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[cw: child abuse. Might not be a good thing to read if you’re a working parent who can’t afford expensive day care.]
Sometimes I get into conversations about why day care is so expensive.
My friends are Silicon Valley liberals, so their assumption when something is very expensive is that some government bureaucracy is going around making it so. However, in my home state of California, the rules for starting your own home day care are outrageously reasonable. You must be 18, live in the home, have no criminal record, take 15 hours of classes in first aid and CPR, and not have tuberculosis. There are various reasonable and easy-to-fulfill safety regulations: you are not allowed to have a loaded gun or an unfenced swimming pool, and if you don’t have liability insurance the parents have to sign a paper that says they know you don’t. The list of things which you are allowed to have is perhaps the most revealing, as it includes such items as using the same towel for every child, not washing your hands after diaper changes, and having an unlocked liquor cabinet.
I’m not honestly sure what room there is for decreasing prices by decreasing regulation. I am not sure whether there are enough people with tuberculosis dying to go into home daycare that they will have much of an effect.
The problem with home day care is math.
The maximum number of infants a home day care provider can legally take care of is four. Let’s assume your day care provider is making the Californian minimum wage of $11/hour. Let’s also assume that you have a spouse and both you and your spouse have fairly flexible schedules: you go to work late and your spouse leaves work early, so your child is only in care forty hours a week. Let’s also assume the day care has literally no expenses other than staff.
This day care will cost $440/month.
Now, I don’t want anyone reading this to take away “day care should cost $440/month.” That is the literal absolute physical minimum that a day care can cost. Most day cares have other expenses, such as taxes, rent (a huge expense in the Bay!), utilities, liability insurance, marketing, toys, books, cribs, and so on, which will add costs.
Let’s say you and your spouse both have jobs that demand you get in at 9am. Now you have to add in time for the commute, which means your child is in day care for longer. (Don’t forget to account for the time it adds if your day care is out of the way.)
And then there’s the question of how good care your child is getting for your, oh, probably it’s $650/month by now.
Taking care of babies is not complicated. The average sixteen-year-old can do a fine job at taking care of a baby, with a bit of training. But taking care of babies is really hard.
Sometimes they scream and can’t be comforted. Sometimes they try to stand up in their high chairs and do a backflip. Sometimes their poop explodes out of their diapers and covers their legs, genitals, onesies, and the furniture. Even if nothing goes wrong, they’re extraordinarily demanding– of cuddles, food, attention, play, diaper changes, songs, and being bounced up and down until your arms ache.
You don’t need a lot of knowledge to do well taking care of a baby. But you need spare emotional resources. You need patience and kindness and love.
In line with California’s general outrageous reasonableness on the subject, four babies is just about the maximum a human being can take care of at a time while making sure they’re fed, clean, and happy at least half the time. As the primary caregiver of a parent, taking care of four babies for forty hours a week is one of the most emotionally demanding and stressful jobs I can imagine. And you don’t get lunch or coffee breaks.
Minimum wage is not a lot of money: a person who makes minimum wage (assuming they’re not being financially supported by someone else) probably spends a lot of time stressing about how they’re going to pay rent and bills this month and definitely can’t afford to treat their depression or chronic pain. (Remember, health insurance costs money which we didn’t account for in our calculation.)
Do you really think our stressed, maybe sick person taking care of too many babies is going to do a good job?
I’m not talking about anything fancy here– I’m not saying “will she be able to feed the children a gluten-free vegan lunch all grown less than 50 miles away off golden plates?” I’m talking about things like: will she lose her temper and yell at the baby? Will she consistently notice every time any baby is doing something dangerous? Will she change the baby when they’re poopy or leave them in a poopy diaper until they get a horrible rash? Will she– God forbid– hit the baby, or leave the baby alone in the house for an hour, or shake the baby?
I’m not saying that our hypothetical day care provider is a bad person. If you make a stressed, sick person do an incredibly emotionally demanding job, at some point they’ll snap.
So let’s up the wage to $20/hour (including benefits), which isn’t exactly programmer money, but is enough that the caregiver isn’t constantly stressed about money and maybe can afford to see a doctor sometimes. And let’s say she’s taking care of two babies, which is a reasonable and sustainable number. Again, this is for 45 hours a week. Assuming that all other expenses are about 30% of what the caregiver earns, high-quality day care costs $2340 a month.
