Briefing: The Child Care Crisis

Part 4 Talking Past Each Other

Note, this is a series I’m doing about childcare in the US, motivated by the upcoming cliff in childcare funding. You can read Part 1 The Set Up to learn more about that and Part 2 The Bookends to understand the very challenging context of childcare policy. And in Part 3 What We Lose I talk about child care costs and the decline in US fertility.

I was on a radio show talking about childcare last week and the host asked me something like, “If supporting childcare has all these positive effects, what’s the argument against it?”

As I explained to her, it’s not exactly the right question, because it implies there’s a back and forth. The problem with childcare is that people in support of government intervention and people against that intervention are completely talking past each other. They aren’t having the same conversation.

On the one side is the evidence base that has broad support for the high return our economy would see by investing in the care of children, which I talked about in Part 3: improving children’s health, development, education; enabling their moms to work; easing the budgets of families; increasing fertility. Win win win win.

Today, the other side.

1 But I Hate Women and Their Children

2 But It’s My Family

3 Think of the Children

Starting with my favorite…

1 But I Hate Women and Their Children

Why should I pay for someone else’s kids?

And it’s cousin,

If you couldn’t afford kids you shouldn’t have had them in the first place.

Probably the most common argument against government support for zero-to-five programs, including childcare, is an ‘us versus them’, ‘my money versus your kids’, ‘I work without help versus you need my tax dollars to motivate you’ complaint. It boils down to the objection that the cost of the program is borne by one group and the benefit accrues to another.

Keep in mind: the north star in a discussion of policy tradeoffs is always empathy. This view of cost-benefit burdens can be expressed more politely or more nasty, but it’s a pretty natural reaction. Investments in children are expensive and if you don’t have children yourself, it feels like a short straw. The onus of caring and providing for children should be on their parents. What’s it to taxpayers?

My response to this argument has a basic premise: investing in children increases the economy. It’s a growth accelerant. The size of the US economy is a direct function of 1) the number of people working in it and 2) their productivity. Free childcare increases the labor force participation of moms, meaning more workers. That’s a near-term boost to #1. Free childcare also increases fertility. That’s a long-term boost to #1. And early childhood education improves the health and education of children in the long-run. That’s a long-term investment in #2.

I’ll stop here and say that there has never been a study or analysis that has found childcare reduces or hurts the economy. It’s only a benefit. It’s just a question of how large. You don’t have to like women or their children, this is a pure economic growth strategy. We know it works, so we should pursue it.

And it’s not as if the only way for the economy to grow is through an investment in you, personally.

I would bet there’s a bridge in Minnesota that is a key channel for moving people and goods, and therefore benefits the economy. Federal highway spending and my tax dollars paid for a lot of it. And I will never drive over this bridge. But that doesn’t mean I need it burned to the ground, or that people in Minnesota don’t need bridges, or that I’m offended it exists, or that it’s a waste of money.

We need bridges. I won’t use most of them, but I can make peace with the fact that a bridge’s benefit to the world extends beyond my driving over it.

2 But It’s My Family

The government is telling us how to raise our children.

Not wanting to spend money on other people’s children is a response that tends to come from people without children, mostly men. This objection comes from people who often have children, and it’s fairly cultural. Some families want the mom to stay home with their children.

The weird thing about this objection—and it needs to said upfront—is that nothing about their situation or ability to make this choice changes should the government have free childcare. You just don’t put your kid in it. There is no state of the world or policy proposed in which there is any type of mandatory enrollment or participation in a free childcare program.

Keep in mind, while school is compulsory in grades, public education is not. You can seek private or home school. Same would apply here.

So if it’s not about changing the option to stay home with your kids, what is this about?

It’s not about norms. The vast majority of mothers work, even mothers with children under 5. That is the norm. Free childcare wouldn’t create large shifts in what is currently happening, but would dramatically change costs and would move some moms to work who are at the margin. (That margin matters to our economy because mothers are a big group but it’s not as if 100% of moms would work, it would be a 2-5 point increase, still in the 70s.)

When Nixon vetoed childcare in 1972, he said it had “family weakening implications,” asserting that putting children in care would somehow threaten what a family is. But our notion of family has changed, as what is typical. And critically, this frames childcare as a way to get women to work, and not an investment in early childhood development. Remember those kids go somewhere!

I think this objection is about fairness. The government will pay other people to take care of your kid, but not you. Related, there’s an implicit assumption that it’s rich women, or career women, who want to put children in care, so this policy would subsidize women of means and leave other women worse off or no better because they want to be stay at home moms.

The second part is off—most mothers work, rich and poor, and it’s poor families who limit their fertility because of expenses, not rich ones.

The first part has some merit. But the answer isn’t “and therefore no one should get help with childcare” but instead to have a comprehensive and inclusive policy. A fully refundable and universal child tax credit is a good start. All parents get help. All parents are recognized. All children have minimum income stability. There is no discrimination on family type. The only difference in the temporary extenstion of 2021 was parents with children under 6 get more. If we had free childcare and a child tax credit, you could bump up the latter for people who don’t participate in the former, giving moms who stay home a little more money.

It’s worth noting that this objection has a conservative bent, harkening back to what is a traditional family, but the solution would have a strong conservative backlash, because you’d be giving women with children who don’t work money, and on the margin, some of them would decide to stop working or work less. I would be fine with that, because women spending time with their children and raising them is their choice. But if any of those women were single, conservatives would not be okay with it.

3 Think of the Children

This ends my series on childcare, for now.

Given what’s happening with the funding cliff, and what happened in the pandemic, I speak about childcare and its effects a lot. But whenever I do, I’ve always got in the back of my head this bit from The Simpsons, of Helen Lovejoy in the meeting about the bear that was spotted in town, yelling out, “won’t somebody please think of the children?”

I tend to quip to reporters that nobody cares about children, at least not in Congress.

Whatever happens with childcare, it won’t be because it’s good for children, or because someone thinks it’s bad for children. And it’s more dark and ironic the more you think about it.