The problem is there’s not a good historical context for the high cost of daycare and nursing homes. Just 60 years ago it was considered normal and good parenting for kids to be left unattended for most of the time. We’re taking 3 year olds wandering around town unattended. This is where some of the outdated expectations of children come from is teaching kids to survive in a world where they’re expected to be on their own for such a huge amount of their childhood

And on the flip side of the spectrum people are living far longer than they ever have so end of life care has become a decades long investment. Social security was first implemented because people who didn’t expect to live long enough to need to think about retirement suddenly found themselves too old to work but needing to make ends meet

The only window of historic context we have for the sheer cost of daycare and nursing care would be from about 1970 and later, since that would be after civil rights protections had been passed (meaning you couldn’t just pay a minority person a pittance to do the work) at a time when women really started entering the workforce in earnest, and expectations had largely become that children were not left unmonitored