A Roundup of Bad Child Care Takes

And all the ways I talk about the need for federally funded child care

I went viral when I clapped back a Republican Senator and told him to invest in children the way he invested in tax cuts. I admitted in an interview with the Associated Press that it was my own lack of stable child care that drove me from my full-time job two years ago, and that many workers and would be workers were in the same place. And I have been on record saying that child care is the smartest economic investment we don’t make, without ever mentioning children.

So which is it? Do we need child care for kids? for workers? for the economy?

All of the above.

The Basic Argument for 0-5 Child Care

Child care is an investment in children’s early education and development which bears lifelong fruit. It supports parent’s employment, which does the same. The latter benefits the economy in real time, because the size of our economy is directly predicted by the number of people working in it. The private market for care is failing, hurting families and curbing our economic potential.

Easy enough.

The Objections

Are wildly diffuse.

• Public Child Care is Having the Government Raise Our Kids

• Moms Don’t Have to Work, They Choose To

• Don’t Have Children if You Can’t Afford Them

• Child Care is Expensive, But it’s Just a Few Years of Pain

• The Federal Government Wouldn’t Know How to Create a Child Care System

• I Shouldn’t Have to Pay for Someone Else’s Children

• Child Care Doesn’t Make a Difference, We Could Spend that Money in Other Places

Let’s get to it. I have a few different tacks for each of them, depending on how saucy I’m feeling.

Public Child Care is Having the Government Raise Our Kids

Cool Headed: The private provision of child care is a market failure. The government isn’t intervening in the family, it’s intervening in a failing market.

Feeling Saucy: This is a horribly arrogant posture that you’d never see applied outside of care. Congress passes a defense funding bill, do they put stars on their sleeves and say they’re all four-star generals? They fund NASA, do they don flight suits and claim that they are astronauts? But they take over child care and get to claim they are *basically* parents? No.

Moms Don’t Have to Work, They Choose To

Cool Headed: Labor market income is a necessity for families, that’s why two-thirds of mothers with children under 6 are working. They want money, stability, and security for their children. Unafforable or inaccessible care discourages work, in effect making that money, stability, and security a privilege for the richest who can afford care.

Feeling Saucy: What a remarkable declaration in a world in which federal policy has declared unequivocally that poor mothers MUST work to get public help. The entitlement for cash support for poor families was ended in 1996 and replaced with a program that has a work requirement, one so onerous that the number of women receiving help goes down during recessions. Those are the same type of work requirements being added to food stamps and what Republicans have said they’d like to add to Medicaid. They have to work if they’re poor but they choose to work if they’re rich? Please. This is not how we design economic policy. If you hate women, write a blog post, when you’re ready to design smart policy to support labor supply, give me a call.

Don’t Have Children if You Can’t Afford Them

Cool Headed: Parents don’t earn the same salary their entire life; as they age and gain work experience, their earnings grow. Most have children near the start of their work life, and therefore near the bottom of their lifetime earnings. In addition, the cost of the first few years of child come as a sticker shock for many, who do not understand that childbirth incurs thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket costs, that family leave is mostly unpaid, and that putting two kids in child care costs more than a mortgage in 45 states and DC, more than rent in 50 states and DC, and more than in-state tuition in 39 states and DC.

Feeling Saucy: This is wild classist! The implications of this objection is essentially that having a family ought to be a luxury in the United States. You want to operationalize this through some kind of income test? Show your W2 to the OB to see if you still get to have a kid?

Clap back: This is your answer? We have a failing market for child care, families are paying through the teeth, women are either dropping out of the labor market or putting their kids in low quality care, and your solution is no more kids? That’s uncreative blameshifting.

Child Care is Expensive, But it’s Just a Few Years of Pain

Cool Headed 1: The child care bill is up to five years long, but the consequences of that payment can last much longer than five years. First, families can go into debt to afford care, including through expensive borrowing avenues like credit cards. Second, the national average price of care is $11k per year, coming to a total of $55k per child, or over $100k for a two-child family. That’s $100k that isn’t being spent on housing, on retirement savings, on enrichment, on anything other than care. And, it’s worth noting, this is a $100k tax on work.

