Policy experts note that public opinion about a particular topic is deeply shaped by at the time. These frameworks are frequently contested through implicit and explicit messages that go out through media, as well as topical debates in the political arena. The political scientist Deborah Stone puts it this way: “Ideas are at the center of all political conflict. Policymaking, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification; the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.”

A classic example . When nuclear power was primarily seen as a new source of cheap energy, it drew a great deal of support. When it became seen as an environmental danger — influenced by real-life accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as fictional media portrayals — public support cratered. Today, some environmentalists are trying to intentionally insert a third frame whereby nuclear power is seen as in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change; they face an uphill battle.

Or take a question closer to child care’s wheelhouse: public schools. While schools inarguably serve a child care function (sorry, ), that is not generally seen as their primary purpose. Instead, schools are defined by their educational impact. Whether that education is at successful careers, civic engagement, personal self-actualization or something else certainly remains contested, but the overarching frame of schools = education is set.

When it comes to child care, America seems to be experiencing what psychologist William James described as the first moments of an infant’s life: a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Particularly in an era when child care is finally getting widespread attention instead of being relegated to a component of welfare, we have yet to answer the questions: what is child care and who is it for? In many cases, we have yet to even ask those questions.

Is child care primarily a work support for parents? Is it child development that helps kids with early learning and growth? Is it a way to reduce family stress and increase family functioning? Is it social infrastructure that connects parents, a la libraries and parks? Is it intended to promote gender equity? Who counts as a valid child care provider? Is the goal to have a minimum level of adequate child care that keeps costs low or to have abundant, first-rate child care settings with well-compensated educators? Heck, we can’t even agree on definitions: is child care policy about ages birth to 5? Birth to 8? Birth to 13? Birth to 18?

You’re probably thinking that child care is not just one thing, and that much of the above list is not mutually exclusive. You’d of course be correct. But ‘not just one thing’ doesn’t obviate the need, again, for a primary frame. Right now, we’re not even trying to hash out what that primary frame is, and so we often end up talking past one another.

Comments regarding child care made by Vance and Kamala Harris in recent months illustrate this societal confusion.

In an August Face the Nation , Vance responded to questions about his opposition to universal child care proposals: “what I’ve opposed is one model of child care. We, of course, want to give everybody access to child care. But look, in my family, I grew up in a poor family where the child care was my grandparents, and a lot of these child care proposals do nothing for grandparents. If you look at some of these proposals, they do nothing for stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home dads. I want us to have a child care policy that’s good for all families, not just a particular model of family, and that’s what I’ve said.”

Harris, meanwhile, the following during an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists: “the state of affairs in our country that working people often have to decide to either be able to work or be able to afford childcare 
 they can’t afford childcare and actually do the work that they want to do because it’s too expensive, and it doesn’t actually level out in terms of the expense versus the income. My plan is that no family — no working family should pay more than 7 percent of their income in childcare, because I know that when you talk about the return on that investment, allowing people to work, allowing people to pursue their dreams in terms of how they want to work, where they want to work, benefits us all. It strengthens the entire economy.”

As you can see, these are not two sides of a coin. This isn’t, ‘I think public schools should get more money, you think we should universalize school vouchers’ or ‘I think there should be a single-payer health care system, you think we should deregulate health care and let the market work it out’. This is one side emphasizing child care as a form of broad-based family support and one side emphasizing child care as a way to strengthen parents’ preferred attachment to the labor force. (I do want to emphasize that actions speak louder than words: Vance skipped a Senate vote where his GOP colleagues a bipartisan House-passed expansion of the Child Tax Credit, whereas Harris is second-in-command of an administration that proposed , including child care, in American history — one that was, again, blocked by Republicans.)

Partially because of child care’s history, it has been subject to markedly less philosophical scrutiny than other issue areas. Frequently, we hear advocacy groups wanting debate moderators or journalists about their plans for child care. That’s fine as far as it goes (the recent Vice Presidential debate was on care issues) but I think we’d get a lot further if we first asked political candidates: Why do you think child care is important? What is your vision for an ideal child care system? I think we’d get a lot further, in fact, if we first asked ourselves those questions.

This article was published in partnership with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

The child care movement needs a broad base of support in order to win an effective, publicly-funded system. There have been strides in this direction over the past few decades, for instance bringing into the fold respected national security figures and leaders from rural areas facing a depopulation threat. Now, a is opening another door by showing how child care is impacting that most respected of American icons: farmers.

The paper, from professors Florence Becot of Penn State University and Shoshanah Inwood of Ohio State University, uses survey data from 729 farm families. It also draws on a literature review and prior work from the authors, including farm family focus groups. Becot and Inwood start by noting that “In the 1980’s, U.S. farm women identified the need for child care support to further their agricultural careers. Yet, it has taken over forty years for child care to be formally recognized as an issue affecting the trajectory and well-being of both the farm enterprise and the farm family,” with the two largest farm advocacy groups finally adding child care as a policy priority in 2023(!). As a sign of how understudied the issue of child care and farms has been, only two previous studies were conducted prior to this one.

In the popular imagination, children are a boon for farms: they are a ready source of labor and, ideally, take over the family business. This is accurate, yet incomplete. Becot and Inwood explain: “[R]esearchers and policy makers have overlooked the time, energy and resources that the households’ social reproduction require. The caring of children is particularly demanding as children need to be fed, educated and emotionally supported. Care work happens simultaneously and in competition with meeting the farm enterprise production needs. As such care work affects the structure and trajectory of the farm enterprise.”

Becot and Inwood’s study illuminated exactly what kind of changes the arrival of children—and lack of good child care options—causes for farmers. They found “the top three most common changes were decreasing resources allocated to the farm enterprise (i.e. cutting down the hours worked on the farm, scaling back farm production and/or farm employees helping with child care), cutting down on hours and/or stopping working the off-farm job, and hiring new workers to help on the farm and/or with household chores.”

While the mere presence of young children has an understandable impact, the need to decrease resources going to the farm itself was particularly pronounced among families with child care challenges. 46% of those without adequate child care reported making such reallocations, versus 23% of those who had decent child care options. Just 18% of farm families struggling with child care made no changes to their business at all. These moves have a predictable consequence on what the farm produces: “83% of respondents with childcare supply challenges report an impact on their farm productivity compared to 62% for those not reporting that challenge.”

It’s important to note, however, that this is not merely a story of how much corn or broccoli a given farm produces. It’s also a story about family flourishing. Becot and Inwood suggest, aptly, that “In addition to triggering a cycle of changes within the household and the enterprise with the potential to alter short and long-term farm economic productivity, the choices farm parents must make likely have consequences on their mental health and quality of life as farm parents might already feel stretched thin due to role overlap and child care challenges. Indeed, if child care expenses were lower, over half the respondents would prioritize allocating freed-up resources towards the well-being of the household over the enterprise/business.”

To illustrate their point, consider from one of the research participants: “Running a small farm, taking care of kids and managing jobs is really tough. Every week, we have to plan everything: meals, work schedules, kids’ activities, farm tasks and more. On top of that, we need to find babysitters. It’s a lot to handle, and it leaves us feeling tired and worn out.”

So what kind of external child care do farm families utilize when they can? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they rely heavily on caregivers, an option taken by nearly two-thirds of families who use any non-parental care. That said, a solid 42% of those families also reported using some form of paid provider, whether an occasional babysitter or a slot in a family child care program or child care center. Availability and cost continue to be a challenge for many.

All of this goes to show that farm families need a version of what all families need: good, affordable (ideally free) child care options, including direct support for trusted caregivers like FFNs as well as parents themselves. Hopefully, understanding child care’s impact on farmers will help open the eyes of recalcitrant politicians. As Becot said about the study from Penn State, “the implication here is that child care not only impacts farm success for the families, but food availability for all.”

While there is a unique legislative avenue available to help farm families—the Farm Bill, which is ostensibly supposed to be passed this year—getting farmers (and their Congressional representatives) behind a comprehensive approach holds the most promise for a sustainable solution. With such a child care system in place, farm families will be healthier, and the nation will be more prosperous and secure.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who quipped, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from a corn field.” I might add, it also looks mighty easy when you’re not the family trying to run a farm in a nation without a decent child care system.

While I often disagree with his conclusions, Matthew Yglesias is a smart pundit who offers his own useful provocations. He also has a big among influential policymakers and thought leaders, making his opinions something of a public mirror to what many in the halls of power are quietly thinking. In his column, “,” Yglesias argues that the rhetorical reliance on child care’s job-supporting prowess (both in terms of creating jobs within the care sector itself, and job creation more broadly) no longer holds water. He writes, “The main problem is that most of Democrats’ ideas about investing in the care economy were formulated in the shadow of the Great Recession and were framed, in part, as ways of putting people back to work
Today, though, we are clearly back to full employment.”

As an empirical matter, Yglesias is correct. What’s more, the labor force participation rates of mothers of young children—aka the group most acutely impacted by child care challenges—is at historic highs. (I have argued before, and plan to go deeper in a future article, about how this can be a gloss: attachment to employment says little about the to well-being required to work without a stable and satisfactory child care arrangement). But Yglesias takes this starting point and goes in a troublesome direction. He writes, citing pro-care arguments by the Roosevelt Institute’s Suzanne Kahn:

It’s true, that if the economy is deeply depressed, the care sector is a “good investment” in the sense of creating a lot of labor demand per dollar spent. But the economy isn’t deeply depressed, so this is actually a huge logistical problem with the idea of expanding access to care. You could, of course, try to make care work less labor-intensive, but Kahn argues against that, saying “strict staffing ratios should be maintained for those receiving government funds.”

She also wants to ensure that unit labor costs not only stay high but become higher, calling for “strict minimum wages and benefits packages set at family-sustaining levels, as well as protections for workers’ ability to organize.” She wants to discourage private equity investment in the care sector by banning stock buybacks and “demanding that corporate boards receiving significant federal care funds include both recipients of the care and caregivers as representatives.”


This is an agenda for what my [Libertarian think tank] Niskanen Center friends call “cost-disease socialism,” where you respond to the high cost of something by subsidizing it, but then attach strings that limit the supply and drive costs up further.

There are faulty premises here, almost all of which start from confusion over what and who child care is for. Yglesias seems relatively disinterested in the impact of care investments on the quality of care, other than a brief aside about child-to-adult ratios where he links to a single paper from the deeply pro-free-market Mercatus Center. There is no engagement with the that shows the greatest predictor of quality is the presence of a stable, warm caregiver; that child care educator churn is sky-high and (presumably due to working conditions). There is no engagement with the question of whether those caring for toddlers should rightly be paid akin to dog walkers and parking lot attendants, or why elementary school teachers should receive vastly higher wages and benefits. There is no engagement with what might happen if we let , given the wreckage they have left behind in other human service sectors like nursing homes and autism services.

Most worryingly, though, is that Ygelsias—and he is far from alone in this—fails to see that care that set it apart from other goods. He writes, in a paragraph that simultaneously contains an important truth and a massive misunderstanding:

That doesn’t mean there are no problems in the space of child or care, but I do think it makes a difference to realize that there isn’t necessarily a “crisis.” The reason to address child care costs is that families like to have more money rather than less, so if you can help them out in this regard, they’ll be better off. But parents of young kids buy all kinds of stuff—groceries, car seats, clothing—and as intense as the prime daycare years are, they are only a small fraction of a child’s life and a modest share of the all-in expense of raising a child. Making child care more affordable would help young families, but so would reducing minimum lot size rules to create more single-family homes. So would allowing mid-rise single-staircase apartments to create more cheap three-bedroom floorplans. If you’re focused on the problem (the cost of living for parents of young children) rather than the policy silo (child care), then you have a lot of options that don’t face the particular sticky problems of care-oriented industrial policy.

The important truth is that the family policy space is overly siloed. We weaken our impact by not making common cause with the full sweep of issues that impact a family’s overall life experience. In other words, our tendency to focus more on individual programs than comprehensive policy isn’t great. Housing and healthcare in particular have huge influences on family flourishing, as do items ranging from the to .

The massive misunderstanding is grouping child care with groceries, car seats and children’s clothing, as if it is merely one material need among many, as if the only problem is the monthly bill. Child care is an essential community support. Sociologist Mario Small that child care programs are key sources of friendships and connectivity for new parents; like schools, they act as assets that enhance entire neighborhoods. Child care providers are among the most trusted sources of advice for those parents, as well. Many times, they act as full ‘alloparents’ (non-kin parental figures). In my new book I cite a moment in the documentary where a preschool teacher recalls how important his child care providers were as his family, headed by a single mother, struggled. “My mom was both my parents, and my other parent was my preschool teachers,” the teacher says. “They helped my mom when she needed assistance. They helped me. They helped my family. They, in essence, I feel, saved my life.”

I also think that semantic debates over what constitutes a “crisis” cheapens the human consequences. While it is definitely important that our policy analysis and projections be as careful and correct as possible, and while “crisis” language has mixed success, there is also a risk of going too far in the other direction. When parents are to try to , falling due to a lack of child care or due to child care, I’m not sure what the perfect word is, but it sure seems like a big problem. (I am not an expert on elder care or long-term supportive care, but my understanding is that from many of the same structural problems.)

And yes, that means we need to spend public money to increase supply, affordability and quality. But that’s not “cost disease,” that’s accepting that certain social goods are worth society’s coin. Allow me from none other than William Baumol, the economist for whom “Baumol’s cost disease” is named: “No matter how painful rising medical and educational bills may be, society can afford them, and there is no need to deny them to ourselves or to the less affluent members of our society, or indeed to the world.” (italics his.) The real question is whether care belongs in that list: I say it does.

So, we do need to reboot the care agenda. We do need to recalibrate away from jobs-focused messaging. What we need is to position care as a national value and show how care bolsters child, family and community vibrancy. Then we’ll have a shared foundation upon which to do the difficult work of determining how best to pay for it.

I about the strange schism between early child care and school-aged child care, and I don’t want to belabor the point other than to say parents of school-aged children represent a shockingly untapped care constituency. Instead, I want to talk about summer care, and summer camp specifically. I recently had the chance to do a podcast recording with the American Camp Association (ACA), alongside the outstanding economist Kathryn Anne Edwards. I also don’t want to get out ahead of the podcast, so I’ll just say one part of the conversation that stood out to me was thinking about summer care needs as a door to movement-building. [UPDATE 6/7/24: The podcast is now live and available .]

After all, one of the major mindset barriers that holds back child care policy is the idea that child care needs are entirely individual family obligations, and thus the state has little-to-no role. I frequently quote a : “the conceptual shift away from thinking about one’s situation as an individual problem or as a problem caused by fate or nature, to thinking about it as a social or public problem, is widely understood to be a necessary, if insufficient, condition for political action.”

Summer care seems to offer many of the factors necessary for that conceptual shift. For one, it’s easy to see the absurdity of providing free public schools (and its child care) for seven hours a day, nine months out of the year, and then suddenly leaving a multi-month gap. While the discussion over how we got here is interesting, and has , the fact is summer’s a for millions and millions of families. This is also a distinctly American headache: journalist Katherine Goldstein recently in which she reported:

I was not able to find any other Western country that has the combination of long summer breaks, no mandated paid vacation time, minimal subsidized options and a dominant cultural belief that kids need constant supervision, especially in public places. Clearly articulating all of these factors really helps me understand how we find ourselves in Hunger Games-like registration battles and spending thousands per kid per summer, just so parents can continue their jobs (emphasis hers).

Moreover, summer camp has the advantage of nostalgia. Early child care is still fighting for its reputation, and there are plenty of Americans—as many as half, —who think young children have little business being cared for outside the home. Not so with summer camps. According to the ACA, more than 26 million kids attend a form of summer camp every year. that they look back on fondly decades after the fact; I know I do. It is what marketers might call an ‘easy sell.’

Finally, it’s worth noting that the falls heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class families. Lower-income families are from camp participation altogether due to things like cost, transportation and not being available to sit at a computer at 8 a.m. repeatedly hitting refresh as if trying to acquire a Taylor Swift concert ticket. Thus, there is a major opportunity for cross-class solidarity in improving summer care options. (Reducing the length of summer break is unlikely to be a viable lever: despite the summer scramble, year-round school by parents.)

It is not uncommon for less popular policy ideas to ride along with more popular ones. To use the example of a different ACA, the Affordable Care Act’s restriction on insurance companies discriminating due to preexisting conditions was one of the keys to its passage in the face of opposition. Child care has its own history here: as Sally Cohen details in on federal child care policymaking, the Child Care and Development Block Grant passed in 1990 largely as a “sidekick” to the more-popular Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet as far as I’m aware, there is currently no major national proposal around summer child care.

