It's getting better - especially since the pandemic - but most jobs are not remotely flexible enough to deal with school hours or sick children. Nursery is insanely expensive in most countries. I really think a mortgage style option would make a lot of sense here because it's a ton of money for a short time. Or, just make it free like some countries do (and the Tories pretended to do in the UK).

Life still assumes only one parent will work. Our school regularly schedules meetings and events in the middle of the day at short notice and expects that will be fine.

So the problem is a bit of a prisoners dilemma: you need to be able to rely on this group (having to scramble to find another solution is OK a few times a year, but not 3 times a month), but you also don't want to be 'tied down'.

So the alternative is to have lots of rules and required 'volunteering'. Which basically turns into the same as 'real' daycare, except that you have to take the day off to do your 'volunteering' (in the case of 2 working parents). So it's just scrambling to solve all the problems that money is supposed to solve (be a fungible store of value), but while at all costs keeping 'money' out of it.

Having been involved with attempts at systems like this, and having observed the problems in a few others, I no longer think it's feasible, at least not for dual income career oriented people. The places where I've seen it (more or less - it wouldn't work as a lifestyle for me) work are of the type of the mommy group of stay-at-home-parents, but those are hardly comparable to real daycare.

And you're only counting the benefits of daycare, but ignoring the opportunity cost of less time with parents and the benefits that come from that.

I don't disagree that there are benefits to daycare, but where is the optimum? A few hours a day? Or the kids in daycare from 8am to 6pm, so they see their parents for maybe 2 hours a day before bed time?

Great! In America, some schools do provide these sorts of programs, called "after-care" for people who cannot take charge of their children after school time. They are typically not handled by teachers, and you have to pay extra for them. There are solutions like kibbutz, which other countries have implemented, that would be a good fit as well.

In practice, I have observed that enough parents do seem to be able to handle their childcare (where I live) that it's not a free program that's paid for by society through increased taxes. But that's a possible option as well.

I could have all of the free time in the world, and childcare would still be better for the kid than entirely time at home.

Imagine if we had schools that at younger age emphasized good manners, being respectful and helpful to parents and allowing for full work days in 2 job households. And then at some point shifted towards practical skills best suited for each individual child - someone is a budding nuclear scientist, someone is better of training as an electrician. I bet parents would love those teachers and not begrudge them good pay.

(There are other fallacies here, too -- like the idea that some centralized broker is an efficient solution. Monopolies efficient? And if you have a competitive market for the brokers, that seems to undermine a lot of the benefit, or at least make this idea much more complicated.)

The real concern is whether families have the choice to keep their kids home a bit more (i.e., say not every weekday) rather than force them to use daycare because they don't have time not to.

If both parents are working, the rest of the non-work hours are going to be consumed by cooking (if there is time for that, or else expensive prepared meals), cleaning, household chores, errands, and everything else people need to do to keep functioning.

>Nevermind that the kind of unstructured play with other kids at day care is exactly what young kids need anyway.

I don't really know what the point in this comment is. Do you think kids outside of daycare don't do unstructured play with other kids?

The system wants parents working and yielding maximum economic output at all costs, kids be damned. It was very visible with the COVID-19 pandemic. At least in my country, a minor research paper with small sample size finding that kids in some age groups spread the virus less than adults (while kids in other age groups spread it more) was prominently featured in the media saying simply that "scientists had found that kids don't spread the virus", while other contemporary studies saying that of course they do (as common sense suggests) were never mentioned. Of course, this was used as an argument to open schools and nurseries as soon as possible so parents could go to work (in theory it was because of education... yeah, sure).

The following I suppose is more country-specific, but in recent years, in my country, nursery schools have been officially renamed to "children's schools", with years having numbers (1st from 0-1 year, etc.) so it's indistinguishable from the latter school where they actually, you know, teach them things, and even uttering the word equivalent to "nursery school" is increasingly frowned upon by people who says "it's not nursing, it's education". And of course, language shapes reality so the underlying convenient idea is catching on, I have already heard parents who have the time to take care at their kids at home taking there instead because "they will learn more", "it's for their education" and such things, when anyone who has had a 1-year-old knows that what they most need is the undivided attention that they won't have in a room with 6-7 more kids and a single adult.

The public discourse becomes more and more focused on making us think that parenting has to take a back seat to today's work culture (lest we start to think that maybe we should change work culture to accommodate parenting) so I'm not surprised in the least that convenient scientific results start coming up on how parenting doesn't matter. (Not accusing the scientists behind the study of anything, by the way. Different scientists can legitimally reach different conclusions, but then the media chooses what to feature and how to frame it, like in the COVID example above).