“The fact is that we need more than one solution to the child care crisis: universal child care and a child allowance and, for that matter, a home care stipend for stay-at-home parents. Pretending that any one of those triad is on its own sufficient is simply wrong.”
At long, long (long, long, long) last, child care is having its moment in the policy sun. Even before COVID-19 exposed the essential yet neglected infrastructure that is child care — in the same way that a sinkhole full of rats exposes what happens when we don’t invest in maintaining streets — child care was getting a lot of attention. Sen. Elizabeth Warren made universal child care one of her first signature plans-for-that, and the issue came up in multiple primary debates. Aunt Bee’s story wound up at the Democratic National Convention, and President-elect Biden released a solid plan to address the issue. One of the most promising evolutions has been the bipartisan support for a better child care system, showing up both in opinion polls and the Senate GOP’s COVID relief proposals.
Which is why it’s a bit bizarre to see some recent pushback from pundits on the Right (as well as some libertarians). These individuals basically argue that while the costs of care are indeed too high, cash for families is superior to publicly-funded child care. It’s criticism that conservative analyst Lyman Stone laid out in depth in an August piece for the Institute for Family Studies, and it’s worth nipping this fallacious argument in the bud before it catches hold. The fact is that we need more than one solution to the child care crisis: universal child care and a child allowance and, for that matter, a home care stipend for stay-at-home parents. Pretending that any one of those triad is on its own sufficient is simply wrong.
I’m not going to do a line-by-line rebuttal of Stone’s article, but it’s worth addressing his three main points (I should note here that while Stone and I are on very different sides of the ideological spectrum, I think he’s one of the sharpest contemporary minds researching and writing on family issues; I have enormous respect for him and his work). Stone is an avowed “pro-natalist,” someone who cares very much about improving a nation’s fertility rate; I, too, am a pro-natalist, and you probably are as well if you think about it — too few kids, and both social and economic systems start crumbling while the electorate beelines towards a feckless gerontocracy. With pro-natalism as his philosophical base, Stone notes that other nations with strong publicly-funded child care haven’t realized tremendous birth rate boosts. He ponders, “why are child care subsidies so ineffective at actually helping families achieve their childbearing goals?”
Stone’s first answer is that “public spending on child care doesn’t always go to families. For example, over half the value of the U.S.’ child care tax credit just goes to inflating the price of child care.” This formulation suggests that U.S. child care providers are raking in government cash and gouging parents in return. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. Already, child care programs operate massively below the true cost of care, a major reason why child care educator wages are obscenely and persistently low. Child care is necessarily expensive, due to the need for low adult-to-child ratios: as it stands, programs and their workers — disproportionately women of color — are the ones subsidizing the rest of the economy. For instance, a Center for American Progress report estimated the true cost of quality infant and toddler care in most states is between $20,000 or $30,000 per child, double what most programs currently charge. Put simply, the idea of child care providers getting more revenue is only a problem if one assumes that paying practitioners better, having improved facilities, etc., is a problem.
While it’s true that half-measures like universal pre-K for 4-year-olds have pushed painfully on infant/toddler supply, this is not cause to abandon publicly-funded child care. It is cause for a true universal child care system that covers infants through preschool ages and minimizes, if not zeroes out, parent fees. After all, the goal of external care isn’t a warm body supervising a child, it’s an excellent program that enriches a child’s brain development while supporting the worker’s livelihood and her own family.
Next, Stone brings up that there are “a large share of families who probably don’t want to use child care services, who would prefer to care for their children at home. Their ability to achieve this preference may be influenced by public policy choices related to child care.” This is absolutely true, and as left-leaning thinkers like myself and Matt Bruenig have written, there absolutely should be a ‘home care’ stipend for stay-at-home parents, who are inarguably performing societally beneficial labor. In fact, nations that model this policy are none other than the social-democratic Nordic nations; in Finland, stay-at-home parents can draw down upwards of $4,500 a year. (It’s worth noting these schemes sometimes come under fire for opening the door to coercion from an abusive husband forcing his wife to stay home and collect the stipend; every policy has unintended consequences).