I don’t want to overstate the case. Creating a comprehensive birth-to-13 child care system is going to be expensive and complex, and no one is going to be hoodwinked by including a robust mechanism for increasing the supply and affordability of summer camps. We still need to argue for early care and education on its own merits, and we should not pretend that early care needs and school-aged needs are identical. I wonder, though, if summer care shouldn’t be closer to the tip of the spear, rather than a forgotten cousin.

Elliot Haspel: First off, tell me: Why did you decide to write this book?

Elissa Strauss: So, it really came from two almost contradictory places that came together in the end. On one hand, I reported for years all about why we don’t have paid leave, why don’t we have universal and affordable child care or eldercare, why is there still so much maternal discrimination in the workplace, why are too many moms still dying during labor? So, all this stuff that moms, and caregivers more broadly, had stacked up against them in society. And part of me felt like I got to a place where I couldn’t write one more paid leave article—I’m absolutely, very glad other people are still beating that drum!—I wanted to dig deeper. And I thought, you know what, there’s something else that I could be focusing on: the cultural roots of the care crisis.

Track two was that when I became a mom in 2012—and I think this is still alive and well—there was very much a sense that it was not cool to like motherhood. You had Rachel Cusks’ being passed around a Brooklyn playgrounds like ‘I’m handing you the truth,’ and that’s a book that really presents motherhood and selfhood as a zero-sum game. And look, I don’t wanna come down against the burden narrative of motherhood, because I think it’s important to also talk about the stresses, especially in the United States. But it felt like there was so much of it.

It took me a beat to realize actually these things are connected. I was writing about why our society doesn’t value caregiving, but I myself in my life didn’t really value caregiving. I wanted to have kids. I love my son, but I thought I had to partition it off from everything else in my life, in order to be legit.

Haspel: That’s one reason I really appreciate this book. It does come at a different angle than a lot of the books, even the books that I write, which are much more on the policy side of things. You had this fascinating chapter on when women’s movements embraced care, talking about this lesser-known feminist history of women who saw care as something really to be valued. Could you talk a little bit about what you found when looking into that?

Strauss: Yeah, that was some of the most exciting research in the book, that and the whole world of care ethics.

Haspel: Oh, we’re going to get into that, don’t worry!

Strauss: They were the two like, ‘Oh, my gosh, why was this never taught to me?’ parts. So you know, many of the feminisms I cycled through—all important, all which fed me and nourished me, and made a world that I like living in, whether a career feminism or sex-positive feminism or reproductive rights feminism—either they ignored care or they didn’t necessarily have terribly nice things to say about care.

And then when I went digging, I found right there were lots of other feminisms, and they don’t say women should be home, you know. I feel like we’ve been set up by Phyllis Schlafly stuff, we’ve been set up as you’re either pro-women staying home and valuing care, or you’re pro-women leaving the house and seeing care as something that holds women back.

And it turns out there is a third way—and not just one we’re imagining now, but that women imagined a hundred-plus years ago. So, the first time I saw this, historically speaking, was with the fight to get women the vote, and how women actually relied on their authority as mothers and caregivers to make the argument that their voice mattered in the populace, that they needed to contribute to selecting our leaders because they had special insights on account of being active caregivers.

They were called ‘social housekeepers’ or ‘municipal housekeepers,’ and it was a very powerful movement. One named Rheta Childe Dorr wrote that a woman’s place is home, but home is everywhere. Even that feels like such an inversion of all categories we use to think about women’s participation in public life. And you know, these social housekeepers make great gains, in addition to helping successfully get women the vote. They also made sure that there were public playgrounds, children weren’t working, there was clean drinking water.

And, of course there’s a tension: this may not have been palatable if these women didn’t wear the motherhood cloak. But I think to fully take away that care was its own powerful lens to look at, that is demeaning care. To be overly cynical about it and say, ‘well, of course they had to do that because men wouldn’t have wanted their voices if they were trying to be truly equal to men.’ That’s true! Yet, I personally refuse to accept the idea that a bunch of moms or caregivers don’t have interesting things to say.

You know, there were a number of Black feminist leaders that thought like this, especially as welfare became a dirty word because Black women needed it. So, we have Johnnie Tillmon, one of the great welfare activists, and her vision of feminism is one that really makes room for being able to care: when the household needs you and the family needs you, you should be able to do that. It should be a right, not to mention a privilege and a joy.

Haspel: So, I want to jump to the last two chapters and the conclusion, because that’s some of the stuff that honestly stopped me in my tracks a little bit. We’re so used to talking about care in instrumental terms, right? Like what it can do for your ability to work. We lose sight of the bigger questions. Can we start with the fact there is this field of philosophy known as care ethics that is, I think, pretty under-acknowledged and under-appreciated. What is that, and what can we learn from scholars of care ethics?

Strauss: To start very broad, we have these ideas of what it means to be a good person and what it is to do the right thing, and how we figure that out. One of the big ideas is a rules-based way to think about it: We follow, maybe, the Ten Commandments or the classroom rule. So we don’t cheat or steal because ‘thou shall not cheat or steal.’ Or maybe we have a more virtue-based approach to ethics, and we think ‘I have these core traits that are good traits,’ like I am honest. Therefore, I don’t cheat or steal. And then there’s something that’s very fashionable here in Northern California which is a more utilitarian approach, that if you can just data-ify everything you could somehow come up with a formula—not to dismiss any of these, even though some people take it too far—that you could figure out what’s the right thing to do by figuring out what would create maximum good in the world.

So, care ethics comes in, and it introduces something to the world of philosophy that was left out for a long time — and that is relationships. That sometimes the right thing to do is actually rooted in that one and only person before you, and that one and only moment that you’re in. An example I use in the book is around when you have to think about cheating or being dishonest. If your kid had a horrible day of bullying at school, and they had a book report, and it’s ten o’clock at night, maybe you help them more than you usually would, and you think it’s not the best and most right thing, but that is actually the best thing for that relationship. Care ethicists are hardly saying, ‘Oh, relationships should be everything,’ but they want them included in our conception of what it means to do right by others.

Adding to that, once you’re in relationships, it is an area where there are deep ethical and moral epiphanies possible. Through these relationships we learn so much about ourselves, we learn so much about human nature. We can actually cultivate the goodness inside of us.

One of my favorites, Nel Noddings, talks about how the ‘memory of care’ is the foundation of morality for many of us. You know, care was just so left out of conversation for so long. And care is not always this beautiful, harmonious, frictionless place of love and ease. When you have someone you care for, and they’re dependent on you, you do have to privilege them versus other people; it’s just the nature of the game. So how do you balance that? When is that right or wrong? For us, we made the decision to send our kids to private school. We still feel really bad about that, even though we also know why we did it. That’s something that is actually at the heart of care ethics, too: how do our care relationships interact with our other relationships?

Haspel: What really struck me was how deep the implications of a care lens take you. You talk about the founding documents of the United States — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You have this quote that “care is as fundamental to the good life as justice, but it’s rarely presented in fundamental terms.” It suggests a broader social contract. And that to me is a very interesting mindset shift. So I’m curious: what would be different if we did start to talk about care and more fundamental terms?

Strauss: I’ll go straight to a very concrete thing: we would care for the caregivers. So, justice is seen as ultimately about equality, right? It’s two independent people having a relationship that’s fair. Once you mix in dependency—which was there all along but ignored—,it just doesn’t relate. Like, there’s no justice with me and my children. It’s never gonna happen! So when we really incorporate care, it opens our eyes: there’s something else going on that we’re trying to achieve. That is, making sure all people that are dependent on others have the ability to survive or thrive, or be treated with dignity at the end of their life, which I think is a universal value now. We just forget that dignity happens through a one-on-one relationship; the core element of dignity is care.

So, if care is a core value of our society, we have to care for the caregivers. Dependency is a chain. It’s a natural part of what it is to be human. And when someone depends on you, you’re not independent anymore. So not only is that person dependent, you yourself become dependent. You yourself can’t fully inhabit the world as an independent person anymore. It’s just not how it works, but right now caregivers are expected to live with dependency while living in a world where there’s a total blind spot for dependency. And no one’s made it easier for them, from the smallest things of, if you bring your elderly parent with dementia who moves very slowly to a certain restaurant, people might just get annoyed with you, there won’t be easy access. If you bring children in the public arena in this day and age you often get a stink eye. So caring for the caregivers is about making space for dependency in the public sphere, and also providing that critical support that caregivers need and don’t get — and it’s tragic.

We have seen the valley phenomenon time and time again in different sectors. Right now, a textbook example is playing out in the higher education space: a well-intentioned effort to streamline the financial aid form known as FAFSA . In a vacuum, the idea was good: FAFSA was overly complicated and confusing, and simplifying the form would make it easier for students, especially those from historically disenfranchised populations, to apply for aid. In reality, the new system was not ready for prime time: glitchy, unable to handle many non-traditional family situations, sending 70,000 emails(!) to an inbox no one at the Department of Education knew existed. It has been, quite simply, a debacle, one that has caused real harm to students and their families.

So, what steps can be taken to lay the groundwork for effective policy implementation in U.S. child care, both now and in the future? It starts with increasing state administrative capacity. While “bureaucrat” has come to take a negative connotation, the fact is most individuals working in state agencies are dedicated civil servants doing important work in offices that are frequently understaffed and overwhelmed. (Fun fact: did you know that “good enough for government work” was originally a meaning something that met the exacting standards of the U.S. military?) In recent decades there has been systematic neglect of these agencies, leading to what scholars have termed the “,” whereby governments are increasingly reliant on third parties like nonprofits and for-profit companies to deliver basic services. The pandemic in state and local government personnel. In child care, some of those third-party partners, like Child Care Resource & Referral Agencies, also struggle with underfunding and capacity challenges.

We saw the consequence of this understaffing when many state agencies for child care as well as other services like housing assistance. Some states have also been having trouble paying child care providers or processing licensing applications or background checks in a timely manner. And, it has that many states lack the staff to conduct regular quality inspections. On the flipside, when Congress surged money to help the IRS staff up, call and the agency was able to start recovering funds from wealthy tax cheats.

Alongside state capacity is the need to upgrade data systems. Child care — and early childhood in general — is notorious for having fragmented data. As policy expert Elliot Regenstein, who authored a report on early childhood data modernization, : “there’s so much we don’t know about the early childhood system that we need to. And there’s so much information that, if we had it, we could use to improve our state and local systems. Which children are in which services? What are the long-term impacts of those experiences?” As those data systems are modernized — which requires some distinctly unflashy but important steps around modernizing government technology, as Jennifer Pahlka explores in — we also need to be working to engage providers. States like Louisiana and Massachusetts have demonstrated in recent years how tethering data participation to public funding can offer far more transparency while enabling agencies to push out resources faster. The presence of , like Louisiana’s , can help as well.

Finally, by reforming existing infrastructure systems, such as distribution of child care subsidy vouchers or program licensing and background checks, we will be establishing the building blocks for a more functional future. As researchers at Georgetown’s Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation , “State-level child care assistance systems face a number of complex and interconnected market, operational and policy challenges. In this reality, states and the CCR&Rs they rely on as delivery partners can merely react to issues; they struggle to engage in proactive, future-focused, strategic work to shift the status quo.” The researchers propose a federal-state partnership aimed at rapidly experimenting with different models that are grounded in the actual user (family) experience. Similarly, some states and cities are experimenting with ways to cut down on red tape: last year, Boise that will reduce the licensing approval time for family child care providers from an average of 94 days to 25 days and eliminate a zoning approval requirement.

Most of these shifts require more funding, of course. But in this case, we are not talking about the tens and tens of billions of dollars required annually to create a workable universal child care system. We are talking about far smaller sums that will shore up implementation capacity and help avoid the valley of death when bold policies finally do get passed. Indeed, the Biden administration deserves praise for their work in this area: in the , states are now required to adopt on-time payment practices and streamline family enrollment. These requirements should hopefully spur states to action without breaking the bank.

A child care system that works well for all children, families, and providers does not lie on the other side of the valley of death. At the risk of overextending the metaphor, such a system lies on the top of a mountain that rises up from that valleyside. But whatever path we take up that mountain, and however long it takes to summit, we need to cross the valley on the way. That means investing time, energy and funds into building out the components needed for effective implementation, and, more importantly, on-the-ground impact.

I thought about this email as I was preparing for the release of my new report, , which was published by the at the think tank New America. While the report scrutinizes many facets of these benefits — and the implications of government increasingly incentivizing businesses to offer them — I was only able to give a brief treatment to one of the most wrenching human consequences: A system that relies heavily on employer-linked child care is a system where if you lose your job, you lose your child care.

Even in the currently strong economy, widespread layoffs are not uncommon. Already in the early months of 2024, have been fired, Nike staff, and for over 12,000 layoffs. Overall, are being fired in any given month.

As I wrote in the report, referencing the well-known risks of tying health insurance to employers:

Instead of “lose your job, lose your health care,” the equation is “lose your job, lose your child care.” In some ways, this latter situation is even worse — at least for parents and children, as job lock is favorable from an employer perspective — for two reasons. First, there is no equivalent of Continuation of Health Coverage (COBRA) or the Affordable Care Act marketplaces for employees to rely on for bridge coverage; instead, parents are thrust immediately into the failed child care market where supply is often nil and waitlists can be months to years long. Second, young children thrive on caregiver reliability and their development is mediated through trusted relationships; multiple transitions in child care settings is correlated with increased risk for behavioral problems and other negative outcomes.

This is a different concern than that of employers , whether closing on- and near-site centers or ending child care stipends. Those are company-wide policy decisions. The issue of what tethering child care to specific employers means for individual employees and their families is a much more personal drama.

Job lock, as , can lead to for employees. It makes them substantially less likely to seek out a different role even if it’s better paying, better located or has hours better aligned with their family life. Job lock may also keep employees stuck in jobs that are abusive, hazardous or otherwise detrimental to their well-being.

While there is limited research on job lock with regards to child care benefits, there is little reason to think the same problems don’t apply. In fact, given that only a minority of businesses offer child care benefits and there are so few other child care options, the gravitational pull to stay can be exceptionally strong. As journalist Rebecca Gale about one health system in Marietta, Georgia:

Staff members who used the child care center at Wellstar Health had the lowest turnover rate — only 1.5% — among staff, according to an internal study which analyzed turnover and benefits.

“Basically no one leaves that utilizes the child care center,” said Penny Ferrell, the executive director for employee wellness and services at Wellstar.

If one is happy with their employer, that’s completely fine. But inherently, this situation takes power and autonomy away from employees.

Moreover, plenty of times the decision about whether or not to remain in a job is not up to the employee. Layoffs occur for any number of reasons ranging from to mismanagement to technological or geopolitical change. Even profitable companies can go through reorganizations. Linking child care to employment, then, is introducing a tremendous and largely unacknowledged risk into parents’ lives.

The answer, as I have been emphasizing, is not to do away with on-site child care centers or suggest employers end any existing child care benefits. The answer is to wrap on-site programs and tuition stipends into a publicly-funded system, one where slots are affordable and not tied to specific ongoing employment. Some employer-sponsored programs already hint at what this can look like by allowing community members to access a certain percentage of slots: as a personal example, my children attended a child care center owned by the Virginia Commonwealth University Health System despite neither my spouse nor I being employed there.

Unfortunately, policymakers are either not fully aware of, or else not compelled by, the dangers of employer-linked child care. Many states are currently to businesses using tens of millions of dollars in tax credits and grants, giving into the temptation of to the private sector. The other action to be taken is for states (and the federal government) to hit the brakes on these incentives. The taxpayer funds would reach far more families in a far more sustainable fashion by building toward an inclusive system with many types of strong, well-funded programs.

Similarly, employer energy would be far better used to forcefully advocate for an effective child care system that will help not only their employees, but the community and nation writ large. This may sound far-fetched, but we have examples. Vermont’s business community for a small payroll tax to enhance the state’s child care system, while the group organizes a coalition of business executives to advocate for a publicly-funded system. (At minimum, businesses can choose to not actively oppose child care investments, which they have done and many state tax proposals.)

In the end, I was only able to offer limited help to the mother who emailed me (beside reassuring her that the fact her daughter had such caring, dedicated parents in her corner meant she would likely be OK). There is nothing to be said to an employer who wants the child care slot of a now ex-employee to use for a current one. And that’s the problem.

So why would we want to rush headlong to build a country where parents and children are at the mercy of employers when it comes to something as fundamental as child care? We’ve . We know how it ends — and it doesn’t end well.

This column was developed with editorial support from the Better Life Lab at New America. All views are those of the author alone.

