Yeah

... you know, you, the quality of childcare just depends on the strength and consistency of relationships between adults and children, right? You want a responsive, warm caregiver.

And so for infants and young children, that means not that many children per adult.

You know, you can't have many children in a, in a lecture hall [laughs] and-

Yeah.

But in general, other countries in, in, in Europe and, and Our peer nations in other places too provide more public funds to subsidize the childcare market, and they do it in various ways, whether it's direct provision, whether it's, um, supporting private programs, uh, vouchers.

Okay, so labor, obviously that costs a lot.

For infants, it's about 70% of the cost is labor.

So we think about wages, you think about any sort of benefits, which we hope in this era after a pandemic that a child care provider would have paid sick leave.

Many don't, but you'd hope they have paid sick leave, some vacation, retirement, specialized training that drives up wages.

So you think of one quarter of that.

those wages are paid by each family of those four infants, plus rent, plus insurance, plus utilities, and all the other things that go into a child care program.

Wow.

And it's because parents of young children are in general at the lowest earning years of their lives, right? Their careers are kind of getting off to a start at that time.