Why Are We So Bad at Supporting Child Care?
America’s “lacking care” culture hurts both parents and our economy
America’s seemingly endless crisis with a lack of affordable child care is often written about. As Salon’s Nicole Karlis noted in an article published on Mother’s Day, in America we seem weirdly determined to make being a parent — especially a mother — super difficult.
It may seem a bit of a stretch to write about childcare on Father’s Day, given that mothers provide more daily care for their children, while typically also shouldering the majority of household work. Still, there are dads out there who do more than others or are single dads. And all fathers of young children needing day care have a deep concern about the availability, quality and cost.
I’m not trying to mansplain here; I’m offering some thoughts to the dads out there. Call it aged mansplaining, if you must.
The crisis affects women who have college educations, women who don’t have college educations, parents serving their country. In our supposedly family-centric country, the problem seems intractable and it is straining marriages, making people rethink career choices, and deterring people from becoming parents in the first place.
It’s so bad that one might get the crazy idea that some people don’t want to see women succeed working outside the home.
Ezra Klien recently had a fascinating discussion of our childcare woes with sociologist Caitlin Collings. If you missed their conversation, you ought to take the time to listen all the way through — that is if you have any as a parent. If you do, you’ll hear a nuanced discussion of the joys and challenges (and even guilt) of trying to both work and parent in our society that endlessly boasts of loving children.
They both agree that parenting has become much more intensive (and thus exhausting) than it was in the past and that there is a critical need for community for both children and their parents.
I won’t spoil the punchline (not so much comedic as a blow to the gut) when Collins, an associate professor at Washington University in St. Louis, mentions how much Swedish parents pay for child care — a figure that had Klein immediately saying he would be moving his family to Sweden.
When it comes to providing citizens with good, affordable child care, we are decidedly not Sweden.
Collins and Klein talk about how it works for Swedish parents and their children, by way of contrasting the approach to what generally happens here, but they could have included any number of countries, like Australia, Finland, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the Netherlands.
Indeed, for 2023 the World Economic Forum ranked the United States as the country with the highest costs, where a couple will spend more than 30% of their income on child care. By comparison, in Germany, where child care is highly subsidized, the average monthly cost is about $120.
Decades ago, when my wife and I decided we were ready to be parents, the work world felt vaguely hostile to our plans. We were congratulated by colleagues but picked up a decidedly worried vibe from management which left us uneasy about missing too much work after the happy event. Living in the United States of Limited Workers’ Rights, we also began thinking about the costs of child care and an eventual college education — all while trying to buy a house (the mortgage rate was near 10% in 1990) and also somehow sock away a little something for vacations, Christmas and, oh, yeah, retirement.
Our first child, a daughter, was born a few years before President Bill Clinton’s landmark Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1993, so we couldn’t take advantage of spending any extra time home with her. The FMLA was something to celebrate, but as these things tend to be after Republicans fight tooth and nail against anything that benefits workers, it was minimal at best, only guaranteeing unpaid time off for new parents or people caring for older relatives — and only 12 weeks at that, which not many could even think of taking. Still, it seemed a good start for parents and the next generations (or, to put it in terms businesspeople might find appealing, our country’s human infrastructure). We were grateful for it when our second daughter came into the world. I believe then I took a couple (unpaid) weeks off. Today, men still see it as a privilege not as a right; they still get that vibe at work.
The reasons typically offered up by conservatives on why we cannot have good (Swedish-like) things are that we are too large a country and too diverse.
The World Happiness Report does show that the largest countries in the world have dropped out of the top 10, but there are many possible reasons for that. In 2024, the United States dropped quite a bit, from 15th to 23rd, but one could look at just a few of the measured areas, such as the respondents’ perception of their freedom to make life choices, their healthy life expectancy, and their country’s freedom from corruption, to get a sense of why that might be.
Would it be impossible for the wealthiest country in the world to scale up various programs to assist young parents in the ways done in Sweden and, say, Germany? Of course, we could do it. The World Economic Forum even provides an amazing investment simulator tool that shows the steps that can be taken in the care economy and the positive economic effects that would likely result. There is a roadmap to much greater outcomes, no matter what size the country you live in.
But did you pick up on that subtle change in tone when your Republican friend moved from “too large” to “too diverse”? That’s where the too-large-and-too-diverse-country argument comes to meaning: Too many Americans are not particularly happy to share if the sharing is with people who don’t resemble themselves. And Republicans who attack public schools and universities seem not to want the educational levels of voters to increase, which starts with early childhood education and quality child care.
Another objection made by conservatives is that we are simply not a collectivist culture (that’s socialism!). If they choose to share, they want to dole it out as charitable giving (and get that kickback in feeling superior about their largess).