First, some context: Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey is proposing five connected pieces of action:

1. Renewing $475 million in state funding to sustain “” (Commonwealth Cares for Children) operational grants that go directly to child care programs;

2. Spending $65 million in adjusting its reimbursement rate for children receiving subsidy, and also taking steps toward using a true-cost-of-care calculation;

3. Expanding eligibility for subsidy from families making 50% or less of state median income to those making 85% or less;

4. Making a major investment in (midsize urban centers that do not include Boston;

5. Governor Healey to promote a “whole-of-government approach to child care” that “will bring together teams from housing, child care, education, economic development, workforce development, health care and human services to work in partnership with the business community to develop new and innovative strategies to expand access, build new facilities and reduce costs for families.”

This is a comprehensive strategy that presses on both supply and affordable access — and, importantly, acknowledges that sustainable supply-building is the first link in that chain. To find out more, I called leaders from two MA child care advocacy and policy organizations: Amy O’Leary and Marisa Fear work for , and Lauren Kennedy is co-founder of .

The trio explained to me in separate interviews that proposed revenue for all these elements is coming from multiple sources: a portion of “fair share” tax dollars, which is a 4% surtax on those with incomes above $1 million – MA voters approved it in 2022; an early care and education trust fund; and general fund revenues. In an otherwise modest budget year, Fear noted that these investments show “prioritization, in terms of how the government is clearly viewing this issue.” Kennedy agreed, saying that the proposals are a “a stake in the ground” about the importance of ECE and that they provide a strong baseline for future funding efforts.

The C3 grants, in particular, represent a departure from the approach many states are taking. Instead of trying to build a sustainable system by merely expanding subsidy eligibility and reimbursement rates, or temporarily extending pandemic-era stabilization grants, Massachusetts has shown a commitment to permanently supporting the operations of its child care programs. Around 7,500 programs receive the grants, which help them maintain payroll and make quality improvements while hedging against the volatility of enrollment shifts. The program also allows the state to collect important information about the sectoral landscape. According to state data, as Neighborhood Villages , “50% of center-based providers and 47% of [family child care] providers reported that C3 allowed them to delay tuition increases; while 66% of center-based providers and 57% of FCC providers reported that they would increase tuition in the absence of C3 grants.”

(Operational grants are also the backbone of Canada’s and they got their in the newest version of the Child Care for Working Families Act. In my view, these should be a much larger part of the U.S. early childhood policy conversation. Kennedy concurs, saying that “once you have these operational grants in play, you can start having a really interesting conversation about the most economically effective way to go about financing a very complicated sector.”)

How did all of this come about? O’Leary, Fear, and Kennedy all credited leadership within government as a key enabling factor for Massachusetts’ progress. In addition to Governor Healey, O’Leary mentioned the Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll, who implemented universal pre-K when mayor of Salem, and Commissioner of Early Education and Care Amy Kershaw. Credit was also given to the former commissioner, Samantha Aigner-Treworgy, who steered the state’s early childhood system through the pandemic and led the creation of the C3 grants. The Massachusetts legislature has stepped up as well, for instance, appropriating the $475 million for C3 in the first place. The Department of Early Education and Care has also staffed up to meet the challenges posed by a more robustly-funded system, hiring dozens of employees to help with implementation.

O’Leary also noted that a critical element was “the early childhood community coming together,” as well as decades of laying the groundwork. For instance, the subsidy rate changes most substantially impact providers outside the Boston area, because they were contending with far lower reimbursements. Yet the Boston-area providers and advocates did not begrudge their peers this focus, instead working largely arm-in-arm. This solidarity has been helped by a recurring “9:30 call” which started during the pandemic and is still regularly attended by over a hundred early childhood stakeholders. The ethos, O’Leary says, is “you do belong, we need to stick together, we should all have this information, and we cannot go back to our old ways. So, I think that the spirit of [the early childhood community] has helped legislators understand what we need.”

Of course, challenges remain. Massachusetts, like most states, is still struggling with child care workforce shortages. Educator salaries remain low. And even with all the new state investments, there are ongoing gaps in family access and affordability. (This is one reason, I believe, that the most dedicated state—while it can make huge, important progress—will never be able to solve child care without eventual federal funds: the budget ask is simply too large.)

What comes next, Kennedy offers, is continuing to work on subsidy eligibility and reimbursement rates, and figuring out the correct balance between demand-side interventions (like subsidy vouchers) and supply-side interventions (like the C3 grants). She would also like to see more of a focus on school-aged child care needs. Fear suggested attention will need to be paid to educator salaries (a by the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity is helping guide the state there), as well as family child care providers and family, friends and neighbor caregivers.

For all the obstacles currently facing the child care sector, we are witnessing something of a renaissance in state attention to the issue. It is also encouraging to see states learning from one another, as with several copying Kentucky’s plan to provide free or low-cost child care to . If states—and the federal government, for that matter—want to see what a comprehensive approach to child care reform looks like, they could hardly do better than to look to Massachusetts.

The first is commentary by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem. Responding to concerns about South Dakota’s child care struggles—which have recently been exacerbated by the closure of several programs serving hundreds of families—Noem .Ìę“The one thing people have asked for that I’m not willing to do is directly subsidize child care for families. I just don’t think it’s the government’s job to pay or to raise people’s children for them,” Noem said, adding vaguely that, “we’ll do all we can to make sure there are resources in their community for [families] to utilize.”

Normally, it wouldn’t be so consequential that a conservative small-state governor is opposed to the fundamental idea that child care has societal benefits and is thus deserving of societal support (and that helping parents afford the care of their choice is comically far from the government raising parents’ children for them). In this case, however, the conservative small-state governor is , if not the frontrunner, to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential pick should he—as seems overwhelmingly likely—secure the Republican nomination. Knowingly or not, Noem is echoing another highly Trump-aligned Republican, . If this line of thinking becomes Trumpian orthodoxy, that’s a big problem.

Second, unless you’re a political junkie, the phrase “Project 2025” probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it should. As :

Led by the long-established Heritage Foundation think tank and fueled by former Trump administration officials, the far-reaching effort is essentially a government-in-waiting for the former president’s second term—or any candidate who aligns with their ideals and can defeat President Joe Biden in 2024.

With a nearly 1,000-page “Project 2025” handbook and an “army” of Americans, the idea is to have the civic infrastructure in place on Day One to commandeer, reshape and do away with what Republicans deride as the “deep state” bureaucracy


That handbook has , and the early learning bullets are a rough read. Perhaps most alarmingly, the authors recommend the literal end of Head Start: “this program should be eliminated along with the entire [Office of Head Start].” No replacement program is suggested, so following through on that idea would result in nearly one million lower-income children and their parents losing access to free child care and wraparound family support.

When it comes to child care more broadly, Project 2025 wants the government to “prioritize funding for home-based child care, not universal day care … Instead of providing universal day care, funding should go to parents either to offset the cost of staying home with a child or to pay for familial, in-home child care.” I have argued many times that there should be financial support as well as , but such a proposal ignores the millions of parents who want and need external child care. Doing what the authors recommend would, ironically, restrict parental choices. (Since they can’t completely kill external child care, the authors do suggest “Congress should incentivize on-site child care,” which it and which has its .)

Put together, Noem’s comments and Project 2025’s recommendations show a disturbing hostility toward child care as a sector. While there are reasonable disagreements over how to best structure child care policy, the extent of public funding required and who should benefit, those conversations generally start with a few common principles. Such principles include the understanding that a substantial percentage of working parents will always require external child care, the current system is not working and the government has a role to play. If that foundation for discussion and compromise is becoming shaky, we may be in for dark days.

On the Democratic side, it doesn’t look like much is poised to shift from the Biden Administration’s first-term approach. An Associated Press article , “Biden will want to bring back the ideas that were left on the cutting room floor. That includes 
 offering universal preschool and limiting the cost of child care to 7% of income for most families.”

The dominant Democratic child care plan continues to be the , which enjoys co-sponsorship by 43 Democratic senators. While the newest version of the Act has some welcome updates (such as combining subsidy vouchers for families with operational grants for providers akin to the highly successful pandemic-era stabilization grants), it still relies on technocratic activity tests and sliding fee scales, and is still mostly silent on school-aged child care, FFN caregivers and stay-at-home parents.

The early months of 2024 would be a good time to try and guide the child care conversation back to a middle ground. That might look like good-faith conservative thinkers and advocates, such as those involved in the * pushing back on the extreme positions being staked out by Noem and Project 2025. These conservatives might remind the far right that Trump actually held a in 2019, and could steer conservatives toward a reasonable alternative like Patrick T. Brown’s vision for . At the same time, progressives need to reckon with whether the Child Care For Working Families approach is still the right one, and push their party to finally come up with proposals that go far beyond licensed child care programs.

All of the above will be easier if child care is positioned not as an isolated issue, but as one service among many needed within a framework of family flourishing and freedom. There is no reason for child care needs to fall prey to rank partisanship. For instance, even as the warning signs flash red for child care, . I won’t pretend the danger to child care is coming equally from both parties, but each has work to do to recalibrate in advance of the election — and if they fail, it is ultimately America’s children and families who stand to suffer.

Disclosure: Elliot Haspel is a senior fellow at Capita, a think tank that participated in the Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families.

1. How bad will the post-stabilization pain be?

Now that pandemic stabilization funds have expired, we’re into when it comes to a . While program closures are a threat (and ), the first gate most programs will pass through is raising their fees. The first post-stabilization we have, although a small ‘n,’ shows close to a third of parents enrolled in programs that used to but no longer receive grants have experienced a fee increase. A large chunk of programs is also being forced to cut back on staff compensation, a risky proposition for a sector still down nearly 40,000 educators from pre-pandemic levels.

The other factor at play is state-by-state variation. Some states, like Massachusetts, are spending hundreds of millions of state dollars to keep the stabilization grants going. Washington, D.C. (and its population of 700,000 residents) is spending $75 million a year on the in the nation – and is . Others, like North Carolina, have let the funds drop out without meaningful replacement. So what child care looks like in 2024 is unlikely to be one national story so much as a series of state stories.

Speaking of stories, it would be enormously helpful to have a dedicated effort to collect quantitative and qualitative data about how the sector is doing. For instance, the National Women’s Law Center recently tracking state and local media reports. Philanthropies may want to fund a suite of data collection efforts to be able to paint a clear and accurate picture about how much pain the sector is experiencing, and how that differs by different levels of state investment.

Of course, there is one big national story here: whether Congress (and, specifically, House Republicans) acts on the $16 billion supplemental request .

2. The rising temptation of employer-sponsored child care

In 2023, both Democrats and Republicans amped up a trend of turning their eyes toward . Actions ranged from new state tax credits to grant pools like Indiana’s $25 million Employer Sponsored Child Care Fund to the Biden administration’s requirement that semiconductor manufacturers detail a plan for child care assistance as part of getting CHIPS Act funding.

I have ÌęČčłÙÌę that this is a : the concept is plagued by issues like opportunity cost (vs. spending money and political capital on a publicly-funded system) and job lock, to say nothing of how elevating employers reinforces child care as a mere work support, thus leaning into the . Employer benefits also further the growing market share of , as those are the providers employers most frequently tap. Instead, I assert employers should pay into a universal system via taxes. (I hope to publish a report going into much more detail on the topic come January.) Others disagree and think employer-sponsored care is , while still others argue that it’s a that can be an on-ramp for employers to get involved in the fight for public funding.

That’s fine! Reasonable people can reasonably disagree about this in good faith. Wherever one falls on the question, it’s an important debate and one that should be brought to the forefront, rather than a road uncritically followed. As federal action remains stalled and many states gear up to consider further incentivizing employer-sponsored benefits in their 2024 legislative sessions, the proper role of employers should be hashed out sooner rather than later.

3. Climate change alarm turning toward child care adaptation

Last year, I wrote that progress was being made in advancing the nascent intersection of early childhood and climate change. 2023 massively accelerated that process. In October, the U.S. Early Years Climate Action Task Force (note: I helped coordinate the Task Force as part of my role at the think tank ) released “.” The plan has since been presented to Congressional staff, executive branch staff, mayors, community groups, early childhood professionals and others. As I write, two of my Capita colleagues are in Dubai at the Conference of the Parties (COP) co-leading multiple sessions on the topic. At the same time, 2023’s chaotic climate change-enhanced weather — from wildfires impacting the U.S. East Coast and Maui to massive flooding events in New York and Vermont to record-breaking heatwaves all over the country — reinforced that climate change is now the context in which early childhood systems exist.

The question now is how to make good on actionable recommendations. That will involve a lot of local and state work to consider what is needed in particular contexts, as well as drawing on funding sources such as the , Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and Community Development Financial Institutions like the Low Income Investment Fund (LIIF). For instance, as LIIF’s Vice President of Early Care & Education Angie Garling : “LIIF is now partnering with the State of California to disburse up to $350 million in facilities grants to providers in every county in the state. Not surprisingly, around 40% of applicants requested upgrades related to climate mitigation. Think solar panels, HVAC systems, shade structures and even misting systems to keep children cool.”

Indeed, adapting and upgrading child care facilities, in particular, stands out as a practical and compelling place to start turning alarm into action. 2024 has the chance to be a key inflection point for young children and the climate.

4. Family, friends & neighbor caregivers start getting their due

One of the more welcome recent early learning trends is a growing acknowledgment from advocates and policymakers that an effective child care system cannot exclude family, friends & neighbor (FFNs) caregivers. For instance, Colorado in FFNs, using American Rescue Plan Act money to hire an FFN point person within the state department of early childhood, launching an FFN advisory council and working with philanthropy to pilot . In more and more conversations I’m a part of, FFNs are coming up, and it’s a noticeable shift from even five years ago.

For quite a while, there has been a tension between FFNs and more ‘formal’ types of licensed child care, owing, I speculate, to some consternation that embracing FFNs somehow made the field feel less ‘professional.’ But that tension seems to be resolving itself in favor of a pluralistic and inclusive approach that acknowledges different settings may require different funding mechanisms and training requirements, but . (That also gestures toward a needed conversation around stay-at-home parents). One way this resolution shows up is increasing calls to or at least to modify it as ‘licensed child care desert,’ since children in those areas are still being cared for by someone: most frequently an FFN caregiver or a parent.

This is a welcome shift, given how crucial FFNs are for many families; they collectively provide regular care for around one-third of the young children in the country, and are especially important for rural and immigrant populations. The question now is seeing if smaller pilots can be scaled, if FFN-focused work can spread across the country, and if FFNs can be folded more fully and fairly into federal child care policy proposals.

5. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but there’s an election coming up

Despite my best efforts, I’m sad to say the 2024 election cycle isn’t likely to be dominated by child care. Undoubtedly, issues around the economy writ large, abortion and the candidates themselves will lead the marquee. That said, child care is poised to be a bigger topic of conversation this year than any election cycle in memory. The child care pain point continues to broaden . Fox News is running segments. Unions have put together a . New advocacy groups, like (full disclosure: I’m on their board) are growing rapidly and already have access to hundreds of thousands of fed-up parents.

The question is whether child care gets drowned out or whether there can be enough of a show of force — both monetarily and from parents making it clear that their vote hinges on care issue — to get candidates’ attention. The way these efforts are messaged also presents a hinge point of casting child care purely in terms of its economic benefits or making the broader point that child care undergirds family freedom and flourishing.

With the odds of an ongoing divided federal government quite high, state and local elections will also be of paramount importance, and not merely because of child care-focused ballot measures. Just look at Minnesota. After Minnesota Democrats took full control of the state government in 2022 for the first time in a decade — and by just a one-vote majority in the state senate — they went on to pass . Similarly, Vermont’s powerful Act 76 would not be law if there wasn’t a supermajority capable of Gov. Phil Scott’s veto.

To that point, the other political trend to watch is whether states will follow the lead of Vermont, Washington State, Oregon’s Multnomah County (Portland), New Mexico and Washington, D.C. in identifying large, dedicated funding streams for child care. These jurisdictions have tapped sources ranging from payroll taxes to capital gains taxes to ‘millionaires’ taxes,’ and there are surely other as-yet uncovered options as well. If states are going to have to carry the child care water for a while longer, the political makeup of state government matters an awful lot.

I don’t think it’s a risky prediction to suggest that for better or worse, the 2024 elections will indelibly shape the middle part of the decade for early learning.

As with many innovations, this is less about a brand new idea and more about scaling. Some child care programs have for decades offered discounts to employees as an incentive. What’s happened in the past year is that two institutions — the state of Kentucky and the United States military — have taken the idea universal within their jurisdictions.

