Housing costs have increased, daycare is shooting through the roof, and everyone seems to be working harder to scrape by, at least in the US.
Daycare in particular is quite painful; there are high standards, but government subsidy is so low that simultaneously parents cannot afford it and programs cannot afford to staff adequately.
The unspoken truth is daycare is highly regulated and that regulation compliance is much of the contributing factor. Either compensate constituents for the externalities of your protective legislation or go back to letting any jill turn her house into a an unlicensed daycare center which is the dirty truth of how people got by for an affordable price before.
The scientific name for this is “baumols cost disease”, namely the proposition that as productivity increases over time, the only things that will stay expensive (and even become relatively more expensive) are the things that consist primarily of labor and can’t be automated away. And childcare is the textbook example of that.
As you mention, regulations say you can’t have more than 6 children per caretaker, and tbh that’s probably not too far off the practical maximum either. Once they’re in school you can increase the ratio (a bit, ideally not to 30 either) but having a dozen infants or toddlers per caretaker means they’re getting neglected.
That’s the bind - it’s not even that it’s regulations, it’s that one person can’t keep track of a dozen mini-humans with no programming burned in yet. If you want child-rearing in a society there has to be a fairly significant fraction of the labor devoted to that, regardless of whether it’s a stay-at-home partner or grandma or a daycare center.
In turn, unless they’re slaves or massively underpaid (au pairs lol), that person needs to eat and pay for their kids’ care too. So, naively, you would expect the cost to trend towards roughly 1/6th of a typical household income (2.5 kids for 2 partners etc). Right on target.
That's certainly part of it. In my state ratio change by 3x from infant to 5 yet tuition only changes about 30% despite similar employee pay across ages.
It's quite consistent, and the explanation is largely regulatory and compliance overhead (especially required liability insurance).
Daycare in SoCal for 3 kids is > 2x our mortgage. And this is a very, very average-price school. I love the school, and they're doing their best, but the economics of daycare (for parents, teachers, and the school administration) in the US are completely broken right now.
Daycare in particular is quite painful; there are high standards, but government subsidy is so low that simultaneously parents cannot afford it and programs cannot afford to staff adequately.