I do like the fact that FI people tend to rationally calculate the financial impacts of various actions, but this is exaggerated, I think. One also have to spend when it makes sense.
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Agreed
Wealth creation is not only meant for retirement but also what happens during accumulation phase
Not saying that private schooling is right or wrong. Maybe it’s just fancy and doesn’t do anything anyways. But the decision should be based on benefits to the child’s future prospects rather than cash flow of the FI portfolio.
Knowing the cost is orthogonal to the choice of spending or not.
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The cost per month or per year isn’t the right way to think about it in my view. Preschool childcare is a one off (per kid) cost. If you take put them in full time from 6 months of age to 4 years at around CHF2500 monthly that adds up to around CHF100k.
If you leave the workforce or change career to a less demanding part time job you will experience a much greater drop in lifetime earnings than 100k. If you are earning 100k it could be as little as a few year’s payback before the additional income dwarfs the 100k (per kid) childcare cost.
If you have similar earning power the most financially sensible decision is to maintain both careers as far as possible. So both try and keep same jobs, possibly with one or both of you dropping to 80% while kids are young. By not changing fields altogether you probably have the option to go back to full time if you want and your hourly rate is likely to be higher.
Of course, you may decide you’d rather have more time off with the kids when young. That’s a personal decision but don’t I don’t believe it’s a financial one.
I would say that opportunity cost is more relevant in a more straightforward situation, such as comparing two types of investment. Here you compare an investment with either consumption or a very different type of investment, which is difficult. How are you going to valuate the chance that with better education your child might have a better income and you don’t have to financially support them financially when they are 30+? You see, you can make these scenarios as complex as you care to 
.
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Evaluating something requires different information inputs. Here we are talking about just one of the inputs (the cost) and doing that more accurately doesn’t make evaluating other inputs any worse. It doesn’t make sense to say “hey, you need to also consider y and z so let’s not calculate x accurately.”