Very, very few people can afford $2340 a month, which is why most babies in day care are in day care with underpaid, overworked caregivers, who often don’t do a very good job taking care of them.
A while ago, a friend told me I should apply for a job at her company, which pays $70,000/year. I’d be good at the job, it’s a great environment, and I’d probably really enjoy it. I turned her down because, between day care and taxes (since my husband makes six figures), working a $70,000/year job would cause me to have an extra $15,000/year in my pocket.
Thing of Things 
I assume you didn’t mean to abruptly end with this unexplained as the last paragraph.
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I did the math on this, and the math is something like: our marginal tax rate on that extra $70,000 could easily be around 40% (especially next year, because I started a new job in April and the employee equity has a vesting cliff). So that $70,000 becomes $42,000. If daycare is $2340 per month, that’s $28,080 per year, which cuts pay after taxes and daycare to less than $14,000 per year. The math is potentially a little better in years where I’m getting less employee equity, but we’re talking an extra $5,000 / year in pay after taxes and childcare.
Part of the problem is that IIUC, we’d get hurt with the worst of the Social Security tax’s regressiveness (because I think it’s always assessed per-employee, not per-household), and the income tax’s progressiveness. And least I think that’s how that works—I’m not 100% certain.
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Yep, that’s how I understand the tax system too. (Source: I’m a VITA volunteer. If you have time and interest, come volunteer too, to prepare people’s taxes for free!)
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The thing I was confused about was why “it would cause me to have an extra $15,000/year in my pocket” is somehow a reason for turning down a job, so your comment isn’t helping. That said:
You either counted taxes and daycare twice, or you just said that $28,080 per year is less than $14,000 per either.
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Because, for me, it is not worth working 40 hours a week for slightly more than the takehome pay of the average fulltime minimum wage worker. I think this is true for most people, which is why, for example, unemployed office workers do not generally respond to unemployment by spamming out resumes at fast food restaurants.
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Left rationalist: $42,000 in take home pay after taxes.
If day care is $2340 per month, then day care is $28,080 per year. So subtext $28,080 from $42,000 and you are left with less than $14,000.
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I could be completely wrong here, but I think the confusion is at least partly coming from the “I’d probably really enjoy it” bit. Since in normal situations “I’d really enjoy it” plus “I’d get $15k for it” makes things kind of a no brainer, but colloquially “really enjoying” a job means something completely different.
But I’m also confused by your response. Unemployed office workers would not even kind of enjoy fast food work (mostly) and people often end up with fixed lifestyles that make it hard to adjust to a pay cut. So it doesn’t seem like that situation (too little money, lots of free time –> too little money, lots of miserable hours) has much in common with somebody who could take a great job but not make a lot at it.
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There are also costs to having a job, monetary costs: you might need more expensive clothes, extra commute, &c. These things can add up to a few hundred per month.
So, it may end up being even less that $14,000 on net.
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@ozymandias
Your reasoning make no sense to me, but I’m going to stop talking about it before I get too angry.
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@luispedro
There can also be benefits beyond the monetary compensation, although it depends on the job and the country (and employer).
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Normally you would want to figure in something analogous to compounding on savings over time by assuming that a $70K/y job will in future yield small raises and/or promotions that come with even bigger raises and/or act as a platform from which to get an even better job with significantly higher pay. The stay at home parent thing might be a wash on a one or two year horizon but it looks worse long term.
This said, you clearly don’t *need* to do it and given you have a secure floor in place there’s no reason you can’t choose to maximize on something other than dollar revenues, short or long term. The only real reason to take the job would be that you think you’ll be happier in the long term if you do because it will be engaging and/or lead to engaging things.
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Science fiction reference, because science fiction is about everything: Bujold’s Ethan of Athoss has an all male planet. They recognize that half the planetary budget goes to raising children.
People who are doing child care (maybe even of their own children!) could be given tax breaks. I realize this isn’t a matter of relaxing regulations.
Typo: The list of things which you are allowed to have is perhaps the most revealing, as it includes such items as using the same towel for every child, not washing your hands after diaper changes, and having an unlocked liquor cabinet
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That’s not a typo. I was curious and looked it up: see this file, specifically the section called “items not required by regulations.”
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Wait, what the math happening here?
$11/hour * 40 hours a week * 4 weeks/month = $1760
Are you dividing by four, assuming that the 4 babies are only contributing $3/hour each?
