Don't Read The Comments!
Think pieces on the childcare crisis make parents even more exhausted.
Happy February Vacation! While Ophira and her family are in the sun and Julie and her family are in the mountains, our talented designer Rachel Harris is contributing this week’s post! Take it away, Rachel!
If you haven’t heard our Parenting is a Joke episode with Zarna Garg, check it out. We got a chance to catch up with Zarna while she had a break from opening up for Amy Poehler and Tina Fey on the road. Dream gig!
The New York Times published yet another think piece on the childcare crisis. Did you see it? Maybe half a dozen of your equally exhausted parent-friends already sent it your way? Did you think, if I read one more think piece on the childcare crisis, my brain will melt, and then read it anyway and plunge way too deep into the comments section?
If you are curious about how some readers responded, there are plenty of handwaving ‘you-made-your-bed’ types, like S. from Minnesota
These comments become only more offensive when the take personal responsibility sentiments are followed with advice, like this commenter’s from Wichita.
This comments section is hardly the first place where it has been suggested that millennials’ casual spending on avocado toast and lattes have made them ruinously incapable of buying anything of lasting value. But it got me thinking about how much money I spend on childcare and at coffee shops. Here is how my numbers break out.
The cost of sending my two kids to daycare in Cambridge, MA is roughly $1,320 a week (a sum that’s both staggering and completely within the normal range for where we live).
My Starbucks order is a tall latte. A few local cafes also make a really good chai latte, not too sweet. If I stop to sit down and answer emails over coffee on a remote workday day, I’ll throw in a tip.
My latte habit runs about $10 per week.
If I cut back on my twice-weekly latte expenditures, the savings would be enough that in 83 years I could afford one year of infant care. Tuition for the 2024-25 school year may not get you that far in the year 2107, so maybe it’s easier to translate this way: my coffee habit is the equivalent of three days of infant care. It also doesn’t quite cover two days of my current childcare bills.
Now, this childcare habit does indeed run almost my full salary. My new nemesis from Wichita would have a lot to say about that. But she seems disinterested in the best situation for parents - and everyone is different! Personally, I am better suited working as a designer than a full-time caregiver – underscored not only from my experience as a parent, but my experience nannying in my early 20s. I’ve always adored kids, but hit a pretty hard limit when more than 30-40% of my roughly 40-hour week is spent looking after children). This is a serious but finite issue for families – eventually, children age into the public school system. Leaving the workforce just for the two-year stretch where both my children are in daycare appeals even less than then unsustainable status-quo.
Until working families can stop running on fumes… I’m gonna keep buying my two lattes each week.