I'm Julie Anderson.This is the Harvard EdCast.Elliot Haspel says child care is a public good, just like public education.But in America, we don't treat it like one.
He's an expert in early childhood education policy and the author of Crawling Behind, America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It. Childcare is one of the largest expenses facing families and childcare workers earn some of the lowest wages.The U.S.
Treasury has even called childcare a market failure.I wanted to understand how America got to this place where having a child means going broke and what it's going to take to change it.
First, I asked what the pandemic exposed about childcare and why we keep hearing about a childcare cliff.
Over the course of the pandemic and the various relief bills, about $50 billion were pumped into the child care system to help stabilize it.
Because we treat child care in this country much more like a private good, kind of pay to play, like a gym or a restaurant, and not like a public good, like a public school or a library or a fire department.When the world shut down and
and everyone took their kids out of child care, that was an existential threat to these programs' ability to stay solvent, just like it was for restaurants.And so stabilization funds came in to help keep the sector alive.
So as that money got ready to expire, most of it expired last year, some of it kind of, depending on how state's allocated it, kind of drifted over in 2024. The challenge is that there have been real shifts in the economy and in the labor market.
And so it's always been very difficult to run a child care program.The economics are not good.The U.S.Treasury Department says it's a market failure.Child care educators get paid around $15 an hour.
because again, there's not much public money in the system, but we'd seen all these other kind of low-wage industries, fast food, retail, right, had really raised their base rates.
And so the status quo before COVID was broken, but there was no going back even to that broken status quo.
And so the idea of the childcare cliff was like, as this pandemic era relief funding goes away and programs are no longer getting kind of these grants to fill the gap, are we going to see them all face essentially disaster.
What sort of turned out is that CLIF might be the best analogy.It's more of like a child care slowly rolling down the mountain towards like a, you know, a bog because it hasn't all gone off just like that.
But we have seen overall, and especially in states that did not choose to step up with their own state money, we have seen numerous closures of child care programs.We've seen real issues with staffing.
high turnover of staff as well, which isn't good for the kids.So we've seen all of these negative consequences and the expectation is without more public money coming in, it's only going to get worse and worse.
what are kind of the long-term effects that we're gonna anticipate out of this as we don't have this sort of band-aid funding that exists and some states have put money into it, some states have ignored it, and it's just a very uneven landscape, I imagine.
So that's a good word for it.We're gonna start seeing, I think, and we've already started to see increasingly, you know, child care haves and child care have-nots.
So that question of state funding is really important because until the federal government, comes in with really robust public funding that is what is often the difference between whether programs are having to raise fees.
There are lots of programs that are sitting with empty classrooms, not because there aren't a bunch of families on the waiting list and not because they don't want to have them open because they can't staff those classrooms and in child care you have
necessarily low child-adult ratios you have to meet if you're going to have a classroom open.
So we see real capacity decreases in those states that haven't stepped up and that's again that's bad for parents who are going to deal with waitlists, they can't find care.
if the turnover of staff is not great for the kids and the programs lost strain on the teachers that remain.A few states, and actually Massachusetts is a shining example of this, have really stepped up.
So Massachusetts has put into place a $475 million annual fund, they call it Commonwealth Cares for Children, or C3, which provides essentially ongoing operational grants.
So more similar to how a state gives base aid to an institution of higher education or kind of a per pupil expenditure for K-12,
It's this idea of just a steady flow of public money that is intended to help programs keep their doors open, not have to raise fees, be able to pay their staff well and things like that.So states that have stepped up are doing better.
But again, it is, to your point, it's uneven.It's far and few between.It's about a dozen states that have really done anything significant.
So it tells you about two thirds of the country, you know, you've got families that are still struggling with a crumbling sector.
So paint the picture for me, because when we look around the world, A lot of developed countries have child care policies in place.They've had them for several decades, and the U.S.has lagged behind in this.What is keeping the U.S.
from making policy that would really support families and children that need it?
