Comment by denimnerd42

I think people do work to break even or even worse. You only need childcare for 4 or 5 years until the kid is old enough to go to public kindergarten. If you are 25 and take a break from the workforce for 5 years you are going to obliterate your career. meanwhile if you had been working at say 25 in NYC at 100k/year and kept working w/ the support of childcare then by 30 you could be making 150 or 200k/year. If you had stopped working 5 years you would be lucky to find that same 100k/year job again. By 30 you still have about 35 years of your career left. I wouldn't want to stunt that growth early on.