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Wellness Wednesday for November 23, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Yeah, and OP made it a bit clearer in another comment that the point of the post is strictly to solicit career-trajectory advice, rather than to examine plans pertaining to spouse and children, so this is all rendered somewhat tangential anyway. Ah, well.

Some states do have private school vouchers of various kinds, there are also tax rebates and of course many private schools offer scholarships. It's difficult to commensurate costs and benefits in the realm of child-raising for many reasons (not that this stops anyone, including me, from trying), but one that I think COVID-driven remote work expansions really highlighted was the possibility of spending more on a house in a good school district, to spend less on private schooling. If you've only got an average number of children, this likely represents only a small savings, but if you have 4+ children (OP seems to have some children and specifies wanting "more") the savings can stack up quickly--even at only $10k/year.

This also kind of overlooks the fact that the "private school advantage" is much more legible in the UK than in the US. There are some good private K-12 schools in the US for sure, but usually when I see stark opportunity or income gaps being discussed in the literature, it's UK schools under examination. In the US, private and public charter academies vary in quality as much as, and arguably even more than, neighborhood and public magnet schools. I admit that--while there are no doubt many good counterexamples!--I personally view suburban $10k private schools as kind of weird; they don't generally appear to outperform suburban neighborhood schools (the way urban private schools are almost always superior to nearby public alternatives), so it's hard for me to see suburban private schools in the US as anything but opportunities for the middle and upper-middle classes to participate in a cargo cult of pretend-wealth.