There’s a lovely, if not somewhat cheesy story about the difference between heaven and hell. In hell, there’s a huge table with a feast served, but all the guests have very long forks and so they can’t eat their delicious meal. In heaven, the scene is exactly the same, except the people are feeding each other. While this might seem a bit random, I think this parable is relevant to our daycare crisis, because in its current state, parents are in a situation where they are forced to question whether its more expensive to stay at home with their child or hire a nanny or send them to a daycare. Part of the fundamental human condition is that we emerge from our mothers, not fully formed, so we require care to develop into self-sufficient adults who can survive and hopefully thrive. In an industrial society where there are two working parents, this means “hiring care” However, either we must hire someone less qualified than ourselves to ensure we are earning more than we pay for daycare or try to benefit from group buy so that we can hire someone more qualified minus the operational costs of running the center. Whatever we do daycare unit economics are stuck with the reality that one adult can only watch a certain number of “unformed” kids without the danger of them not surviving and certainly not thriving. However, there is another issue at play. In communities where families live close to elders, grandparents, aunts and uncles are able to share the tasks of caregiving, increasing the quality and decreasing the costs. The reality of the modern work force, people living far from home and not near family, makes this more difficult. So what are we do to? It’s truly a catch-22! Where there is a will, there is a way. All over the country, families are banding together to create preschool co-ops where they share the responsibility of caregiving and/or come together and hire a teacher to watch all their children. It’s higher quality, less expensive and is actually a way that parents have come up with to hack the unit economics of daycare. Of course, there are complications, but I think there is real promise in the possibility of these collaborative forms of childcare that have emerged organically from the daycare crisis.