Yeah, you're right.I mean, just to put that in quick context, right, the OECD says the target should be countries spending about 1% of their GDP on early care and education.The US is down at about 0.3%.And we are really bottom of the league table.
There's only one or two countries that put in less than we do.A lot of this tracks back to 1971.So a quick history diversion. Right.So it's 1971.
President Nixon is in office and Congress on a bipartisan basis passes something called the Comprehensive Child Development Act.
And this would have begun to fund a nationally funded, locally run network of child care programs as envisioned as a broad based support, so almost every family would see some kind of benefit.
This was the era when Head Start was going, so it was also envisioned to really be tied in with child development outcomes.It's a strong piece of legislation.
It gets to Nixon's desk, and as the story goes, he basically is hemming and hawing about whether or not to veto this thing at the time. you know, he's facing some blowback from his right wing around his closeness to China.
He's kind of looking to burn his conservative credentials.And Pat Buchanan, the sort of arch-conservative advisor, ends up writing him a veto statement, which he goes with.This veto statement is extremely strong in its language.
It says, basically, to do this would be to commit the moral authority of the federal government over that of the family.By the way, this bill required nothing of anyone.Nothing was mandatory.That really starts this sort of shift of child care
into more of a culture war issue.And we really are still dealing with the consequences of that.This was the time when lots of mothers of young children were flooding into the workforce.
Many other countries in this period are, to your point, starting to really step up with more public funding.But this gets bad.By the mid-70s, when they try to bring these bills back, there's this pamphlet that goes around.
And to this day, no one knows exactly where it came from, but it gets all this place.This pamphlet goes around saying things like, you know, the Comprehensive Child Development Act is gonna let children unionize and sue their parents.
So there was like full-on Red Scare going on.Like there's this political cartoon and said like, you don't have to go to the USSR to see the Iron Curtain.And you see like these kids like behind government childcare, like jail.
I mean, it got really bad in the seventies.And so, You know, we've never gotten to this point in the country of really reckoning with is child care an individual responsibility?
Is it actually something that should be more of a right that should be more seen akin to public education or libraries or parks or roads where society has a vested interest in supporting the family?
So a lot of that sort of underlies why we've never gotten that far.And then after the 70s, really both parties and even the advocates involved sort of seed ground into the welfare sort of mindset and framework.
And so a lot of the debates over the rest of the 70s and the 80s and the 90s
are not about should we have universal childcare, it's what kind of welfare-based childcare support should we have, you know, sort of how do we support kind of low-income families, ideally for as short a time as possible.
It's only for the past few years, and some of the pandemic has, I think, shown a light on this. started to reckon again with this, like, what is childcare for?Who is it for?How do we think about it in society?
But really, like, there's some pretty poor first principles, values level questions that we've never resolved as a country.
It makes it really, really hard to build the kind of political will and coalition that you need to pass major pieces of childcare legislation, which aren't necessarily expensive.
Many, many years ago, we'll see if you remember this, you did state that universal child care was a solution and it is a bipartisan issue and you mentioned this bit about culture and we live in such a polarized time.
I'm wondering, do you feel like that's still true today that it can be a bipartisan issue and get support.
I actually do, and maybe it's Pollyanna of me, but the fact is it is a pain point across lines of difference, right?
Like their child, their pain points in the reddest areas in the country and the bluest areas in the country, right, is an existential threat to many rural communities if they're having young families having kids and they're leaving because there's no child care.
The more sober minds were willing to have these conversations.
So, you know, we've seen, especially in the Senate Republican caucus, like, actually, like, they're putting forth, you know, bill proposals and ideas that do some of what most experts would agree you need to do.
Think about how do you actually fund programs that they're actually true cost of care?Like, how do you support the workforce if they're not making poverty wages, things like that? I think the real rub comes down to two things.
One, it's making sure that the policy being proposed is comprehensive enough.
And what I mean by that is it needs to be inclusive, not just of licensed child care programs like centers and family child care, but also family, friends, and neighbor caregivers.
This idea of grandparents, everyone laughs at it, but they are actually an important part of the child care system.We just need to make sure they're supported so that if they want to do that, they can do that and not have to choose between
I want to take care of my grandkid, but I actually have to work as a Walmart greeter or something because I need some income.So that's one piece.
And then also the question of stay-at-home parents, who also provide a tremendous amount of childcare in this country, particularly for infants and toddlers, have often been ignored in these conversations.That's the easy part.
You could advance a more pluralistic, inclusive idea of what is childcare. The more difficult part is how you're going to pay for it.
So by the estimation of the National Academies of Sciences and most other people, the price tag for a truly good, high-quality, universal child care system where you have well-paid educators, lots of choices, lots of supply, is probably north of $150 billion a year.
I'll immediately put that in context by saying that if you add up all of the public money we spend on K-12 education in this country, it's about $800 billion.So it's not that wild of a number, actually, but it's a big number.
And that question of how are you going to pay for it, in particular, how are you going to pay for it in an era where we do have lots of, you know, an increasing national debt, where we're facing down
you know, within the next 10 years or so, issues around entitlement programs, that does seem to me to be one that we are going to need to hash out.
But again, that all starts by coming to some agreement on some of these fundamentals about what is childcare?Who's it for?What is it the role of society, you know, vis-a-vis parents in supporting parents?
Because if we can solve the first principles issue and can agree on that, like pay-fors, are just like that's a matter of compromise and legislative process.And, you know, it's not always clean, but usually it's sufficiently motivated.
We do see politicians tend to come to some kind of compromise on that.
You see a lot of emphasis on universal pre-K. especially on some candidates' platforms.But it does leave off kind of birth to age three pretty much is kind of a lost piece of that, which I think you just indicated.
And we could probably do a whole episode on universal pre-K alone.
Yeah.And interestingly, like my view, and this is not a consensus view, I will say, but my view on this is that actually we have made a big mistake in separating out pre-K from childcare as if they were two separate things.
And there's a history to this.There's a history that's going back to the earliest kind of childcare programs in the country, which were very reluctantly provided for the children of
Poor families and immigrant families, families where the mother was widowed, had to work.They were very low quality.They were very poorly funded.You would have like one adult for 30, 35, 40 kids.It was bad.And so of course it had a bad reputation.
And then you have like the nursery school movement, right, coming in in like the 1910s, 1920s, specifically targeting middle class families, you know, often attached to universities and very much like trying to be like, we're not that.
And nursery schools are the forerunners to today's preschools.And so we've had this sort of artificial divide.
But if you, I always like to say, I could take someone, like I could take you and we could say, close your eyes, and I could take you to a really high quality pre-K classroom, and I could take you to a really high quality four-year-old classroom in a childcare center, and you wouldn't be able to know the difference.
We treat them as if they're completely separate things, they're not. Because high quality care and education are happening in both situations.
So to the point that oftentimes, because universal pre-K attached to the public schools is on a school year, school day calendar.So many times you have a kid who goes to the universal pre-K system and then school ends at 2 p.m.
and guess where they go?To a childcare program.
This idea that they're separate things to me is a little silly, but it has been an effective way to get some public buy-in and some buy-in from policy makers by basically saying, we're just going to take the public school system and we're going to march it back a year.
And so there have been trade-offs, but there's a reason.And this was very deliberately done.
If you ever go back and look for the history of the Pre-K Now campaign in the 2000s, this was a very deliberate choice responding to some polling, honestly, that said child care is a bad brand, and preschool is a good brand.
What that tells you is you need to build up the brand of care, because it goes beyond just education. Quite frankly, elementary school is middle childhood care and education and high school is adolescent care and education.
Like we just lop the care part off of the school.
So, you know, it seems like people know how expensive child care is.There's no surprises, I think, for even folks who maybe don't have their kids in a child care center.
But I think about what that means for women, what that means for marginalized communities. I think I saw that families below the poverty line spent 27% of their income on childcare when the recommended amount is 7%.7% is more affordable.
And I don't think there's a lot of folks out there spending 7% of their income on childcare.