In Kentucky, as NPR recently , “The state made all child care employees eligible for free child care, regardless of household income.” This was accomplished by a policy change making child care educators who work more than 20 hours a week at a licensed program categorically eligible for the state’s child care assistance program (which is otherwise means-tested and has a sliding scale of parent co-pays). Similarly, the Secretary of Defense to offer at least a 50% discount to child care educators. The Air Force went further, putting into place a “first child free” policy for child care staff.[1]

The effects have been impressive. While there are always multiple influences in a labor market, these incentives appear to be helping recruit and retain staff at a time when child care employment nationwide at around 40,000 educators below pre-pandemic levels. On a recent panel, Alex Wagner, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, “what I’m really proud of is from June of 2022 to now August of 2023, [Air Force Child Development Center] staffing has gone from 65% to 
 80%.” One Kentucky child care center owner told NPR, “That is a beautiful incentive. Any of my teachers who have children — they can work for me, and their children are paid for by the state.”

But Elliot, you may be saying, aren’t you a crusader , and isn’t this technically an employer-sponsored child care benefit? Sort of. This is a unique and narrow use case.[2] Directly improving staffing levels of child care programs has widespread benefits. It allows programs to keep more of their classrooms open and serve more families. A useful by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley concludes that “For each early educator who benefits from a child care subsidy in Kentucky, as many as 13 other children under age six benefit from stable enrollment in her classroom or group.”

Stable educators are also a critical element of quality; young children don’t generally do well with . And, importantly, this innovation relies on public dollars rather than the largesse of corporations.

Now, here come the caveats. This is not, as the NPR headline suggests, a way to “fix” child care staffing shortages. The only sustainable fix is to have enough public money in the system to offer educators family-sustaining salaries and comprehensive benefits. Subsidizing educators’ own child care doesn’t put new money into the system. Some providers may actually take a modest financial hit: with few exceptions, states reimburse providers for each child enrolled in the subsidy program at a than the true cost of care, or even what providers can charge ‘full-pay’ parents.[3]

Moreover, the benefit is limited in scope: this may be obvious, but it only helps educators who have young kids. As , about one-quarter of child care employees nationwide had a child under the age of five. That’s a substantial minority — using most recent data, the CSCCE brief suggests more than 200,000 child care employees could potentially benefit — but still a minority.

There’s also a temporal question. An educator who takes a lower-paying job with a child care program as opposed to a higher-paying one with Amazon or Target because their toddler gets free care–effectively a $10,000 raise plus the ability to be near their child–will face a crossroads within a few years. What happens when the child reaches school-age (or eligibility for free pre-K, if their state or locality offers it) and the financial calculus changes?

So long as the incentive is kept within its proper context and not seen as a replacement for permanent public funding, however, it is well worth pursuing. It can legitimately put a finger in the dam of staffing challenges. It is good for kids, and good for the health of child care programs who will experience less turnover. Child care educators should never have to face the painful irony of leaving their jobs upon having a child
due only to the lack of affordable child care.

I was discussing this topic with a colleague, and she wisely pointed out that unlike how pushing corporate child care benefits cements child care as an individualized and private service, making child care free for staff actually makes a positive philosophical contribution. It is a tacit acknowledgment — coming from ruby-red Kentucky and the U.S. military, no less! — that for at least for a certain segment of the population, society has a compelling interest in providing free child care regardless of an individual’s income. The more precedents that normalize the idea of a strong, choice-based child care system with public backing benefitting all of society, the better off we’ll be. I hope other states take note.

I often say that people too often look for some outside-the-box solution to child care, when the real problem is we’ve never been willing to build a box at all. Offering free child care for child care educators isn’t a solution, but perhaps it’s a solid strip of duct tape.

[1] Subsequent children are discounted 25%.

[2] For what it’s worth, I’d also argue that the armed services are a unique employer; the Department of Defense also operates 180 publicly-funded K-12 schools!

[3] That financial hit may be offset by having enough staff to keep classrooms open — it’s a much bigger problem to be majorly below capacity because of staffing shortages! — but the point is that this incentive does not make programs more financially sustainable in the broader sense.

First, some context-setting. Child care unionization is extremely scattershot. There are a few large family child care unions in states like California and Illinois, and a bare handful of center-based unions. As The Hechinger Report back in 2020: “The child care industry, which is made up of many small businesses with high employee turnover, is largely nonunionized. Just a quarter of home-based providers belonged to an association or a union last year, according to a survey conducted by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California, Berkeley.”

Because most centers are either single sites or small local chains, unionization is difficult. That said, none of the large corporate chains–Kindercare, the largest, has over 36,000 employees–have seen significant unionization efforts. (notably, after employees at a Kindercare center affiliated with the University of Southern California voted in 2016 to become the first unionized Kindercare site, Kindercare coincidentally less than a month later.) (a 2021 about unionization, with comments by employees of some of the large child care chains, makes for fascinating reading.) In some cases, pre-K educators who work at school-based sites are folded into teacher’s unions. Family child care providers may have an easier time because they can collectively bargain against their state government in search of a better contract, as happened in California. However, as the think tank CLASP , in much of the country family providers have no legal ability to unionize:

The effectiveness of what unions do exist in child care suggests how important they can be. The CLASP report notes examples from early educators in New Mexico gaining hazard pay during the pandemic to those in Rhode Island getting the right to Spanish language liaisons at the state’s Department of Human Services, which oversees child care. The retirement fund won by California’s union, Child Care Providers United, sets a national precedent.

Unions, by dint of their organizing prowess, can also help the sector writ large flex its muscles. This has been very apparent overseas, as unions in places like and have been instrumental in their respective child care policy progress. It is also the case on a smaller scale in the U.S.; for instance, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) was one of the participants in Connecticut’s successful ‘’ effort. The presence of unions also opens the door to what is known as “,” where an agreement is reached that covers an entire workforce. One form of sectoral bargaining just concluded in California, where all fast food workers .

To be clear, unionization is not a panacea. While technically even the employees of small businesses like single-site child care centers can unionize, the barriers to such actions tend to be high. Moreover, unions sometimes work at cross-purposes to other stakeholder groups and even other unions. In New York City, three different unions variously represent school-based pre-K teachers, community-based pre-K teachers, family child care providers, Head Start teachers, and certain child care center directors. This can understandably .

Nevertheless, unionization should absolutely be a bigger part of the child care conversation. The strategy has been around for a while — the first recorded instance of child care union is in 1949, and there was a unionization published by the Child Care Employee Project in 1986 — but it has rarely been front and center. Increasing unionization opportunities will require a basket of different tactics, from advancing more state laws that authorize collective bargaining by family child care providers to center-based educators to build support among employees of the big corporate chains. Such efforts will also require financial backing from philanthropies and other sources. In this year of high union activity, there may be no better moment to start charging up child care educator power – power that will be badly needed in the battles to come.

Garcia is absolutely correct. Child care policy too what is known in the sector as “family, friends and neighbor” care, or FFN for short. This is a problem, and it should stop.

If you drew a pie chart of where all kids below school age are on any given day, only about a third of them are in a formal program like a licensed center or licensed home-based child care program. Another third are with one of their parents. The last third are with FFN caregivers — a group of caregivers . That’s a huge proportion of children and caregivers getting vanishingly little policy attention![1]

(I’m glossing over some major nuances: many more 4-year-olds, and many less 4-month-olds, are in formal care vs. informal care. Also, large numbers of households , one of which is usually FFN care. The point, I hope, is nonetheless clear.)

So why is FFN care such an afterthought in most child care policy proposals? Major federal bills, from the Build Back Better Act to the newest iteration of the Child Care for Working Families Act, are essentially silent on the issue. I think there are two factors at play here, one more practical and one more philosophical.

Practically speaking, FFNs are a difficult population for policymakers to get their hands around. The term FFN masks substantial differences: a significant percentage are paid (a miserable $7,400 a year on average), while most are unpaid. It can be unclear how to reach them because they are generally exempt from regulation: Grandmothers taking care of their grandchild do not have to register with the state. Research that plenty see this as a calling and would like to have more engagement with and support from the broader child care system, while others are content to maintain their informal status.[2] Moreover, these can either be consistent or extremely dynamic care situations that change week-to-week. All told, traditional child care policy mechanisms like fee subsidy assistance don’t map well onto FFN care!

The philosophical question, I think, that throws some advocates and policymakers for a loop is this: how do you simultaneously push for a well-trained child care workforce and honor the relationship and knowledge that, say, a grandmother brings to bear with her own grandchild?

To me, the way out of the thicket is leaning on the dual distinctions between individual or very small group care vs. large group care, as well as between kin or fictive kin relationships vs. non-kin relationships. (“Fictive kin” refers to individuals who are not blood related but have an emotionally significant relationship to an individual; it’s the friend or neighbor who may as well be family.) Suggesting a grandmother does not need specialized training to care for her grandchildren suggests nothing about what we should expect if that same grandmother was caring for eight unrelated toddlers. What we need to do, instead, is make sure FFN caregivers have the support—monetarily, socially, and with regards to child development—that they need to feel comfortable and confident. How much each caregiver chooses to access that support will depend on individual circumstances. As Garcia said on the podcast, “We cannot just continue to take advantage of 
 FFN providers without ensuring that they are also properly equipped, that they are compensated.”

Garcia’s point surfaces a yet-deeper set of underlying questions: who gets to decide what type of care is worthy of public support and respect? If we require caregivers to establish a formal relationship with the state in order to get resources—particularly knowing what populations that excludes—what does that say about our commitment to true parental choice? If caregiving is labor, if caregiving supports child development, if caregiving boosts the economy, if caregiving enables family flourishing, then how can we say only institutional programs belong within child care policy? The implication that embracing informal caregivers will somehow cheapen or hurt the effort for child care to be taken seriously or well-funded is revealing: we should reject the premise.

In fact, advancing a better deal for FFN providers is not only the right thing to do on the merits, it also carries political benefits. A child care movement and policy agenda that excludes FFN care and excludes stay-at-home parents is excluding two-thirds of its direct constituency! It also leaves the movement vulnerable to opponent attacks. Leaning into the assets FFN providers bring—such as robust relationships, proximity to families, cultural responsiveness—will broaden and strengthen the sector’s efforts.

There are hints of what this could look like. The Hechinger Report on FFN care and featured Hawaii, the state with by far the most FFN care because “friend, family and neighbor care is valued both culturally and by necessity.” Hawaii has developed several promising models for engaging these caregivers in organic training opportunities that also serve to build social connections. Garcia praised Colorado for using some of their pandemic relief funding to hire a full-time staffer in the state’s Department of Early Childhood focused on FFN issues, establish an FFN advisory council, and offer professional development to FFN providers. Colorado is also home to a first-in-the-nation for these caregivers. In another vein, the Home Grown philanthropic collaborative has put forth a .

As you can imagine, such models and policies require resources. Yet, as the Hechinger article explains, “nationwide, aid for family and friend caregivers is rare. In 23 states, there are no known statewide supports for relatives and friends who provide child care.” And in most states that do offer aid, what support exists is meager or has high barriers. For example, FFN caregivers are technically eligible to become recipients of subsidy vouchers for low-income children, but in general and payment rates miserly.

The most immediate step forward would be for policymakers and advocates to start fully embracing FFN care as a critical component of a healthy and vibrant child care system. (The same goes for stay-at-home parents, which I will talk about in a subsequent column). FFN providers, and groups that seek to uplift them, should be at policy development tables. More research should be conducted to determine and advance aligned solutions. Family, friend and neighbor caregivers have been doing the work for a long, long time. It’s time that child care policy finally had their backs.

My gratitude to Home Grown’s Natalie Renew for reviewing a draft of this column and providing invaluable feedback and insights.

[1] FFN care is especially essential for rural and immigrant populations, as well as those who work non-traditional hours (nights and weekends).

[2] Even more confusingly, FFN caregivers are sometimes lumped in with either licensed family child care providers on the one hand (e.g., paid individuals who care for multiple non-related children in their home, and who have some sort of formal relationship with the state) and with stay-at-home parents on the other hand.

First, the good news. If you’re a family of four in New Mexico making below about $120,000 a year, . Soon, If you’re a California family of four making under about $85,000 a year, . Soon, if you are a Vermont family of four making under about $53,000 a year, . In the last Congress, both the Build Back Better Act and the Republican (which garnered 14 GOP co-sponsors) included provisions that families making under 75% of their state median income could have child care for
 you guessed it, free.

(Note I am intentionally saying “can be free” and not “is free.” We will get to that in a moment.)

This begs a remarkably under-asked question: why? Why should child care be free for some and not for others? If we’re going to draw a line between free and not-free, where does that line get drawn? As the examples above show, lines are being drawn, but in wildly different places. New Mexico uses 400% of the federal poverty line, Vermont uses 175% of the federal poverty line, California uses 75% of state median income. And when did we decide at the federal level that 75% of state median income was the ticket?

The first order question is why anyone should pay at all. Some goods and services—public schools, libraries, fire departments, national defense—have such positive societal benefits that we have determined there should be no user fee. Households and corporations instead pay into those systems through taxes. That is why Bill Gates can send his child to the local public school for free or check out a book at the local library for free, despite obviously being able to pay.

I think sometimes the digression into questions of whether these items fall under the technical economics definition of “public good” or “merit good” misses the point. Sometimes society takes one for the team so that there can be a team. Schools provide, among many other things, a commonly accessible experience and (aspirationally, at least) a common foundation of knowledge and skills. Libraries are enormously important sources of community. It is, on an almost ineffable level, good to know that the fire department will come to my house and the rich guy’s house.[1]

Early care and education is a gray area. Like, ultra-gray. Here’s how gray it is: depending on your child’s age and what type of setting they happen to attend, you may or may not have to pay. Universal pre-K programs—the truly universal ones, like Florida’s and Georgia’s—have no income check. Yet if your child misses the age cutoff by a minute, you’re out of luck. The difference between an August 31st birthday and a September 2nd birthday is the difference between free and many, many thousands of dollars.[2]

I’m going to suggest we need a coherent theory for why people should or should not pay for child care. The shrug-emoji approach makes it difficult to build a compelling case for transformative investments in child care.

Why? Just making child care less expensive for some people, along some seemingly arbitrary lines, falls into the trap of “deliverism.”[3] In , progressive stalwart Deepak Bhargava and colleagues explain why the theory of deliverism, “the presumption of a linear and direct relationship between economic policy and people’s political allegiances,” is wrong. Contrary to popular belief, helping ease people’s wallets—such as through the pandemic stimulus checks or the expanded child tax credit—is not on its own enough to build political will. Instead, Bhargava argues, “policies that deliver economic benefit without speaking to, reinforcing and constructing a social identity are likely to have little political impact.”

This assertion has big implications for child care. It is difficult to make a values-based case for universal provision if you’re focused on chopping up what benefits go to whom and when. Telling a story—you provide value to society, you deserve support in caring for your family so they can thrive, and those people over there are stopping you from getting it—works better when you have a simple way of explaining the benefit. That doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be universally free, but as Canada’s “$10 a Day” campaign shows, it does mean having an easily understood benefit for everyone.

That lack of identity-building can also impact the actual effectiveness of these policies. This is where that “can be free” vs. “is free” distinction comes in. One interesting finding from New Mexico’s expansion of eligibility for free care is that, so far, not that many middle class families are taking advantage. The Albuquerque Journal “about 76% of families receiving assistance are at or below 200% of the federal poverty line.” (Eligibility rose to 400% of FPL as of July 2021.) There are many different reasons for this—just making child care more affordable , and that supply needs to match preferences—but I have a supposition that many middle-class families do not yet see themselves belonging in a child care subsidy program. No one has told them why they do.

Not having an answer to “should child care be free,” and, if not, where should we draw the line?’ is thus becoming increasingly untenable. This isn’t a place where we want a thousand flowers to bloom any more than we want some states choosing to charge various amounts for fire service or middle school.
We need a clear answer that is grounded in philosophically sound reasoning. That path leads toward good politics and good policy.

[1] I won’t pretend there isn’t self-interest there — the fire at my house can spread to the rich guy’s house, and to be sure the fire truck coming to poorer areas. But you get my point.

[2] This schism is present even in major Democratic policy proposals like Build Back Better, which would have made pre-K free for three-and four-year-olds, but instituted a sliding scale for younger children and for care of pre-K aged kids outside of traditional hours. No one I’m aware of has made a detailed defense for why that should be the case.

[3] Based on conversations ±ő’v±đ had with some of those involved, it’s worth noting that the Department of Health and Human Services’ oft-cited “7 percent of income” line for “affordability” did not come about out of some unimpeachable methodology but was intended more as a general guideline. In fact, HHS used to say that affordability was 10 percent of income; the line itself is malleable.

