Despite all this, many parents who have the option not to (i.e. they can afford in-home care with a nanny or for one parent to stay home) still choose to send their babies and toddlers to daycare. How come? Surely most well-off adults wouldn’t agree to be ill nonstop in exchange for the monetary savings daycare provides?
My experience of day care (admittedly, a small one with < 10 children), is that the incidence and severity of illness is very low relative to how it is described in this article. Last year, I had to keep one or the other child home from day care on no more than thirty occasions. In basically every one of these occasions, the child had a runny nose and maybe a slight fever. Every instance of more severe illness that we suffered in the same time span (no more than five occasions) occurred on vacation and was unrelated to daycare. Maybe we are incredibly fortunate. I believe the biggest negative effect on my children from these bouts of illness will be that they missed out on being at daycare and watched a lot of TV because I usually had to work on those days. I do not think the illness itself will have any quantifiable effect on their lifetime earnings.
We could have further reduced this disease burden by having one of us quit our job to parent at home. This would have cost us at the very least $50,000 in foregone income net daycare costs, and probably a lot more in terms of career development. We could have hired a nanny for an additional $25,000 a year.
In my opinion, the benefit of reduced illness would probably not justify the expense. We are wealthy enough to afford the nanny option, but not so wealthy as to find this a good use of those funds.
My experience of day care (admittedly, a small one with < 10 children), is that the incidence and severity of illness is very low relative to how it is described in this article. Last year, I had to keep one or the other child home from day care on no more than thirty occasions. In basically every one of these occasions, the child had a runny nose and maybe a slight fever. Every instance of more severe illness that we suffered in the same time span (no more than five occasions) occurred on vacation and was unrelated to daycare. Maybe we are incredibly fortunate. I believe the biggest negative effect on my children from these bouts of illness will be that they missed out on being at daycare and watched a lot of TV because I usually had to work on those days. I do not think the illness itself will have any quantifiable effect on their lifetime earnings.
We could have further reduced this disease burden by having one of us quit our job to parent at home. This would have cost us at the very least $50,000 in foregone income net daycare costs, and probably a lot more in terms of career development. We could have hired a nanny for an additional $25,000 a year.
In my opinion, the benefit of reduced illness would probably not justify the expense. We are wealthy enough to afford the nanny option, but not so wealthy as to find this a good use of those funds.