Finally, Stone notes that “there is a fundamental concern of fairness involved in government subsidized child care,” because wealthier families and two-parent families tend to utilize external care more often. This point is largely overblown, as the differences are real but not drastic; for instance, Stone’s data shows around 60% of single-mother households have their four-year-old enrolled in a care program, versus 65% of two-parent households. Moreover, ‘fairness’ as a concept isn’t applied quite correctly here when talking about a would-be public good. It’s not particularly fair that Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos have the option to send their children to public schools for free when they could easily pay for the service, but it’s part of the connective tissue that makes a healthy, democratic society
In a lot of ways, what Stone is saying is: Hey, parents have a wide variety of preferences when it comes to child care! That is correct. Large, meaningful swaths of parents want to use some amount of external child care; large, meaningful swaths want to remain home with their children. These preferences are also dynamic, and shift over even relatively short periods of time (surprise: people change their minds). The solution, then, is to have policies that support all of these choices. Pretending the U.S. child care system wasn’t breaking down even pre-COVID, and in desperate need of public money, reads as a backdoor to forcing more parents into staying at home, as opposed to honoring their preferences no matter which direction they may run.
The conservative wariness about publicly-supported child care is, in this sense, built on straw men. I work in this field and know vanishingly few people who think we should eliminate private child care delivered by individuals in their homes, or by faith communities (I know some, myself included, who think we should transition away from for-profit child care, but that’s hardly the same thing). After all, public money supports private health clinics (Medicare) and private colleges (Pell Grants), so long as they agree to abide by certain laws. And I know literally no one (they may exist, but I haven’t met them) who thinks we should tell parents who want to stay home that they’re wrong and need to put their kid in external child care. At most, there is some implied tension between the push for professionalizing a credentialed early care & education workforce and honoring stay-at-home parents, but I think that has more to do with group care versus 1:1 care than any sense parents aren’t capable of cultivating their children’s’ healthy development. Although not a perfect analogy, it’s worth noting public school advocates don’t generally oppose the idea of homeschooling.
A child allowance, then — something I have been championing — should be seen not as an alternative to publicly-funded child care, but as a complement. Stone is spot-on that “the families with the greatest financial needs often face numerous difficulties, not just one big cost.” But when it comes to child care, they also face one big cost! A $400 a month allowance isn’t enough to contend with a $1,000 a month child care bill. Meanwhile, even families who use free informal child care, like a grandmother, still need cash for when their car’s battery dies so they don’t spiral into eviction and deep poverty. Truly supporting families means that we do both.
“A child allowance, then should be seen not as an alternative to publicly-funded child care, but as a complement.”
The rejoinder to “why not both?” is, of course, that money is finite. While, technically, this is true (the seemingly inconsequential national debt might argue otherwise), it obfuscates the point. Lots of policy problems require multiple simultaneous solutions, because humans are messy and diverse. We have distinct healthcare policies that target the poor, the elderly, children, people with disabilities, and so on. We have food and agricultural policies that variously target corn growers and lobstermen. The lack of affordable, accessible child care is a major problem for many families. The isolation and opportunity cost of having a stay-at-home parent is a major problem for many families. Poverty is a major problem for many families. As Bruenig posited in his “Family Fun Pack” proposal, or as proponents of ‘universal family care’ have argued, we can get a lot farther when we stop treating families as if they exist in one dimension (after all, we haven’t even touched on paid family leave).
This is why we should reject the artificial juxtaposition of a child allowance and a publicly-supported child care system. Families with children badly need both types of financial support, and for children in external care, they badly need a quality program with stable, well-compensated practitioners. That financial support not only bolsters fertility, but family thriving. Among families I interviewed about child care costs for my book — most of whom were middle-class — two consistent themes were stress and sacrifice. Having an extra line-item equal to rent or a mortgage for five years per child kneecaps the ability to save, perform preventative maintenance, or move into a larger house or vehicle that would increase the likelihood of family expansion. Similarly, being stressed out about making ends meet does not improve quality time or parenting patience.
The child care conversation is going to only get louder as we move into the Biden administration. It is my fervent hope that instead of a reflexive opposition to government involvement, conservatives will step back and realize that family policy is one of the last remaining bastions of bipartisan hope. We can simultaneously advance multiple actions which will make all American families stronger and, ultimately, lead to more American children.
Elliot Haspel is a former elementary school teacher and early childhood policy analyst who writes about early childhood and K-12 education policy. He holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured on The Washington Post, The New Republic, Romper, The 74 Million, and other sites. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, was published in November 2019.