Tag Archives: child care

Biden’s push for child care failed. What lessons are there for Kamala Harris?

Originally published in Vox on October 8, 2024.
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Caregiving policies are having a moment in the 2024 election. Back in June, before President Joe Biden exited the race, the first presidential debate moderator asked both candidates how they’d help families better afford child care, noting that prices averaged over $11,000 per child in 2023. (Both Biden and former President Donald Trump dodged the question.) New care policy proposals then surfaced on the campaign trail over the summer, as vice presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance endorsed an expanded child tax credit (CTC), followed by Vice President Kamala Harris endorsing her own expanded credit on top of a new CTC for families with newborns. Both campaigns have said they’d fight for paid family leave and Harris recently said she’d cap child care costs at 7 percent of a family’s income.

If some of these ideas sound familiar, it’s because the push for “care economy” policies — ranging from paid family leave and an expanded CTC to affordable child care, universal preschool, elder care, and higher wages for care workers — was a central focus for advocates and Democrats during the 2021 Build Back Better Act negotiations. However, those talks fell apart after Democratic leadership failed to reach a deal with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who had concerns over the size and scope of the package. The following year, care policies were ultimately excluded from the $740 billion Inflation Reduction Act Democrats passed into law.

Advocates are now pressing politicians to redouble their commitment to care legislation — citing polling that suggests such investments are not just good policy but smart politics. Care organizations are particularly pinning hopes on Harris winning in November, as a Democratic victory increases the chances for significant new federal spending.

But should Harris actually win and advocates get another opportunity to push for federal policy, what, if anything, would they do? How, if at all, are they reflecting on their last failed push, and preparing for the future, especially given the strong chance that Republicans win the Senate? The odds of a Democratic trifecta are low.

Over the past several months Vox has been speaking with lawmakers, strategists, philanthropic funders, congressional aides, think tank experts, and leaders of care advocacy groups to gauge the future of federal care policy. The interviews revealed a simmering debate over whether advocates should narrow their focus to one or two agenda items in a future legislative push or whether compromise represents premature capitulation, a sign of adopting a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Beyond the tactical debate, deeper tensions have surfaced over whether future efforts should focus on the most vulnerable families or build out new programs for more people, and broader questions have emerged about who sets the agenda in Democratic policymaking, and whether there’s room in the party for real dissent.

Should Democrats have prioritized more?

In the summer and fall of 2021, as congressional negotiations for Build Back Better were heating up, activists saw a major opportunity to push new investments in paid family leave, child care, elder care, universal preschool and an expanded CTC. How exactly to describe this sweeping legislation wasn’t clear. “Cradle-to-grave” social welfare? A jobs and climate package? Human infrastructure?

While Sen. Manchin had signaled he opposed spending as much as the White House and House Democrats were prepared to invest ($3.5 trillion over 10 years) and that he disapproved of budget tricks including temporary programs he suspected leaders would try to make permanent later on, advocates were optimistic that with enough pressure, Manchin would come around on most things. Manchin had also emphasized that he opposed expanding the CTC in a way that eliminated its connection to work, but activists believed he’d ultimately cave on that as well, given emerging research that showed how a CTC without work requirements successfully reduced child poverty by 30 percent during the pandemic. Both the White House and Senate Democrats were staking out political capital in declaring an extension of the pandemic CTC to be their top priority, too.

So when negotiations for Build Back Better ultimately collapsed in late December 2021, care advocates, White House officials, and Senate Democrats insisted there was ultimately nothing else they could have done, that Manchin had been disingenuous and never intended to strike a deal in the first place. (Manchin had expressed openness to policies like a permanent expansion of preschool and a larger CTC with a work requirement.) By the time January rolled around, care advocates were loath to adopt any new strategy, insisting they just needed to keep fighting and that eventually Manchin would come to his senses. Inflation was soaring by that point.

Anyone who challenged this strategic consensus faced consequences. In February 2022, Patrick Gaspard, the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, acknowledged in a memo that the House’s version of the Build Back Better Act had no path in the Senate, and urged lawmakers to focus on lowering health care costs, addressing the climate crisis, and reducing child care expenses through initiatives like universal pre-K. Shortly after, a coalition of care advocates voted to expel CAP from their group for throwing its weight behind a proposal that didn’t include an expanded CTC.

Also in February 2022, representatives from an umbrella group representing large, private child care providers spoke with Manchin about possibly moving forward on expanding the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) — a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. Other care economy advocates grew furious, and accused the group of sabotaging their larger, more progressive agenda.

(While CCDBG has bipartisan support in Congress and is massively underfunded, many liberal child care advocates oppose its work requirement and want to see policymakers increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just poor households.)

“That was probably one of the ugliest negotiations I’ve seen in terms of stifling folks,” said one child care advocate who requested anonymity to describe their private coalition calls. People who held very senior positions in the Obama administration on child care were saying the same things about moving forward on CCDBG, the advocate added, “and were being met as some sort of public enemy #1.”

A Democratic Senate aide, speaking anonymously to describe their own private conversations, recalled hearing through the congressional grapevine in the winter of 2022 that Manchin might be open to a deal on expanding CCDBG. This sounded encouraging to the aide, who had already accepted that the window for some sort of investment on the scale of the House’s version of Build Back Better had passed. But when this aide broached the idea of a new path forward with care advocacy groups, they too were met with backlash.

“We had some really tough conversations with outside advocates when we tried to change course and got some very bad reactions,” the aide told Vox. “The idea to expand and pump out CCDBG, I think, fell really short of what they were trying to do.” The aide had hoped that, given their boss’s record on championing care policies, advocates would have been more understanding about a strategic pivot, and see it more as an effort to be nimble and respond to an evolving situation, and not about throwing groups under the bus. “Honestly those were very bad conversations and I look back at that time with a lot of sadness,” the aide said. “These things can get kind of intense and personal.”

Finally, after more than five months of resisting a new plan, and more than three months after Manchin expressed openness to reviewing a proposal on expanding CCDBG, Sens. Patty Murray and Tim Kaine released a proposal to expand CCDBG aid for more than a million new children. But most political observers felt it was too little, too late, and that the door for reaching a deal had closed.

“I mean, it was like a Hail Mary, you could see the window was closing and that’s finally when [advocates] came to try and find some compromise,” said one leader who supported pivoting much earlier. “There was this mentality that if you show your willingness to compromise early it’s going to kill your chances, and I think it was ultimately their unwillingness to compromise earlier that killed it.”

When does perfect become the enemy of good?

The last few years seem to have revealed that within the Democratic Party, there’s not much space for debating competing care policy ideas.

In the fall of 2021, as advocates began circling the wagon to get their policies through congressional negotiations, Matt Bruenig, the founder of the left-wing People’s Policy Project, came out with a number of critiques about the package — for instance, that the Senate’s paid leave bill would exclude at least 30 percent of new parents, that the House’s version was full of giveaways to insurance companies, that the proposed child care bill could lead to massive hikes in cost for middle-class families, and that pre-K and child care bills were crafted in ways that made adoption by Republican states unlikely.

Democratic lawmakers and care advocates “mov[ed] quickly to dull a dagger,” as Politico put it at the time. Child care proponents publicly dismissed Bruenig, arguing he wasn’t closely reading the legislation and was spreading “a viral set of misinformation.” Paid leave advocates similarly declined to raise any concerns. “I trust the judgment of the Ways and Means Committee and of politicians who need to square the fact that there are lots of different interests at play,” one national paid leave advocate told the American Prospect when questioned about the insurance giveaways. Another said they were not “choosing fights” as negotiations progressed.

Bruenig wasn’t the only person to notice weaknesses in the bills. When another think tank analyst raised issues, they were similarly told to keep quiet. Anyone raising concerns at this vulnerable negotiating stage was letting perfect be the enemy of good, or not grasping that this was the best possible version lawmakers could pass at this time, and that modifications could always be made later.

Except a few weeks after Bruenig’s critique about rising child care costs for unsubsidized families, Senate Democrats quietly revised their bill, significantly raising the income threshold to address that concern.

Similar dynamics emerged the next year when attempts to strike a new deal with Manchin were met with fierce outcry. The incentives to keep one’s head down and go along with the coalition were real.

Bruenig has called this policymaking apparatus both dysfunctional and undemocratic. “If this nightmarish process actually generated good policy that was put into law, maybe you could forgive people for engaging in it,” he wrote in May of 2022. “But in reality, it keeps generating extremely broken policies that mostly don’t pass anyway and that fail to live up to expectations even when they do.”

Even if some believe it’s unwise to debate legislative details during ongoing negotiations, since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, there’s been little space or energy to explore alternative ideas. “Now is allegedly supposed to be the time when people are to say, ‘Okay, let’s hash it out,’ but it still doesn’t happen,” Bruenig told Vox.

Care advocates think they deserve more credit for coming close

As it became even clearer over the summer of 2022 that child care investments were not going to be part of what ultimately became the Inflation Reduction Act, child care advocates began ramping up threats of economic calamity. A letter sent that July from 26 national organizations warned lawmakers that omitting child care aid from the reconciliation package would push the early childhood sector “closer to a catastrophic funding cliff that will affect America’s entire economy” and “preven[t] countless moms from pursuing economic security — let alone economic success.”

These warnings continued to escalate over the next two years. The following summer, advocates warned that if Congress failed to renew expiring Covid-19 child care funding, then 70,000 child care programs would likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care, and mothers in particular would be forced to quit their jobs or work part-time.