But if we do that, then 2 babies for $20/hour
$10/hour * 45 * 4 = $1600, and 130% of that is $2080 for the single baby.
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10*45*4 = $1800, not $1600. $1800 *1.3 = $2340
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Many Americans want European levels of social services without paying European levels of taxation. The way to provide day care if your a first world developed country is the way the Europeans do it, universal pre-K. This requires tax dollars. Otherwise, you get a situation like the one where we are in now where the upper middle class struggles with day care costs, the wealthy do not, and everybody else has to improvise a lot.
Besides the general aversion to taxation in America, the politics of universal pre-K are complicated by class issues. Universal pre-K seems to be mainly popular with educated women that at least like their jobs. Many working class women prefer to stay at home with their kids according to what I have read. Most women like most men aren’t necessarily going to end up with careers and jobs they like.
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I remember that I was perplexed as to why lower-class women seemed less interested in feminism than upper-class women. Then at some point I realized that most lower-class women are probably going to end up at boring, low-status jobs that are far less fulfilling than being a stay-at-home mom. Then everything clicked.
Why fight for a right that you have no desire to ever exercise?
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Feminism has been something that was almost exclusively for upper and (upper) middle class women from the beginning, as many liked the lives of their husband for themselves. Lower class women generally didn’t. Not just because their husband’s jobs are usually boring and low-status, but because they pay poorly, can be dangerous, dirty, etc. Being a stay at home mom is usually much more pleasant and rewarding. Note that poor white men are the group that commits suicide the most, although usually when those men lose the last bit of self-respect when they lose their shitty job or their partner, so they can no longer find a meager bit of self-respect in self-sacrifice.
Social Justice in general is an upper and (upper) middle class ideology that has solutions for upper and (upper) middle class people’s problems, not for the lower classes, unless their problems just happen to be the same. Although, even then they are often excluded. For example, there is huge focus by feminists on sexual misbehavior in colleges, even to the extent of creating special provisions where college students can get some form of (supposed) justice outside of the legal system. This despite studies showing that young women who don’t go to college are slightly more at risk.
There is a new study about political divides that identifies political clusters and their characteristics. It found that the ‘progressive activists,’ which are those who support SJ, are much richer, highly educated and whiter than average. Privilege, thy name is Social Justice 😉
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The recent study should be taken with at least a few grains of salt. If they asked minorities about what they thought about hate speech rather than political correctness, more of them might have been in the hard liberal camp. Questions are important.
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This is off-topic and has been discussed on this blog ad nauseam. Please desist.
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Maybe the European posters can help with this. According to my brother, the concept of leaving your kids alone with an unlicensed teenage babysitter for a few hours is nuts to his European friends. He states that his European friends told him that this job is done by licensed people in their twenties and older. My Europeans friends, who to be fair were teenagers during the 1980s so things might have changed, said that they had American style babysitters when their parents needed a date night and did that work themselves when they were teens for money. Which is true?
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At least in my part of Europe (Scandinavia), daily 9-5 type caretaking is typically done in formal (tax-supported) institutions with lots of legal requirements, while sporadic take-the-kid-for-a-few-hours-while-I-do-this-thing type caretaking is done by family or acquaintances or I suppose random teenagers if nobody you know is available.
(In-home daycare does exist for the daily 9-5 usecase, but is less common.)
The licensing requirements for daycare institutions include having a certain number of staff per child (depending on age – you need more staff for younger kids), and a certain percentage of the employees need to have relevant degrees.
It’s not uncommon for the non-degree-having staff to be young people, working there for a few years while they figure out what they want to do with their lives, but there are also people who have that job for decades.
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In The Netherlands, care-taking for long periods is either done by professional organizations or family (usually the grandparents). ‘Date night’ babysitting is usually done by grandparents, other parents or teenagers.
I think that trust in the abilities of teenagers has gone down a lot, probably partly justified. Due to smaller families, children get less experience caring for their siblings. My one grandmother had so many children & the household was so much work, that the children simply had to care for each other, because the parents were so busy that they would only intervene if things got really bad.
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For professional childminding (that is, to be employed to work in a creche/nursery/day care centre) here in Ireland, you need a minimum of a QQI Level 5 Certificate (this is a post-school leaving qualification you can do with an academic year – nine months – of study) plus things like police vetting.
Childminding by unqualified people in the home does take place, but you need to be registered with the Child and Family Agency to do this. You should also be declaring any income you receive for tax.