The nuance is that, of course, child care is an economic driver. But here’s the thing: if the primary reason we need a child care system is to allow parents to work, then the policy target quickly becomes what I call the minimum viable child care system. That is not equivalent to — is, in fact, in direct opposition to — a sustainable, high-quality child care system that works well for parents, educators and children.

Consider child care educator wages. They are miserably low, a median of $14 an hour (~$29,000 a year). They have been miserably low quite literally for decades. “” is a report that came out in 1989. You can find — “Child Care Workers Stuck in Salary Limbo”— that could’ve been written yesterday. Nothing has changed because the industry muddled along. Child care has long been in market failure, but it’s frankly a failure the broader market has been willing to tolerate, like a business accepting a certain amount of inventory shrinkage.

There were staffing shortages that led to slot shortages, but the pain was modest enough to evade real action. Prior to the pandemic, there were still over 1 million formal child care workers. Nowadays, the argument — an argument I — is that because other low-wage sectors have raised their base compensation, child care can’t keep up. The shortages are getting worse, the pain deeper. Tolerance wanes.

Yet follow that to its logical conclusion: if child care offering $12 an hour used to be OK while programs were competing against the McDonalds and Walmarts of the world also offering $12 an hour, and now McDonalds and Walmart are offering $17 an hour, then all we have to do is get child care up to $17 an hour. Right? Minimum viability. There is no broader case.

Because economically speaking, the quality of the day-to-day interactions between a child care educator and a toddler are of little concern. Whether that educator is making poverty wages and can barely keep a roof over her head and the heads of her own children is immaterial. Whether the parent feels comfortable with the child care situation is immaterial. Care itself is immaterial. So long as there is a warm body in that classroom and the meat packing plant worker doesn’t have to miss his shift, The Economy has not been harmed: our investment is returned.

That is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but not exceptionally so. The very first American child care programs (which followed on from the first child care workers, enslaved Black women) were little more than miserable holding pens for the children of ‘unfortunates’: poor and widowed mothers. As puts it:

“They were crowded, marginally funded, staffed by untrained personnel, and barely able to meet minimal standards of sanitation. Furthermore, as [historian Emily] Cahan points out, they were never really ‘for the children.’ They were initially established to help the mothers. Then, during the depression, they mutated into the Works Project Administration emergency nursery schools, the primary purpose of which ‘was to provide work for unemployed teachers, custodians, cooks and nurses.’ Serving the children was definitely of secondary concern.”

This somehow managed to be an improvement over the alternative, which was keeping these young children locked in a room all day or letting them loose in dangerous workplaces. All to say, American child care rests quite literally on a foundation of labor exploitation and a desire to put in the least amount of funding possible.

Low Wages Everywhere

The modern economic case for child care and that there is economic value in healthy child development. But the exploitative nature of the sector remains.This is, importantly, not a uniquely American phenomenon. Even in countries like Canada and Germany that have made major child care investments in recent decades, there are huge . Why? A persistently underpaid workforce.

This is more understandable when you consider what it means to avoid the minimum viable system. The Vermont legislature commissioned that asked, among other things, what would a salary scale look like that was equivalent to K-12 educators?

Check out the annual median salary column. These are reasonable salaries that circle the middle class, particularly if paired with reasonable benefits like health insurance and retirement. A two-earner family with an early childhood lead teacher and an electrician — neither of whom may bear a four-year college degree — could easily pull in around $100,000 a year. The game changes.

Yet, again, the economic-productivity case for child care does not suggest why we would ever actualize a salary scale that looks like that. After all, if we are seeking a healthy return on investment, then paying more money into the system than is strictly required to keep a not-terrible amount of slots open is a poor investment. (Indeed, while Vermont put in a truly impressive amount of new child care funding, they rejected RAND’s scale and ).

We are, moreover, breathtakingly bad as a country at putting enough public money into systems that very obviously provide a net positive return. Emergency medical technicians — the people saving workers’ actual lives, if we want to cast this in cold economics — make a median salary of less than $36,000 a year. If we can’t convince policymakers to get EMTs a decent wage, I’d gently submit we are deluding ourselves to think we’re going to get them there, without a forcing function or change in strategy, for a profession that many still see as babysitting. Indeed, this issue of low wages — which is tied up with questions of worker power — dogs many large U.S. industries and has all sorts of nasty .Ìę

It is worth reiterating that even in countries with far more progressive governments and far stronger labor unions, child care educators . Why? Tim Jackson, Director of the U.K.’s Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity, put it this way : “In the so-called social contract of neoliberal economics, wages follow productivity. Because care takes time, care workers are condemned to pitiful wages, insecure jobs, impossible working conditions and — pandemic aside—the lowest ranks in the status game played out in modern society. Capitalism condemns care, not accidentally, not inadvertently, but systematically.”

(I would add two things: first, the wages-follow-productivity idea that drives much of modern economics is very much a myth; just look at CEO pay. Second, we cannot speak about without acknowledging the fact it is overwhelmingly performed by women, and gendered expectations around care — care that is “valorized but not valued,” per scholar Emma Dowling — exist even in the most ‘equal’ of societies.)

Jackson’s conclusion is, I suspect, one reason it has been difficult for U.S. child care champions to fully embrace stay-at-home parents and relative caregivers in major policy proposals. It is hard to simultaneously make an economic growth argument and fully honor care. Making it easier financially for a parent or grandparent to provide care for their (grand)child is incoherent in the language of economics. Financial metrics and media coverage do not capture the human development value proposition when a grandmother is paid to provide care as opposed to being a Walmart greeter.

Indeed, to see the ultimate hollowness of overfocusing on economic production, consider elder care. A dementia-stricken 85-year-old is no longer producing, and will never again produce, anything of significant economic value. Yet it is clear to most that we would be morally impoverished, indeed give up a bit of our national soul, to simply cast that person aside.

I do not want to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction or suggest we entirely throw out economic logic. Jobs, particularly good jobs with decent compensation, can be important sources of meaning in people’s lives. As we saw with the Great Recession, the state of the economy matters; the effects of that downturn on individual and family well-being . Moreover, women having access to jobs translates to financial empowerment, the ability to resist coercion and .

The lack of child care is absolutely a barrier to parents, especially mothers, having jobs and careers they desire. The economic productivity argument, though, cares little for the quality or stability of jobs, cares little if working conditions support health and flourishing. The idealized image of the growth economy is not empowered women but a stock market rising with no end in sight — a goal that generates a gravity well of minimum viability.

To transform child care, then, we must reposition it in the American mindset — beyond babysitting, beyond a bridge to work.

Recasting Child Care

To get away from the minimum viable child care fallacy we must do two things: first, explicitly position child care among higher ideals than mere work enabler; and second, crafting policy proposals aligned with such a vision.

As Tim Jackson asserts, what’s needed for a paradigm shift is “not just to rail against capitalism — though that of course is one of great joys of our time.” Instead, Jackson says, insomuch as we talk about the economy, we should talk about the well-being economy. He explains (speaking here largely of health care, but entirely applicable to child care): “Our job is to reconceive economy as care 
 To build some concept of universal basic services. To protect the rights, wages and living conditions of care workers. To reform the distorted productivity that robs care of meaning. To constrain the rent-seeking behavior of private firms intent on extracting value from people’s infirmity 
 Our job is to build a new myth better suited to our human condition as a mortal species on a finite planet on the edge of an inhospitable galaxy in the middle of a mysterious universe
”

The first element of a new narrative starts with a change in the way advocates and elected leaders talk about child care. Instead of talking about child care as essential for economic growth, talk about it as essential for families and children being who they want to be, as essential to the national character, as essential as the public schools voters already support.

Public education offers an instructive example worth spending some time on. Schools absolutely allow parents to work, but that is almost never the primary case made for their existence. Horace Mann, often considered the father of American common schools, once argued of education, “The general utility of knowledge, also, and the higher and more enduring satisfactions of the intellect 
 impart to this subject a true dignity and a sublime elevation.” Even Mark Twain offered that “out of public schools grows the greatness of a nation.”

The argument for public education has variously (and with various levels of problematic-ness) been made on grounds of democracy, global competitiveness, social mobility, innovation, workforce development, cultural assimilation, self-discovery, and, yes, the need to keep children off the streets during the day.ÌęWhen the New York Times  in 2022 entitled “What is School For?” they featured 12 writers’ answers, which ranged from “economic mobility” to “hope.” None focused primarily on school as a work support. Because school rationales have always included higher ideals, there is little appetite for a minimum viable education system. [1]

Don’t get me wrong, the American education system is badly inequitable, and teachers are absolutely laboring under difficult conditions without great salaries, particularly in high cost-of-living cities. But relatively speaking, teaching is a solid job that offers family-sustaining salaries and adequate benefits. Every state constitution includes an obligation for the state to provide universally accessible, free public schools. Every family has a slot. The nation spends over $700 billion a year on K-12 education. It is the largest or second-largest line item in all state budgets. The median pay for teachers is slightly north of $61,000 a year.[2] Even roiled by culture wars and debates over funding mechanisms, voter support for public education .

You can tick off every single point for spending $700 billion on K-12 education and apply it to the early years and to care and education services outside the school day and school year. Voters are already on board with funding a high-quality child care system. They just don’t know it yet.

Elevating child care into the loftier reaches of the public’s imagination does not, however, have to rely on educational rhetoric. There is a strong case to be made that care is wrapped up in that most American question: self-determination. A wise politician might ask parents the following:

Shouldn’t you be able to spend time playing games with your children rather than frantically refreshing summer camp registration pages in January? Shouldn’t the number of children you have be entirely a question for you and your partner, not one the government influences by making care unaffordable? Shouldn’t you be able to go to church with your family rather than working an extra shift just to pay for care? Shouldn’t your child be supported in learning from birth, not from an arbitrary age cut-off? Shouldn’t you have support outside the school hours that are comically mismatched to your work hours? Shouldn’t you be able to choose the care situation that works for your family rather than having your hand forced into one you’re uncomfortable with? Shouldn’t you be able to do the work you’re passionate about—be a doctor, a firefighter, start a business if you want to—knowing your children are healthy, happy and well cared for? If family is the cornerstone of American greatness, shouldn’t the government support your family like it supports wealthy corporations?

To take this even a step further, support for care is arguably not something families should have to beg from their government, but something owed. The sociologist Theda Skocpol has made in the early parts of the 20^th century that mothers—like soldiers—deserve restitution for their immense service to the nation. Skocpol brings up a 1911 speech given by G. Harris Robertson to the National Congress of Mothers, where Robertson inveighed in favor of cash payments to poor mothers: “We cannot afford to let a mother, one who has divided her body by creating other lives for the good of the state, one who has contributed to citizenship, be classed as a pauper, a dependent. She must be given value received by her nation, and stand as one honored.”

(One today may read that as uncomfortably close to defining a woman’s value by her reproductive ability, and it leaves fathers and other family formulations out of the picture. I think we can reasonably update the language while maintaining the core idea that child-rearing provides social value and demands society’s respect and recompense, a tonal shift from pleading for help to ‘how dare you shirk your obligations to American families?’)

Contrast these arguments to the language even some of today’s most stalwart child care champions use. In introducing a , Sen. Elizabeth Warren stated in the bill’s press release:

“Just like investments in roads, bridges and broadband, investments in child care are critical for families and the success of our entire economy. I have long said that child care is infrastructure and the Building Child Care for a Better Future Act will help secure a strong, long-lasting federal investment in child care to raise wages for workers and ensure affordable and accessible child care for all.”

Again, this logic isn’t wrong, but it is incomplete and ineffective. We have had two-thirds of mothers of young children in the workforce since the late 1990s without an adequate amount of funding to maintain a functional child care system. The economy did not collapse. We have wrung about as much juice as there is out of the economic-growth argument.

One can imagine a media blitz to reinforce the new messages. Television ads with couples explaining that they had to uproot themselves from the town and faith community they loved because they could not find affordable child care. Shots of the inside of a child care center where an educator is joyfully engaging a dozen 4-year-olds fading in and out against the inside of school where a Kindergarten teacher is joyfully engaging a dozen 5-year-olds: the stinger, “One of these teachers makes $14 an hour. Child care isn’t babysitting.” Or perhaps the same split-screen with big block letters — “Cost to Parents: $0 a year” on one half, on the other “Cost to Parents: $12,000 a year,” fading to the question “Why?”

There are any number of creative options out there, ranging from TikTok challenges (#WhyIsntChildCareFree?), the engagement of influencers from celebrities to the increasingly popular “.” I am not a PR specialist, and my point is not to propose a particular campaign, nor to propose one specific line of narrative from all ±ő’v±đ put forth above. Specifics will necessarily be driven by context and audience. My point is to suggest that we are fighting the child care battle on the entirely wrong terms.

Alongside shifts in the zeitgeist must come shifts in actual policy proposals. If I may ask your indulgence : “To maximize its popularity, such a plan should help with the early years as well as after-school and summer care, and follow the lead of some Nordic countries with stipends for stay-at-home parents. The simplest, strongest plan to capture the public’s attention could be to mimic the public-school system, and propose universal and free child care. Ideally, any plan would be tied into a suite of pro-family policies that includes paid family leave and a monthly allowance for helping with general child-rearing costs.”

Whatever the particulars of this next generation of proposals, they must be grounded in the fundamental ideas that child care—indeed all care—is patriotic, care makes America stronger as a nation and as a people, and care’s relation to economic growth is a secondary benefit rather than its primary purpose.

I want to close with the words of Robert F. Kennedy, who :

“Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year 
 Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

A child care system built in pursuit of improving labor force participation and corporate productivity begets child care policy built in pursuit of the minimum viable system. A child care system built in pursuit of healthy, prosperous, and free children and families—upon which rests a healthy, prosperous, and free nation—begets child care policy of which America can be proud.

The choice is ours.

[1] The success of K-12 schools in this regard has created frankly bizarre lines of demarcation. If a program is lucky enough to come under the umbrella of being perceived as “education,” the public dollars flow. Public Pre-K teachers who work in schools have by far the highest wages and lowest turnover of any early educators. But that means a program down the street serving similar—or even the same —ages get a fraction of the funding. Non-school-based child care educators with bachelor’s degrees are paid as little as half as much as their school-based counterparts. To the 5-year-old born in August, a true dignity and sublime elevation; to the one born in November, a way to allow working parents to do their job.

[2] This pay rate did not happen by accident. The history of teacher’s union organizing is long and complicated, but these unions have been on the scene since the turn of the 20th century. Whatever you think of the National Education Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) today, the fact is they have consistently — and successfully — fought for higher pay and better working conditions. There is a labor union side of the story here, to be sure.

Philosophically, it makes little sense to overly segment the early years when talking about care. Certainly child care needs are most intense and expensive prior to school entry; those seven hours a day for 180 days a year aren’t nothing! But families do not experience care needs in a vacuum: a household that has found an affordable slot for their toddler but can’t afford care for their second grader is still under stress. The primary child care subsidy law, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, serves children up to age 13 for this reason. Most people wouldn’t know it, but .

Politically, bringing in parents of elementary schoolers massively expands the child care constituency. While there are around 20 million children under the age of five, not all of them belong to families that utilize external child care. (Stay-at-home parents should be brought into the coalition as well, but that’s a story for another column.) More than three million are infants, and parents of babies are not famously known for having a lot of discretionary time or energy. On the other hand, there are over 35 million elementary school students in the U.S. with less bleary-eyed parents. (Of course, there are also a fair percentage of these families that overlap because they have both an elementary schooler and a young child.) Ten million , another 20 million would if one was available and affordable, and the vast majority have summer care needs.

Why hasn’t there been more of a seamless melding of early child care and school-aged care? To find out, I asked , a child care luminary who has held top child care roles in the federal government and has been fighting for decades toward a better system. Lombardi told me over email that “I don’t think there is any one point in history that marked a clear separation, but it did seem slowly over time these issues diverged somewhat.”

Lombardi pointed to a few different influences. One was the emergence of different policy mechanisms and funding streams. For instance, while Head Start, Early Head Start and public pre-K were expanding with their age-specific focuses, in 1994 Congress reauthorized the nation’s major education law and funded 21st Century Community Learning Centers — centers that encompassed afterschool programming. Around the same time, some large philanthropies started to direct their funding to more discrete age bands. The direction of the money pushed advocates along like a strong current: the Afterschool Alliance was founded in 2000 and the Birth-to-Five Policy Alliance (now the Alliance for Early Success) followed in 2005.

Looking back, then, the split-up of early years and school-aged child care does not read as a story of rancor, but as a gradual and unintentional separation. ±ő’v±đ never heard anyone make a vocal case in favor of keeping the two at arm’s length.

