Rethinking child care

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: the high cost of child care.

A new The Wall Street Journal analysis found families can spend anywhere from $24,000 to $147,000 on just the first five years of daycare. That’s one of the biggest expenses many households face.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Lawmakers have pushed for child care to be subsidized more heavily. But some experts warn: the real cost may be paid by the children themselves.

WORLD’s Anna Johansen Brown brings us the story.

ANNA JOHANSEN BROWN: Nearly 68% of children under age 6 live in homes where both parents work. During the workday, it’s becoming more common for children to be looked after at daycare and preschool centers rather than by relatives or friends. In 2017, just under 9 million children were in child care centers.

In a TikTok video, working mother of four Paige Connell explains what the expense of child care looks like for her family.

CONNELL: So, I’m gonna break it down for you. Our two youngest kids are in daycare full time. They are two and four, and so they are full time day care. They are charged like a toddler and preschool rate. That is about $3,400 a month for the two girls.

That’s a little higher than average. Child Care Aware of America reported in May that the typical married couple would have to devote around $13,000 per year to child care. And it’s only getting pricier. Across the board, the average price of child care rose 29% between 2020 and 2024.

Many daycare and preschool centers are privately owned, but there is some government assistance available to low-income families. Yet, as of 2020, most of the children eligible for assistance didn’t get any. In July, Democratic Representative Bobby Scott spoke about a bill aimed at helping families access child care funding.

SCOTT: The Child Care for Working Families Act makes the investments that we need to turn our childcare system around and meet the needs of children, parents, and childcare workers.

Subsidizing child care isn’t just a Democratic concern. The Trump administration’s reconciliation bill raised the amount of child care expenses that earners can claim.

Universal pre-K is also becoming more popular. About a dozen states, including California and Florida, have passed universal pre-K policies. Advocates report that these programs can help parents earn up to 20% more every year. But those programs may take a toll in other ways. Quebec embraced universal pre-K in 1997. Jenet Erickson is Senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies. She has seen a troubling trend:

ERICKSON: Quebec really experimented with that with a massive rollout of a universal daycare system and what you saw was a significant increase in risk for children socio-emotionally.

Those risks include behavioral problems like anxiety and aggression. And adults who grew up in Quebec child care programs were more likely to become incarcerated.

And that leads Erickson and others to suggest a more customized approach. Instead of free pre-K for every family, Erickson says legislators should prioritize helping low-income families get assistance. But most of those families don’t like to rely on institutional daycare centers. They would prefer to choose their child care provider.

ERICKSON: So I think as much as the states can free things up in the sense that they could give vouchers to families to go contract directly with their child care provider, that frees that up some.

Some suggest that making child care cheaper would also allow parents to have more children. The national birth rate dropped to 1.6 at the end of last year. But Erickson isn’t sure that subsidizing child care would do much to fix that.

ERICKSON: If you're at all aware of what's happened in Western Europe, the Nordic countries that provide extensive welfare options for families with children, that would mean mother might have paid leave for a whole year, access to daycare immediately, access to daycare, federally funded daycare for two to three to four or five years, and it's done nothing to the birth rate.

Katherine Stevens is the president of the Center on Child and Family Policy. She says the loss of valuing parenthood is at the root of the birth rate problem.

STEVENS: If that were acknowledged and we had a society where people were able to raise their own young children, that, I think, would do more to increase fertility rates than making leaving your child with a paid stranger more affordable for you.

Instead of fully funding daycare, Stevens says it would be better to give parents the option of working part time temporarily. That would allow parents of young children to stay in the workforce if they’d like to.

STEVENS: It's really a very small amount of time that we're talking about investing in, as I said, creating a whole new human being who's going to be here in this society with us for their whole life.

Stevens believes there needs to be a culture shift. She likens making things easier for more parents to leave their children during the day to a person buying a puppy, knowing that they would never be able to spend time with it.

STEVENS: I don't take it lightly that a person would get a puppy and drop it off in doggy daycare all day. I don’t think that’s good for puppies at all. Why did you get a puppy if you were already planning ahead to never be with your puppy? Right? And so why? Don't we have that identical parallel mentality with young children?

That’s not to say institutional child care is useless. Stevens acknowledges that children who come from unstable home environments may benefit from child care.

But she says that doesn’t mean everyone should rely on it or expect the government to supply it.

STEVENS: But I think that the term, quote, child care, we need to be thinking about what that term child care means. What it means is the care of young children. And we need to be asking, who is it in our society who should be caring for young children? And the answer is their family.

For WORLD, I’m Anna Johansen Brown. Reporting by Bekah McCallum.

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