This “child care cliff” idea originated with the left-wing Century Foundation and was echoed by Democratic and union leadership like Sen. Murray and AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. It was repeated in more than a dozen national news outlets, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC. As I reported at the time, leading experts quietly disagreed with the scope of the projected closures, but were staying quiet so as to not upset others in their child care coalition. And indeed, industry-wide collapse never followed, while more moms with preschool and school-age children subsequently joined the labor force. Jobs in the child care sector continued to grow, too.

Looking back, White House aides maintain they did all they could have done to reach a deal with Manchin on care policies, as evidenced by the fact that they were ultimately able to negotiate successfully with him on climate change.

Leading care advocates also deny any missteps. They say that, upon reflection, they are proud of all they have accomplished over the last four years, despite losing the bruising reconciliation fight. They point to wins like the new Biden administration rule to lower child care costs, a new law protecting nursing parents, and that care agenda policies have remained a top priority lawmakers regularly highlight.

“In the Build Back Better fight, the care community was able to get care policies out of the US House, even though that was not assured for quite a long time, and we lost by just one vote in the US Senate,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, the executive director of MomsRising, a national advocacy group. “As a community we were punching above our weight. We did get care through the administrative level and through the House so what that means is we have to double down now.”

In a post-mortem of the Build Back Better fight published by the progressive think tank New America, care leaders interviewed similarly praised the coalition for being small and mighty. “While the outcome of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) social agenda is widely known, much of the progress care advocates made given their minuscule financial resources is a big success story that deserves more attention,” the report said.

Though some have argued advocates erred in refusing to pick one or two policies to focus on, activists publicly maintain that they are ultimately stronger if they push multiple programs all together.

In their own post-mortem of the American Rescue Plan, the Century Foundation pointed to historic levels of funding for child care and home care as evidence that “a holistic framework across care movements and strategies is impactful.” The liberal think tank argued that trying to silo aspects of the care agenda from one another “creates a scarcity myth and a fight for resources and helps maintain unfair power structures.”

What care advocates see in the climate movement

Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, says part of the challenge of figuring out strategy is that child care advocacy does not have a single leader or single organization. “In some ways [this] means more voices can be heard, more small-d democratic, but it also can create challenges,” he told Vox, contrasting this with the 1990s, when the Children Defense Fund, and specifically its leaders Marian Wright Edelman and Helen Blank, “were basically the child care points of contact.”

Past legislative battles may offer insight: following the defeat of universal health care under President Bill Clinton and cap-and-trade for carbon emissions under President Barack Obama, advocates for health care reform and climate went through years of painful reflection and recalibration of their tactics and goals. To get legislation through the legislative process, leaders agreed, they’d have to change course.

Health care proponents had to figure out how to bypass a strong suspicion of socialized medicine. So, with the past failed health care push top of mind, lawmakers drafted the Affordable Care Act to allow for a market-based approach with industry buy-in. Meanwhile, climate advocates realized that they had overestimated the power of businesses in the GOP coalition An influential 2013 report by a Harvard scholar helped push the climate movement in its next decade to embrace grassroots activism, while practical experience led climate groups to negotiate more concertedly with Manchin in 2022 to get the IRA over the finish line.

The care movement has had no comparable recalibration, at least yet. If anything, top care leaders point to the climate movement not as a coalition that had to make tough strategic compromises but as an example of the power of big political spending and a commitment to fighting over many years. “What’s the difference between the climate change movement and the care movement?” Rowe-Finkbeiner, of MomsRising, asked in the New America report. “Tens of million dollars and several decades [of concerted organizing].”

The report noted that the top three environmental lobbying groups outspent care lobbying groups in 2021 and 2022 about three to one. In addition to investing more political dollars, the New America review recommended building a bigger coalition including more faith leaders and businesses, working with Hollywood to feature more diverse characters and storylines about caregiving, and getting serious about publicly battling the opposition, such as large industry groups that fight corporate tax increases.

An aide for Sen. Murray also pushed back on the idea that there’s not enough room to update ideas, noting their boss’s Child Care for Working Families Act, which has 42 co-sponsors, has evolved based on feedback, with newer changes including the expansion of eligibility and increased grants to providers.

“This was the product of countless discussions with other Senate offices, unions, policy experts, and other stakeholders,” the aide said. “Murray wanted to write a bill that could win the most possible support to actually get passed into law.”

Where things might go after the election

In interviews with advocates, aides and policy experts, I’ve tried to glean a clearer sense of what might happen with care policies should Harris win in November. Some activists declined to discuss hypothetical scenarios at all, saying they would not “negotiate against themselves” by publicly signaling what they might compromise on, but others were willing to get more specific.

Assuming Harris wins but lacks a Washington trifecta, the two most commonly cited ideas I heard were an expansion of the CCDBG program for low-income families — as that’s something Republicans generally support — and an expansion of the child tax credit, as that bipartisan program is also set to expire next December, so Congress will likely plan to reauthorize it in some form.

One area of tension will likely be over whether to expand the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which helps parents offset the cost of child care. Supporters of expanding the credit say it will make any deeper investments in the CCDBG go further, by making child care both more affordable and more accessible. Rates for CDCTC were last set in 2001, so they have not kept up with inflation and other increases in care costs.

“There is a monumental opportunity that should not be squandered,” said Radha Mohan, the executive director of the Early Care and Education Consortium, which is lobbying for the expansion of the CDCTC. Other progressive child care groups have opposed it, as they see it as further entrenching a child care financing system they want to ultimately move away from. The White House declined to endorse expanding the CDCTC in its latest budget, favoring a new child care entitlement instead, though Biden did support increasing the tax credit in the American Rescue Plan.

Aides say there is a real sense within the Democratic caucuses that lawmakers need to do something on care, since it was so clearly left on the cutting room floor in 2022. Some child care advocates worry that lawmakers might try to frame existing proposals to expand the CTC as sufficient. The National Women’s Law Center put out a brief last week on this concern, arguing that the CTC and child care should not be seen as interchangeable.

(There’s no doubt that many of these policies and acronyms can be confusing. In the first presidential debate, Biden mistakenly referred to the CTC, which can be used for any costs associated with raising kids, as a “child care tax credit” — causing stress among child care advocates that the two will continue to be conflated.)

Other care advocates are looking at the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act next year as a fresh opportunity for advancing their own priorities, since Republicans likely will agree to new social spending in exchange for renewing their business tax breaks. The real question is how much money will exist to support care policies given other commitments. Harris, for her part, has already pledged to bring back the pandemic-era CTC and create a new CTC for newborns, two items that could cost up to $1.6 trillion over 10 years.

Some experts say lawmakers should not be afraid to go back to the drawing board. There is a tendency for groups to become “path dependent” on old ideas, even if there are better, more effectively designed policies out there.

Bruenig, for example, advocates for universal free child care along with home care allowances for those who don’t want to send their kids to day care. He believes these policies would be easier and fairer to implement than Democratic proposals aimed at capping costs at 7 percent of a family’s income. He also says there’s no reason all the Democratic paid leave bills have to exclude nearly a third of new parents. In the next session of the Maryland state legislature, Democratic Del. Vaughn Stewart, with Bruenig’s help, will be introducing a bill to close that loophole in Maryland’s paid leave law.

A divided government may force advocates to embrace more bipartisan solutions, and there are some signs that such work has already started. A new bipartisan working group of 30 child care experts and analysts convened throughout 2023 to try and find common ground, and new bipartisan working groups in the House and Senate also launched last year to focus on paid leave.

Whether advocates would push for some or all of their care priorities together remains an open question. Rowe-Finkbeiner stressed that it’s important “the policies move together,” saying it’ll take a combination of them to help families the most.

Sen. Murray is optimistic that if Democrats win the Senate, it will be a Democratic majority that’s “markedly different” from the last time, and one that’s ready to make serious, long-term investments in child care. But if they don’t win the Senate, Murray told me, Democrats will still act. “I will always talk to anyone and everyone to make progress on child care in every single way possible,” she said.

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Innovation in child care is coming from a surprising source: Police departments

Originally published in Vox on July 5, 2024.
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Earlier this year, a brand-new child care center opened up in San Diego, serving about 25 families.

The center charges parents 50 percent less than market rate, and child care workers are paid 15 percent above the going local average. Its hours of operation are flexible. It stays open from 5:30 am to 7 pm every day, longer than most child care centers, and can accommodate emergencies like unexpected work shifts. There’s only one catch: To send your child, you have to work for the San Diego Police Department.

San Diego’s law enforcement child care center, funded through both public and private money, is the first of its kind in the country, but plans for several others across the US are already underway. A bipartisan bill in Congress would expand the model further.

Supporters call law enforcement child care a win-win-win — a way to help diversify policing by making it more accessible to women, a recruiting tool at a time when police resignations and retirements are up, and applications are down. And, frankly, they hope that an innovative model for child care will give a PR boost to a profession that has taken severe blows to its reputation over the last decade.

But it also raises a basic question: Why just police? What about subsidizing other professions, including other first responders like firefighters and nurses?

“My response is those other professions haven’t been demonized like law enforcement has,” said Jim Mackay, a retired police detective and the founder of the National Law Enforcement Foundation, which has advocated for these child care centers and worked with police departments to build them. “My philosophy is if you have a healthy law enforcement then everything else kind of prospers out from that, and we have to treat the problems with law enforcement first.”

There’s no data yet on if this employer-centric model will pay off, but advocates argue that the child care investment is a smart bet. The estimated annual operating cost for each center is $2 million, while the average cost to recruit and train a single police officer is $200,000. In other words, if this helps keep even just ten officers in the ranks, it will have been worth it.