So, what could a tighter linkage look like? It would start with a unified policy proposal. Both major federal child care proposals — Sen. Patty Murray’s Child Care for Working Families Act and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Child Care for Every Community Act — are primarily focused on young children and are essentially silent on school-aged care. Both bills would leave intact the current (limited) Child Care and Development Block Grant support of school-aged care. Extending care benefits up through elementary school does add to the price tag (California’s costs $4 billion) but the investment is well worth it both in terms of political will and improvements in human flourishing. There are also, of course, real differences between early care and school-aged care that would need to be reflected in policy. Many outdoor summer camps and after-school clubs are not currently set up to be part of the child care subsidy system, and the current system may well not be designed in a way to effectively include them. That should be a serious conversation, which is in a way my whole point.

Once a comprehensive policy is in place, it will smooth the path for coalition-building and parent activation. Consider summer child care again. Currently, the group sitting most squarely at the intersection of ‘needs heavy usage of summer camps’ and ‘’ are two-earner middle class households, especially (sigh) mothers. This is an electorally potent group that too often experiences what writer Rebecca Ackermann once termed “.” A child care plan that pumped money into summer care options to make them much more affordable and widely available could be an advocacy entry point for parents who may no longer have a personal reason to agitate for better toddler care.

Philanthropy, too, has a role to play here. Even if a funder is only interested in the early years, promoting a policy and advocacy agenda that encompasses school-aged care is actually a better bet than putting up a wall at Kindergarten, and the same goes for funders targeting what are known in the sector as ‘out of school time programs.’ Recapturing the cross-age solidarity that existed in the beginning of the 1970s would be a boon for every age.

The continental drift between early care and school-aged care may have been unplanned, but putting the two back together will require serious intentionality. We cannot allow the technocratic cleaving of age groups and funding streams to impoverish our understanding that care is care and the experience of parents and children is a totality of the pulls and pushes in their lives. (This goes for elder care and care for family members with chronic medical conditions or disabilities, by the way, and is a care-lifespan idea promoted most notably by  of Caring Across Generations.) Thankfully, integrating the issue across the age spectrum is a win-win. All the connection requires now is some attention, love and, dare I say, care.

The report, from the Low Income Investment Fund, is titled, “.” With a level of sophistication I have never before seen applied to early childhood settings when it comes to environmental issues, the authors connected New York City’s robust child care licensing data with projected risks of floods and sea level rise. They conclude:

Mapping state child care licensing data in the context of projected long-term sea-level rise and stormwater flood scenarios suggests that 1,638 licensed FCC programs caring for 22,702 children in New York City face immediate risk of flood and water damage. By 2080, a flood mirroring what occurred in 2021, as a result of Hurricane Ida, would put nearly 80% of licensed FCCs at risk.

Family child care programs in NYC are of particular concern because so many include or primarily use basement spaces as part of their physical layout. To see how generalizable these results are to cities and states without heavy basement usage, I called up one of the report’s authors, Joe Fretwell.

Fretwell acknowledged that in “the Northeast corridor where there is a lot of denser housing and a lot of basements, there are unique risks to that area” due to the proliferation of basements used for home-based business. Yet, he added, “That being said, there is a lot of generalizability. There is a huge amount of housing and infrastructure in this country that has not been maintained, particularly in the face of climate change. Housing in this country is generally not ready to withstand worsening weather.” This is a particular concern for family child care providers, who operate on exceptionally tight financial margins and often have little ability to keep up with needed maintenance, much less invest in climate-resilient upgrades.

It should be clear by now that the operability of child care facilities, whether in-home programs or centers, is entwined with broader questions of the future of child care. Hurricanes like Harvey and Ian , while heat waves can easily and force extended closures. What’s more, better facilities will not only have more adaptive capacity, they will be healthier, safer and better support the thriving of staff and children. As Fretwell explains:

“Sometimes infrastructure gets pitted against workforce issues, but we see those things as completely aligned — particularly thinking about programs that serve low-income children and rely heavily on public subsidy. Calls by the sector as a whole to increase reimbursement rates, to increase public funding for child care, those things are directly related obviously to the sector’s ability to pay educators more and provide high-quality programs, but also in the individual bottom line of programs and their ability to operate like a normal small business and take on a loan if they need to, which is not possible for most child care programs right now.”

(Family child care providers especially can too often fall through the cracks when it comes to receiving financial support, as they tend to not be nonprofits yet to also be more informal businesses that may lack a business banking account and other mechanisms. These challenges cropped up painfully when it came to family child care programs during the height of the pandemic.)

Beyond loans, child care providers are in desperate need of public dollars to finance facility upgrades. Even modest investments can make a big difference. As an example of what climate-resilience upgrades can look like, the report gives the example of Yolanda Miguel, who owns a family child care program in Brooklyn. Miguel’s basement flooded badly during Hurricane Ida due to the slope of the backyard and cracks in an outdoor staircase. Thanks to a $63,600 grant from LIIF, “Yolanda has been able to repair the backyard play space and re-open her program with new equipment. She renovated her back deck, ground level and outdoor stairs, making it safer for the children, while also mitigating future water seepage into the basement.”

Making capital funding readily available to child care programs, including family child care homes, is one of the concrete recommendations the report offers. While the recommendations are technically focused on New York City, many are widely applicable. These include:

• Offer technical assistance to providers to ensure that any public, philanthropic or private facilities financing is used for projects that make programs more prepared for disasters.
• Use data to prioritize programs and areas that face compounding racial, socioeconomic and climate disparities for facilities funding.
• Allocate funding from various federal, state and local environmental/climate-related legislation for child care facilities.
• Incorporate child care facilities into city/county flood mitigation plans.
• Make care infrastructure and young children a priority in broad city/county resilience planning.

Climate change and child care can feel like disparate issues. Spending a few minutes sitting with LIIF’s report and interactive maps will disabuse you of that notion. We cannot solve the child care crisis without considering the implications of climate change, and given the crucial contributions of child care to both child development and family flourishing, we cannot effectively respond to a chaotic climate without investing in the early years.

The need to act is urgent. In many ways the LIIF study was a low-end estimate of the threat. When I asked Fretwell what surprised him the most in their results, he replied, “the sheer magnitude of risk to the sector was really eye-opening,” adding that “New York City has released three projections [for potential levels of water deluge in coming decades] — and the worst-case scenario has already happened.” (This was during the storm system that culminated in the remnant of Hurricane Ida in 2021— at one point, Central Park was taking on more than three inches of rain an hour.)

Despite how we might idealistically think Washington or a statehouse works, frequently the game of who-knows-who (and, its corollary, who-has-money) dictates what gets done. For a disturbingly excellent illustration of this, consider journalist David Wessel’s 2021 book, “.” Wessel chronicles the passage of “Opportunity Zones,” special tax-advantaged census tracts – and a policy that by and large has lined the pockets of rich investors as opposed to sparking development in distressed low-income neighborhoods. This year, the federal government will dole out over $2 billion (equivalent to this year’s increase in federal child care spending) on this program.

As Wessel shows, Opportunity Zones (or OZs) came about not as the result of public demand or community leaders crowding their Congresspeople’s office, but was rather the brainchild of none other than Sean Parker of Napster and (“drop the ‘the’”) Facebook fame. Parker effectively worked the system, leveraging his money to gain access and hiring a team of well-connected former Hill staffers. Through insider networks and relationships, they were able to quietly get buy-in across the aisle. The idea was ultimately championed by Sens. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Cory Booker (D-NJ). (While some boosters on the Democratic side have backed off OZs in the face of obvious problems with the policy’s design and implementation, the policy is still highly likely to survive and instead get only modest reforms.)

Wessel — who is extremely harsh on the rich-get-richer impacts of the policy — writes that, from a dispassionate perspective, OZs are “a case study of how a clever, ambitious and big-idea billionaire … can hire the right people and court the right members of Congress to turn an idea into reality even at a time of partisan gridlock.”

Or take a more high-profile example than the (relatively) small-dollar OZs: the Inflation Reduction Act. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — recipient of millions of campaign dollars in Wall Street money —  in the IRA that would have eliminated a tax break for hedge fund managers and private equity firms. Meanwhile, Bill Gates, along with a bevy of lobbyists, Child care couldn’t keep pace, and we all know how that story ended.

I want to step back for a moment and clarify: child care has many top-notch advocates and organizers and elected official champions. They work tirelessly, and at both at the state and federal level, advocates have notched some impressive victories in recent years ($40 billion in the American Rescue Plan Act was no mean feat).

What the child care sector doesn’t have is a real lobbying arm. It doesn’t have a regular flow of former Hill staff and former Congresspeople populating its ranks. (To be clear: there are some, not zero, of these individuals — and they are unsurprisingly some of our most effective advocates.) It doesn’t have billionaires picking up the phone and calling key Senators. Child care does have a few deep-pocketed backers, such as Warren Buffett and Jackie and Mike Bezos, but there is a distinction between generous grantmaking and Bill Gates- or Sean Parker-style personal lobbying.

The largest dedicated child care lobbying group I’m aware of is the Early Care and Education Consortium, which represents many large for-profit chains. (I say ‘dedicated’ because child care is one part of the broader agenda of some groups, such as the Center for American Progress or National Women’s Law Center, so it is difficult to parse out exactly how much lobbying activity is happening on the subject. That in and of itself is notable, because many other issue areas — from health care to climate change — have singularly-focused lobbying organizations. There are, of course, pros and cons to each approach.) You may recall the Consortium featuring prominently in the New York Times’ , as they worked against the Build Back Better Act; several chain executives also donated to Manchin’s campaign after he halted the legislation. Still, even the Consortium packs a relatively small punch: according to Opensecrets.org, their are less than $500,000 per year. By comparison, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the nation’s largest lobbyer—spent over $80 million in 2022; as another comp, the Environmental Defense Fund spends over $1 million lobbying most years.

The good news is that the sector is trending upwards in this respect. Recent years have seen the advent of several 501(c)(4) child care arms in states like Virginia and Oregon, entities with much more flexibility to lobby and contribute to candidates (indeed, in my experience state child care groups are generally better at playing the inside game, partially owing to the difference in playing field). More and more politicians are putting child care front and center in their agendas. I hear more acknowledgment than ever before in my conversations that the moral righteousness of fighting for young children and their families must be complemented by hardball politics.

That trend needs to continue. We need donors pouring money into establishing a new advocacy and policy infrastructure that works the outside game (raising the issue’s cultural salience and nailing the communications), the inside game (raising the level of connectivity among political insiders and influencers), and connects them through popular and impactful policy proposals. Such infrastructure is particularly critical in an era of divided government.

In the end, the title of this article is a bit of a con. Where have all the child care lobbyists gone? Nowhere: they basically never existed in the first place — and that’s the problem.

The Bezos Family Foundation provides financial support to Early Learning Nation.

Yet here we sit amid a buckling child care system, with no prospect of major federal action and only a handful of states making meaningful moves. Why?

One unaddressed political problem is that voter support for child care is exceptionally soft: it doesn’t actually create incentives or consequences for elected officials. Until the sector reckons with that reality and comes up with a strategy to combat it, we will struggle to make true progress. High poll numbers are nice but, until they harden, can threaten to lull us into a sense of complacence that we’ve got the public on our side. A related problem, which is for another column, is child care’s relative lack of champions among the rich and powerful who have the ear of elected officials; like it or not (not), that is . 

In political communications terms, child care—like — suffers from a problem of salience. Salience is a near-synonym for importance, but it carries more implications. Specifically, salience asks the question ‘how much does this issue impact voters’ behavior?’ Scholars that salience encompasses both how much attention voters (and the media) give an issue and how much weight they assign it when making decisions.

I think a good illustration of the salience issue comes from “The West Wing.” In one episode, a pollster pushes President Bartlet to support an anti-flag burning amendment because it had overwhelming public support (oh, to be back in February 2000). Later, a different poll expert comments that while accurate, the first pollster asked the wrong question — “he never asked them how much they care.” Although 80% of West Wing Americans were against flag burning, a mere minority said it was important, and barely any said it would impact their vote.

So how much do voters care about child care? Sadly, not a lot.

Child care has a salience problem. A classic way of measuring salience is to ask voters “what do you think is the most important problem” facing the nation. Gallup has been for years. The economy is almost always at or near the top. Lately, inflation has been headlining. On “non-economic” issues, today’s voters are most concerned with government leadership and immigration.

Where is child care? I can’t tell you because it doesn’t make the chart. Yes, of the nearly 50 options listed, child care doesn’t even get an honorable mention. Its near-peers don’t paint a rosy picture, though. As of January 2023, a mere 2% of voters chose “education” as the most important issue, and less than 1% chose ‘care for the elderly.’ (By the way, this seems to have happened with all the hoopla around Critical Race Theory. In the end, .)

Pew , and issues like education come out better here. Instead of looking for a sole most important problem, Pew asked whether a variety of issues were a “very big problem,” “moderately big problem,” and so on. Again, inflation reigns at the moment (as of last May, 70% were saying it is a very big problem), with affordability of health care and violence coming in a distant shared second. On the “quality of public K-12 schools,” 39% said it was a very big problem. Again, child care is not on the map.

This out-of-sight, out-of-mind phenomenon (which is tied to child care being cast as an as opposed to a shared social obligation) shows up in popular culture, too. Schools have hit shows like “Abbott Elementary.” In years past, shows from “A.P. Bio” to “The Wire” to “Boston Public” have shone lights — some comedic, some harsh — on public education. There are about schools and teachers. When’s the last time you saw a fictional TV show or movie about child care? To be sure, there are some absolutely fabulous documentaries about child care. These simply do not have the popular reach I’m talking about, though.

Vicki Shabo at New America’s Better Life Lab has done work . The recent highlights for child care are unimpressive. They include things like one-off comments in a “Grey’s Anatomy” episode and passing references in a few other shows. (I also recall child care briefly  with the punchline being that it was bumped out of a prominent place in Selina Meyer’s presidential campaign announcement; “children are of no value,” complains her political director.) Although child care does get not-infrequent news segments these days, it has also largely been ignored by popular analysis shows. For instance, there have been 261 episodes over 9 seasons of John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight.” He has covered everything from sanitation to police in schools. He has done a grand total of zero segments on child care. (He did do a  in 2016, though.)

What’s to be done? I don’t think we’re magically going to make the public decide child care is the most important issue facing the country, but we can surely help increase its salience. Part of that will involve a deliberate “influencer” strategy. We have to present — in mediums that reach far beyond the echo chamber of college-educated progressives — the case for interdependence, the ways in which child-rearing produces social value and requires social support. That interdependence includes support stay-at-home parents, by the way.

As The Cut writer Kathyrn Jezer-Morton , tongue seemingly only half in cheek, “I want artists and celebrities to make inane and tone-deaf viral videos about [child care]. I want Cardi B to demand it on behalf of her fans and Gwyneth to murmur about it on Instagram. I want direct-to-consumer fashion brands to compete for my attention by trying to out-care each other with infographic posts about its necessity.” Imagine the “Abbott Elementary” for child care. [1] Imagine, I don’t know, Rhianna’s Super Bowl pregnancy reveal with her backup dancers spelling out “Universal Child Care Now.” I can’t claim to have a concrete plan here, but achieving cultural lift is a question that should be getting much more attention than it currently does from child care advocates and philanthropies.

The other needed strategy is to work on political messaging that drives home how much child care is a major cost-of-living and freedom issue, in essence borrowing the existing salience. (Fully tethering child care to education is another option, though that would require a hard turn away from the pre-K/child care split and to say the least.)

Embracing that frame requires getting away from complicated schemes with sliding scales and income percentages and subsidy cliffs. Instead, we need to be stating simply and repeatedly: The lack of affordable child care is hurting families. It is hurting American freedom. Child care costs blow a hole in family budgets and . It is causing parents to have fewer choices about the number of children they can have and living where they want. Having access to the care you need for your family to thrive should be a right.

There’s no question that child care is higher up on the agenda than it was five years ago. But even the boldest fall far short of the investment needed to hit the trifecta of affordability, compensation and quality. There remains a distinct lack of a mass child care movement.

My point in all of this is that we face as much a cultural problem as a policy one. Jezer-Morton is right when she writes, “politics starts out as storytelling.” We need a better story about child care, one that captures the public’s imagination. We need to turn the potential energy stored up in voters’ hypothetical support for child care into kinetic consequence: then, history suggests, politicians may finally step up.

That’s how I feel about a lot of the current child care proposals. While there is welcome momentum at many state houses, almost no one is willing to contend with the true cost of a sustainable system that includes well-compensated educators.

