Childcare is like lawn service

I saw this post.

mom chat this morning, my sitter quit and another’s nanny’s fill in ghosted. childcare is a nightmare and there are no solutions whatsoever.

— Pamela J. Hobart (@amelapay) March 19, 2024

She followed up with additional comments:

this was actually my biggest surprise when I became a mom. even if you’re willing and able to pay it’s an incredible stress and time consumer to arrange.

training up a stranger at $25/hr so you can get a pap smear or take another child to asthma appointment is… the opposite of a break.

getting someone reliable and actually easy to work with usually requires a significant minimum commitment like 20hrs/week. That is luxurious and expensive for SAHM and nowhere near enough to work meaningfully either

No intention to bash the young lady, nor criticize.  But it does touch on a mindset, perspective, and trade-offs.

I had lunch with a friend yesterday and we were discussing a phenomenon in both our neighborhoods (ten miles apart, entirely different parts of town.)  Thirty years ago, on Saturday mornings, many people would be out (depending on the season and weather) doing yard work.  You got air, exercise, and saw and talked with neighbors.  

In those thirty years, it has changed.  Almost everyone has lawn services now with the attendant noise of mowers and leaf blowers, on any day of the week.  Gone are the individual health benefits of exercise and the knitting up of neighborhood ties.  

Why?

In my mind, it is obvious.  We all became more prosperous.  More people can afford lawn care.  Possibly amplified by a lowering cost of labor given the prevalence of non-English speaking workers in the sector.  As people become more productive (and higher income) they are buying back time from low productivity activities such as yard work (except where that is an actual hobby).  

It is a process of more or less unconscious decisions.  No one set out to have residents do less lawn work but that is the consequence of declining service costs and rising consumer incomes.  And there are the consequences, potentially, of reduced public health, more noise pollution, more traffic congestion, etc.  

Distributed trade-off decisions with an observable outcome.  No point in complaining about it.  Do your own lawn or not.  Visit with your neighbors or not.  Have more time for other activities or not.  All are viable, legal and reasonable trade-offs.  

Hobart's thread reminded me of that conversation, especially her observation that 

There are no solutions whatsoever.

Really?  That is obviously not true.  Why does she say that?

Clearly it is the vernacular way of saying "There are no solutions whatsoever that I find acceptable."  Or, more revealingly, ""There are no other trade-off choices which I find acceptable."

I suspect everyone can empathize with the irritation and frustration when plans go awry.  Someone fails to show up for the job or shows up but in no capacity to perform.  Materials are misplaced.  A critical path item or activity is delayed.  Everyone has this happen.  The details differ as do the magnitude of the consequences, but we all experience plans frustrated by people and circumstance.

There is an implied expectation in the thread that mothers, both working and stay at home, ought to be able to have reliable, cheap, safe, easy to work with, on call labor.  Yes, that would be nice.  Has it ever existed anywhere?  No, not as it is being conceptualized in the thread.

What has been the norm is family and friends to pick up the slack when things go awry in a family.  The grandmother or grandfather, siblings of the parents, aunts, uncles, neighbors or friends.

When we had large families who stayed geographically close to one another across time, when there were plenty of people in the neighborhood with whom we formed friendships, this was absolutely a solution.  Typically, The solution.  

Why did we give up large families, why did we start living apart, why did we invest less in local neighborhood relationships?  Because we got more opportunities to make different decisions with better or more desirable outcomes.

Smaller families allow greater investment in those remaining.  Moving away to better career opportunities enables career and income improvement.  More time working reduces our hours with social neighbors and forces us to prioritize the few hours remaining to be spent with our strongest friendships which are not necessarily with neighbors.

In other words, Hobart has made a series of decisions (pursue career and financial opportunities) which have reduced some other goods and services which she liked (family and friend assistance).  She made a trade-off decision.  And nobody can claim she made a bad choice.  De gustibus non est disputandum.  

When we were talking about lawn services, the key observation was that prosperity (owing to increased productivity) has crept up on everyone, allowing them to make different trade-off decisions than in the past and some of our nostalgia for the past is a nostalgia for things we chose (often unconsciously) to give up because we were able to choose something better.  That's what Hobart's thread reads as to me.

We might hanker for on-demand free, safe, reliable childcare, but that has never existed and won't.  We might wish for free, self-maintaining, effective lawn service where everything in the garden is healthy, green, and beautiful with no effort, but that has never existed and won't.  Instead, we make trade-off decisions.

The easy response to people lamenting cheap safe on-demand child care or lamenting the noise of leaf blowers and the congestion of lawn service trucks is to roundly criticize those people as lap-of-luxury, First World Problem, whiners.  

True to a degree.  

But what I suspect it actually reflects is the discombobulation arising from the fact that never have so many been so productive and so prosperous and had so many good choices to make and that consequently we don't have the personal and social or cultural norms that allow us to make more and better trade-off decisions more gracefully.  Such lamenting can come dangerously close to appearing to be victimhood complaining - look at all the good problems I have.  

I am reasonably confident that it not usually the intent.  I suspect it is just a consequence that we have never been in this situation before and therefore we lack the social class, religious, and cultural coding which would allow us to be better at recognizing the trade-off decision-making process, how to navigate it, and how to be comfortable with the consequences of it.

There is one further consequence from this line of thinking.  If we accept that rising productivity and consequent prosperity necessarily means we have to make more complicated trade-off decisions than we were able to afford in the past, one of the implications is that we are also more responsible for our own outcomes than in the past.

In 1500, random chance and borderline poverty for everyone meant that everyone was substantially subject to the whims of random fate and fortune.  Work as hard as you might, bad weather, plague, pestilence, war, etc. was more likely to determine your outcomes than you were.  

Nowadays? The four horseman aren't dead, but they are mostly stabled.  People can determine their outcomes to a far greater extent than they used to be able to do.  Which means that there is no longer and there is less real opportunity to blame anyone else than ourselves.  Which is also an unpleasant outcome.