Tell me how this affects women and marginalized communities in particular.
I mean, there are huge equity issues here, right?And like, that is the stat.
And then at the same time, you can imagine just like we think about it for a minute, like there aren't a lot of families that are paying 27% of because they're just choosing something else, they're figuring out a way to make it work.
Because if you're making, right, $30,000 a year, are you actually paying $10,000 of that for like childcare, you need every dollar you've got just to make ends meet.So you're making sacrifices to make that work either your
finding some sort of family, friend, and neighbor, caregiver situation, you're cobbling things together.Books like Getting Us Cheap, which is a sociologist, Amanda Freeman, right?She interviews a lot of low-income women.
I remember very clearly one story of a woman who would bring her four-year-old to work with her, and she would hide her in the grocery store.She was a grocery store stocker, and she'd hide the little girl in the bread racks.
This is what we are consigning families to do when we don't have adequate child care is, you know, families are going to make things work because that's what they do.
But the damage it causes, the stress, the damage to family well-being, the other thing we see a lot of low-income families do is what's called working staggered schedules.
So if you're both working shift work and one of you works, you know, the day shift, one of you works the night shift, and so someone's always home with the young kids, Imagine having a marriage like that.It's really cascading effects.
And then, yes, there's huge opportunity costs here.Having a young child in this country is a cause of poverty.It's not correlated with it, it is a cause of poverty.
The leading group in this country with the highest probability of being evicted from their homes are Black children under the age of five. And a lot of this is a childcare story.It is a housing story.It's really hard for those families to get it.
And then when there are inevitably breakdowns in childcare situations, particularly informal childcare situations, you know, it can be really problematic.
I see these families thrust into poverty, thrust into homelessness, or on the flip side, just not able to get ahead despite working incredibly hard. because child care costs and availability is sort of like an anchor.
We should also say the child care workforce is disproportionately made up of women of color, disproportionately made up of immigrant women.
They're again paid among the lowest 5% of all occupations, and so there's also a racial inequity, gender equity, piece there where the more we keep that workforce stuck in poverty wages, again, the harder it is for those folks to get ahead.
So yes, there's any number of ways in which the broken child care system and our failure to adequately fund the child care system has disproportionate impacts on communities of color and otherwise historically disenfranchised communities.
So what's your vision for a better childcare system in America and what is it going to take to get there?Can we get there?
Yeah, I do think we can get there.And you're right.We've seen countries, peer nations that have made huge changes in their childcare systems over just a couple of decades.So Germany is another example.
a country with very strong traditional quote-unquote gender norms, right?
We see after reunification really huge shifts to the point that now every German family has a legal right to a slot in child care from the time the child's one to the time the child enters school.Not perfect, don't get me wrong.
Ireland's done major reforms, Australia, Canada I look to a lot.They're implementing what they're calling a $10 a day system that's backed by billions and billions of public money.So yes, change is possible.We've seen it happen.
We've seen it happen in countries that are not super dissimilar from the US.We don't have to just look at Finland or whatever to get hope.
My vision starts from the idea that every family has access to the care that they want and need and that care is of high quality. You got to start from the family, not from the program.
So that means a system is going to be inclusive of all different kinds of care.That means that there's enough public money flowing.I mean, ideally, you're talking about if I get to wave a magic wand, like it should be universal and free.
It shouldn't cost a dime to anyone.And we should get it back from folks who are richer or wealthier on the back end in taxes.
So that's my ideal system, having a system that is deeply affordable and that is enough public money flowing also that you're seeing early childhood educators paid a family-sustaining salary with good benefits.
We should have childcare facilities that are palaces, really.We should be proud every day of the places that we're dropping our kids off if that's what we choose to do.
And again, there's support for family caregivers, there's support for stay-at-home parents, there's support for all these different kinds of care.
And that it goes up through, it does not stop at school entry, because anyone who has kids in school knows that summer child care is miserable.After school, child care is not particularly fun, right?Like, child care needs do not end.
at the sort of the water's edge of kindergarten, that they may get slightly less acute.
