Let's go as big as families deserve

My proposal for a universal Child Development System

Last year, a prominent think tank reached out to me to ask, basically, what’s my dream child care policy. I explained that I thought America needs something bold, that the solution should be bigger than the problem and the problem is already big enough. Their response was, “You should write that down.”

And I did!

Thank you to the Roosevelt Institute, which published my proposal, Whole Child, Whole Day, Whole Year: Assembling a Comprehensive Child Development System for America. You can read the whole report in detail (I take pride in my liberal use of references!) and I’ll summarize it here, talking about:

1. The Problem Isn’t Child Care

2. We Aren’t Starting From Scratch…

3. But We Are Going Big

4. A World of Possibilities

5. Development Isn’t a Word

6. The Money Talk

The Problem Isn’t Child Care

The problem is that families are trapped between an unstoppable force and an immovable object: the labor market and the K-12 public education system. Families need income to provide for themselves, but the vast, vast majority of jobs don’t align with K-12, which doesn’t start until age 5, ends by 3:00pm, and breaks for the summer.

Families have to bridge this gap by stopping work, working less, or buying care. All three come with incredible costs, whether it’s money spent or money lost. Nothing invites judgement like being put in a hard position and making a different choice than somebody else. Nothing—except maybe parenting. The result is a toxic and distracting mix of societal debates about which parents are making the ‘right’ choice that has resulted in almost no change to any part of this situation.

The lens of ‘labor market vs K-12’ is a way to sidestep those societal debates and focus instead on the practical constraints introduced by a conflict no one can really disagree occurs: jobs and K-12 simply don’t match, and they never will, because neither will ever change. And with that fresh lens, the problem gets much bigger: it’s not a child care problem, it’s a child care/after school/summer problem, and each part brings its own challenges and costs to families.

My proposal is to create a Child Development System that covers all three—child care, after school, and summer—in a single program that is:

• unified: only one source of funding and administration;

• universal: there’s no income test or requirement or limit.

You can think of it as free care, but it’s really about taking the empty space between the labor market and schools and filling with intention. If we need a place to keep kids safe while their parents are at work, we might as well take advantage of that need to create the best system possible.

A system that of course, remains up to parents whether to use.

It’s a subtle point but really important. We—whether that’s we as a country, economy, or society—need to fill this gap. But that doesn’t mean all parents need to use it. What’s required for a country, or an economy, or a society isn’t required for all families in it.

It’s that old phrase: it’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So let’s build a Child Development System.

We Aren’t Starting From Scratch…

A Child Development System needs three things:

1. Providers

2. Someone to pay providers

3. A price

I think it’s easy for people to fall into the assumption that if the government pays for something it means they also provide it, but that’s not a requirement. The government can directly provide something, or they can reimburse a provider using a pay rate, called a reimbursement rate. In first version, the government sets up a summer camp, runs it, and pays for all the costs associated. In the second version, an independent provider sets up that camp, runs it, and then bills the government for costs at some agreed upon rate.

The way that I designed this system was to think about what we currently have in the patchwork of parent-procured early childhood, after school, and summer and build from there. We don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch, and we shouldn’t throw away everything good we’ve got in hand. Here’s what we have:

• A lot of providers of early childhood, after school, or summer including

  • private providers (e.g. home-based, center-based, attached to an employer, summer camps, YMCAs, some for-profit, some non-profit, etc.)

  • public providers (e.g. Head Start, public schools, city governments, etc.)

• A lot of funding streams, including

  • three primary streams of federal funding for child care and after school

  • a dozen more than can be used for either early childhood or after school

  • funding for Head Start

The last thing we have is:

• Ways to calculate per child cost

In other words, we’ve got providers, we’ve got money, not enough of either but a way to link the two through reimbursement. The first half of the Child Development System is already built, we’ve just got to put the pieces together and expand.

…But We Are Going Big

Each part of the current system—providers, government, and reimbursements—need to expand, and there’s lots of choices that have to be made along the way. I’m going to ‘follow the money’ from the federal government on down to the provider.

First, the feds get the money together

Congress takes all the various pots of money that go to early childhood, after school, and summer, combines them into a single fund, and increases it enough to cover all children.

• I call it this the CDS Fund. It pays for care; so when a provider bills for reimbursement, it bills this fund.