Unpaid childminding would be family/trusted friends or neighbours.
Teenage babysitters would be, as said, looking after a child or children in their own home during the evening/night for a few hours when the parents went out. During the day would only work for weekends and during school holidays, and that might not be convenient/reliable enough for parents, but it does happen. The trend does seem to be going towards preferring registered childminders, though.
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This is one of those cases where “European” is just a bad concept. It will be very very different in different European countries.
In Luxembourg, for short term things, it’s normal to hire teenagers. Often informally, but there is also some very basic state certification if you want to go that route.
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> I’m not honestly sure what room there is for decreasing prices by decreasing regulation. … The maximum number of infants a home day care provider can legally take care of is four.
Maybe I’m missing something, but that seems like an obvious way to decrease prices by decreasing regulation. Now, you might—reasonably!—argue that this is a *good* regulation. Certainly there are huge disadvantages to having one person providing care for, say, 8 infants; I’d probably agree with the regulation (though I haven’t studied it).
But whether or not it’s a *good* regulation, it seems like it’s clearly a regulation that could be changed to have an impact on the cost of day care
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I’m not sure how many home daycare owners are willing to take on more than four babies. I’d suspect– could be wrong– that very few day care providers would take it, so the price wouldn’t change much, but enough day care providers would take it that more babies would die because of the change in regulation.
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Actual babies need a lot of care. There might be an opportunity for reducing costs by letting people care for more than 4 older kids.
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But whether or not it’s a *good* regulation, it seems like it’s clearly a regulation that could be changed to have an impact on the cost of day care
If you can ensure that parents are not going to take the childminder to court if little Johnny catches the measles from one of the other seven kids, or when little Susie falls and bumps her head, and that they’re happy that the kids will all get plonked in front of the TV as a babysitter etc.
Eight small kids in an ordinary sized house is a lot to keep an eye on, even more so for one person, and make sure they’re not pulling a boiling kettle down on themselves or getting into other trouble.
Even eight babies need a lot of looking after between feeding, nappy changing, and making sure they’re napping at the right time, unless you’re just going to leave them all lie in their cots crying and soiling themselves and not attending to them, and parents are not going to pay for that.
You’re paying for the childminder’s time, and that has to be worth enough to make it worth their while to look after children (if they’re not family members doing it for free). There are costs, even if you have a lot of kids in one place with one unqualified person looking after them all. How is it worth her time to look after eight kids rather than have that same time without those kids and do something else?
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Just a small note – not disagreeing with the overall premise but one particular line:
>$440/month is the absolute physical minimum amount daycare can cost
That’s only true if the daycare worker to child ratio is 1:1, with a 1:4 ratio the absolute minimum is $110/month.
From a business perspective, it seems like there can be economies of scale to this, especially to account for fixed costs. A person being paid more would be willing to take care of say, more babies at once, say 3 rather than 2. Multiple daycare workers can share the fixed costs of one center. At least in my jurisdiction, day cares are property tax exempt.
I wonder why there are no “super day cares” where it’s just one center taking care of say, ~100 kids.
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The cost of labor is $440 per week, not $440 per month. At 4 weeks per month and 4 children per provider the cost per child per month is still $440.
If it’s $25 an hour to incentivize providers to take care of 3 children the bare labor cost is $1300 per child.
And “superdaycares” might still exist, but suffer from the same labor cost problem described in the blog post: no matter what, there is a limit to the attention and emotional resources of a single provider and you run up against the labor cost minimum again. Even in a hypothetical superdaycare where innovation has allowed a 6:1 child-to-provider ratio the absolute labor minimum is going to be $293/child/month before rent and the costs added by whatever invention or infrastructure allows the caregiver’s resources to be distributed over that many children without loss of care quality.
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I see – my mistake.
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> That’s only true if the daycare worker to child ratio is 1:1, with a 1:4 ratio the absolute minimum is $110/month.
I read Ozy as doing the math as: $11/hr * 40hr / 4 -> $110/week. Which is then ~$440/month.
