The Rising Cost of Child and Pet Day Care

High Costs and Family Tradeoffs

• Multiple commenters report child care costing $1–2k/month even for part-time care, seen as unaffordable for anyone but the well-off.
• Many families respond by having one parent leave the workforce; for some daycare would eat half or all of a salary.
• There is debate whether it’s still rational to keep working when daycare roughly equals take-home pay (for career and earnings growth vs. risk of skills decay and lack of safety net).

Why Are Prices Rising? (Baumol, Wages, Housing, Regulation)

• One camp leans on the Baumol effect: labor-intensive services must pay wages that keep pace with higher-productivity sectors, so prices rise.
• Others emphasize basic wages: caregivers “deserve to be paid enough to live,” so higher labor costs are unavoidable.
• Disagreement on main cost drivers:
  • Some argue real estate and housing costs indirectly drive everything, including wage demands.
  • Others counter that salaries dwarf rent in daycare budgets.
• Regulation is acknowledged to raise costs (ratios, training, credentials), but many argue it cannot explain parallel increases in pet daycare, which is lightly regulated.

Private Equity, Market Structure, and Pricing Behavior

• Several commenters suspect heavy private equity (PE) involvement in child and especially pet care: buyouts, consolidation, slick portals, then steady price hikes.
• Others question whether prior owners were just underpricing out of ignorance or reputation concerns.
• Discussion of “altruistic pricing” vs. fully profit-maximizing strategies: PE is seen as exploiting customer inertia, trust, and switching costs, and “liquidating goodwill.”
• Debate over barriers to entry: some think new competitors could undercut; others point to high capital needs, staffing rules, and trust-building as real barriers.

Broader Economic Context: Inequality, Housing, and Two-Income Norms

• Rising housing costs are repeatedly linked to wider cost-of-living pressure and degraded public services, especially in California.
• Commenters connect today’s squeeze to wealth concentration, weaker unions, lower top tax rates, and the erosion of the mid-20th-century one-income family model.
• There is tension between valuing women’s broader career options and lamenting that dual incomes now feel mandatory just to afford housing and care.

Policy and System-Level Ideas

• Proposed interventions: subsidized caregiver training, public-school-based childcare, direct subsidies, or redistributing wealth from the very rich.
• Others see these mostly as shifting, not reducing, costs—funded through general taxation or immigration (“importing taxpayers”).
• Automation is widely dismissed for childcare/pet care: too much trust, liability, and human interaction to realistically replace labor in the near term.