Congress also creates a new line of funding to support capital grants to existing or new providers to expand the number of spots available. Think of it like the church that needs money to convert some space into a functioning after school program.

• I call this the CDS Grant.

And then it creates a federal office to 1) administer the CDS Fund and the CDS Grant, 2) set the reimbursement rates, and 3) set the minimum standards for a provider to be eligible for reimbursement.

And we’re good to go! Money to send! An office to send it! Now where does it go?

Next, we pick our ‘Lead Agency’

A Lead Agency is in charge of overseeing the program’s development, expansion, implementation, and performance in an area. They are like the COO of the Child Development System for whatever area they cover. They receive federal money and distribute it.

It’s a big question of who the Lead Agencies should be, because they could be a local, regional, state, or federal public agency. Regardless of who we pick, their task is the same.

Then, providers enroll in the program

Being a Child Development System provider will come with some strings attached—licensing, inspection, safety, etc. If a provider meets those, they become a recognized provider in the Child Development System. The Lead Agency oversees all of this.

Then, families enroll with providers

Families who are looking for early childhood, after school, or summer programming find a Child Development System provider and enroll their children. The Lead Agency facilitates all of this.

The Lead Agency fills the gaps

The starting point of the non-system we have today doesn’t serve most children, so the Child Development System will need to expand to establish more spots. What’s nice is this can be done based around what communities need and communicate to the Lead Agency.

Boom! We have a Child Development System

Instead of billing families, providers bill the federal government (via the Lead Agency) to be reimbursed for all of the kids in their program.

Is that it?

No. And yes! That’s basically it. There are a ton of details to work out, and those details are SO HARD AND IMPORTANT, but they are really a question of how to make the system work best, not whether it can work at all.

And consider the alternative is defending a system that isn’t enough for families, isn’t affordable for families, and will only get worse. I’d take a tough implementation question about the Child Development System over frantically hitting refresh on the summer camp sign up page, because even though it’s 5am and I’m on vacation in February, I’ve got scant minutes to secure camp enrollment.

Sometimes, optimism about the future is just knowing there’s a better set of problems you could have.

And don’t forget:

A World of Possibilities

The fundamental change between what we have now and the Child Development System I propose is money. Right now, child care, after school, and summer are all about what makes market sense. Even for a non-profit, it still has to be a viable endeavor and make enough money to stay afloat. Money determines what the system looks like.

In the Child Development System, providers bill for costs. It’s not about whether it would make enough money, but whether families want it. Hence, families determine via their preferences what the system looks like.

A lot of people stand to benefit in the world where families have more power.

Care workers

can get paid better. In the Child Development System, their pay is mostly set by the reimbursement rate. Higher wages means longer tenure, less turnover, more skills, and more returns to education. You could set up a registered apprenticeship for Child Development System workers, you could spin off Associates-level specialties like nutrition, health, development, behavior, or social work or specialities in specific stages of development from early childhood to adolescence. You could require that large enough centers have a nurse.

And Child Development System workers could also be employed by the system but not assigned to a specific center. Think of something like, a team of social workers, child psychologists, education specialists, health care workers that covers a region who visit each provider regularly but are also on call for support.

Schools

get some help. Think of schools and the Child Development System working in partnership, complementing each other and the help, support, and education they provide children.

Schools must prioritize academics. Kids need to learn subjects and skills; they’re tested to make sure they have. But they need more than subjects and skills as they grow up. Schools know this, and incorporate things like socioemotional learning into their curriculum, but they’ve basically been asked to do more with less. The Child Development System can complement academic instruction with non-academic instructions, offering places for enrichment, support, and growth outside the classroom.

For what it’s worth, parents love this.

Surveys of parents who enroll their kids in after school programs and summer camps say that they want their kids to grow, explore, experiment, be challenged in a place without an assessment that lives on their permanent record. You can fail science class but you can’t fail science camp. You can fail a test on Shakespeare but you can’t fail theater camp.

Employers

can apply to open up on-site centers, whether that’s for early childhood, after school, or summer. It doesn’t add to their costs or come out of their profit, so it’s really a matter of it they think it’ll be convenient and helpful to their staff, not how much money they’d have to sink into it. The world doesn’t operate 9-3, but it doesn’t operate 9-5 either. Hospitals, police departments, and factories, for example, don’t close up shop at 5pm.