Because here’s the thing: with the workforce 80,000 educators from pre-pandemic levels, staffing shortages are keeping us from even filling our existing capacity, much less increasing supply! So, you can make child care cheaper, but without handling the compensation issue, you’re going to generate a whole lot of demand without anywhere for it to go. (Even Canada, with a vastly better funded system, is learning this lesson the hard way: a “Child-care costs are down and demand is up, but a shortage of spaces, staff persists.”)

It’s worth putting a fine point on how much the early care and education workforce is struggling. A from the Prenatal-to-3 Policy Center found that in Texas — aka the country’s second-largest state — “the median hourly wage for early childhood educators 
 is only $12 per hour, which amounts to an annual wage of $24,960 for an early childhood educator who works full time.” That’s more than $4 below the state living wage, a bar crossed by only 1 in 10. Texas early educators. Sadly, Texas isn’t an outlier.

There’s also almost no room for professional growth. The Center went on to note that an educator with 25 years of experience can expect to make only $2 an hour more(!) than a first-year educator. As a cherry on top, few have access to benefits: a showed that less than 1 in 3 Texas early educators have employer-sponsored health insurance or retirement plans, and only half have paid sick days.

That last fact is especially painful considering that the well-being of the workforce is in decline thanks to the pandemic and stress on the sector. A that tracked educators at 100 centers reported a major jump in depressive symptoms between 2019 and 2022, from 19% to 32%, with almost half displaying some evidence of food insecurity. The Virginia data is consonant with Texas’: half of educators with paid sick leave, although in the Old Dominion a whole 40% have employer health insurance (woo-hoo?). Thanks to inflation, real wages between 2020 and 2022 actually went down.

All this to say, raising the median child care wage from $12 an hour to $14 an hour isn’t getting it done. Particularly in a low-unemployment economy still dealing with inflation. The competition isn’t letting up (which is good! Full-time jobs should respect people’s hard work and enable them to live reasonably!): Chipotle it is hiring 15,000 new workers, and they offer an average wage of $16 an hour with medical, PTO, retirement and more. United Airlines a nearly $20 an hour starting wage with a $10,000 signing bonus for baggage handlers at some airports. California, meanwhile, may well move to a $22 minimum wage for fast food workers depending in 2024.

Let me put this in plain dollars and cents: child care needs to be a job with at least a $40,000 a year starting salary plus benefits. I accept that there is regional variation given cost of living, etc., but I maintain there should be a floor that keeps the job is attractive and sustainable everywhere. That equates to around $20 an hour. (Substantially more will be required in high cost-of-living cities.) There also needs to be opportunities for robust wage growth; there’s no reason a lead teacher with 25 years of experience who displays mastery and leadership within their program shouldn’t be making $75,000+ a year. For comparison, that’s what a highly experienced K-12 teacher in the St. Louis area can make. What’s more, permanently raising wages by cultivating less-stressed, better-trained staff. Frankly, if your governor doesn’t have a plan in place to get the child care workforce up to the $20 an hour level within the next few years, your governor doesn’t have a child care plan.

The good news is that we finally have some hard proposals and numbers starting to come in that would make the necessary moves. In Vermont, a legislature-commissioned from the RAND Corporation laid out the costs — and potential sources of tax revenue — needed to establish a sustainable child care system. Crucially (and all credit to advocates and elected champions on this), as the VT Digger , “In conducting their study, the consultants were given a two-fold mandate: Figure out how much it would cost to ensure that families receiving state help pay no more than 10% of their income toward child care — even as wages are raised such that child care workers earn salaries in line with their peers in public education.”

RAND found that Vermont early educators currently make an average of $30,000 a year, whereas early elementary school teachers are making around $60,000. For their cost model, they asked what it would look like to raise the starting salary of a lead teacher with no degree but a Child Development Associate certificate up to $42,000 a year, one with an Associate Degree to $50,000, and one with a Bachelor’s to meet their elementary counterparts at $60,000. Importantly, there is room to grow within these bands, with the top-end Bachelor’s-holding early educator reaching $90,000. (If you’ve been following me, you know I have some feelings about the credentialism of tethering salary bands to degrees — and relying on parity with K-12 educators, for that matter — but that’s not the point today.)

This is a serious proposal. It includes real costs (between $180 million and $280 million annually in new funding) and real potential revenue sources (options include either one or a combination of: a payroll tax on employers, a sugary beverage tax, a sales tax increase, and so on). These are big numbers for a small state, and no politician likes to talk tax increases, but it sets the stage for honest conversations about how these are worth more than their outlays. A Vermont journalist that “in testimony this week … you have small businesses that come up and they’re asked by committee members, would you support a 0.9% payroll tax? [The amount RAND suggests is needed to fund the system]. And they go, oh, of course I would. I can pay for that in one single shift. And that’s a conversation that we haven’t heard before on child care.”

More of these sorts of conversation-starters may be on their way. Washington, D.C. is toward full salary parity, with health benefits, between early childhood educators and K-12 educators. Colorado’s is set to release its findings and recommendations in the coming weeks.

With major federal child care action stalled, now is the time to be laying the groundwork both for state actions and for defining the scope of federal funding needed. Every state should follow the lead of Vermont and other vanguard states by commissioning a report on what it would cost — and potential revenue sources — not only to make child care affordable, but to make child care a sustainable occupation for educators. Ideally, such reports would be commissioned via bipartisan legislation and led by impartial third parties in order to minimize accusations of bias.

Incrementalism in child care ceased to be an option years ago. Without the compensation in place to recruit and retain a robust workforce, little else matters in child care policy. The sector is sinking. Will policymakers realize that half a rope is, in this case, the same as no rope at all?

1. The Child Care Cliff Cometh

For a child care system already buckling, the road ahead looks treacherous. Pandemic relief funding has already started to run dry, and by 2024 the spigot will be turned off entirely. Forced to take even small wins where they can be found, advocates (including myself) cheered Congress increasing child care funding by $2 billion in their omnibus package, but this is the merest drop in a giant bucket given the $53 billion that is expiring. No one should be taking a victory lap.

The fundamental challenge — crippling staff shortages from uncompetitive wages — hasn’t changed, and the strain on remaining staff is only piling up. Many, many programs are facing down an existential crisis, and are reluctantly preparing to take the only action they can: .

The question for 2023 is whether lawmakers respond to the enormity of this problem with a response of the same size. As , “The issue cannot wait until 2024 … Getting educators, especially well-qualified ones, back in classrooms will require significant amounts of permanent public funding and the time to recruit and train staff.” One variable is how influential advocates and organizers can be, and whether philanthropy will double-down on politics: child care has begun to get more muscular, but is still a relatively lightweight field when it comes to lobbying and advocacy.

The first chance for action will come as state legislatures begin their 2023 sessions, sessions that — especially in states like Minnesota and Michigan which have new political dynamics after November’s elections — are truly pivotal. Ultimately, however, states can carry the water but so far. Which leads to the second major theme of the year


2. Is Bipartisanship Possible?

I don’t know if you’re aware, but a divided government doesn’t tend to get a lot done. With a fractious House Republican majority taking the helm, there are open questions about whether they will be inclined to move any significant legislation whatsoever. I am not, however, hopeless. If there is any middle ground to be found, it is surely around family policy.

Conservatives have had something of an awakening (spurred in no small part by the overturning of Roe v. Wade) around the need to support working families with actual policies instead of platitudes. Recently, more than two dozen right-leaning thinkers of ‘pro-family policy principles’ which included the need to “Acknowledge the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs associated with becoming a parent, and advance policies that would make having children more affordable and achievable.” Similarly, National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru had an , “Family-Friendly Federal Policy Should Be a Priority.” While these pundits tend to emphasize child tax credits and marriage more than child care, they are surely aware that child care is the, well, elephant in the room.

±ő’v±đ several times about the fact that the Senate GOP actually put forth a child care bill that embraces many Democratic priorities — absent, of course, any actual funding. While that bill has now expired, it ended this last Congress , not just moderates and retirees but staunch conservatives and presidential hopefuls.

2023, then, will be something of a put-up-or-shut-up moment for Congressional Republicans. If they are willing to come to the negotiating table and talk dollars and dedicated funding sources (and if Democrats are willing to ensure existing choice-based principles remain intact), perhaps a breakthrough is possible. If not, then this year will puncture yet another bag of hot air as America’s parents and children are left stranded once again.

3. Scrutiny for For-Profit Chains

While questions swirl about the future of U.S. child care, one facet has come under increased scrutiny: investor-backed for-profit chains. These companies, mainly backed via private equity, have been rapidly snapping up market share as independent programs fail. I wrote some pieces , and in December the New York Times’ Dana Goldstein . Among other revelations, Goldstein reported that the chains (despite their public assertions) were lobbying behind the scenes against universal child care policies — policies that would, incidentally, restrict their profit and require them to pay their educators well. Perhaps most galling, many chain executives showered Sen. Joe Manchin with campaign contributions the month after Manchin killed the Build Back Better Act with its $400 billion in transformative child care funding.

This scrutiny is likely to continue as the chains grow. States could begin looking at potential regulatory steps, and it is easy to imagine more researchers and policy analysts turning their attention to this long-ignored piece of the sector. With Sen. Bernie Sanders taking over the powerful Senate HELP committee, Congressional action is also feasible. Either way, the issue of mixing profit motive and toddlers isn’t going away.

4. Deepening the Climate Change & Early Childhood Connection

If you’ve followed my work at all over the past year, you know I strongly believe that there is work to be done . The good news is that last year saw progress in this area. The has had three important public listening sessions, and will have three more this year en route to publishing a major Early Years Climate Action Plan in the fall. That plan will provide a roadmap for how early childhood stakeholders can help systems adapt for the climate era while reducing emissions, and how climate stakeholders can invest in early childhood as a way to build short- and long-term societal resilience.

Similarly, as more evidence emerges about the direct and causal negative impacts of climate change on young children, so too has evidence around the positive impacts of young children’s access to nature. If efforts to green child care play areas, increase shade, combat heat islands, and improve park proximity pick up steam, it will have a double-benefit for children and the climate.

5. Early Childhood Meets World

The raging storm that swirls around early care and education can create whiteout conditions, making it difficult if not impossible to see more than a few feet ahead. Yet two things can be true: the technical and policy challenges facing the sector are immense, and there are bigger moral and value-laden questions at stake. Those engaged around early childhood have an immense opportunity to pull back and shine a spotlight on the larger picture.

Put simply, securing tens of billions of dollars to stabilize the child care system and start building an effective one is a critically important but incomplete goal. There are broader issues here: what does America owe its families? Do children provide value to society that goes beyond their role as future units of economic productivity? How can we espouse principles of freedom when so many parents have their choices about family size and where to live and how to pass down their stories to the next generation constrained not by preference but the availability of care? What, in essence, is this all for?

The early childhood sector has serious moral weight, since we deal not with widgets or stock prices but with vulnerable children and young families. This affords the chance to paint a hopeful moral vision and to situate policy benchmarks, such as child care funding and paid family leave, as vital enabling elements of that vision. As my colleagues Joe Waters and Ian Corbin : “There is no getting around our need for spiritual renaissance. A culture of daring, future-facing innovation is best fostered by dedicated groups that willingly pool risk and reward, but this kind of pooling — also known as solidarity — generally springs up where there is a deep, shared vision of what is good and beautiful and worth pursuing.”

The balancing act for early learning in 2023, then, will be fighting tirelessly for very practical solutions while building that solidarity in all directions. A spiritual renaissance requires grappling with the child care problem not merely in terms of return on investment or school readiness, but in terms of interdependence and the very future of our nation.

It may be obvious, but . They elicit responses in people’s minds that can prime them to support or reject certain ideas. For instance, believe the switch from focusing on LGBTQ+ domestic partner benefits and other legal elements, to the core emotional appeal that “love is love” helped spark one of the most in recent U.S. history.

I’m of two minds when it comes to the early childhood question. So, I thought it might be fun to stylize those minds and use them to explore the debate. The goal here isn’t to offer the right answer — again: I don’t know what the right answer is, if there is one! — but to help draw out the underlying tensions and further conversation. So, with your indulgence, I give you: Carol and Ed (get it?)

Carol and Ed: A Socratic Semantic Debate

Carol: Look, Ed, I think you’re a swell guy, but the fact is this sector is about child care. We are caring for children — wherever, whenever. There’s a learning component, for sure, but it’s more than that: it’s about relationships and nurturing these children to have the maximum human development possible. See, this is going to be a quick debate!

Ed: OK Carol, I hear you — and I think you’re swell, too — but let me poke a hole in your case before I get to mine. Do child care needs end at school entry?

Carol: No, of course not. There are before-school, after-school and summer needs.

Ed: Right. Well, the term “child care” doesn’t specify that. So right away it’s confusing to the lay public! Early childhood education, on the other hand, is clean and crisp. It says what it is.

Carol: That’s not the slam dunk you think it is. Watch this: early child care. Voila!

Ed: “Early child care” is
 clunky.

Carol: It’s literally shorter than early childhood education! And anyways, early childhood education sounds so
 formal. Most people don’t think of sending their one-year-old to school.

Ed: I’ll grant that, but education doesn’t have to mean school. You can get education at an in-home early childhood program, too.

Carol: Now who’s using confusing terms?

Ed: I mean, sure, it’s not perfect. But let’s talk about what we’re talking about: we need a term that is widely understood and also conveys ideas which will build public and political support, right?

Carol: Sure.

Ed: OK, well, between ‘care’ and ‘education,’ which one is a constitutional right in every state and a fully publicly-funded system that gets $700 billion a year, and which one is seen as welfare and is constantly fighting for scraps?

Carol: That’s not fair! Care has been systemically devalued for centuries, coded as “women’s work” so that the economic system could hum along without having to pay for home labor. And that’s before getting into the of domestic work, such as the way that enslaved Black women were forced to care for their enslavers’ children, or how even after emancipation many were Even the earliest so-called ‘early childhood education’ programs — aka nursery schools — were from child care programs because the latter felt too ‘poor.’ So you’ll forgive America for having questionable ideas about the value of care. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t or can’t reclaim the concept.

Ed: No one’s arguing care hasn’t been given short shrift. It’s atrocious. But from a practical standpoint, if the two choices are to try and revitalize a poorly-treated concept or take advantage of a robust one, why wouldn’t we go with the latter? We’re having a hard enough time getting care occupations — child care, elder care, care for individuals with disabilities — up to even a living wage. You really think we can get Americans to suddenly agree that care should be publicly funded as a middle-class profession? K-12 teachers should get paid more, but at least they make a solid salary with benefits! Meanwhile, public pre-K programs are the only universal(ish) early childhood programs that have won major support and funding, even in red states. That’s because, as sociologist Sandra Levitsky has written, . That was a decision based on communications research. Why not relax into the water?

Carol: I’ll tell you why, it’s because “early childhood education” has some big problems. Do we really want to march the school system back to the first few years of life? How is that developmentally appropriate? And it completely takes parents out of the equation. Levitsky also writes — let’s see, ±ő’v±đ got the quote here, “while considerable public discourse has focused on the educational development of three- and four-year-olds, the needs of working parents with babies are rarely mentioned at all. Perhaps more insidiously, the logic of ‘social investment,’ which drove the political shift from child care to early childhood education, generally construes children as a ‘good investment’ in ways that implicitly suggest that women are not.”

Ed: Look, there were some missteps in pushing down too much direct academic instruction into pre-K in the late aughts, I’ll grant that. But play is making a comeback! And most systems are mixed-delivery now.

Carol: By “most systems,” we’re excluding California — you know, the biggest state in the union, that would be the 40th-largest nation in the world if it was its own country? — which is currently ? And, while we’re at it, you still haven’t answered: does “early childhood education” mean just pre-K or does it mean infants and toddlers too? Does it mean service hours outside the school day and school year?

Ed: It’s all education


Carol: Uh-huh, I can hear the conviction in your voice just as much as I can see the continued artificial split between preschoolers and infants/toddlers. That’s what an education frame gets you. Know what else it gets you?

Ed: Better polls? More funding?

Carol: Ha-ha. No, it gets you credentialization. There are costs to adopting the education frame. Our education system treats degrees as synonyms for skills, which is a position with a very questionable research backing. You can try to create policy backstops like substituting experience for degrees, but the fact is that you’re assuming a high risk of unintentionally discriminating against family child care providers, to say nothing of stay-at-home parents and relative caregivers. Parents and kids need a pluralistic system that meets their dynamic needs and preferences. I’m just not sure ‘early childhood education’ gets us there. I say the price is too high to pay.

[At this point, a third voice enters the conversation: Trey (get it??)]

Trey: Ed, Carol, you both make excellent points, and this is such an important debate! May I suggest an alternative that incorporates both perspectives?

