Cheap-Cheap

I was reading a story on Axios, about gender differences in "the Great Resignation," and how those were tied to the accessibility of child care. Near the end of the story is this sentence: "And the availability of affordable, high-quality child care remains a growing problem."

I'm not really a fan of the way that "affordable" is typically used. Mainly because affordability is a relative term. What is affordable to one person may be out of reach for another. But it's become a way of describing something as inexpensive that isn't meant to evoke poverty.

Taken this way, if one talks about the availability of inexpensive, high-quality child care, at least one problem becomes evident. For something to be both high-quality and inexpensive, the resources needed to attain the requisite level of quality need to be fairly plentiful. And is that true of the resources that go into child care? Now, I haven't worked with children in a very long time, but I remember it as a very labor-intensive industry. And while people are most certainly not a scarce resource in the scheme of things, well-educated people who are good with children and willing to spend long periods of time with them just might be. Especially if they can find other work that pays better. When I stopped working with children, I started doing quality-control work for video game software. For the same hourly wage. The benefits weren't quite the same, but given that it was a much lower-stress role, I didn't feel the need to take time off as often as I had before.

By the time I'd worked my may into testing productivity software, I was making double what I had been as a child and youth care worker. And the benefits were better. That's a hard thing for working parents to compete with.

It's also only part of the equation. There's the physical space that a child-care business needs to occupy and the materials needed to keep it operation. And there are likely other personnel requirements. Sometimes people can do double-duty, but if they aren't be paid for the other work, it just lessens the effective salary of the role.

In this sense, the use of the word "affordable," rather than "inexpensive," hides some of the constraints that are built into the system. Maybe making those constraints more apparent will create room to better understand, and perhaps then solve, the problem that people perceive.