Communities

get the chance to foster “ecosystems of care” for children and families. You might have heard of something called Positive Youth Development. It’s a research finding: certain protective factors can help young people succeed and keep them from having problems, whether they are academic or behavioral or emotional or substance or so on.

And what are the protective factors?

Basically positive influences and experiences. Kids need the chance to develop skills and confidence under the guidance of adults. All kinds of afterschool and summer programs have been evaluated under this framework, from sleepaway camp to 4-H clubs. Here’s a list of what makes a program a positive influence:

• Physical and psychological safety and security

• Emotional and moral support

• Supportive adult relationships

• Opportunities to form close, durable human relationships with peers that support and reinforce healthy behaviors

• A sense of belonging and personal value

• Opportunities to develop positive social values and norms

• Opportunities for skill building and mastery

• Opportunities to develop confidence in their abilities to master their environment

• Opportunities to make a contribution to their community and to develop a sense of mattering

• Strong links between families, schools, and broader community resources

It was actually a summer camp director who explained to me that the biggest win of the Child Development System I proposed would be to bring Positive Youth Development to more communities in a permanent way.

Development Isn’t A Word

It’s a mission.

I called this the Child Development System intentionally. Yes it’s about finding a safe place to keep children. Yes it’s about making it easier to go to work and bring home income. And there’s another system you could design that’s functional and meets those concerns.

I used ‘Development’ because I am swinging for the fences, for children. The expectation is built right into the name that this is a place for children to grow. And the way its designed is to take as a starting point that there’s not a single path to thriving.

We have been conditioned by scarcity for so long to have the lowest expectations. I hope that anyone who hears about what I propose can have that creative part of their brain activated to think, “Oh here’s what we could do in my community,” or “If it’s not about money than I would love for my kids to do XYZ after school,” or, “If the city gets to decide where to open a child care than I’d want it at XYZ.”

It takes confidence to be creative, and we’ve been insecure in care arrangements.

The Money Talk

I find it very inspiring —and telling—that the number one objection I hear in response to my proposal is that it’s too expensive. It comes out like a sigh of wistful regret: but we can’t have nice things. Or, of course I want to be ambitious about the community we could build to help all children and empower families, but I’m not allowed to.

It’s too expensive? Y’all, keep in mind you probably have no idea how much this system, or really anything, costs the federal government. We have all internalized years of political rhetoric rather than looking under the hood. Did you look at a cost comparison of 15 federal policies and this one was at the top? No, and if you did, it wouldn’t be.

Put your political leanings and support aside and consider just the numbers.

The One Big Beautiful Bill includes over $4 trillion in tax cuts. What does that mean? Well, the cost of any federal policy is given over a ten-year timeframe (it’s because policies almost never spend the same amount of money in a year as they scale up or get rolled out).So, $4 trillion over ten years is roughly $400 billion a year.

Here’s some accounting:

• Biden proposed a near-universal child care system in 2021 that was projected to cost $38 billion a year.

• Assume that they underestimated in 2021, and assume that child care is just a fourth of the total cost of the proposed Child Development System. That could push its cost to $200 billion a year—still less than half the size of the tax cut just passed.

• Assume that rolling out the Child Development System comes with pressure to increase investment in kids in other places.

  • It’s a little cruel that we’d have universal access to early childhood care but not paid family leave when a kid is born. That’s estimated to cost $25 billion a year.

  • If we are expanding a universal floor for children, that should include some investment in schools too. That’s mostly done through local funding, but the feds pay for lunch and breakfast, and they could max out that investment. The current school lunch and breakfast program costs $22 billion a year and covers about half of kids. Assume a universal free school meals program would be double that cost, or $44 billion a year.

  • Parents who want to stay home, especially when their kids are under 6, feel shortchanged by the Child Development System, like they are paying for something they don’t want to use. So Congress reestablishes the 2021 expansion to the Child Tax Credit which sent almost all kids $3000 a year regardless of parents work status. That would cost $160 billion a year.

If you’re keeping track, we are at $429 billion a year. So for about the same amount of money for the tax cut that was just passed, all kids in the US get: paid family leave as a newborn, early childhood care, lunch and breakfast every day they are in school, after school programming, summer programming, and all while their parents get $250 a month in help.

Like I said, we’ve been conditioned to be insecure and unambitious. I say with confidence: We can do this. And I say with passion: We should.

Photo by Agence Olloweb on Unsplash