As it turns out, investing in people tends to pay off for everyone
I’m, of course, not knocking charitable giving, which is good for all involved. I’m merely suggesting that we could do more collectively to address broader societal needs. This is true especially when we know our giving is a win-win situation like investments in the care economy, or, say, with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which assists millions of people with food insecurity and has a very positive ripple effect in the economy. As it turns out, investing in people tends to pay off for everyone. (But don’t try to reason with Republican politicians about that.)
Many American historians (not, perhaps, those teaching in Florida) would tell you that our slave culture still lives on in our exceptionally predatory form of capitalism, in the way we think about workers and their human rights. American historian Heather Cox Richardson would tell you that our “cowboy myth” culture also keeps us from taking positive collective actions to benefit all Americans and that not sharing with others unlike ourselves has been the whole appeal of the so-called movement conservatives, who call themselves Christians while despising social welfare and investing in our country’s future.
Donald Trump, a convicted felon who regularly projects about fantasy criminal immigrants, often claims he isn’t against immigration but just wants more people from “nice” countries like Denmark, Switzerland and, well, Sweden to be those immigrants. (Being the lecherous old guy he is, still trying to embody the myth of the Playboy — “Does Mr. Hefner know you stole his pajamas?” as Stormy Daniels cleverly put it — it’s easy to figure he’s mostly thinking about Danish and Swedish models.) But why would citizens of those countries ever choose to come here when Republican policies would strip them of rights and benefits that make their lives so lovely and free for the pursuit of happiness? Why would Europeans come to this country when Republican politicians show every day that they don’t care a whit for the welfare of children and working parents, or for child care workers, who can often make more serving up fast food. The news in this country is replete with horrific stories of children being mistreated or even dying while in unlicensed or overly crowded child-care centers.
The question to ask them is, Hey, why can’t we make our own country nice?
The elephant in the room is our outsized military budget, which outspends the next 10 countries combined. As Andrea Mazzarino writes in Salon, our vast spending on the military has long kept us from addressing critical priorities for our fellow citizens, which has led to the anger, loneliness, and political dysfunction we see today.
In addition, for decades Republicans have managed to hoodwink people into trusting them and their supply-side “trickle-down” approach of helping corporations and the already wealthy, when the economy has historically performed much better for everyone when Democrats are in office supporting the people who actually do the work.
Let’s put that in that shameless propagandist Trumpian way: Everybody knows, even Republicans agree, that in the modern era, Democratic presidents have overseen far better economies, including the national debt, than Republican presidents. It’s not even close.
The Biden Administration wants to help with both child and elder care, but their larger plans have been thwarted by Republicans in Congress. Still, in April of last year, Biden signed an executive order asking agencies to find ways to lower the cost of both child and elder care and to find ways to pay workers better.
Biden invited Clinton back to the White House in February of last year to emphasize the need for more child care assistance — and seeing Clinton brought back memories of the push not only for parental leave but for universal health care, which would at least partially succeed under President Barack Obama as the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA and its Medicaid expansion in various mostly “blue” states now covers more than 40 million Americans (increasing 30% from 2021 and by more than 200% since 2014), including young people up to the age of 26 who can remain on a parent’s coverage.
Trump wants immigrants from “nice” countries. Hey, why can’t we make our own country nice?
Republicans simply do not want workers to have health care insurance apart from their employers, or smarter child care options. Trump talks about creating something “better” than the ACA, but it’s always just talk with Trump. As the late Media Matters senior writer Simon Maloy wrote in Salon, Donald Trump’s proposed plans to address the child care crisis were “a mix of useless and inadequate.”
We may not have to buy our provisions at the company store these days, but the attitude is much the same: Keep your workers too busy and too anxious about the future to feel able to move on to another job or start their own business. And fire them if they try to start a union. These still-prevalent U.S. attitudes make such satirical fare from The Onion almost too easy: “Norway to Start Hiding Its Standard of Living to Make Other Countries Feel Better About Themselves.”
In terms of the upcoming election, every young person should bear this in mind: If a politician is taking something away from you — the protections of your health care insurance, your chance for affordable child care, your better and fairer economy or, you know, your books and your bodily autonomy — it’s not going to be a Democrat.
When our second daughter was born, her mother, who has a degree in early childhood education, soon left her job because it didn’t pay enough to cover the high cost of child care. She couldn’t use her degree because child care was too costly, and we were both concerned about the quality of the care we might find. Decades later, that’s still the dilemma many couples face.
When we sent The Ezra Klein Show podcast link to our daughter, now a mother of three with a demanding career, we wondered how she might find the time to listen to it. Her response was no surprise: “I’ll definitely listen to this! In small spurts in my car over the next week.”
I don’t think she ever found time to listen to it. That, pretty much, sums up the problem for workers all over America — we’re kept too busy and too in debt to have time to do our duties as citizens and become involved in the critical political issues of the day.
Happy Father’s Day to all the dads out there. I suggest you make the question Why can’t we make our own country nice? purposeful as you cast your vote in November.
Note: A slightly different version of this essay was posted on Father’s Day.
