Edit: before you read this, I want you to understand that I am not giving a flippant answer. I spent a half hour of my own working day to draft this response.
Childhood education is a mechanism that reproduces the existing social order, by transmitting the dominant culture—shared outlook, beliefs, knowledge, and skills which influence one’s educational and occupational opportunities—and legitimizing the inequalities that result from it.
Parents are training their children on employers behalf—to the child's detriment—when they, for example, encourage their children to adopt the dominant language, accent, dress code, manners, hobbies, and tastes. (This is especially true of extrametropolitan families.) Likewise, when parents limit their children’s exposure to their own culture and language (even only as an opportunity cost), they are complicit in reproducing the dominant cultural superstructure which principally benefits the dominant economic institutions and only incidentally benefits the workers these children go into—if at all.
Parents who cook, clean, and care for their children are providing essential services that enable their children to grow up healthy, educated, and productive. These services have a monetary value. Parents are owed wages from the employers who hire their children in the future and profit from their skills and abilities. Since we can't predict the future to track individual employers down, we might implement a form of insurance which would wring compensation from the private sector en mass.
Having kids is a benefit to society. Even though nobody has kids "for the greater good", it still is in everyone's interest that there is a strong upcoming generation. I think it's not unreasonable for a society to pay parents who decide to stay at home during the first years for their efforts, if only to make having kids sufficiently attractive.
Lots of people just can't afford to stay home and capitalism makes it hard enough to rejoin the workforce after 3 years, let alone advance your career. A societal advance in this regard would also be needed imo
This is where theory and practice collide. In theory, society should pay parents. In practice, paying parents results in incentivizing the people you do not want being parents into having more kids.
What society really wants is to incentivize good parents to have kids, but that is nowhere near possible to measure and implement.
actually it is possible: education. basically, the reason one might not want some people to have kids is their lack of education. provide them with better education and that "problem" goes away.
Sorry, I missed the “first years” portion of your comment. I had originally read it as simply paying people to be stay at home parents for the whole time they have children at home.
Paid parental leave up until at least breastfeeding is done is a no brainer.
Just spitballing, here, but maybe some sort of voucher system to distribute leave among all your "alloparents?" But that's hard to systematize. Probably the simplest thing is simply to increase wages and PTO across the board, and let workers/consumers act on their own priorities.
no need for vouchers. we just need the right and the support for more people to work part time. that right for example is already law in germany. the problem is that not many people make use of it, partly because it would reduce their income but partly also because there is no broad social support for people to reduce their worktime in order to do other useful things.
Sounds like parents too tired from work making up reasons why being exploited past the point where they can care for their kids is actually a good thing.
