Emily: after years of avoiding signing up for The Fray your article inspired me to take the plunge.

Imagine the long term effect on our country of putting some attention and money into daycare. and it would take a tiny fraction of what we spend in Iraq.

Daycare workers are true heroes, the ones who really deserve golden parachutes.

I agree. I think that we need to have a national discussion on this issue, using actual costs of helping daycare workers (and comparing them to the costs of things like the war in Iraq, the in-space missile defense system, the money the gov't gave to bail out Bear Sterns, etc.).

I do think the problem is that the wealthy people in control of this country like getting cheap daycare (for them, it's cheap to pay for an illegal nanny, etc.) and don't really want their situation to change.

As for child care tax credits, until the gov't decides that the national birth rate is none of its business (it's trying to encourage births), then it will have one hand in the pot. Since we benefited from this credit, I have nothing against it! However, I do think that either you support childcare or you don't, and our gov't tries to have it both ways.

Yes, I agree this requires attention at a collective level. One thing that bothered me in the article was the implication that the low pay is mainly a result of individual parents insisting on low cost daycare. In my experience, parents are willing to pay a lot for quality care, although of course there are limits on what they can afford. Those paying full price at the facility under discussion were paying up to $275 per week, or roughly $1100 per month. At the high quality university daycare I use for my son, full time toddler-care costs near $1300 per month, and full time infant-care near $1500. If you have a toddler and an infant in at the same time, as I will next year, this means paying close to $2800 per month on daycare. Not cheap by any estimation. Even if you have a decently paying faculty position it's hard to manage. (Students pay somewhat less.) I do not know exactly what the workers are paid at our center, but I've heard that it's not much better than average. So, if parents are paying this much and the costs of running a quality center are so high that they still cannot pay decent salaries, I think we need to talk about increased government subsidization. That would require national attention to the respects in which quality daycare is a social good, worthy of tax payer support, and so forth.

Would you be willing to pay your whole salary to someone to care for your child?

If I were a single parent, obviously the answer is no. At full price this particular daycare would be unaffordable for almost any single parent. For a non-single parent, the answer is not so simple. As part of a two-parent, dual-career family where my husband and I have the same jobs and make the same amount, we consider half the bill to come out of each of our salaries. Even if the total added up to one full salary, we'd have to weigh the cost of paying that for a couple of years against the life-time cost (including, importantly, to our children's standard of living) of one of us entirely giving up his or her career and the income stream associated with that. The profession is not one that you can leave and re-enter, nor is it one in which scaling back to part time work is an option. Many academic couples are in the same boat. Anyhow, I'm not sure what spirit your question is asked in. These are difficult decisions for all parents, with costs and benefits associated with all choices. I was merely calling into question the idea that parents are in general guilty of putting downward pressure on daycare workers' salaries low by demanding "cheap" daycare.