$2K/month for two kids in flyover country at what amounts to the only day-care in the area. That's just the day-care costs, not counting the additional missed work from every bowel-voiding illness they bring home! Have to pick them up by 16:30.
Our parents' parents were primarily not paying for day-care. It still seems quite odd to their generation to have mom work to pay for someone else to watch the kids.
$2k/mo is a lot, but it can be avoided if one parent stays home. Helps with the illness-spreading and inconvenient pickup times, too. If you're in "flyover" country and there's only one day-care in the area, it's likely that's what a lot of the other households are doing.
Fun fact, like 80% of the kids at that particular day-care are there on "scholarship." Not sure exactly what that means, being as how they're not likely to be there on intellectual merit at this age, but it looks like care is partially or completely subsidized by the government. I'm for affordable care, but it seems like the same perverse incentives that have caused the cost of college to go up like they have.
Ultimately, our solution was that I now take the kids to work with me. I run my own business, and it's not really conducive to having kids there (light industrial/light manufacturing), but day-care costs were literally more than half my wife's take-home pay, and she's a PhD mathematician in a tenured position at a state university. My productivity suffers, but due to the economic downturn from the coronavirus pandemic, we actually come out ahead.
The biggest challenge is working remote has shown a better way for many in mid-career. I hope they prioritize their own lifestyle instead of someone else's
Yeah I'm hoping mgmt can't claw WFH back, a lot of the folks I know still doing mostly programming or desk-job engineering work have seen a significant improvement in both their personal lives and the development of their children from WFH.