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I wonder why there are no “super day cares” where it’s just one center taking care of say, ~100 kids
Those tend to be preschools/nurseries rather than day care centres as such. Once you’re on a scale of taking in hundreds of children, you get regulated, and regulations about staff ratios etc. are very strict (especially for small children/babies). In a facility that is a peer to the place I work, for instance, the regulations about staff: child ratios are:
Babies (6 months+) is 1:3
Walking – 2 years is 1:5
Toddlers (2 – 3 years) is 1:6
Preschool (3-5 years) is 1:11
It has, between the various services it offers, 200+ children and that can be absolute bedlam at times. It is not-for-profit and most of the children attending come under various government schemes to subsidise low-income/disadvantaged families to pay for childcare, but it is still expensive to run because minding children on a large scale, or minding children not your own, is not at all the same thing as minding your own kids in your own home.
For instance, there is no government inspector (as yet) that will call into your house and mark you down as having the plug sockets uncovered, or not having guards on the door hinges so the kids can’t catch their fingers.
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One thing I’m confused about is why more full-time parent caregivers don’t take in one or two other kids. At $2k/month/kid that’s a lot of money! I had been thinking that this was mostly limited by regulation, but it sounds like at least in CA this isn’t the case.
(I wrote about this some a while ago, https://www.jefftk.com/p/childcare-costs and commenters on fb had some ideas but nothing great)
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I think this does happen, but it’s rarer than it should be. My mother, while I was an infant/toddler before pre-school age, took in three other similar-aged children for in-home daycare services in order to supplement her and my father’s income. I’m not sure why it’s as rare as it seems to be–perhaps coordination problems in finding clients with suitable-age children and the problem of getting strangers to trust you, a person whose qualification seems no better than their own, to take care of their beloved child.
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I thought about it before Viktor was born, but honestly it’s stressful enough taking care of one kid! (That said, Viktor is taken care of two days a week by a rationalist mom.)
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$2k a month is a lot, but the important question is whether it buys anything relevant for the people in question. A stay-at-home parent is already sufficiently well-supported by their partner that they can afford to grab the initial $2k-ish gain (plus other, harder to quantify benefits). Given that, does the extra $2k actually do anything for them? I don’t think it’s actually that common for people to play number-go-up with their bank accounts, so the extra money is only worthwhile if it can be used to get some other benefit.
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It’s also money that has to be declared as income for tax purposes. If you’re advertising your services, this means you’re considered self-employed/small business (and that involves expenses such as, for the very least, taking out insurance for minding kids in your own home). People who don’t want to bother with setting up all that (and just want some quick cash in hand/under the table) will probably do it by word of mouth and discreetly so as not to draw attention. You won’t know if that woman with three small children is the mother or is Sue the Neighbourhood Child Minder unless Sue makes it known she’s taking in kids 🙂
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Is 4 children per person the maximum only for infants or for children of any age? It seems like at older ages it might be more doable to take on more kids (though I’m not actually sure of this).
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It’s the maximum for infants. Older children require fewer adults to take care of them, and as such day care for older children is less expensive. That said, if you space your kids pretty closely, even if you plan on going back to work once your kid is old enough you can still wind up with three or more years out of the workforce.
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“As the primary caregiver of a parent, taking care of four babies….” I wonder if you meant to say “a baby” here, rather than “a parent”?
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I think part of the problem around paying for childcare (be that someone childminding in their own home or a service like daycare/nursery/creche) is that people conflate it with parenting – I don’t have any special training or knowledge, I can look after my child just fine, what is all this expense?
But it’s not the same thing at all. We’ve long since moved on from the days when if you were looking after your own children, you probably also lived with or near mother/mother-in-law, had married and single sisters, aunts, female cousins and friends who could support and advise you and help with childminding. Even the days of just leaving a child with a family member/friend/neighbour in their home are being phased out, as people expect (a) to be paid for this, however small an amount and (b) people expect more and more from their childminders.
Think of it this way – if your parents asked you for help setting up a computer system, you’re hardly likely to present them with an itemised bill at the end. If you’re doing it as your job, you fully expect to get paid the going rate for time, labour, and the rest of it. You wouldn’t do it for a stranger on the basis that because “but sure my cousin Joe is a technician and he did it for his aunt for nothing, why are you charging me this amount?”
Same with childminding when it’s not the granny doing it as a favour.
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The more I think about it, the more I feel that the nuclear family was a mistake.
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The fallout was quite bad.
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One partial solution if you can work from home is to hire a teenager to babysit your child at your residence, while you are home.
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A childcare provider is, by necessity, working longer hours than you are.
If you are not paying them your entire salary (with modification for efficiencies of scale, etc.) you are saying their time is worth less than yours is. This is why actual service jobs will always be low-status and the phrase “public servant” is such an obvious crock of faux-humility.
