>you are providing significantly less to society than those caring for many kids
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?
It is cheaper per child to care for multiple children at the same time. It's basic economies of scale. Nannies and childcare providers that only look after a single child ought not to be subsidized, at least not nearly to the same extent as those who provide care more efficiently.
In an economy of scale, the quality of your product does not decrease. But when one person is looking after ever more children, their quality of care does decrease. So you're not incentivizing more efficient care, but simply worse care.
It's akin to education - the general goal is to minimize the number of students per teacher, not maximize it.
Yes, if you had one caretaker looking after thousands of children, quality would be poor. But that doesn't mean the optimal number is 1. A professional caretaker looking after a manageable number of children can certainly outperform an amateur looking after one or two, and a facility with multiple specialized caretakers can outperform the single professional caretaker.
You don't want to minimize students per teacher, you want a healthy number of students per teacher. Class sizes are not optimal at 1. Below some minimum class size (which varies by age group) there is no benefit to further reduction, and sufficiently low numbers can be harmful. That's to say nothing of the additional cost of that labor to achieve such faculty ratios.
You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur." Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more. An interesting one is that children who spend extensive time in daycare even end up less socially competent which is quite interesting since it runs contrary to one of the typical arguments in favor of daycare. But it's also not surprising if you think about it, because at home a child is getting vastly more attention and interaction than he would in daycare.
And this is especially significant because that's just speaking aggregately. Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on. If you isolated it only to active, highly involved, parents - the results would be exponentially better than they already are.
> You've gone from efficiency and economies of scale, to a "professional" outperforming an "amateur."
These are one in the same. Economies of scale work because of specialization.
> Raising a child is not like making a widget. Endless studies [1] demonstrate that more early non-parental care leads to worse outcomes in just about every single way - worse behavior, health, attention span, long term higher likelihood of police encounters, and much more.
You didn't link to any specific study but that's the exact opposite of what the search results say [1]. The results suggesting that daycare has negative effects all seem to be from the Institute or Family Studies [2] which is a conservative think tank promoting traditional gender roles. If you have credible sources that state otherwise, please share them directly.
> Obviously not all parents are created equal, but it turns out that even bad parents tend to be better than non-parental care, especially early on.
Yeah, you're gonna need a specific source for that claim.
The Institute for Family Studies doesn't independently carry out studies. It just provides an objective review of the studies available while providing links to each study for each and every point they make, so that you can easily verify what they say. The paper you linked to, by contrast, is being actively disingenuous. For instance they claim that:
> "Other reported benefits of attendance at high-quality child care include less impulsivity, more advanced expressive vocabulary, and greater reported social competence (Belsky et al. 2007)."
You probably thought they were comparing high quality daycare to parental care, because that's certainly what they're implying. Here [1] is the paper they're referencing, which unsurprisingly they chose to not provide a link to. They are comparing high quality daycare care against poor quality daycare! Both had overall negative effects relative to parental care! In particular all non-parental childcare was directly associated with lower social competence, poorer work habits, conflicted relationships with teachers (and their mother!), and so on.
That paper itself is based on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development series. You can find a more casual overview of that study's findings here. [2] And an opinion piece, 'daycare - yes or no', based on an overview of the available evidence (including the NICHD study) here. [3]
Amateurs regularly outperform professionals in schooling (they seem to perform somewhere between "at least as good" to "decently better" on average), and studies in the 80s found that 1:1 tutoring with mastery learning is wildly more effective than normal classes (with the average tutored student performing at the 98th percentile of control students).
Again, I think if you simply searched for studies on these things - you'd find a million results. Here [1] is one with volunteer tutors improving student performance on the order of about 0.3 standard deviations relative to their peers.
I don't entirely understand the fetishism of expertise among a certain segment of society. Don't you realize that most of all teachers and other educational institutions are staffed by those who would be considered nominally experts? And this has even been taken to the next level by widespread adherence to a national curriculum (common core), again composed by even greater ostensible experts. And all of this has been complimented by the 5th highest spending per student in the world. And the result? Educational outcomes are falling off a cliff.
Obviously this isn't to say that anti-expertise is the answer, but rather that motivated people of reasonable intelligence and objectivity, regardless of expertise, are a [measurably] excellent source of value in just about everything. And, by contrast, expertise itself does not guarantee good results nor effective performance, especially in the context of other issues that might otherwise impair performance like large class sizes, minimal motivation, poor work environment, etc.
And getting paid considerably less. You're almost certainly providing proportionally more for your pay.
A childcare provider can register and only look after 1 child, usually, but wouldn't because they want/need more income.
Presumably nannies (careworker for children from a single family) are registered childcare providers where you are; would a nanny be subsidised able to get paid with a subsidy?