Ed and Carol (looking at each other warily): Go ahead


Trey: Why not adopt both-and terminology? Many other nations call it Early Childhood Care and Education, or Early Childhood Education and Care. I personally like the simple Early Care and Education. It even has the same ECE acronym some people are already familiar with!

Ed: Do they call it that, though? I mean, I understand that’s what the official government documents might say, but do parents go around saying “oh, I had such a stressful time this morning getting my kid off to his early care and education center?”

Carol: Well, to be fair, do U.S. parents say “oh, I had such a stressful time this morning getting my kid off to his early childhood education center?”

Ed: No, they say “preschool” or the dreaded D word —

Carol: Don’t say it


Trey: Uh-oh, he’s gonna say it


Ed: Day care.

Carol: Boo!

Ed: Here’s the problem. Day care sucks as a term. It’s not even accurate, since there are overnight programs. But it sticks because it is a simple one-word term that conveys a clear meaning. Same reason France uses łŠ°ùĂšłŠłó±đ and Germany uses kita. I’m actually fine with early care and education, but no one’s going to use that popularly. So, if we don’t want day care to dominate, we should just take “preschool” and apply it everywhere and to all ages. A center-based preschool. A church preschool. A family preschool.

Trey: OK, but I can already see Carol’s mouth opening to object. Can I try one other thought? What if we followed the U.K.’s lead and just called them “”? That way the focus is on child development during that age period, not about any given setting.

Carol: I mean, I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it? It’s kinda bland. And it’s unspecific: aren’t things like pediatrics part of “the early years” too?

Ed: Yeah, I’m with you there.

Trey: Well at least I got you to agree about something!

[The debate in my head transitions to closing statements]

Ed: I am certainly sympathetic toward the need to massively improve how we value care in this country. The fact is, however, that if we want to have a rights-based system with universal access, the most efficient route is through fully embracing the phraseology of early childhood education and preschool. The body politic and politicians alike can easily understand the idea that if we publicly support K-12 education, and if learning begins at birth, we need to publicly support early childhood education as well. And it’s not just about political expediency! This is demanding work, and educators should be treated as the skilled professionals they are. That suggests to match. Putting these educators on the same level as elementary school educators is only proper. The sooner we stop wishing the world to be as we want it to be and accepting the world as it is, the sooner we can reach our common goals for early childhood. Thank you.

Carol: My respected opponent has fallen into the trap of rhetorically assuming that care work is not as inherently “skilled” as education work. This is precisely the problem! A comprehensive birth-to-five system of care cannot be sliced and diced like this without losing the structural integrity of the whole. The top-line goal of this sector should , the top-line goal should be . Good child care not only helps kids develop the foundations of academic skills, it supports entire families: it allows parents to find the work-care balance that they prefer, have the family size they prefer, live where they prefer, be financially stable, have sources of community and parenting support
 all of which helps young kids to flourish, by the way! There are countless examples of terms shifting in the public mind, or professions like nursing finding a new prominence. I don’t think it will be simple to elevate child care to the level of respect and compensation it deserves, but if ever there was a fight worth fighting, this is one. And, let’s remember, we were one skittish Senator — or, arguably, one choosing to not, y’know, have an affair — from having hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into child care as we speak. Care matters. We should say so, right in the name.

Trey (quietly): I still think we should call it early care and education.

Let’s break this down.

The Rise of Employer-Sponsored Child Care

It was perhaps natural that employers would start to look shinier as the child care sector went into crisis mode and prospects for major federal child care action faded. One major step along this path was when Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer launched “” in March 2021, whereby an employer, an employee and the government equally split one-third of child care costs. Other states have since .

Employers themselves have jumped on the child care benefit train as they look for an edge in a competitive job market. The Hechinger Report in May that, “Companies from car manufacturers to theme parks are launching child care benefits.”

The idea is out of the bottle now. The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg recently calling for companies to offer on-site child care as a way to lure parents back into the office, while the Harvard Business Review ran last year by four management professors asserting that, “The sooner employers treat child care with the same seriousness as health care and other aspects of businesses infrastructure, the faster employees can get back to full force.”

I want to be very clear: I think all of these folks are well-intentioned and earnestly looking for a solution to a vexing problem. That said, ±ő’v±đ laid out before why employer-sponsored benefits are fool’s gold — they don’t put more money in the system to address crippling workforce shortages and so are often vouchers to nowhere; on-site centers reach only the barest minority of employees; losing your job shouldn’t mean your child losing their beloved caregiver — and my wariness here goes much deeper.

A Perk is Not a Right

Writing recently in the Reno Gazette Journal, Ann Silver, the CEO of the Reno+Sparks Chamber of Commerce, :

“Subsidizing child care costs may seem a line item completely separate from an employer’s responsibility, but in the same way employers have embraced the benefits of mental health and wellness, greater workforce satisfaction and productivity, removing the doubt of whether an employee’s child is in safe hands during working hours stands to benefit the corporate bottom line.”

The ‘benefits of mental health and wellness,’ of course, equal perks like subsidized gym memberships or access to telehealth counseling services.

You see the problem.

The philosophical argument for publicly-funded child care is that it is a social good. That means that there is something about care which offers broad value and that, in turn, generates a societal obligation to support it. Public education is the classic comparison here: while access to schools certainly benefit corporate bottom lines by (well, some working hours), schools are also a bedrock of American democracy, American freedom and American achievement.

There is a reason that a right to public education exists in all 50 state constitutions, and in fact Congress made establishing such rights a for rebel states to reenter the union. Education scholar E.D. Hirsch , “Our educational thinkers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the schools as the central and main hope for the preservation of democratic ideals and the endurance of the nation as a republic.” As a result, we don’t ask corporations to offer the 5th grade as a benefit, we ask them—and everyone else—to roll up their tax dollars to offer the service universally, to the tune of $700 billion a year!

Child care fits this mold. It offers essential developmental and learning opportunities while cultivating the foundations of citizenship and civic behavior. Access to affordable child care options, like access to public schools, gives parents legitimate choices about where to live and how many children to have, as well as the ability to provide for their families and . The lack thereof constrains vital self-determination while pitting every family for themselves in ragged atomized competition. Since society requires healthy families with children in order to be healthy—in both the present and the future—child care produces social value. Society (via government), not employers, therefore holds responsibility for its provision.

Why Not Both?

When I argue against employer-sponsored child care, a common rejoinder I get (including from people I very much respect) is a version of the ‘why not both?’ meme. Since child care is a hot mess, the argument goes, we need every bit of support we can get. Let’s not turn up our noses at companies that see a problem and are trying to help, even if it’s only an interim step on the long path to where we really want to get.

The problem is that in this case, the concession comes with a steep price. Accepting employer-sponsored child care as a feature of the system will make it much harder to achieve robust public funding.

The evolution of U.S. health care provides a cautionary tale. While no longer widely remarked upon, in 1945 President Truman that would have been folded into the social security system. The proposal would have created a comprehensive, universal, single-payer system akin to the U.K.’s National Health Service which emerged in the same post-war period.

Truman’s proposal set off a vicious debate (including lots of accusations about socialism, and the American Medical Association launching a multi-million-dollar campaign to oppose it). The nail in the coffin was the loss of support from labor unions. Why did they pull support? Because employer-sponsored health insurance plans were starting to grow. A Kaiser Family Foundation paper notes that, “as workers gained better benefits from their employers, unions believed they could negotiate even more in the future.”

Of course, we know the end of this story. By 1958, 75% of Americans had an employer-sponsored plan. This choice had consequences. The entrenchment of health insurance as a private job-linked issue has led to a dysfunctional, unpopular, expensive, ineffective health care system — and one which has proven almost impossible to overhaul. People don’t like the system but are used to the linkage, and the health insurance lobby is a mightily powerful opponent.

It is easy to imagine a similar result for employer-sponsored child care. Already, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is at best , declaiming the importance of child care while launching seven-figure . What incentive will business interests have to support a universal system when big companies can assert they’ve already taken care of theirs? How much harder will it be to make the case that child care is a social responsibility instead of an individual one if millions of workers have individualized benefits? (These fatal flaws, incidentally, rhyme with those underlying the .)

When Horace Mann made the case for public education, he did not suggest it would be fine for companies to offer schooling as a fringe benefit while public schools dealt with challenging politics and became established. He laid out the stakes as nothing less than the future of American society: “Public education is the cornerstone of our community and our democracy,” Mann inveighed, later declaring that “education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.” That is how you argue for a public good.

So no, this is not a question of walking and chewing gum at the same time, or accepting incremental steps up a high mountain. This is a question of not trying to walk in two different directions at once and instead going nowhere. We can compromise on specific tactics and we can compromise on speed, but we cannot compromise on first principles.

Conclusion

We have a moment before us. More people are paying attention to child care than any time in recent memory. The crisis point is deeper than at any time in recent memory. In looking for any port in a storm, there is a rising temptation to embrace employer-sponsored child care. I cannot put it any more clearly: this is folly. We will surely rue the decision. The good news is there is still time to turn back. Our response to businesses that want to help their employees navigate America’s child care wasteland should be simple: we’re glad you’re here, join us by advocating with all your power for a universal publicly-funded system — !

Ireland is a fantastic case study for the U.S. because the system has, historically, shared many of the same features and challenges: a highly privatized and market-based system with meager public funding, marked by high parent fees and low educator wages. All of that has started to change in recent years. In fact, in just the past few weeks, the Irish government signed off on their first-ever , while the for 2023 will cut parent fees by 25%. Here are four lessons I am taking away from my time on the Emerald Isle:

Policy vision matters

After much work, in the late 2010s a broad consensus emerged about the guiding light for Irish child care policy. This consensus was built through a series of expert panels and iterative policy briefs, culminating in what was known as “,” an “all-of-government strategy for babies, young children and their families” between 2019 and 2028. First 5 called for, among other things, a re-envisioning of how child care was funded.

In 2021, the government published a follow-on report, “,” which put meat on the bones of the vision and laid the groundwork for September’s new pay deal.

First 5 is not the only tentpole policy document, however. Given Ireland’s membership in the European Union (EU) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), third-party reports such as the OECD’s 2021 country review on and the European for ECE have helped shape the contours of Ireland’s new direction. This direction includes a major focus on program quality, something that became all the more urgent after an in 2019 by one of the country’s prominent news agencies turned up stunning neglect.

Unlike the U.S., where there is still rank disagreement over whether we should even have a strong publicly-funded child care system, Ireland shows just how impactful it can be to put in the long, hard work of agreeing on a vision. The question appears to be much less “what should we do?” and much more “how do we now do it well?”

Political Power Matters

The simple presence of good policy has never been enough to move the needle. While advocates have been hard at work in Ireland for decades, a pivotal moment came when the country’s largest trade union, known as the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU), took on child care as a signature issue. At one point, SIPTU had more than 10(!) full-time field organizers working on what they call the “” campaign. The unionization drive helped, as one person suggested to me, activate an army.

A seminal event occurred in February 2020, in the run-up to national elections, when thousands of child care workers across the country , and 30,000 educators and allies flooded the streets of Dublin. The action generated huge media coverage and pushed child care into becoming a top-tier election issue just as the Covid pandemic was about to highlight how critical the child care sector was.

The recent upswing in child care power is not merely due to unionization, though. Ireland’s child care coalition is both deep and broad, including the stalwart as well as players such as the large , the latter of which approaches the issue from a distinct angle that goes beyond questions of provider wages or parent fees.

Clearly, as U.S. advocates continue to strive for progress, there is an immense need to consider opportunities for widespread unionization and locating as many allies as possible.

Decoupling Wages from Affordability Matters

Perhaps the key Irish policy innovation was the establishment of “core funding.” Core funding is “a supply-side payment to providers to support the provision of quality services.” You might think of it like “base aid” provided by states to institutions of higher education. Core funding — which is currently backed by €221 million in government funding (significant for a country with the population of Colorado, and slated to rise to €259 million in 2023) — offers a reliable source of money so that programs do not have to rely so heavily on parent fees. In return, programs agree to abide by certain regulations, such as capping their parent fees and implementing the new staff wage scales.

Those wage minimums mean that no child care staff member will receive less than €13 an hour, meaning all will be above the Irish living wage. While advocates readily acknowledge there is much longer to go and this is but a first step in solving their workforce challenges, the inking of the pay deal set off a massive celebration in the sector, with the hashtag #WeDidIt proliferating.

By targeting dedicated funding at wages while dealing with affordability separately, Ireland has decoupled the two and gone directly at the issue of workforce compensation — something the U.S. would be wise to emulate.

Funding Sustainability Matters

The biggest question for the Irish child care sector is the sustainability of this new funding. Governments come and go, and while a parliamentary system like Ireland’s is less prone to tectonic changes than America’s winner-take-all, there is still no guarantee of what happens if political winds shift, a recession takes hold, and so on. No child care entitlement is enshrined in law, and core funding is filled budget cycle by budget cycle. The sector knows where it is headed, now the question is how fast it can get there and how solidly it can sink these new roots.

Still, by any measure, the Irish child care experience should inspire U.S. providers and advocates. Here we have a country that has, after many years of striving, rapidly made huge progress on building a child care system that works better for parents, providers and children. I am immensely grateful to those who took the time to help me learn about the Irish child care system, and I will be watching their progress closely and cheering them on.

The are indisputable. Programs are constrained by high fixed costs and meager public support, so they sky-high fees while cutting wages to the bone, yet still struggle to keep the lights on. More than 16,000 providers have since the start of the pandemic, and the system is beset by ongoing of over 85,000 educators. Without a major increase of permanent public money, parents will face continually fewer and more expensive choices, while the economy experiences ongoing drag.

Passing large amounts of child care funding now requires going through regular order and the 60-vote filibuster threshold. On nearly any other issue, that is an insurmountable obstacle. However, 12(!) Republican Senators are on a bill reflecting many Democratic priorities: reducing child care fees while improving child care supply and quality. For those keeping score at home, those 12 plus the Democratic caucus gets a bill passed. The problem is the legislation has no dedicated funding attached.

The Child Care and Development Block Grant Reauthorization Act in March by GOP Senators Tim Scott and Richard Burr. The bill supercharges the existing child care subsidy system used in every state. Among other policies, it makes care free for all families below 75% of state median income (in an average state like Michigan, that’s ~$70,000 for a family of four) and substantially improves educator compensation. Without any set aside funding, of course, these promises are worth as much as the paper they are printed on. That said, a common bipartisan framework clearly exists.

And it should — child care needs swamp ideology. Two-thirds of U.S. children under the age of six . Child care deserts are rampant and in both and . By some metrics, than urban ones. Beyond the youngest kids, millions more families rely on child care programs for their elementary schoolers’ before- or after-school care. Many of the nation’s stay-at-home parents are and feel. No politician has constituents untouched by the issue.

Compromises will be needed to win enough support to pass child care legislation, but as the gun safety, CHIPS, PACT, and IRA bills have recently proved, compromise (both between and within parties) is indeed possible.

Democrats will need to accept explicit language affirming faith-based child care programs’ right to receive public funding. This is already a feature of the existing system, but one that during the Build Back Better debate. Moreover, this would be an ideal time to adopt some form of a ‘home care stipend,’ cash support for stay-at-home parents. This is an idea with backing from both and . Similarly, the processes for starting in-home daycares and for informal caregivers (like grandparents) becoming recipients of public support could be eased. Together, these measures would address concerns about government overreach or putting the government’s thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents.

For the Right, the concession will come in agreeing to robust funding sources. One obvious candidate is the estate tax, a levy currently only paid by the wealthiest 0.2% of Americans. A from researchers at Penn-Wharton shows that if the 2000 estate tax law were in place, the U.S. would be generating nearly $80 billion more a year. Other studies that simply going back to Obama-era standards would raise between $20 billion and $30 billion per year over current levels. Framed as a tax on the ultrarich, the policy has , and that’s before tying it to broad child care benefits.

Whether through estate tax reform or other means, leaders on both sides of the aisle should sit down and identify a dedicated source of permanent child care funding. Between the proposals put forth by Senators Scott and Burr on the right and on the left, there is surely a deal to be struck. It is unquestionably worth the attempt.

No other path is so promising. States are , but simply don’t have the funding capacity to solve the crisis. The includes a measly $1 billion increase in child care funding (the Murray-Kaine plan offers more than ten times as much). Digging up another tranche of emergency funding would help but do little to address the crippling workforce shortage. Relying on a post-midterms Congress to contain a hardline House is somewhere between risky and reckless.

President Biden and the Democrats have notched an impressive set of legislative victories by not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Republicans have displayed a willingness to set down their sabers when there is a legitimate opportunity to advance their goals. Those principles should now be applied to aid the millions of families with young children — across both parties — who are waiting, desperately, for their turn to get some support.