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THE PROBLEM WITH ‘AFFORDABLE’ CHILD CARE  
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Elliot Haspel
March 20, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ The service is essential to families and communities. It should be
free. _

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Imagine a politician stepping up to a podium and promising that voters
will not pay more than 7 percent of their income for their kid to go
to public school. This scene likely strikes you as absurd. Public
education fits into a basket of services that Americans generally
agree are so essential that they should be accessible to all and
funded by taxes. There is no meaningful debate over “affordable”
public schools, “affordable” libraries, “affordable” parks,
“affordable” streets, or “affordable” fire departments; most
people seem to take for granted the fact that they are free.

Child care should be seen as one of these essential services. It makes
it easier for parents to work, set down roots
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and have the number of kids that they want
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Much like public education, it helps children develop knowledge and
skills. A comprehensive child-care system can benefit whole
communities—including people without children—by reducing poverty
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supporting health and safety
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and building social connectivity
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Yet most politicians aren’t striving to make child care free;
they’re striving to make it affordable. This framing accepts the
damaging premise that child care should be a private market commodity.
It’s time we instead see child care as the vital service it is—one
that undergirds national prosperity and should be universal and free.

Although there’s never been a serious national effort to implement a
universally free program, a free-for-some child-care system did seem
possible in the U.S. at one point. In 1971, Congress passed a bill
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establish a federally funded, locally run network of child-care
programs that would be free for low-income families and on a sliding
scale for everyone else. But momentum died quickly
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Richard Nixon vetoed that legislation, and the coalition supporting it
splintered, perhaps leading some people to conclude that an ambitious
child-care overhaul was a political impossibility. There have been
efforts since to make child care more affordable, but the most
sweeping of these have faltered. Widespread conservative opposition
to a universal system
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over mothers working outside the home
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made the road rocky. Some critics point to the struggles of a
universal (though not free) model in Quebec, which some argue was
rolled out too quickly
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resulting in care of variable quality. Plus, any major
program—especially a free and universal one—would be more
expensive to taxpayers, who might resent that even the wealthy can
access it for free (a critique that has also derailed efforts to make
college free
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One of the most notable failures was 2021’s Build Back Better Act,
which would have funneled $400 billion
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child care. In this political context, it makes sense that those who
want better child care might settle for affordability if they believe
it might realistically improve a broken system, even if it won’t
completely fix it.

Political viability, however, does not always lead to thoughtful
policy design—which becomes evident when you look at how
affordability is defined. Consider the common line—touted by
President Joe Biden
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both Democratic
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proposals, including Build Back Better—that only the wealthiest
families should pay more than 7 percent of their income. That number
does not derive from any careful calculation of what parents can
afford without hardship. Rather, it’s the average of how much
American families were paying from 1997 to 2011. The Obama
administration used that statistic
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2016 to recommend reducing the cap on co-pays from 10 percent to 7
percent for those receiving subsidy vouchers. Although the effort
certainly helped low-income families, those who aren’t eligible for
the voucher now typically end up paying more—on average, 8 to 19
percent of their income, depending on their kid’s age, what type of
provider they use, and where they live, according to the U.S.
Department of Labor
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And even a 7 percent co-pay can be hard for poor families to meet.
Still, despite its inconsistent application and the burden it may
pose, the 7 percent figure has become gospel for many lawmakers and
was recently codified
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a recommendation into a requirement. If, however, the national average
for child-care costs in that time period had been 9 percent or 4
percent or anything else, that would have likely become the
“affordability” benchmark.

