That would mean there is a correlation between salary and added value to society. I honestly doubt that and even if my salary is rather average in this forum, I would say that the my added value to society is rather low to some other, lower income jobs.
And I actually got a quite meaningful job optimising wastewater treatment plants…
Yep. And nice to be able to discuss all our different opinion 
it’s refreshing in this polarized world.
I totally get the choice to reduce work time to take care of kids. Having to pay someone to take care of your kid to allow you going to work to make money to pay this person… it’s like a total absurd circle that baffled me at times.
My mother stopped working for almost 7 years to raise their 4 kids, while my father earn low income. So at the beginning, the idea to put our kid 100% in kita was hard for me. I felt guilty, like to abandon him…
But after seeing how he love it to be with his friend, how it help him develop, it changed my view on it. And the weeks of confinement this year finished convinced me that the kindergarten was doing a hell of a job with kids.
They’re doing lots of different activities everyday, feed them well, develop them… which I found extremely hard to do it on a daily basis for a long period of time! (Especially while trying to work remote at the same time…) Having my first kid at 38yo doesn’t help either, has it’s sometime hard to follow up energy wise!
I guess nothing is all black or white…
Maybe it’s a try to eliminate a potential cause-effect relationship? Vasectomy → less kids → less stress → less hairloss? Can’t this theory held against a jury? 
I think we can add child support that is paid in most canton. I don’t have the exact number in mind as it is my wife managing it, but it is something like around 10-12k per kid yearly if I recall correctely.
Amen to that.
Tough subject. Is a nurse’s “value to society” higher than a programmers? Our intuition would tell us so. After all, nurse’s job is very demanding and she/he is directly helping people in need. Whereas a programmer just sits there where nobody sees him and does stuff nobody understands. On an empathic level, he has no chance to compete.
But we should not trust our intuition regarding matters like this. The society tells what it wants through economic demand. They want to watch their favourite club win, so footballers earn millions. With one kick of a ball, millions are satisfied. The same with hitting the key of a keyboard.
I have a good friend that works with kids and also met someone else that worked in the social and both basically told me that you can’t simply move millions of africans here and hope they will fill the spots. You need at least a second generation (or even a third?) to see them being able to compete. The reason is simply education. The people that come are not enough educated to compete and I’m even talking about kids that go to school here. It seems that learning is really not only done in school but even at home. Note that for the society this is for now good, since they will fill all the jobs that people living here don’t want to do, but on the long run you can’t continue this way probably. The only hope is to see Africa rise or to have some other proxy country inbetween.
Weird topic.
This analogy lol
Such immigration is a touchy topic & discussion can quickly become or at least feel “racist” or some user can feel personally insulted.
Compete? I believe most such immigrants have done / do simple jobs first, their children move up a bit and their grandchildren “compete”.
That’s the way it’s always been, mostly, with such immigration, no? Why should it stop working?
It’s not ideal, but lacking insufficient home-grown population, I believe one can continue this way, when done in moderation / not 4 billion at once.
Agree. But I’m not sure if it always worked this way and if people understand that.
Also note that it worked because we were technologically different. In the 50ies, Switzerland didn’t have IT jobs.
It is a tough one, and I would not dare to say which job is worth more or not. I am merely thinking that there is a discrepancy between added value and society. A programmer is not worth 2 or 3 nurses, and that is pretty easy to prove : just stop working and see what happens, your projects got delayed until someone else picks it up. You remove 2 or 3 nurses from an intensive care station, people will die (with Corona or not, does not matter).
Take a less easy example : The guy bringing your trash away. I guess some Soutern Italy guys can tell us what happens when it does not get removed in a timely matter from the street. Or just go once to SEA to see the impact.
And finally there is a bias in your thinking : you align interests of todays economy with the interest of the society as a whole. Unfortunately, this is not the case right now. Otherwise we would have already solved climate change problems etc.
Football is just an extreme example of the misalignment.
Going back to childcare cost. Economy and Society needs well educated, well socialised people, but at least in Switzerland this seems not a priority and this should be a private matter. I do not think so, Taxes should be and could be used for that, to create a more equalitarian society where it does not depends on your luck in which family you are born that you gonna be successful or not (at least reduce that factor as much as possible).
In the end, I would stress out that I do not believe that everyone should earn the same, but at least everyone who does full time work should be able to earn enough for a dignified life. Secondly, I think the disparity of salaries just goes out of hand. The work of the guys on the top are not worth 20x-30x or more than the guys on the bottom.
Indeed! 
To summarise the “plus”-side financially p.a. per child (very simplified)
Tax savings 5k
Kinderzulagen & Familienzulagen 5k (generous company, I think your 10k may be for 2?)
Below 180k gross family income the Kita is partially paid by Gemeinde.
Below 120k family income the Kita is fully paid.
Values can vary strongly in different places.
For us the 40% Kita-presence costs are almost covered by the tax savings & Zulagen.
The most massive financial influence is the loss in income, together we work 140% instead of 200% before.
For a one-child household that dwarfs any Kita costs.
In second place for us is rent.
Our rent has almost tripled (32k instead of 12k) as we lived very cheaply before (away a lot, not a lot of stuff) and now (always home 
, lots of stuff). Of course it’s a much nicer flat, and by choice, but still rental expense increased 20k “just like that”.