Cool Headed 2: The pain to families may be temporary but the affect on the economy is not. If someone cannot work because of child care, we lose five years of labor force participation at a minimum. That’s also five years of skills and experience being eroded and five years of earnings lost (and the taxes they would have paid on them. And if the parent never goes back to work, it’s closer to 35 years lost. This absolutely makes our economy smaller.

Feeling Saucy: This an admission that the system is broken, but policymakers are fine with the pain because the people experiencing it don’t matter. You don’t have to like children, or their mothers. Inflicting pain on them benefits no one, least of all the economy.

The Federal Government Wouldn’t Know How to Create a Child Care System

Cool Headed: The federal government has already created a child care system through the Military Child Care Act of 1989. It wasn’t an overnight success and like all social services, it’s a work in progress. There was legislation introduced last year to continue to expand and improve the program. But it’s been three decades and the military has better child care—and clear avenues to improve it—than the private child care sector. On the civilian side, the federal government has directly provided child care through Head Start since the 1960s. Like the military program, it is not an overnight success and is also a work in progress, but delivers high quality care, higher quality than families can buy

Feeling Saucy: No one would design the piecemeal private system that we have. If you wouldn’t start with this why are you making families end here.

I Shouldn’t Have to Pay for Someone Else’s Children

Cool Headed: The education of children is an economic investment that you benefit from. Those children grow up to be your doctors, engineers, builders, or any number of people you rely on in the economy. Their parents work, adding to the economy and paying more in taxes.

Pretending to be nice but actually throwing a little shade: Most people fail to appreciate economic investment that doesn’t flow directly through them. But this myopic, self-centered assessment does not make good economic policy. I don’t personally benefit from a new bridge in Minnesota, or rebuilding efforts after a hurricane, but I benefit from being in an economy and society with good infrastructure, that supports people hurt by a disaster. We assess economic policy by its return, not by your individual benefit.

Rolling eyes: Someone invested in you. Someone who wasn’t your parents and wasn’t yourself subsidized your upbringing. Our country is always investing in children. So really this isn’t about paying for someone else’s kid, it’s about those kids getting an investment that you didn’t get. So how should this work? It doesn’t matter what we learn about how to help children or how the economy changes, we can’t give kids today anymore than you got as a kid? Pettiness doesn’t make for good policy, especially when its spiting children.

Child Care Doesn’t Make a Difference, We Could Spend that Money in Other Places

Cool Headed: The gross economic inequality between rich and the rest of us in the United States is already imprinted on children by the time they show up to kindergarten. This is called the “school readiness gap” and its exactly as it sounds, the difference in readiness for kindergarten between children who come from different income households. The cause of this gap is not a mystery: it’s predicted by the same inequality children experience in the quality of early childhood care. And the consequences of this gap aren’t small, starting school behind can put children at a lifetime disadvantage. Kids don’t have an equal start, money guarantees that and always will. Comprehensive early childhood care is a thumb on the scale to fight that influence.

Swinging for the Fences: You want to know the truth about the American Dream? Is it alive? Have we ever had it? All wrong. We don’t want the American Dream, we don’t want every American to have an equal chance of success because that chance doesn’t start at age 18, it starts at birth. We’ve got definitive proof that by age 5, that dream is dead. And either you don’t care or you like it that way. Prove me wrong.

The Kicker

I have no doubt that child care—federally funded, free or near free care—is coming. Demographics like falling birth rates and labor force participation will eventually force the government’s hand. Childcare is a barrier to having kids and it’s a barrier to work. We need babies and workers. Ergo, it’s just a matter of time. And sometimes that’s the only argument that someone will hear. It doesn’t matter if you don’t like it, you can’t hold back the tide.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash