Monday, November 2, 2009

Paying working moms to stay home in Germany

Germany is considering paying moms $225 a month if they'll stay home with their kids under 3. The reasoning is just that moms should be home with their kids, and the kids should simply not be in day care. Germans seem to agree with this, since only 18% of kids under 3 are cared for by a third party. (Only? I wonder what the percent is in the US.)

The problem is that when you subtract the cost of child care (in looking around the web while writing this, I found people talking about paying $60 or so a day for preschool in Munich, and $1250 a month someplace else) from the wages a poor immigrant makes, they might make a profit by staying home, so the kids who need the child development part of child care most are most likely to lose it through this program. Child care functions as State Preschool there, where poor immigrant kids from Turkey learn to speak and act German. (And I don't want to hear about the kids keeping  their culture; I'm more concerned about them getting a good job when they're of age.)

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