America’s Child Care Crisis Was a Political Choice

America’s parents today live under the shadow of two days in 1971. On December 9 of that year, President Richard Nixon vetoed a piece of legislation known as the Comprehensive Child Development Act. The bill, passed through Congress with bipartisan support, would have begun funding a locally run network of high-quality child care programs. Writing with language that could likely be penned today, the Washington Post editorial board opined that, “As every working mother knows, unless she is lucky enough to have a trusted relative down the street, it is almost impossible to find a good child care setup in most communities at any price,” and the legislation “just might provide a vehicle for a new national effort to make childhood livable.”

Nixon, however, ended up acceding to the advice of his conservative advisor Pat Buchanan, who would later tell journalist Brigid Schulte that “we wanted to not only kill the bill, we wanted to drive a stake right through its heart.” Nixon’s veto statement, written by Buchanan, said that pursuing this (voluntary) path would be a “long leap into the dark for the United States government and the American people” and “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over [and] against the family-centered approach.”

Yet Nixon and his aides couldn’t ignore the fact that thanks to a changing global economy and improved rights for women, mothers of young children were flocking into the labor force; by 1970, nearly one-third of married mothers with children below the age of six were working for pay, and their numbers were rising rapidly. So the very next day, on December 10, Nixon signed into law a tax package that included an expansion of child care-related deductions which would reach into the middle class. Universal child care was out, and what author Maxine Eichner has called the “free-market family” was in. The child care system still hasn’t recovered, philosophically, practically, or politically.

It has become commonplace, 55 years after that fateful December, to assume that America’s broken child care landscape is an inevitability. Despite countless reports about expensive and hard-to-find child care slots (a 1994 front-page story in The New York Times said of one, “Study Confirms Some Fears on U.S. Children”) and a low-paid, transitory workforce (the first National Child Care Staffing Study, which detailed those trends, came out in 1989), there has, until recently, been little public demand for change. A recent YouGov poll on behalf of New America’s Better Life Lab (full disclosure: I helped coordinate the poll) found that only five percent of Americans nationwide—and, perhaps more notably, only eight percent of parents of young children—had ever contacted an elected official about child care.

The post-COVID years, however, have brought signs that the country is ready to move out from the legacy of the Nixon veto. Over the past few years, New Mexico became the first state to offer free child care to all households, regardless of income, where all parents are working or in school; Vermont passed a small payroll tax with the support of business leaders that has powered a major child care expansion; and New York City launched their own pathway to universal free child care. Other states, including red states like Texas and Montana, have also made historic investments in their child care systems. If these solutions prove sustainable and scalable, the U.S. may finally make good on a long-delayed promise to “make childhood livable.”

Successful Models

Every successful child care model, both in the U.S. and abroad, has robust public funding as a prerequisite. That’s because child care doesn’t work as a free market service akin to restaurants or gyms. The fixed operating costs are simply too high owing to the need for low adult-to-child ratios in order to maintain children’s safety—to say nothing of shepherding crucial early childhood brain development. There are few corners to cut, and so programs are faced with the dilemma of charging parents exorbitant fees, paying their staff poorly, or closing when options A and B lead to underenrollment. The normal rules of supply and demand do not work as they should, one reason why former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called child care a “textbook example of a broken market.”

States that are doing better by their families have taken child care at least partially out of the raw market by injecting public funding, bringing child care closer to that of other socially beneficial services like schools, libraries, and fire departments. New Mexico, for example, is powering its universal child care system with $700 million a year in funds mainly drawn from the state’s oil and gas revenues. Vermont’s payroll tax generates over $120 million a year, a substantial amount for the low-population state, which has resulted in growing supply, slashed parent fees, and improving educator wages. Even red states have been stepping up in this fashion, as with Montana setting aside millions in a dedicated fund to stabilize the child care workforce and expand supply.

