[camgunz]

Yeah can confirm, both my partner and I each take a day off because day care only gives us 3 days. This is actually preferable as day care is almost a 2nd rent at just 3 days a week.

There are some policy changes in the works to more heavily subsidize day care costs, but I think they won't kick in until next year or something.

[bojan]

Those changes won't kick in until at least 2027, but even then, it's very questionable how feasible it is, considering there aren't enough teachers to cover the demand even at these exorbitant end-user prices.

[camgunz]

Yeah I think we did the math and our day care costs ~11 euros an hour, which is pretty low if it was 1 person's income, but there are like 6-8 kids in the group every day, so it's something like 75/hr, which is maybe adequate: 4 groups pulls 600k/yr, you burn 360k on staff (6 nannies across 4 groups at 50k each plus an admin), rent/supplies/tech is 100k/yr let's just say, so your margin is 25%. Even if we're way off here, that's a lot of margin.

All that said, I don't really get why day care is privatized while school is public. I mean I do: it's vestigial from when we didn't allow women to work; what I mean is that if we want more women to work full time--and I know that we do because every month it seems there's yet another thinkpiece about why women in the Netherlands won't work more hours and policies floated to address it--it seems like the main things to do are give more partner leave and nationalize day care.

My partner had this great idea where both parents should get a year off with pay (maybe 70%, whatever), which is a good idea in general for couples but also would dramatically lower the load on day cares.

Either way, childcare is a huge societal enterprise; we're not gonna get out of paying through the nose for it. Basically, you can either have a low fertility rate, a very male workforce, or raised taxes for childcare; there's not really another option.

[amadeuspagel]

Subsidizing demand is never the solution.