This is just one example of the seemingly arbitrary frameworks that
shape American child-care policy and, in turn, family life. Another is
that one specific form of child care for one specific age band
actually is, in many cities and states, free for everyone: public
pre-Kindergarten. Pre-K serves mostly 4-year-olds, along with some 3-
and 5-year-olds, and might have a slightly more academic bent, but
it’s otherwise largely indistinguishable
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child-care program for that age range. In fact, many providers
offer both child care and public pre-K
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The division between the services stems from a 19th- and
early-20th-century system that stratified care options by class. Back
then, lower-income families got “group child care
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which was underfunded and overcrowded and sometimes even had dirty
facilities; middle- and upper-class families, meanwhile, received the
much more attentive and better-resourced “preschool education.” In
the following decades, pre-K was folded into the public-education
framework, and child care came to be seen as part of the ill-regarded
welfare system
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Reformers in the 2000s concluded that child care “had effectively
become a ‘bad brand,’” the sociologist Sandra Levitsky wrote in
a 2019 report
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Rather than working to improve child care’s reputation, many instead
attempted to officially incorporate pre-K
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the public-school system.

Although this move might have seemed politically expedient,
undercutting child care has hurt kids and left families scrambling.
For one, focusing on 3- and 4-year-olds leaves younger children out
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though learning starts before birth and continues from there. It also
adds extra stress for parents, as pre-K programs are generally aligned
with the school day and school year. Many parents must still struggle
to secure care before and after pre-K hours, and during summer
vacations. And this strain can affect kids too: Their health,
happiness, and cognitive development are all tied up with parental
well-being. But more fundamentally, creating divisions between care
and education fails to recognize how closely intertwined—and
necessary—both are. Schools aren’t just for learning; they
also serve a major child-care function
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And child-care educators aren’t just watching kids; they are, much
like schoolteachers, developing relationships with children and
guiding them as they gain skills and knowledge and grow into full
people.

Child care, then, has come to occupy a strange position: crucial yet
significantly undervalued. The policies governing it are capricious,
filled with random benchmarks and major blind spots. Laws rarely
consider certain types of caregivers, such as stay-at-home parents
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friends, and neighbors
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There are no major national efforts to address child-care needs for
the after-school and summer periods
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Access to care often relies on luck. As a recent headline from the
Hechinger Report put it, “Free Child Care Exists in America—If You
Cross Paths With the Right Philanthropist
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Of course, a truly effective system would demand a tremendous level
of government investment
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But the U.S. has no problem spending more than $800 billion
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year on public K–12 schools. That system may be flawed, but at least
enrollment in a public school doesn’t require a waiting list or
depend on the largesse of a billionaire or an employer
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The need for a stronger commitment becomes clear when you look at the
best child-care systems in the world, which also fail to guarantee
free care. Exemplars such as Finland
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only quasi-universal systems that retain distinctions between paid
child care and free preschool
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Granted, the parent fees for child care are generally modest and have
a cap—in Finland, the maximum fee
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295 euros ($320) a month, which would make most American parents
salivate. But these systems otherwise contend with many of the same
issues U.S. programs do, such as underfunding and staffing shortages
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Without a mindset and policy shift, we’ll continue to struggle to
remedy these pains.

In the U.S., some people are starting to acknowledge that “free”
should at least be on the table. Recently a report from an influential
New York think tank argued for a universal “free or low cost”
option [[link removed]]: “There is a strong moral
and economic case that child care should be a guaranteed right, just
like public education.” Voters may be on board. A new survey
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New Yorkers from researchers at Cornell and the University of Buffalo
found that nearly 80 percent agree that child care should, like public
schools, be universal and free. New Mexico came closest to
implementing this vision, at least temporarily; it used pandemic-era
funding to waive co-pays for working- and middle-class families
receiving subsidies. As _The New Republic_ reported
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the move improved financial stability, civic engagement, and quality
of life for parents and child-care educators. Although there’s no
permanent statewide program like that, some states, including several
Republican-led ones such as Kentucky, have made child care free
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the kids of child-care providers, regardless of income.

Trying to solve the child-care crisis by striving for affordability
accepts largely unchallenged assumptions and a legacy that devalues
care. America needs a system that reflects child care’s key role for
kids, families, and community vibrancy. Making it accessible to
everyone—not just those with a certain income—can help create a
sense of solidarity, instead of forcing people to get bogged down in
questions of who deserves aid. Child care is indispensable to the
national fabric, and “affordable” is not good enough. It should be
free.

_Elliot Haspel is a child-care-policy expert and the author
of Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It
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* Child Care
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* Affordability crisis
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