Meredith Maskell is one parent who has benefitted from these investments. A Vermont mother of a seven-year-old and three-year-old twins, Maskell and her husband—a state employee and high school teacher, respectively—were staring down the barrel of a $43,000 child care bill after her twins were born. Then, Vermont’s new child care law came into effect, and Maskell’s family received a subsidy award that dropped their monthly bill to $1,200. “I joke it was the best day of my life,” Maskell laughs. The impacts were immediate: instead of draining their savings, Maskell and her husband were able to start rebuilding their financial security so that, as she explains, “each month we weren’t like, ‘oh my God, can we afford to pay all of our bills on time?’”

Despite differences in their specific policies and funding sources, child care reform across the country shares certain similarities. For one, states “all buy into parent choice,” says Helene Stebbins, executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a nonprofit network that supports state child care advocacy groups. “You want all kinds of options for families, so that’s a common characteristic or ingredient.”

Indeed, there is no one-size-fits-all model for child care. Parental needs and preferences for care when their children are very young vary widely and are dynamic: some want a licensed center that looks like a school, others desire a more family-style feel, while still others require options that match up with night or weekend work hours or a particular language or religious tradition. There is similarly wide variety in the desire for more formal types of care versus having a trusted family member or parent be the primary caregiver. What’s needed, says Marica Cox Mitchell, chief program officer at the early childhood-focused Bainum Family Foundation, is a fully funded system marked by “coherence, clarity,” and especially “simplification.” Mitchell added that “in many ways, simplicity is the innovation.”

Successful child care systems in other countries are built with both pluralism and simplicity in mind. In Nordic nations like Finland and Norway, for instance, parents can choose between deeply subsidized (often free) formal options and getting a “home care allowance” every month. As a recent report from the People’s Policy Project, a left-leaning think tank, explains, “In any society, some parents prefer to care for their children at home. Finland gives them the freedom to do so, and lets them move between home care and public daycare as needs change. Staying home means lost income, so the allowance replaces part of it, preventing poverty.”

The Return of Government as a Family Partner

Despite headwinds at the federal level, many experts and advocates are hopeful about child care’s future. “The game is momentum,” says Stebbins of the Alliance for Early Success, who notes that state victories bubbling up to national laws has been the path followed in other arenas like health care. Already, Democrats across the country, from both moderate and progressive wings of the party, have taken up the mantle of universal child care, while younger Republican leaders like Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama are regularly putting forth bipartisan child care legislation. The gains in many states also owe to the presence of sophisticated, sustained grassroots organizing and advocacy campaigns that have activated unusual messengers from business leaders to police chiefs.

That said, success is hardly guaranteed. Polling data confirms the American people remain deeply ambivalent about the role of government with regards to child care, and often unclear about the solutions on offer. In the Better Life Lab poll, when asked to choose a definition of universal child care, no single option was chosen by more than one-third of respondents, and nearly a quarter reported they were uncertain as to the phrase’s meaning.

It’s also unclear if early child care can stand alone, either on the merits or the politics. Families do not experience their child care needs in a vacuum, and experts have noted the importance of putting child care in a family policy ecosystem with items like paid family leave, after-school and summer programs for older siblings, and predictable job schedules—all of which all shape how families actually engage with care. Similarly, some of the most successful framing has focused on second-order effects of child care, whether New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s entreaty that child care lets families stay in their beloved city or small rural cities taxing themselves lest they be unable to maintain adequately staffed police forces or public schools.

Ultimately, the future of child care comes down to a question of sociopolitical imagination that echoes from a half-century in the past: Is child care purely a private family responsibility where households have no legitimate claim on society’s help, or is it an activity with such widespread social benefits that government has both an interest and obligation in creating the conditions for success? For parents like Meredith Maskell, that question has been asked and answered: “we can contribute to society in a way that we wouldn’t have been able to if we were paying that much in child care,” she says. If child care can be placed in its proper role as a pillar of family policy and a pillar of a healthy American society, far more households—both those with and without young children—can begin to thrive.