unionizing, but unionizing is very difficult and dangerous because 1. Unions have been heavily propaganized against and 2. Bosses will do a bunch of illegal stuff to prevent unions.
Unions are becoming more popular as conditions worsen, but the capitalist owners are fighting harder than ever to prevent the growing unionization.
Capitalism
Its simple really. The management make all the money, while the workers and customers get shafted
The owners make the money. Management might be better paid, but they are still workers
Submit to market and die
“Can’t afford to pay a living wage” means “I can’t afford a yacht if I pay you”
More like “my yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”.
“My second yacht would be slightly smaller if I pay you”
…Because it’s ridiculously labor intensive? And emotionally draining?
Have yall ever had to take care of someone really old, with failing health? Or really young?
I’m not saying there aren’t huge structural issues, or leeches on the system. But it’s fundamentally hard. Taking care of just a few others will absolutely drain a professional, and paying them a livable wage + tax/benefits, with no other expenses whatsoever, will drain savings of those taken care of.
I think you misunderstood the OP. Yes, taking care of our elders can be a very exhausting task. But those of us trained in taking care of them should not be paid a sub standard living wage while the nursing homes (and their managers/owners/w-e) get paid the big bucks.
Do y’all really think managers make “big bucks”? Don’t get me wrong, most management is living the 90’s middle class life in 2026. But when did that become aspirational?
I still remember the Simpsons being the representation of a poor family. Now they are high class. That shit is not managers fault. Most managers are just working to not lose what they have while supporting their people as much as they can.
No, my friend. The Simpsons were middle class. Go watch it again and show me evidence otherwise.
Huh, I always thought the Simpsons contrasted the US national projection of a mostly flat “middle class” society against the strict reality of its own socioeconomic classes. Simpsons being lower middle class (what I offhanded called poor), families like the Flanders being solidly middle class, and families like Dr. Hibbert being upper middle class. This was further contrasted through the display of Mr. Burns being very clearly wealthy.
My point was that the Simpsons live a life that is no longer achievable even by the average “upper middle class” family. A doctor may be able to support three kids and a stay at home spouse while owning two cars and a home, but not in most parts of the country.
That said, I was a kid when I watched those episodes, so I’ll have to look again.
And to my original point, most managers are not making an income that gives them upward or even lateral mobility. They are mostly just trying to avoid getting fired. Add in that HR has most actual power, and hides behind the front facing manager (who has no actual power), and you have a shell game of authority and responsibility that supports keeping everyone “under control.”
they’re explicitly upper lower middle class folk
This is a naive understanding of where the money goes. The corporate owners of nursing homes could make less profit. It would be ideal if those leeches didn’t exist but we still live in a capitalist world, so they won’t be going anywhere soon, unfortunately.
Capitalism cannot function without paying workers less than their labor is worth, thus creating “profit” margins for rich people to steal from
Workers feel responsibility for the people under their care. Bosses exploit their guilt over untended people to reduce wages.
For the same reason, nurses are not fairly compensated for their work.
