why is it that the hourly wage for childcare positions so low?

What qualifications, education, etc are needed? That is - what are the barriers to entry?

Maybe there are a lot of people out there who want to stay home with their own kids, and figure, hey, why not watch some other people's kids and make some money?

As stannius suggested, it's all about supply and demand. There is a large supply of people willing and able to do child care. If you want to raise your wages you need to stand out from the crowd biy getting additional training or experience. That's pretty much true for any job.

But even those who have a technical degree or associate degree in childcare qualify for positions in schools/daycares/childcare centers and the average pay rate is around 8.00-10.00. To me, that is pretty darn low for someone who has an associate's degree. i wasn't sure if the general pay rate for childcare workers were low because the degree is not as difficult as other degrees like business or accounting.

In my experience, difficulty has very little to do with it. It's all about supply and demand. There are plenty of "easy" degrees for which a person can be paid pretty well if they work hard and there are "hard" degrees for which it is very hard to get a decent paying job.

A child care worker making $10 per hour gets paid $80 a day or $400 per week. If you add in benefits and taxes (even with no benefits the employer still pays a lot of extras like ss, unemployment insurance, workers comp, etc.), that person is costing at least $500 a week or $26000 a year. Obviously they can care for more than one child at that rate but if the costs are too high then parents would not have their kids cared for because it would not be economically rational. One parent would stay home instead.

That's the kind of thing keeping wages low in child care.

I think the hourly wage for chilcare position is very low... but they are providing a great service when the parents are not at home. You cann't count the value of proper caring and education of your child in terms of money.

Actually you can. It's called an opportunity cost.

If a parent stays home and takes care of the kids they make $0. If instead they work at a job the make money but also have to pay for childcare. Let's say they make $30000 a year. If childcare costs $30000 then there is no net benefit to working. I think most parents would assign a premium to taking care of their own kids and I think most people want to work at some job for their own professional benefit. Those tend to balance each other. The net result is that childcare workers' pay is limited by what the market will bear - what parents can make working +/- how they value caring for kids themselves and the other benefits of working at a job.

DH is correct. The wages are limited by how much a person can pay for childcare. Basically, whomever makes the lowest wage among the two parents, has to make more than the cost of day care. From what I have seen in my own area, that means making at least $1000. Not that hard for an educated person, but for someone working an hourly job(retail or whatever), that could be difficult. And that is just for one child.

If the costs went up 50% to pay higher wages to the workers, then suddenly the parent would need to net more than $1500 a week, which is probably around $45K a year gross(my math might be off there). Only experienced, educated professionals are going to be able to afford that price, and the number of customers and providers would shrink dramatically.

If you want to get into the business, I would suggest getting a license for an in-home daycare. We looked everywhere for a responsible person operating a low cost daycare out of their homes and were extremely dissapointed by the results of our search.