Just how Bad is Daycare? A Chilling Case Study & Literature Review

In this eye-opening episode, Malcolm and Simone share their personal experience of taking a huge risk by pulling their three children out of daycare and opting for a more unconventional childcare arrangement with their neighbors. They discuss the staggering costs of daycare for middle-class families and the surprising improvements they noticed in their son's behavior and the family's overall health after making the switch. The couple also delves into the long-term effects of frequent illnesses in early childhood and the controversial findings of the Tennessee Volunteer Pre-Kindergarten Program study. Throughout the conversation, they offer practical advice on how to create a sustainable and mutually beneficial childcare arrangement within your community. Join Malcolm and Simone as they challenge conventional wisdom and share their insights on prioritizing children's well-being.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this, We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard. Like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be here with you today. Something really shocking happened to us recently. We took a giant gamble on how we were handling our children's childcare.

So before this, we were sending our children to a daycare facility. And if you are not at the lower end of income in Pennsylvania, that means you are paying for that all out of pocket. So by the time we got to children number three, three at a I'd say like a low [00:01:00] range to mid range facility in terms of cost.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: This is costing us what was it? 5, 400 a month?

Simone Collins: It was we paid 1, 193 every week and that's 62, 036 a year. Insane. So that's

Malcolm Collins: just for three kids?

Simone Collins: Just for three kids.

Malcolm Collins: With the fourth kid on the way, we basically decided this, and keep in mind, we're in suburban or really ex urban. Pennsylvania.

We are. Friends of

Simone Collins: ours looked at our daycare bills and said, this is, you're so lucky. I wish I could be paying this.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Who would live in like New York and Philadelphia.

So this is almost as inexpensive as it gets unless you're in an extremely rural area.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Or unless you are low income. And we actually know people also actually who intentionally manipulate their income.

Yeah. In a way that probably the IRS would not be happy about to qualify for subsidized daycare because it makes that much of a difference. 62, 000, that's a [00:02:00] generous salary for someone. That's yeah. Yeah. And this is why a lot of people are like why bother? Working when all of it would literally go to daycare and keep in mind.

Of course, it's post tax dollars

Malcolm Collins: I'd point in mind this was only Three kids. Yeah, this is the minimum number of kids we could have and be above replacement rate This is the yeah. No, I mean it's it's insane. Yeah, so to be above replacement rate in the u. s. You And you are not in poverty, you need to be extremely wealthy.

And this does part to show why you do get this higher fertility rates on the really low end, because there just isn't a cost to additional kids when the state's offering to pay for everything. In the same way that there is an enormous cost to additional kids for the middle class. I need to go further with our experiment because something came down to, we realized we couldn't, keep affording this as we moved on with our family.

So we're like, we need to find a new sustainable solution. And this got really interesting for us because we had [00:03:00] tried au pairs before and we had found that they were fairly entitled.

Simone Collins: It was just like

Malcolm Collins: having an extra kid.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Babysitters live in nannies, the whole thing, all of it. We tried everything.

Malcolm Collins: Even like PhD students, we tried bringing over to our house to work. And so We ended up trying something that a lot of people said, you guys are insane to be doing this,

Simone Collins: here's what we ended up deciding to do and try. And this was a big risk for us is we have neighbors who were willing to basically do a child care pool with us, and we know many families that have done this before where they live right next to other families.

In this case, it was actually a couple that was soon to have a family whose business we're helping to get started and they're really interested in doing like some communal child care, sharing resources, things like that. So pulling resources together in that classic community way. So some people are doing with this with friends, we did it with neighbors that we didn't really know that well.

And so we were really nervous [00:04:00] because everyone, whenever you go as a parent to the pediatrician, for example, and this is something only Malcolm does, I stay home and keep doing whatever it is I do. And Malcolm does all the kid errands. The pediatricians constantly shame him, like, how many words does this kid speak now and what are their milestones with this?

And so you are constantly afraid that if you do not have some kind of professional team, making sure that your child meets these weird, arbitrary. learning milestones, you're gonna be the worst parent ever. And that if we went to a less structured education format or childcare format for our three kids, the things would just totally go off the rails.

They'd be bored out of their mind. They would complain about it. They wouldn't want to spend time with this couple. And I

Malcolm Collins: know what they do with the couple. So they do about an hour a day of teaching learning to read or something like that. And other than that, the kids just basically do whatever they want.

They've got a room to themselves and they play amongst themselves. So going into this situation, this was an enormous risk. Because it's not easy to get kids in [00:05:00] daycare. That's the thing. Like you pull your kids out. That doesn't mean you can get them back in.

Simone Collins: In fact, we've been on one daycare list.

I never bothered to take us off of it. We've been on for over a year

Malcolm Collins: at this point. So we started having our kids stay with them. And fortunately for us one of our kids who is autistic was in ABA therapy which is a form of therapy for autism. It's controversial because it basically just teaches kids how to mask that they're autistic and pretend that they're not.

And some people are like autism rights, people shouldn't have to pretend. And it's

Simone Collins: yeah, but they need to, but let's be realistic. You got to fake it.

Malcolm Collins: Yep. We have graphs on all of his behavior and it was night and day. The two scenarios, a standard. Like mid to low end daycare versus just staying in a house with minimal supervision, doing whatever they want all day.

So we're talking

Simone Collins: tantrums plummeting.

Malcolm Collins: Let's do some of these graphs on [00:06:00] screen so people can see. So I'll start with,

Frequency of aggression dotted line here is when he started staying at