I think that's a division, an abundant division of really where we stop trying to treat childcare as this scarce thing or this thing that we reluctantly provide, but that we are proud to say, like, we're going to come alongside families and we're going to support them in their flourishing because they need access to the high quality care that they need, whatever they define as need and prefer so that they can thrive.
What's it going to take?First thing it's going to take is that repositioning of child care in society.
I think if we start seeing it a lot more as a right, a lot less as a personal obligation to figure it out, that's the first step to cultural change.This is the EdCast.We have lots of debates over lots of things in education.
At the same time, very few people question that education is a right.Is it right in all 50 state constitutions?There is an argument whether it should be right at the federal level, right?Like it is
just an assumed part of the social fabric of this country and everyone pays into it.
Whether or not you have kids, whether or not you have kids in school, you pay into it because it provides enough social benefit that is categorized as that kind of a good.
And again, the same thing we could go through libraries, fire departments, parks, roads, you know, there's a whole set of things.
Until child care gets into that bucket, it's going to be really hard to pull out the funding that we need to create the system that I'm describing.So I think a lot of the work is actually cultural.
How do we change the way care is portrayed in popular media?We see little glimmers of this.Allison Felix at the Olympics being really vocal about the need for child care and helping set up
the nursery there in Paris that was pretty good, good quality.But we need a lot more of that from every segment of society to say, this isn't a nice-to-have, this isn't something that we know.You choose to have a kid, you deal with the kid.
No, this is actually important.And I don't think it has to be partisan either because we could talk about the effects on public health and safety.At least department or hospital can't stay staffed because of child care.
We can talk about rural communities or faith communities and their ability to keep themselves vibrant as a result of having families with young children.
You can talk about families in this country having the ability to have the number of kids that they want because many of them tell us that they're not having more kids for no other reason than that they don't think they can afford or deal with child care.
That's a problem.So I think there's a values-based argument to be made, actually.
My next book's coming out in the spring, and this is a lot of the case that I'm making is we got to start from a place of values and the very broad idea of how we position child care in society.
And then we need to go out and we need to draw down a good couple hundred billion dollars. a year of public money to make the whole thing work.See, it will never work without it.
There's a journalist, Annie Lowery, and she has this line that I quote all the time, and I say that I wish that every politician had it like emblazoned somewhere in their office, which is, the math does not work, becomes the child.
Like, the math will never work. And no country has ever made it work without a large investment from the government.And so we can nibble around the edges, and we can try to quote-unquote innovate, and we can try to find a way.
And I'm sure there are little things we can do on the margins.
But fundamentally, if you want a functional child care system in this country that works for families, that works for children, that works for the educators, and that ultimately works for communities and the economy and society writ large,
It has to start with robust, permanent, dedicated amounts of public funding.And we have never done anything like that in this country without first deciding as a nation that it is a value that we hold.
Well, I hope I get to see this happen because it feels like the value piece is a challenge given the current climate in our country where we're not able to come to some kind of consensus on a lot of things.
I'm more hopeful.I think this is a place where I think we could come together.Everyone in this country, your family needs care and they know it on some level.
And so if we can help them see themselves in and everyone relies on somebody who needs care, it's like healthcare debates, right?
Like everyone's going to need at some point, even if you think you're invincible, 20 years old and you know, healthy, like you're going to need it or you're going to need somebody who needs it.And so how do we think about it?
The last thing about that, you do see different education systems in different states, but even the most conservative state in the country isn't trying to say that there shouldn't be schools, right?
One of the states with the best rated pre-K system is Alabama.If we're able to step away from the culture war, it scrambles the partisanship.
If we get stuck in the culture war, then yes, it is going to be very partisan, it is going to be very polarized, and it's going to be very hard to make progress.
Elliot Haspel is a senior fellow with the family policy think tank, Capita.
He's the author of Crawling Behind, America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, and also the forthcoming Raising a Nation, 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All.I'm Jill Anderson.
This is the Harvard EdCast produced by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.Thanks for listening.
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