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Ozzy, will it harm your career to have child rearing years at home? I know plenty of people who go to work even though they get paid less than their childcare costs because it is important for their long term salary and career prospects.
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Something felt off about this until it clicked.
Nobody sane arranges to mind 4 infants all day on their own.
But lots of people can cope with minding 1 infant, a 4 year old, a 7 year old and a 9 year old.
And that’s the pattern I’ve seen much much more often with child minders I know.
And many parents still need to hire someone for kids that aren’t infants. The kids school finishes 4 hours before work does? hire someone to pick them up and mind them until the parents finish work.
Kids take dramatically less time as they get older. An infant needs almost constant attention but once they’re not pooing themselves constantly they still need supervision but not regular cleaning.
Also many people mind the same few kids for years on end. I know a fair few older mothers who’s children grew up who choose to supplement their income with home daycare and are effectively self employed and already have medical etc and so aren’t too pushed about profit margins. They can pick and choose their clients which means they probably collect some of the easier-to-mind kids.
Which probably makes it even harder to compete as a commercial daycare and means the average kid dropped in is even more likely to be the hard-to-manage kind.
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i know a lot of providers and i have worked with and served on boards of daycare centers for rich and poor. and the irony is that poor people are often more expensive to provide daycare for.
Lots of those people are marginal in terms of their lives, through no fault of their own. So for example they do not often have great benefits in their job, so they’re less likely to be able to take a day off if their kid is sick (and kids always get sick!) And similarly they are more likely to be ordered to work odd hours, or unexpected hours, or hours which don’t perfectly match up w/ daycare. And they may have a long commute, which means they are more likely to occasionally have traffic that will make them late. And they may not be even able to call at work. And they may not have many stay-at-home friends who can help.
These things are perfectly normal. But remember: Unlike a normal business, the cost and hassle is passed to daycare employees. If you get stuck in traffic your daycare folks can’t go home until all the kids are picked up, so god help them if they have their OWN schedules which rely on leaving work on time, and so on.
What poor folks really need is a daycare that will take the kids on the way to work and let them get picked up after work, and be flexible about the occasional late pickup, and ideally feed them meals and snacks along the way*, and also perhaps not be too picky about a sick kid in daycare because life happens and kids get sick and what are they supposed to do, lose their job?
In other words, the type of person who often needs daycare the most is often also the type of person who needs the highest and most expensive level of daycare, which is hard to provide at ALL and is literally impossible to provide both well and affordably.
A lot of it has to do w/ commute. Say you work an 9-hour day (including lunch and breaks) which is pretty normal, right? And you have a 30 minute commute, which is also pretty normal. Now you need TEN hours of daycare. And if you allow 30 minutes on each end of the day for setup and breakdown, the daycare must pay its staff for ELEVEN hours of daycare. At that point you can’t get away with single staffing unless your staff is very interested in working 55 hour weeks, which most folks are not. So now you need to hire more staff–don’t forget the extra benefits and taxes and training, even if you’re lucky enough to be outside the progressive “fight for 15” areas–which gets even more expensive.
Moreover, having done a lot of hiring, it turns out that there is not an infinite supply of smart caring nurturing individuals who are willing to work unpredictable hours wiping snot and shit off someone else’s sick kid for $12/hour in a run-down place. Especially when they can hopefully work more predictable hours** in a nicer place, for a bit more money, taking care of rich folks’ kids. So the ones you get are either do-gooders (great, but in limited supply) or people who can’t find anyone else who would hire them (in large supply) or people who are themselves fishing for things like health benefits and vacation days and sick time… nice for them, nice for society, but costly to your customers and you because you will lose your license if people don’t show up.
So to put it mildly, the people you often end up getting to work in your low-price long-hour daycare are NOT usually aching to use their straight-A early education degree to lovingly teach your little Sally how to learn her letters. And this will eventually help contribute to significant behavior differentials which will continue throughout nursery and kindergarten to the detriment of the kids.
*fact: if you have to wake up your kid super early and feed them breakfast and leave them at daycare all day, it’s hard.
**fact: rich people are late less, because they have more predictable jobs and can call on the nanny or other rich stay at home friends in an emergency. And if they’re late they pay whopping late fees. And they also usually have the kind of job where they can call ahead if they’ll be late and not get fired for doing so. So it’s easier on the staff to deal w/ rich people.
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