Tanya Meisenholder, the director of gender equity at the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, says child care is one of the job barriers she hears about most often from female cops and those considering entering the profession. Women make up only 12 percent of sworn officers and 3 percent of police leadership in the US, though there’s a national campaign underway to increase those numbers.

“Child care is the one thing that’s been brought up over and over not only as a barrier to entry but a barrier to promotion,” Meisenholder said. “Police child care would show the agencies value their employees and are listening to their concerns. It has the potential to be somewhat transformative.”

The idea is spreading quickly

Angelie Hoxie, a state police detective in Idaho, heard about the San Diego child care idea and wanted to see if she could build a similar model for Treasure Valley, which covers the greater Boise region.

Idaho police agencies have struggled with recruitment and retention, and many families are on year-long child care waitlists. The Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children said over 90 percent of child care facilities cite staffing as their top challenge.

In early 2022 Hoxie helped launch the Treasure Valley Law Enforcement Coalition and within a year they were lobbying state and federal officials and partnering with a local university and local philanthropy.

By winter 2023, Republican Gov. Brad Little was recommending funding for Idaho police child care programs in his workforce development budget, and by March, a bill to support the effort passed out of both chambers of the Idaho legislature. Republican Rep. Mike Simpson then successfully earmarked $2.65 million from the federal budget to help finance the new child care center. Construction is set to launch this summer with the program to be operational for police families by 2025.

St. Louis County in Missouri is another region set to open a law enforcement child care center next year, following the same model as San Diego: longer hours of service, subsidized rates for parents, and higher wages for workers. Their goal now is to care for up to 75 kids at a time, and by operating for 18 hours a day, upwards of 150 families could be served.

The push was prompted by a rank-and-file woman officer during the pandemic who struggled to find care for her 1-year-old while balancing her new 12-hour shifts. Twelve-hour shifts have since become the norm for the department, even after Covid-19.

“We’re absolutely hoping it helps with both recruitment and retention,” said Tracy Panus, a spokesperson for St. Louis County police.

Democratic Rep. Scott Peters, whose congressional district includes San Diego, introduced a police child care bill last year to authorize $24 million annually in funding under the federal Child Care Development Grant program. The bill would also allow Health and Human Services to provide grants of up to $3 million for new police child care centers. In December the Congressional Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed the legislation.

“There’s no question that [child care] is a priority—it has come up in every single focus group we’ve done,” said Kym Craven, the executive director of the National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives.

Taking some cues from the US military

That police might take on leadership in child care is less surprising when one looks to the Department of Defense, which sponsors the nation’s only federally run universal child care program.

The military child care program, which serves roughly 200,000 children, is known for being affordable and high-quality, and its 23,000 child care workers are paid higher wages than their private sector counterparts. Members of Congress and former military leaders have been in discussions over the last few years about how to expand and improve upon this child care program to boost army recruitment even further.

Still, expanding public subsidies for police child care is not popular with everyone, including those who want less public money subsidizing police departments, and those who want to see public dollars prioritizing child care for low-income families.

Others have raised concerns with the idea of employer-sponsored child care more broadly. In one report published this past winter, Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, argued that employer-sponsored child care “does nothing to address the fundamental challenges within the child care system, nor does it promote a pluralistic system of choice.”

He compared the model to painkillers for cancer. “They can ease the pain for a while, but the body gets sicker, and the temptation to overly rely on painkillers only grows,” he wrote.

Still, advocates for police child care say the public safety needs are too urgent, and the possible benefits to communities and agencies too great to pass up. They hope in five years they will have firmer data showing their investments have worked.

“In this new generation not too many people want to become law enforcement officers,” said Mackay. “We’re really trying to stem that tide.”

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

Rent control for child care?

Originally published in Vox on May 21, 2024.
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Brittany Kjenaas and her husband live with their 3-year-old daughter in northern Minnesota, where they pay more for child care than they do for their mortgage. Kjenaas, a health care supply manager, and her husband, a miner on the Iron Range, cite their day care bills as the primary reason they’ve abandoned plans to have any more children.

“We waited until we were in our 30s to start a family and … it’s not an exaggeration to say that the decision was based on the cost of child care,” she said. “She is our only child, and unless something changes in the cost of child care, she will remain our only child.”

Kjenaas is not alone in speaking out about how the prohibitive cost of child care is shaping the reproductive decisions of middle-class families like hers, families that are ineligible for low-income child care assistance programs.

In Minnesota, state Sen. Grant Hauschild has said that he and his wife considered having a third child but decided against it due to day care costs. It’s among the top three issues he hears about from constituents on a daily basis, as well as from prospective employers considering setting up businesses in his region.

It’s what makes a bill Hauschild introduced alongside Minnesota state Rep. Carlie Kotyza-Witthuhn this year so interesting.

Their legislation — known as the Great Start Affordability Scholarship Program — targets middle- and upper-middle-class families, those earning up to 150 percent of the state median income, or $174,000 for a family of four. Think Small, a local children’s advocacy group, estimated the scholarships would reduce child care costs for 86 percent of Minnesotans with kids under 5.

The benefits would be on a sliding scale but could be as high as $600 per month per child, with the state sending payments directly to Minnesota child care providers. The effort aims to ultimately cap family child care payments at 7 percent of a household’s annual income, an affordability threshold endorsed by the federal Department of Health and Human Services, and more recently by a bipartisan Minnesota state task force.

HHS landed on this benchmark about a decade ago after determining that, between 1997 and 2011, families consistently spent about 7 percent of their income on child care.

A 7 percent cap would represent a massive change for most Minnesota families, who pay some of the steepest child care costs in the country. Infant care in Minnesota stands at an average annual cost of $1,341 per month; preschool checks in at $1,021. The Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning national think tank, estimates the average Minnesota family with an infant and a preschooler pays roughly 37 percent of their household income for care.

State leaders like Hauschild have been getting fed up with federal inaction. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the 2021 Build Back Better fight, and child care funding was excluded from Congress’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. While bipartisan compromise on child care seems possible, leaders right now only seem to be able to find common ground on helping low-income families, not the bigger group struggling with child care costs.

The Minnesota proposal failed to advance this year, but advocates believe their time lobbying on an off-cycle budget year has positioned them well for 2025, when the legislature embarks on more serious appropriations.

Still, whether state lawmakers will be able to ever fully fund the program’s cost (an estimated $2 billion or so annually) without the federal government is unclear.

If the proposal passes, Kjenaas said it would do even more than enable her family to grow.

“If we pay a few thousand less on child care, we’d be able to take our daughter to the zoo, go see a movie, and even plan a fun road trip because we’d finally be able to do so without the stress of how much money it would cost at the end,” Kjenaas testified before a Minnesota House subcommittee in November. “We’d be able to buy healthy food at the grocery store instead of pre-packaged stuff. We’d be able to have time to make healthy meals because my husband wouldn’t have to work overtime to pay catch-up on our bills … We’d have room to breathe.”

Building a bigger political base for child care

Not everyone in Minnesota agrees with the push to expand child care subsidies for wealthier families, especially since low-income families are still struggling. But it helps, advocates say, that the state legislature succeeded a year prior in securing new child care investments specifically for poor families.

Armed with a substantial budget surplus, Minnesota lawmakers in 2023 raised early childhood education workers’ pay with a half-billion-dollar investment and invested $300 million more into early learning, including new investments in Head Start and low-income scholarships.

“For a long time, the emphasis has been on the most vulnerable kids, and we made some really big strides in that area last session,” said Ericca Maas, director of policy and advocacy for Think Small. “We came together after that and said, well, glaring at us is middle-class families.”

The debates around equity continued this year as advocates lobbied for the Great Start Affordability Scholarships program, said Clare Sanford, the government relations chair for the Minnesota Child Care Association, a provider group. Some activists protested pushing to help wealthier families before those with the least resources were fully covered.

This debate was never fully resolved, but ultimately, Sanford said, leading groups decided they’d be more successful in the long term if they could expand their coalition to include more families.

“There’s a fundamental agreement that we need to help those who have the least first, and we know we haven’t finished doing that. However, part of the strategy is we need middle-class families to see themselves as part of this,” she told Vox. “We need more political will to form a greater political base.”

Megan Pulford, a single mother of two in northeastern Minnesota, is the type of parent advocates like Sanford want to bring into their coalition. As a bank loan officer, Pulford has never qualified for state child care assistance, but covering the cost of day care for her two kids comes to nearly $2,000 a month.

“Money is just so tight, our bills are just so tight,” she told Vox. “If we didn’t have to pay as much for child care, we could actually put more into our local grocers, local businesses.”

A big part of the coalition-building strategy is helping middle- and upper-middle-class parents overcome feelings of shame that they may be struggling with costs at all. Lawmakers have long treated child care assistance as a carrot to induce poor mothers to work, rather than a general investment in the healthy development of all children.

“The myth in our country is that very young children are a private responsibility, not a public one,” said Sanford. “Everyone will pay taxes to fund public K-12 schools whether or not they have kids because that’s a commitment we’ve made as a society that an educated workforce is something we all need. We do the exact opposite for ages 0-5.”

“We feel the need to help parents really understand that this is a shared experience and that it’s okay for them to share that they’re not holding up,” Maas, of Think Small, added.

The search for simple language continues

American child care advocacy is often plagued by cumbersome math and jargon, and the effort in Minnesota this year was no different.

In contrast to Canadian politicians who’ve been campaigning for child care that costs no more than $10 a day, US progressives have long stuck with more complicated language around limiting costs to thresholds of annual household income. (The specific threshold to signal affordability used to be 10 percent, though was lowered to 7 percent about 10 years ago.) The 7 percent benchmark was recently included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act and was included in the Biden administration’s new rule to reduce child care costs for families already receiving subsidies.

Rep. Kotyza-Witthuhn, the Minnesota House sponsor of the Great Start Affordability Scholarships, said they felt 7 percent was a good target because Minnesota lawmakers had already pledged commitment to the goal last year and because it already exists as a federal recommendation. But advocates acknowledge it can be very confusing, particularly since many families don’t know what 7 percent of their household income is, and for some families the goal is to still have them spend less than 7 percent.

Talking about “capping” child care costs, advocates hoped, would at least provide a clear policy message they could galvanize parents around, but then child care providers started getting nervous, interpreting the cap language as a cap on their expenses or a cap on the amount of tuition they can charge.

“People freak out when you talk about a cap,” Maas told Vox. “Providers freak out about things they charge being capped, and some parents really bristle too at the idea that they couldn’t invest more in their child if they wanted to.”

To mitigate this confusion, some advocates started describing the proposed scholarship subsidy as more like a co-pay, similar to health insurance. But health insurance is among the most confusing items Americans have to budget for.

While the fight was unsuccessful this session, Democratic leaders in Minnesota say they’re keeping it as a goal for 2025.

“It is a priority for my caucus and our leadership,” said Kotyza-Witthuhn. “Everyone knows the system is broken.”

The child care cliff that wasn’t

Originally published in Vox on May 14, 2024.
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“The writing is on the wall right now, in big, bold letters: the child care crisis is only going to get worse unless we take action — and soon!” said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray in November, following the expiration of federal Covid-19 subsidies for child care. Democrats and other child care advocates were pushing for a $16 billion bill they said was essential to save the industry.

“Our nation’s child care system is on the verge of collapse,” stressed AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “Over 3 million kids are in danger of losing their child care slots, over 230,000 child care workers could lose their jobs,” added Senator Bernie Sanders.

Sanders was citing numbers from The Century Foundation, a liberal think tank that warned the US was headed for a disastrous “child care cliff” due to the expiring pandemic aid. Nearly every major national news organization — including the Washington Post, CNN, Bloomberg, NBC, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times — reported on this coming cliff, and its prediction that 70,000 programs “will likely close.”

The warnings echoed another set of doomsday predictions during the pandemic when advocates stressed that without significant new investment in child care and paid family leave, women would be forced to leave the labor market en masse, leading to what some described as a coming “she-cession.”

The “she-cession” failed to materialize beyond the first initial months of Covid-19, with female labor force participation ticking steadily upwards thereafter, especially among moms. So advocates updated their messaging, emphasizing that such workforce gains could crater if major new federal investments were not made soon. The Century Foundation predicted $9 billion annually in lost family earnings, and tax and business revenue loss for states at $10.6 billion per year.

But Congress did not pass big new spending in paid leave or child care. Republicans rebuffed Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, and the $16 billion child care stabilization bill Democrats rallied around last fall.

Still, labor force participation among women ages 25-54 has continued to rise, with larger shares of moms of both preschool and school-age children working now than at any time in history. Most of the labor market gains have been driven by moms with young kids under the age of 5, with roughly 70 percent of them holding down some formal job.

Jobs in the child care sector, too, have continued to expand, with more people working in the sector as of April than in any time on record.

The lesson to take from all of this is not that people should stop advocating for policies that would improve the lives of parents, kids, and those who care for children.

We know that paid leave boosts the health of mothers and babies and that many families struggle to find accessible and affordable child care. We know that child care workers are among the lowest paid, which can result in high turnover, and we also know that some parents wish they could stay home with their children, rather than work a formal job. We know that even among families that do cobble together child care arrangements, there is more we could be doing to lower household stress.

But advocates don’t need to rely on cataclysmic economic predictions to make the case for better and more humane family policy, and continually warning of a disaster that never comes undermines their case and credibility.

The fact is that not everyone agrees on what specific policies are necessary to improve child care and conditions for parents — some people would prefer direct cash support to families over funding for daycare centers, for example — but these are the real debates that the public should be having.

A strong economy does a lot

More women — including child care workers who are disproportionately female — are working today, and for the most part, that’s for positive reasons.

The US economy is strong and growing, and workers’ wages have risen faster than prices for more than a year now. Even in child care there’s been an increase in wages, with the average wage standing at $13.31 per hour in 2021, $14.22 in 2022, and $15.42 in 2023. Average preschool teacher wages also reached $19.91 per hour last year.

“As Nobel Laureate Claudia Goldin taught us, one of the most important drivers of women’s labor force participation is higher wages, so we shouldn’t be too surprised that childcare workforce participation and prime-age female labor force participation are both trending upward,” said Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a centrist think tank.

Tight labor markets can cure a lot of economic ills, added Patrick Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “The fact that low-wage workers have seen the strongest wage growth post-pandemic means that a lot of moms have seen pay increases, switched to better jobs, or work from home at higher levels — all of which make reliable child care more achievable,” he told Vox.

The expansion of remote work since the pandemic is most certainly a factor in boosting female labor force participation, especially among college-educated moms and married women. Federal labor statistics show that 23 percent of women workers teleworked last month, compared to 19 percent of men. Nearly a quarter of teleworkers had children under 18.

“The current tight labor market leads many employers to offer benefits like paid leave or flexible work hours and location,” said Adrienne Schweer, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a centrist think tank. “These are the kinds of benefits that women consistently rate as important factors in their employment decisions.”

More women working also leads to more demand for child care, especially as the number of children in the US continues to grow. This all helps explain growth in child care employment, said Sydney Petersen, a spokesperson with the National Women’s Law Center, a liberal advocacy group.

Still, that more women are joining or staying in the labor market with young kids isn’t necessarily something to cheer about in all circumstances. Katharine Stevens, the president of the Center on Child and Family Policy, a conservative think tank, said some women are working likely because they couldn’t make ends meet on what they were earning before recent rises in inflation.

“Unfortunately, that probably means that women who would have preferred to stay home full- or part-time to raise their own young children have been forced to spend more time working outside the home instead,” she said. “We should be making it easier, not harder for them to do so.”

Paid leave and child care subsidies could boost labor participation more

That rising wages and a strong economy have boosted employment among women doesn’t mean supportive care policy couldn’t drive those gains further. Suzanne Kahn, vice president of the Roosevelt Institute, a liberal think tank, said they’ve been focused on how to make these labor gains “sticky” even if the nation’s economic conditions decline.

Advocates for public investment say there’s already evidence that states that increased their child care spending have seen better results. A new brief from the National Women’s Law Center analyzing Census Household Pulse Survey data found that the share of respondents with children under 12 who lacked child care increased by more than 5 percentage points since the fall in states that didn’t make major new investments in their child care sectors.

By contrast, in the 11 states that did make significant new investments, the share of women respondents with children under 12 who wanted to work but reported not being able to because they were caring for a child decreased from 45.3 percent to 31.9 percent.

Schweer, of the Bipartisan Policy Center, pointed to a poll her think tank conducted last year that found that among prime-age adults not working due to issues related to caring for children, 39 percent said they would have likely continued to work in their last job if they had paid parental leave, and 45 percent would be more likely to start or return to work if a future employer offered that benefit.

“At the moment, macro policy is pushing up employment in general but that does not mean there is not still an increment of women out there who would also be employed (or at least job seeking) if there were more child care subsidies,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank.

McCabe of the Niskanen Center said policies like subsidies for child care and paid leave are probably important to boosting women’s labor force participation to similar levels in other countries because rising wages alone “aren’t enough to get us there.”

Child care access could be much better

Just because more women are working doesn’t mean their lives aren’t being affected by child care issues, and even remote work can be a double-edged sword for moms, as my colleague Anna North has written.

“As a mom of a small child, I have to say just because it’s now possible to work from home with a kid doesn’t mean it’s not extremely challenging,” said Kahn, of the Roosevelt Institute.

“They are making it work, but paying with the cost of their own health and well-being,” argued Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation. “Increasing labor force participation is only good for the individuals working more if they are also being paid enough to pay their bills and save for emergencies and the future, and if providing for their families isn’t at the expense of caring for them and spending time with them.”

Diane Swonk, the chief economist at KPMG, a US audit and tax services firm, noted that child care access issues are making it harder for women who are working to stay at work.

Absences from work due to family or personal obligations hit a record high in March, she said, and stayed elevated in April. Full-time workers who cut down on hours and worked part-time due to other family or personal obligations in April was the highest month since May 2008.

We don’t need doomerism to advocate for families, workers, and kids

Despite the ubiquity of the “child care crisis” phrase, people have different and sometimes competing ideas about what policies are needed to make balancing work and family rearing easier in America.

That conversation may get hard and messy at times, but will push us closer to the truth than making sweeping-yet-thin projections about economic and societal collapse.

“Boosting employment was never the best justification for supporting working parents in the first place,” said Chris Griswold, the policy director at American Compass, a conservative think tank. “Helping families afford to raise children isn’t good because it maximizes economic activity — it’s good because families matter and economic pressures hurt kids and parents alike.”

“There are clearly steps we could take to improve the functioning of the child care market, but the idea that we need a massive federal overhaul to fix a ‘broken’ or ‘failed’ market has been largely disproven,” argued Brown, of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. “Markets are more resilient than many on the left give them credit for. The ‘sky is falling’ crowd is, yet again, overhyping the evidence to push an agenda that doesn’t fit what parents want.”

There are smart people on the left and in the center who disagree with Brown, including US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who argues child care in America is a “textbook example of a broken market.” These are critical questions shaping the well-being of millions, and we should continue investigating them. But the child care cliff should make everyone cautious the next time there’s a political crisis advocates don’t want to waste.

Canada is promoting child care for $10 a day

Originally published in Vox on December 18, 2023.

A massive social policy experiment is unfolding in Canada to provide families throughout the country with child care for an average of $10 a day. The plan, which was introduced in 2021 amid the turmoil of the pandemic, aims to spend up to $30 billion Canadian by 2026 to bring down child care costs for parents and to create 250,000 new slots.

The federally backed effort brings Canada’s safety net closer to that of other Western democracies that have stepped up on child care, including Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, and Australia, and it could prove an inspiration to other countries whose systems still lag, like the United States.

Almost three years in, Canadian families are already seeing a significant drop in price, paying hundreds of dollars less for care each month than they were prior to 2021. Canada is making “solid progress in offering more affordable child care,” concluded a think tank report issued in October. Five of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories have already reached the $10-a-day child care goal ahead of schedule, while others have reduced their fees by over 50 percent. ($10 in Canadian currency is roughly $7.50 in US.)

In addition to reducing costs for parents, the plan has created about 52,000 new child care spots, and in some provinces, like Nova Scotia, federal funding has helped boost the wages of early-childhood educators.

“This is social infrastructure that will drive jobs and growth,” Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said of the policy in a 2021 budget speech. “This is feminist economic policy. This is smart economic policy.”

Canada is a less populous country than the United States (about 40 million people to the US’s 340 million), and while it has never previously had a national child care policy, it has long embraced a more sturdy safety net than the US, providing its citizens with universal health care and annual family allowances to parents. Moreover, Canada provides parents who want to stay home with their infants partial paid leave for up to 18 months.

Still, the two countries aren’t “radically different,” Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, told Vox, “which is one reason [Canada is] an interesting near peer.” Like in the US, Canadian child care advocates had been organizing with minimal success for decades prior to the pandemic — but unlike in the US, they’re finally seeing meaningful progress.

Consequently, US activists and lawmakers are looking to this dramatic shift in Canadian child care policy for inspiration, and leading congressional Democrats even began this year to incorporate the successful “$10 a day” idea into their own political messaging. The Child Care for Every Community Act, introduced in Congress in February, pledges to cap costs for all families and ensure that at least half of families nationwide pay no more than $10 a day.

The policy shift among Democratic lawmakers is backed by research from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, which found that when it comes to building support for expanding food assistance, voters were more persuaded when presented with a dollar-per-meal framing compared with a dollar-per-month framing. This fact struck the pollsters, who soon realized the same concept held true when messaging on child care.

“It’s really about drilling down to the smallest dollar denominator that you can to get your point across,” Danielle Deiseroth, the executive director of Data for Progress, told Vox. “You want to avoid having to do mental gymnastics to figure out how much things cost or you’ll be spending. And for child care, we found talking about the actual dollars and cents, especially given how top of mind inflation and high prices have been for voters, was particularly effective.”

Local organizing in Canada helped spur national action

Canada’s national child care plan is on a potentially transformative trajectory, but it didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, years of locally driven organizing proved pivotal in finally moving the needle on the federal level.

Beginning in 1997, the province of Quebec invested in a universal and affordable child care system with the goals of raising public revenue, helping more women join the labor force, and improving child development. While rollout of the effort has been uneven over the last 25 years, researchers found it has helped boost female workforce participation and that the public investments more than paid for themselves. Moreover, when child care centers closed throughout Canada during the pandemic, the publicly subsidized centers in Quebec, which are less reliant on charging parents high fees to operate, were more able to stay open and bounce back to full enrollment. This comparative advantage was not lost on federal politicians struggling to lead Canada out of its economic downturn.

“I’ve been defending private markets all my life. I’m not an extreme leftist. But you also have to be pragmatic,” Pierre Fortin, an economist at the University of Quebec at Montreal, told Bloomberg in 2021. “Child care is an area where private markets don’t do a very good job.”

Advocates in another Canadian province, British Columbia, began organizing for child care under the banner of $10 a day and, beginning in 2016, persuaded the provincial branch of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) to embrace the idea too. It became a central and popular legislative plank for the NDP, which identifies as a social democratic party, and helped propel it into government after British Columbia’s 2017 provincial elections.

Carolyn Ferns, the policy coordinator at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, said advocates in other provinces were wary at first about embracing the $10-a-day mantra pioneered in British Columbia, since for some low-income families, $10 a day is still too high.

“But the simple language made a real difference in getting buy-in from the public and families, especially in terms of retail politics and just being able to explain to people on their doorstep what you’re doing,” Ferns told Vox. “That’s what sold the federal government on it.”

In the US, some advocates hope to chart a similar path by organizing landmark state-level child care policy reforms. Earlier this year, Vermont legislators approved a first-of-its-kind package to pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s child care system, raising wages for child care workers and reducing costs for families. The path to victory in Vermont involved a concerted 10-year advocacy effort backed by philanthropy and grassroots volunteers.

Similarly, in New Mexico, voters approved a historic ballot measure in 2022 to guarantee a constitutional right to early-childhood education, a political effort that came out of more than 10 years of organizing led by early-childhood educators and parents. National child care advocates heralded the victories in both states and studied the campaigns, hoping to replicate them in other parts of the country.

In Canada, though, child care advocates trace their efforts for a universal nationwide program back well beyond more recent grassroots efforts in the provinces, to the release of a federal report in 1970 that recommended steps to enhance equal opportunities for women throughout Canada.

Martha Friendly, who in 1982 founded the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a small Toronto-based policy institute, has watched the social movement for child care grow in her country over 50 years. “A lot of the social infrastructure in Canada was developed post–World War II, and child care then wasn’t viewed with a feminist lens, it was established before women were really entering the workforce in a large way,” she told Vox. “Child care was long conceived as a welfare program for the deserving poor, but in the 1980s and 1990s a real movement emerged to reframe child care as an important policy issue for women.”

Advocates like Friendly also credit feminist leaders like Freeland, who is also Canada’s first female minister of finance, and former premier of Quebec Pauline Marois, who served as education minister between 1996 and 1998, with moving government-backed child care efforts forward.

Reducing fees is the easiest part

Not everything has been smooth sailing in the implementation of Canada’s child care plan, especially in more densely populated provinces that have struggled to attract enough new workers to meet the demand for care. Most of the money thus far has gone into bringing down costs for families and not to recruiting and retaining more child care workers.

“The goal of offering child care spaces at $10 a day is not the most difficult part. The difficult part is to create new child care spaces because it requires more people working in the sector,” Sophie Mathieu, an appointee on Canada’s national advisory council on early learning and child care, told Vox. “Currently, child care workers are not very well paid, even in Quebec.”

In November, child care advocates across Canada organized a National Day of Action to demand further public investments. In Ontario, the most populous province, activists drew attention to the thousands of families stuck on waiting lists and the meager salaries of child care workers. To address this, activists are calling for a clearer salary scale, beginning at $30 to $40 per hour for registered early childhood educators and $25 per hour for other staff.

A report issued by Toronto’s economic development committee in late November affirmed that in order to meet its 2017 goal of creating 30,000 new child care slots by 2026, the city will need to add funding and raise wages and benefits “to levels comparable to positions in the public sector.”

It’s not a new problem, even for countries that invest more heavily in their social safety nets; Haspel points to Germany, which is dealing with similar workforce issues. In 2013, Germany declared that all families have a legal right to child care, but then failed to invest enough in funding staff to meet demand. “If you can get your kid into Kita [preschool] you are set, but it’s a huge scramble,” Haspel said.

Friendly, of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, agrees that more investment into raising wages will be needed but said she’s not too worried overall about Canada’s efforts, as other countries have established comprehensive child care systems through iterative progress over time. “I think building any kind of social program like this is push and pull,” she told Vox. “So it’s not that Canada’s effort is not successful, it’s that we’re in the first phase. In every country that is happy with their child care system, it always took a lot of work.”

Canada’s national child care effort, which prioritizes nonprofit and public day cares, does have some critics, like Peter Jon Mitchell, of the conservative think tank Cardus, who would rather see the government just give families more money directly to spend. “The federal government is trying to entrench an expensive but poor-quality program that serves a minority of programs and that only funds some forms of child care that parents use,” he told Vox. “And they really underestimate the cost and complexity of their plan.”

But Ferns, with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, rejects this critique and argues it’s been tried before with little success. “We had the conservative approach to child care for over a decade at the federal level under the [Stephen] Harper government, and it didn’t make child care affordable,” she told Vox. “They had universal child care benefits, and child care fees just went up. It didn’t help improve accessibility, affordability, and quality.”

More lessons for the United States

The $10-a-day effort in Canada offers a number of practical lessons that may aid child care reformers in the United States. In addition to the value of working to seed local victories that can potentially be replicated nationally later on, and of simply not giving up, advocates praise Canada’s savvy implementation and straightforward messaging on child care reform.

One feature of the five-year child care implementation plan that Haspel described as “really smart” is the federal government’s commitment to giving voters some immediate benefits as it works toward its larger affordability goal. As an interim step, provinces have already worked to bring average fees down by at least 50 percent. “So you as a politician can say, ‘You were paying $8,000, now you’re paying $4,000,’ and we’re slowly continuing to build these new child care sites online over time,” Haspel said.

Another possible lesson for the US — which, like Canada, faces a shortage of child care workers — is Canada’s openness to immigration. In addition to raising wages and benefits in the child care sector, enlarging the workforce could help create new child care slots. Mathieu told Vox it’s a “very delicate issue,” but it’s one she and her colleagues on the national advisory council have been discussing. “It’s part of the solution,” she said. “It’s one solution among others.”

Advocates in the US also admit there’s something fundamentally more appealing about Canada’s $10-a-day concept than the more complicated advocacy language often used in the US about capping costs to a percentage of one’s annual income. Democrats still use this more cumbersome messaging — it was included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act, and the Biden administration’s proposed child care rule back in July.

“I like the simplicity of $10 a day,” said Marica Cox Mitchell, a leader with the Bainum Family Foundation, a Maryland-based philanthropy focused on early childhood. “It’s universal.”

Some, however, argue that implementing a Canada-style child care plan pegged to a $10-a-day pledge isn’t the best way to address family challenges in the US. Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the DC-based Niskanen Center think tank, said he thinks the US would be better off focusing on prioritizing a paid leave policy similar to Canada’s rather than trying to replicate the country’s strategy around child care.

“Canada doesn’t have to worry about supplying nearly as much infant care precisely because the majority of Canadian infants are being cared for at home by their parents for the first year of their life, when center-based care is at its most expensive,” he told Vox. “Another reason to prioritize paid leave over child care is it reduces this problem.”

Many national advocacy groups in the US, including Moms First, Chamber of Mothers, and Moms Rising, reject the idea that politicians must choose one over the other and maintain that, like in Canada, activists in the United States can and should lay the political groundwork so leaders can capitalize on windows of opportunity when they arise.

“Our neighbors to the north have shown it is possible to cut across party lines and invest in a child care system that works for more families,” said Jessica Sager, CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports family child care educators. “The vision of a mixed-delivery system, which offers a variety of options to families, is already taking hold in parts of the US. While we can consider Canada’s efforts, we can also find remarkable efforts across our own country.”

A program that saved child care for millions is expiring. What now?

Originally published on September 29, 2023.
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This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.

Some $24 billion worth of child care funding — one of the last remaining Covid-19 emergency relief programs still in effect — is set to expire Saturday. Issued as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the program marked the largest investment in child care in US history and allowed fragile businesses to cover rent and maintenance and raise wages for their notoriously underpaid staff. The Biden administration has reported that the grants helped 80 percent of US licensed child care centers stay afloat.

Frequently referred to as the “child care cliff,” the expiration of the grants is expected to renew strain on the child care sector, which already runs on tight margins, struggles to recruit and retain staff from higher-paying industries, and charges most parents far more than they can comfortably afford.

Many news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, have cited an estimate from the liberal think tank the Century Foundation stating that 70,000 child care programs will likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care.

That figure was derived from an October 2022 survey of 12,000 early childhood educators that found 34 percent of child care programs reported that they would have closed during the pandemic if not for the emergency grants. The grants covered 220,000 programs and 9.6 million kids, so the Century Foundation multiplied those figures by 0.34 to arrive at its estimate.

Experts in child care policy told Vox, however, that the “cliff” may prove far less of a tumble for providers and families than that popular statistic suggests — partly due to poor data on industry supply and demand and partly because most states have made unprecedented investments in their child care systems over the last two years.

The federal grants were authorized to help child care programs during the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, after lawmakers deemed the child care sector “uniquely vulnerable” to the crisis, and less able to access relief loans through methods available to other small businesses. In a US Senate HELP Committee report issued this past spring, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that emergency relief was needed because child care providers began “hemorrhaging money during pandemic shutdowns” as fewer children attended and they faced unexpected costs to comply with reduced group sizes, cleaning materials, and personal protective equipment.

Today, programs are no longer struggling to enroll students nor needing to cover the costs of pandemic safety regulations. “Saying you would have closed during Covid if not for the grants is not the same thing, that you will close after Covid if the grants don’t continue,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of another left-wing think tank, the People’s Policy Project.

One leading child care expert declined to comment on the widely cited Century Foundation estimate (“We didn’t do the number and I don’t want to speak directly to that,” Sarah Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund, told Vox), while another said that they knew no one who expected the loss of programs to reach anywhere near 70,000, but did not want to say so on the record for fear of alienating other leaders in their child care advocacy coalition.

“Will there be some adjustments [when the funds expire]? Yes, obviously, that’s fairly true, but you see estimates that a quarter of American kids will lose their child care spots and I will gladly take any bet that anyone at the Century Foundation wants to place,” said Patrick T. Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “I do not think 25 percent of kids are going to lose their child care. People have a vested interest in using strong frames and narratives to say we have a broken market.”

Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, defended her organization’s analysis but acknowledged that the estimate of program closures is unlikely to come to pass, telling Vox it’s more like a “worst-case scenario.”

“A number of states have put forward their own state funding and our analysis did not account for that,” she said. “We don’t have numbers yet of how much will be mitigated by state investments, but from Alaska to Maine to Illinois, they have put their own funding in, and that will make a decent difference in reducing the losses.”

Why Congress isn’t extending the Covid-19 child care grants

The federal pandemic grants were objectively successful in helping to stabilize the child care sector over the last three years, leaving many people baffled that Congress would choose not to renew the funding now. The Department of Labor recently reported that the price of child care rose 6 percent in July over the previous year, nearly double the rate of inflation.

From Republicans’ perspective, the child care grants, like other Covid-19 safety net programs, were passed as an emergency relief measure, and now that the emergency is over, the pandemic level of spending should not become the new federal baseline. A strong current among conservatives supports “going back to normal” and reining in spending more broadly to address inflation and the deficit.

Democrats and progressives argue that funding for child care was woefully low before the pandemic, and returning to the status quo now, amid a tighter labor market and fierce hiring competition from other industries, would be untenable. Reduced federal funding could mean pay cuts or hiring freezes, or hikes in costs that families can’t afford, leading to fewer children served and, ultimately, closure of some programs.

In response to the impending deadline, congressional Democrats earlier this month proposed a bill to give $16 billion to child care providers each year for the next five years. It has no Republican co-sponsors and even its own authors concede that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. The Biden administration has declined to lobby for additional child care funding in the fraught ongoing budget negotiations, arguing that it needs to bargain with Republicans only over emergency priorities to stave off a government shutdown.

One recurring challenge for Democrats is that because they have so many areas they want to see new big investments in, and because they work within broad advocacy coalitions, leaders often struggle to home in on a few specific priorities, instead championing lots of big social investments at once.

This dynamic was on display during the failed Build Back Better negotiations and amid Inflation Reduction Act talks. Child care investments were in competition with new spending on preschool, affordable housing, paid medical and family leave, and the expanded child tax credit. In the end, virtually none won out.

Child care programs face tougher staff recruitment. Parents face higher costs.

Over the last two years many states passed new legislation to support child care access, affordability, and quality, including red states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Montana and North Dakota, as well as blue and purple states like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, Alaska and Vermont. Most states were in strong fiscal positions and built on the political momentum for child care investments that coalesced during the pandemic.

Linda Smith, who heads early childhood research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Vox that the impact of the expiring pandemic funds will vary by state, but she expects that broadly, retaining child care workers will become harder. In 2019, the median child care worker earned $11.65 per hour. Today their pay averages $14.22, but without public subsidy, programs may have to raise rates for families to continue paying workers those higher wages. The survey released last October and cited by the Century Foundation found that 43 percent of child care centers and 37 percent of home-based providers expected that they’d have to raise rates when federal relief dollars dry up.

“In lower-income working families, passing those costs on to parents is not going to be an option,” said Smith. These increased costs will also overlap with the resumption of student loan payments in October after a three-year pause, and higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans.

Some states are already starting to see the effects of diminished funding. In June, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin started reducing its federal stabilization grants from $20 million a month to $10 million, and the remaining funds are expected to end completely in January. Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told CBS that nearly 90 percent of day care centers are raising tuition in response. Some programs have closed.

Whitney Evans, the California director for ParentChild+, said she expects the decline in federal funding will affect low-income parents who are least able to work remotely. “For middle-income families, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass but they’ll figure out a way,” she told Vox. “But for children with the least access to resources, who won’t be able to pay more for slots if rates go up, there will be even less space available.”

Could this affect female workforce participation?

A big question looming over the expiring child care funds is whether a major disruption to the child care ecosystem would force parents — and mothers in particular — out of their jobs. Child care advocates have been saying for years that a failure to invest more in the nation’s child care system will result in that outcome; this was a key argument during the fight for the Build Back Better Act.

However, despite the failure of Congress to pass those new child care investments, workforce participation among moms, and even moms of very young children, has continued to rise. The latest data showed 66.6 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were working in 2022, up from 66.5 percent in 2021, and 61.6 percent in 2010. And more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under five were working this past summer — more than even before the pandemic. The expansion of remote work, which makes it easier for parents to juggle their jobs and child care responsibilities, is likely one major contributing factor.

Kashen, of the Century Foundation, credits the American Rescue Plan investments for staving off female workforce fallout, and said that the “reality is most parents have to work,” so even if moms are employed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t making hard trade-offs behind the scenes, including working later hours, facing declining mental and physical health, or spending less time with family.

Is there any chance child care funding will return?

The politics are challenging right now. Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a fierce battle over cutting federal spending and have expressed little appetite for new social investments.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Among parents, the child care issue is far less polarized. A recent poll of Kentucky voters and parents found strong support for investing more taxpayer money into child care programs, and a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund this summer found that 74 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Republican voters, back increased federal spending for child care.

Moreover, during the second Republican presidential debate earlier this week, the moderators pressed candidates on how they would expand access to care — even citing the expiring pandemic-era funds. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott blasted the Biden administration for allowing day care costs to exceed $15,000 per child, and Doug Burgum, the GOP governor of North Dakota, stressed that “child care is workforce infrastructure.”

That bipartisan support for affordable child care is likely why Republicans, after rebuffing Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, agreed to a 30 percent increase last year of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. And this past summer, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) announced the launch of a new Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in Congress, and Reps. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill to improve federal child care tax credits, legislation endorsed by advocacy groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Some Republican lawmakers remain ideologically against government involvement in child-rearing and oppose efforts such as increased spending on non-religious day care centers. This is partly why some Republicans are more open to expanding the federal child tax credit, which gives money directly to families to spend how they see fit. Expanding the tax credit is also a priority for Democrats, though it might be tough for lawmakers to secure new investments for child care and the child tax credit at the same time.

Progressives, for their part, are hopeful that they’ll have another opportunity to push new child care investments during the end-of-the-year omnibus tax package negotiations. Last year advocates secured new funding in this period for a maternal and child health home visiting program, doubling the amount of federal spending and reauthorizing the program for five years.

“The pandemic gave us all a better sense of what it means to have more money in the child care system,” said Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund. “We know that money needs to be sustained beyond Covid, and we’ll be looking at every possible way we can to make that happen.”

One state just became a national leader on child care. Here’s how they did it.

Originally published in Vox on May 22, 2023.
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Action in Congress to support child care has been stalled for years. But in Vermont, lawmakers have just approved an ambitious plan that would pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s starved child care system.

The bill authorizing $125 million in annual investment comes after nearly a decade of organizing. As in many states, thousands of Vermont kids lack access to any child care program, and among families that have been able to land competitive slots, average costs exceed $26,000 a year, more than 30 percent of many families’ household income.

Meanwhile, child care workers are some of the lowest paid employees in the state, earning about $15 per hour, and typically with no benefits. Given that their workers could make more money doing just about anything else, programs struggle to hire and retain staff — adding additional stress to parents who can’t rely on their child care programs to stay open.

The newly approved child care bill would expand state subsidies for families earning up to 575 percent of the federal poverty level (or $172,000 for a family of four) and families earning up to 175 percent of the poverty line (or $52,000 for a family of four) would now pay nothing out of pocket.

The new payments will mean an infusion of funds for child care, allowing providers to be reimbursed at a 35 percent higher rate than they currently are. The legislation also tasks lawmakers with studying how to create an affordable full-day pre-K system.

The investments would be paid for in part by a new payroll tax, of which employers would cover at least 75 percent. It’s not law yet — it’s headed to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, who has previously said he would reject any new taxes. His office did not return request for comment, but Democrats have a supermajority in the Vermont legislature and have made clear they would override any veto in June.

Vermont’s legislative victory comes nearly a year after the Inflation Reduction Act passed the US Senate without any child care provisions, a gutting blow after the House had approved a $390 billion investment in November 2021. The Vermont victory also comes as federal pandemic child care subsidies are expiring, and President Joe Biden looks to make child care a top priority heading into his reelection campaign. Last month, Biden signed new executive orders to boost child care programs and their workers.

The path to victory in Vermont offers a roadmap for activists in other states who want to see increased public investment into their child care systems, and insight into the policy trade-offs leaders had to make for their measure to get through the legislative process.

“Vermont showed that you can have a bold vision, cultivate a broad base of support, persevere though budget battles and pandemics, and make the state a better place for those who don’t have a voice in politics,” said Helene Stebbins, the executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a national nonprofit that supports early childhood advocacy. “The hard part is not the policy — it’s the strategy, and the patience.”

How Vermont built its winning coalition

The origins of Vermont’s child care campaign trace back to 2000, when a Burlington real estate developer named Rick Davis and his friend in private equity, Carl Ferenbach, launched a foundation dedicated to supporting Vermont children.

For its first decade, the foundation focused on a range of initiatives, including youth centers, programs for kids with incarcerated parents, and supporting new community pre-K programs. This work helped prompt Vermont legislators to pass a bill in 2014 requiring all school districts to offer at least 10 hours per week of publicly funded pre-K.

Yet huge gaps remained, and the philanthropists grew more interested in the emerging research demonstrating the cognitive importance of a child’s earliest years. Teaming up and pooling money with other foundations interested in children’s issues, the two men launched Let’s Grow Kids in 2014 to boost child care access, an area they thought would carry the most bang for their charitable buck. They pointed to economic studies that found every dollar spent on high-quality early childhood programs yielded a return of $4-$9.

“Everybody knows we should invest early to save money down the road,” explained Davis, who often framed his work in terms of economic development. “We’ve got to find ways to get young families to come to Vermont and stay.”

In 2015, Bob and Christine Stiller, the founders of Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, gave Let’s Grow Kids a massive $20 million gift, and the group pledged to achieve their mission by 2025. This so-called venture philanthropy idea was to essentially use foundations as a catalyst for legislative change.

Let’s Grow Kids assembled a powerful team of lobbyists and organizers to lead the campaign. In 2015, Davis recruited Aly Richards, a top aide to Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, to serve as CEO. While working for Shumlin, Richards led the push to establish Vermont’s universal pre-K program. Other Let’s Grow Kids leaders included a former lobbyist for victims’ rights and a campaigner for legalizing same-sex marriage.

The philanthropic investments helped support statewide organizing, ultimately bringing more than 35,000 Vermonters into the campaign. Volunteers wrote op-eds, signed petitions and pledges, turned out for rallies, and testified before state lawmakers. Let’s Grow Kids also funded television ads and digital marketing, and organized 1:1 meetings with politicians. They helped mobilize child care workers to share their stories, and during the 2016 election, they asked all state candidates how they would address Vermont’s child care problem, and posted their responses online.

Let’s Grow Kids conceived of their strategy from scratch but studied lessons from other winning campaigns like Freedom to Marry. “We’re very small, very nimble, and we had an opportunity and responsibility to be a pioneer,” Richards said.

In 2021, with just four years left until their organization planned to shut down, Let’s Grow Kids established a sister 501(c)4 organization to exert more power in the 2022 midterms. Their goal was to support candidates who not only committed to prioritizing child care, but who also would commit to increasing public investment. Let’s Grow Kids ultimately endorsed 130 candidates last cycle, of which 117 won in November. This led to the first-ever coalition of self-described child care champions headed to Montpelier.

The political compromises lawmakers had to make

Partly spurred by the Let’s Grow Kids campaign, Vermont lawmakers passed a law in 2021 setting goals to expand child care slots, to limit family child care spending to no more than 10 percent of their annual income, and to pay early childhood educators comparable wages as kindergarten teachers in public schools.

Policymakers then commissioned a study to figure out how much that would all cost. To meet all those objectives, state officials would need to raise between $179 million and $279 million in new public funding, according to a report led by the Rand Corporation published this past January. The consultants suggested instituting a new payroll tax, a new sales tax, or a new services tax to get it done.

Even coming in this year with a Democratic supermajority, new committed legislative champions, and a well-funded lobbying effort, the last few months in Montpelier demonstrated the tough political compromises inherent to passing any new program.

Lawmakers said they weren’t ready to commit to spending as much as the Rand report recommended. When the legislative session began, Vermont Senate lawmakers proposed instead expanding child care subsidies for families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty level, (or $180,000 for a family of four), paid for by a new payroll tax funded primarily by employers. They thought this was fair, as child care largely provides a benefit to employers. To help fund those new subsidies, Senate lawmakers also proposed repealing a $1,000-per-child tax credit Vermont authorized last year.

In the House, lawmakers favored keeping the child tax credit in place and instead wanted to fund child care investments via a new progressive corporate and personal income tax. In this scenario, wealthier individuals and businesses would finance the bulk of the new revenue, but all taxpayers would still help contribute to a social program that benefits the greater good. The chair of the Senate finance committee said she didn’t like taxing people who might not ultimately need child care services.

Lawmakers were gridlocked for weeks, and it was not clear the two chambers would be able to compromise. In the end, House lawmakers agreed to the payroll tax, but funding families only up to 575 percent of the poverty level, not 600 percent, so that the child credit would stay in place.

The final legislation garnered approval from Democrats, progressives, independents, even some Republicans and a Libertarian. “It is not easy to ask Vermonters — any Vermonter — to pay just a little more, which seems to be a theme of this session,” said Republican Rep. Ashley Bartley of Fairfax. “However, the price of inaction is far greater.”

While Let’s Grow Kids didn’t achieve their goal of capping child care costs at 10 percent for all families, advocates have hailed this as a “quantum leap” forward and note they still have two more years left to push for additional investment, as well as to formalize a compensation scale for workers. Higher-income families that won’t receive direct financial assistance will still benefit from new subsidies flowing into the system, which can stabilize the workforce and boost program quality.

Vermont’s child care political blueprint

Not every state has the kind of philanthropic infrastructure Vermont enjoys. Experts say, though, their political roadmap could be replicated elsewhere, including the assemblage of a diverse coalition of parents, grandparents, business leaders, and child care workers.

“I really think that no matter the demographics of a state, no matter the political landscape, there is something that cuts through anything and that’s grassroots mobilization,” Richards told Vox.

The only other state to take comparable leadership in state child care investments is New Mexico, which successfully organized a ballot measure this past fall that authorizes new money from a state sovereign wealth fund to provide dedicated funding for universal preschool and child care. Like Vermont, the victory came after a decade-long organizing campaign, where early childhood educators helped lead the fight.