It was meant to sound a bit funny, glad it worked
These are poor examples and I will try to prove it with a counter-example. You can’t just say “imagine if a programmer/nurse went missing”. It doesn’t prove much. I could also say: imagine toilet paper went missing from a public toilet when you were sitting on the loo. Would you value t.p. more than the smartphone you’re holding? Does it mean t.p. is worth more? Subjective value of an object/service for a particular human in a particular moment does not scale up to the average for the whole economy. A bottle of water on the desert is worth more than gold. But in an abundant economy it isn’t. So if a nurse goes missing, it’s a short-term tragedy, but you will find another one willing to do the job (apparently, if it wasn’t the case, nurses would earn more).
I feel bad discussing this because I know it will piss off a lot of people. “No, of course a nurse is worth much more, they earn too little, we should pay them more!!!”. I’m just saying: just because you think the prices set by the free market are broken, it doesn’t mean they are…
May I try to give another point of view based on one of my experience?
I work in IT as well, former engineer now Portfolio/Project Manager for years, in different industries (Air Travel, Bank, Medtech…)
In 2014 I took a year of to travel. I joined my sister on her field study in Congo, where she was studying Pygmees, deep in the rainforest. I spend a bit less than a month with her and them, in the forest with 95% moist, 40°C, no running water or electricity, and 5 walking days from the nearest “village”.
The village/community chief (not really a chief as they are a non-hierarchical society, but let say the natural group leader) was a nice guy who should have been around 35-40yo (hard to date their ages as they don’t have calendar or dates, just “tomorrow”, “soon”, “yesterday” or “before” exist in their language…). One time he went with my sister in the closest small “city” (1 week travel) to buy some stuff, weapons fur hunting, machetee…
Not the first time he was out of his forest. However he find himself stuck in a room, because the door was closed and he didn’t know how to use a door handle. Yes… Later on, because they asked me, I had to try to explain to this guy what I was doing for a living…
As you can imagine, trying to explain to a guy who don’t know how a door work and don’t need time or date to live, that your job is to create Excels and PowerPoint on a computer, sitting on your ass all day long revealed to be very hard. And a real eye-opener for me.
Reality is that most of our high paying jobs aren’t producing anything concrete. They exist only because of the economic model we live in, and the economic model need them to continue to be in place. It’s a circle that feed himself. It create the need, and by fulfilling it’s need you create itself. If you don’t produce food, shelter or health, you basically just her to feed the system that feed you. No judgement here, just my observation of how the life work, from my point of view.
After that I tried since to have jobs that give me at least the impression of doing/create something, bring something to humanity (not society). Hard to keep the same income by doing it, but at least I feel more in line with myself.
TLDR : yes, I think a nurse is more valuable that us IT guys 
unless you are the one maintening/developping the computer the nurse absolutely need…
P.S : sorry for making the diverted thread divert even more!
Not as flagrant as an expericence you had, but having worked in India for 9 months had kind of the same effect on me.
Another one being that I should stop complaining, I have it good.
Yeah those reality checks from time to time help you to stay happy or value what you have in live. I went to Senegal in 2014 (during the Ebola crisis…) just for 4 days but seeing different African people coming together with their ancient computer hardware and sometimes tribal clothing gave me a lasting impression on how different live must be for them.
Again: just how hard the working conditions are does not prove how useful a job is. But I really don’t want to discuss it further, I don’t think anyone will get convinced one or the other way…
Maybe to lead this thread back on it’s original meaning: Are there specific reasons why people don’t consider “Tagesmutter” (aka private child care) and “Au-Pair” options more often? Is it really because of the socializing aspect of the expensive KiTas?
Shouldn’t it be more expensive ?
I was just guessing that 5 kids in one KITA will make the thing less expensive than one persone for one kid…
And for Aupair you have to plan a room in advance…
One thought regarding this: if you’re a stay at home mom (if you decide to raise your kid instead of going to work), you theoretically have the capacity to look after a few more kids (maybe 2, maybe 3). So that would be some extra income to consider: raising your own kid and taking care of the kid of a friend/neighbor. Do you know any such private childcare providers? Or is it too exhausting for young moms to do this?
But I’m somewhat convinced that there would be a breakeven at around 3-5 full days in KiTa vs. higher rent for the extra room. The Au-Pair model is somewhat abusive as you pay the person no “real” salary as they usually have no formal education for taking care of the kids. It’s basically students who want to earn something on the side.
As an example a Chinese friend of mine used to take care of two kids for 3 (or 6) months in a family in Zurich and got food, accomodation and pocket money of 700 CHF per month (plus one free day iirc Sunday or so).
But that is not everywhere. We get 200 CHF per month for a child (Familienzulage) and Kita is only susidised until I think around 80k income. We do not have a Kita in our village, but the one in the next village is 125 CHF per day until 18 months and 110 from 18 months.
It is called “Maman du jour”. It is less expensive, but the quality vary greatly, you have less control on what the kids are doing all day, the value she’s teaching etc…
On my opinion it’s too much of a gamble to risk your kid. And as awesome a one women can do, she’ll never be as efficient as a whole group of professionals taking care of several child at the same place.
Regarding the “au pair” I would have loved it, but as it is often young women from abroad, my wife just put a big NO stop sign on the idea 
They are usually called “Tagesmutter” and are significantly cheaper than regular KiTas. But again there might be no formal education/training for teaching the kids anything useful, while KiTas might have some real concepts like focusing on music or weekly forest play days.