Heads up: This post is 15 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
Wife and baby arrived in Tokyo last Thursday.
OMG! How do you people raise a kid without a domestic helper?!
This made me think today, a couple of weeks ago @HKGCIO went to a Startup Monday event at BootHK and my friend @jonbuford was asking on Twitter how the HKG gov can help promote Startups in Hong Kong. There were some good answers:
If my friends are any indication, Internet Startups Entrepreneurs tend to be young and just starting to have a family. It’s a long way round, but improving childcare benefits for young families should really help us… well… get time to do work! :D
(Also, improving the chances of developers and creatives of procreating a next generation certainly helps the long term outlook of a place! :)
Anyways.. baby asleep, finally can start to do some work…
Comments#
Nicholas Wang — 2010-12-21 02:59:35
Friend replied on Facebook, “grandparents usually help out”.Sure, and people hire domestic helpers too… but I’m talking about bigger benefits… like free health care for kids under 18 (Japan has that), free domestic helpers specifically for families with new borns (France has that, I think), and gov subsidized childcare centers… not the kind of stupid play group shit where they start force feeding kids with memorization or conforming to rules and shit… we don’t want to send our kids to obedience schools meant for dogs!!What would be really nice is if local communities and friends can organize their own childcare systems… like, I would love to home school my kids but I can’t do it 24/7, if a group of parents can take turns, I bet those kids will be much better off than anything any childcare or school “business” can offer!