While Vermont’s win is yet another example of the child care movement gaining momentum, Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change Action, said the “real lesson” from states like Vermont and New Mexico is that the system is broken, and federal investment is needed to fund the true cost of child care, to pay early educators what they deserve, and to make care affordable for families.

Miriam Calderon, the chief policy officer with Zero To Three, a national advocacy group focused on infants and toddlers, agreed with Wells that states can’t fix this problem alone.

“In the short term this looks like not letting tens of billions of dollars in federal child care funding expire in September and protecting child care funds from deep cuts proposed as part of the default debates,” she said. “Long term, we need to pass the Child Care for Working Families Act, which ensures a strong federal and state partnership in funding the early care and education our babies and toddlers and families deserve.”

Fixing the child care crisis starts with understanding it

Originally published in Vox on April 17, 2023.
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Nearly every day a new story is published about “the child care crisis” in America. (I’ve written stories referencing it myself.) President Joe Biden has referred to the “acute, immediate child care crisis”; on April 18, he signed new orders to boost child care programs and their workers.

But what exactly is that crisis? A closer look at the various articles, think tank reports, advocacy campaigns, and political speeches reveals that not everyone is talking about the same thing.

Is the crisis the inability of families to afford child care? The struggle to land spots in licensed centers, or find care close to home or work? Is it a lack of support for parents who want to stay home with their kids, or the failure to provide support to other informal caregivers? Is it the inability to attract child care workers in the competitive labor market? Is it inequitable enrichment opportunities for children, or the challenges parents, particularly mothers, face when trying to work? Is it all of the above, or only some?

Crises are often multifaceted, and disagreement over what should be prioritized to address them is not unusual. But the “child care crisis” rhetoric, by combining several problems into one, often muddles the picture, and implies there’s more consensus on said crisis than actually exists. This matters because not all proposed child care solutions would address the respective concerns, and some interventions could even make aspects worse.

The first step to solving a crisis is understanding it. And policymakers know less about the child care landscape than one might expect. For instance, despite many anecdotal stories reporting a shortage of child care staff, researchers admit they do not actually have a good idea of what the supply and demand mismatch for child care actually is — what kind of care do parents actually want for their kids, and would they use center-based care if it was available? Private and informal arrangements — be it through grandparents or nannies from sites like Sittercity and Care.com — remain vastly understudied.

The concept of a “child care desert,” which has been popularized by advocates in recent years, refers to communities that have more than three kids for every licensed slot, and presumes parents would want those official slots if they were available. Experts admit they don’t know this is the case.

“The data is horrible, it’s very, very limited, we’re all trying to stitch things together from multiple incomplete sources,” said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist who has studied the sector. “And I don’t love the ‘child care desert’ metaphor — it’s a great communications tool, everyone understands immediately that putting children in a desert is dangerous — but as a research tool, it’s fairly arbitrary, and doesn’t take into account who really wants care and under what circumstances.”

Some groups, like the Bipartisan Policy Center, have been trying to gather more precise estimates, and concluded recently that across 35 states, a gap between supply of available care and potential need for it exists for 3.5 million children, or 31.2 percent of kids. But researchers involved acknowledge their data does little to clarify parental demand for care. Those 3.5 million kids might need slots in child care, but they might not.

Separate surveys the Bipartisan Policy Center has led in partnership with the polling firm Morning Consult found that while two-thirds of parents prefer “formal care” — meaning a child care center, a home-based child care business, pre-K, or Head Start — one-third of parents prefer “informal” care — meaning care from relatives, parents, friends, neighbors, and nannies. Indeed most parents currently using informal care told pollsters they’d prefer it, even if a free and convenient formal option were available to them.

This suggests “there’s not one solution for child care needs,” said Morning Consult pollster Claire Taylor.

Leaders should say which problem they are trying to fix

Journalists often report on parents struggling to find child care, or child care businesses struggling to hire and retain staff. But not knowing what the demand really looks like complicates crafting a solution.

Should policymakers look to boost the number of licensed child care businesses run out of homes, or primarily centers? Since 2005, home-based child care businesses — which tend to be cheaper for parents — have declined by almost 50 percent, in part due to increased competition and rising regulatory burdens. Should child care be targeted to traditional working hours, or do parents need more flexible options? How has remote work affected demand?

The number of child care providers backed by private equity has also increased significantly over the last few decades, while the number of children participating in nonprofit child care, like a church-based program, has declined. Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has argued policy should be designed to better support nonprofit options, which could help address affordability concerns and better align with parent preferences.

Is the key crisis of child care the cost families are paying? One fundamental challenge is that an individual’s peak earning potential — in their 40s — doesn’t align with when most families have young children.

Many experts argue the government should increase spending on early childhood — partly to bring expenditures more in line with public spending on older children. But there’s debate over whether the government should subsidize the cost for more affluent households. In late 2022, Arizona State University professor Chris Herbst found that families spent 8.7 percent of their annual income on child care costs in 2019, up from 6.6 percent in 2005. This increase in cost burden, Herbst found, was similar for families regardless of income level and marital status.

Even though not all parents want formal child care, researchers do feel confident in saying the current prices deny many families, particularly low-income families, a real choice between formal options and informal ones.

Or is the child care crisis around unequal learning opportunities for children? Some researchers argue that boosting “quality” of programs, even if that makes them more costly to run, is essential. Others argue the trade-offs required to boost quality metrics are unnecessary and unduly expensive, and only serve to impede access to care.

Or is the lack of affordable child care a crisis due to its impact on workforce participation? When costs get too high for care, many parents — and usually moms — decide it makes more sense to reduce their hours or quit altogether.

Or is it the low wages paid to child care workers — which can fuel high turnover and disrupt parents’ work schedules? “The wages are undeniably empirically low,” said Herbst, who found that the median hourly wage ranked 16th lowest out of 753 occupations on a federal labor survey — in between cashiers and sports bookers. To raise staff wages without public subsidy would likely mean raising parent fees. In practice, this would mean fewer families able to afford formal child care at all.

The trade-offs of contemporary child care proposals

This won’t be an exhaustive list, but to illustrate some of the ideas above, it’s perhaps easier to look at concrete ideas people are already talking about.

One idea is increasing investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. There’s already bipartisan support for this, as right now only a tiny fraction of those families eligible actually receive assistance.

Additional CCDBG funding could help more low-income mothers work in the labor market, and find affordable child care. But many progressive child care advocates argue policymakers should increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just low-income households, and warn increased funding to CCDBG alone would do little to incentivize quality improvements, or address low wages in the sector.

Another idea is increasing immigration. Expanding immigration could bring down the cost of child care for families by increasing the supply of workers and help more moms work in the labor market. Past research has shown that when US communities increase their supply of low-skilled immigrants, the employment of high-skilled women goes up because they can hire more nannies and cleaners. Other research found that tougher US immigration policy decreased the number of immigrants working in child care, and led to reduced employment of college-educated women.

Whether an increasing supply of immigrants would help with wages is unclear. One study found metro areas with increased low-skilled immigration between 1980 and 2000 saw “larger decreases in the median wages of childcare workers” but another found reducing immigrants led to lower wages for immigrant and native child care workers alike. Past research found that the arrival of low-wage immigrants has little to no negative effect on native-born workers’ wages or employment. Matthew Yglesias, author of the pro-immigration book One Billion Americans, noted that expanding the supply of Spanish-speaking child care workers could, for example, create new positions for bilingual child care workers to work as supervisors.

Yet many child care advocates express ambivalence about immigration as a solution — warning that the workers could be exploited and that it could detract from their broader goal of boosting the status of child care work in the US. “The history of child care in America is that it’s been done by Black women, immigrant women, and unpaid labor of moms, so there are artificially depressed wages based on discrimination,” said Julie Kashen, the director for women’s economic justice at the left-leaning Century Foundation. “The idea is to fight against the discrimination, not just to play into those kinds of ideas.”

An idea Kashen and many other advocates support instead is increasing public subsidies for licensed “high-quality” child care, as Democrats proposed doing in their failed Build Back Better package in 2021, and which Democrats plan to introduce again soon.

This new public spending would boost child care wages and likely induce new workers to the field, though would offer little help to those parents uninterested in formal care, and could raise prices sharply for higher-income families.

Another basic idea is simply to give parents money with the discretion to spend it as they see fit. This could help more parents afford child care if they want, and potentially allow child care businesses to raise their prices and increase wages. A child allowance, however, wouldn’t necessarily boost the supply of workers, the quality of programs, or maternal labor market participation.

These trade-offs are playing out in real-time right now in Vermont, where Democrats are advancing a proposal to increase subsidies to early childhood programs, paid for in part by repealing a child credit Vermont authorized last year. Vermont’s robust child subsidy was based in part on the success of the federal government’s expanded child tax credit during Covid-19, which helped families buy household essentials and reduced the child poverty rate by 30 percent.

Vermont’s proposed reshuffling of funds would likely raise the wages of child care workers, though take money away from informal caregivers. Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, called this a “breathtakingly bad idea” and noted progressives rejected work requirements in the federal child tax credit but are now “pushing for the expansion of subsidies only accessible to households where all parents are in paid employment.”

The bottom line is you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who says they don’t want to support children, families, and child care workers — and if “tackling the child care crisis” simply means that, then yes, everyone agrees. But figuring out exactly how to do that is where things get tricky, and where the political rubber meets the road. It also helps explain why so little has gotten done, despite seeming consensus on the crisis rhetoric.

Better data would help, particularly more research on parent preferences and informal care arrangements. But so too would speaking in plainer language about what measures we’re fighting for, and which ideas to support parents, kids, and workers we’re not.