The American Families Plan effectively bribes parents to use professional child care.
The American Families Plan effectively bribes parents to use professional child care.
T hey don’t call ’em the “mommy wars” for nothing.
For couples with young kids, work and child care can be incredibly fraught topics. There are no perfect options, just trade-offs that different couples, with different values and different work situations, evaluate differently. Sometimes it makes the most sense for both parents to work while the kids go to day care; other times it’s best for one parent to stay home or work part-time; still other couples are able to rely on family members to watch the kids rather than using day care.
Joe Biden’s American Families Plan would plop the government’s thumb heavily on one side of the scale, using taxpayer money to massively subsidize child care for the working and middle classes. Stay-at-home parents, who watch their own kids so no one else has to, would no longer pocket the resulting savings for their families. This is far outside the proper role of government, contrary to the values of many American parents, and quite possibly harmful to kids.
The plan would subsidize child care in two major ways. First, it would cap the amount that families would have to spend on day care: The “most hard-pressed working families” would get care for free, while those earning up to 1.5 times their state’s median income would have costs capped at 7 percent of their income. On top of that, the plan would provide “free universal pre-school for all three- and four-year-olds.”
The subsidies’ effect would be strongest among lower earners, who would become eligible for the biggest subsidies. But in many places even a family earning six figures could have its costs capped below $150 per week, which is less than the typical cost of care for a single child today. (Nationwide, the median household income is about $70,000, while the median income for a family of four is about $105,000.) The Biden administration itself estimates that the “average family” would save “$14,800 per year on child care expenses” and $13,000 from free preschool.
When a couple has kids and both spouses work, that creates a need for someone else to watch their offspring, and paying someone else to take on that responsibility for many hours a day is expensive. Eliminating those costs is a major benefit of staying home, especially when day-care prices are high, or when the non-working spouse has limited job options. For middle- and especially working-class parents, Biden’s plan would swoop in and blunt that simple economic reality, declaring that the government stands ready to absorb the costs of watching kids so that parents can work instead of staying home — and that those who stay home anyway would be passing up five-figure government subsidies.
You don’t have to be a radical libertarian or a hardcore traditionalist — I’m neither — to see the problem with the government bribing parents to turn over their kids to the care of others.
Pressuring parents into the full-time workforce also runs against the basic preferences of many Americans, including the lower-earning Americans who are most severely targeted here. In one survey, only about 30 percent of married moms said their “ideal” work situation would be full-time employment, with 40 percent wanting to work part-time and roughly a quarter not at all. (The remainder say they don’t know.) Another survey found that “53% of married mothers prefer to have one full-time earner and one stay-at-home parent while raising children under the age of five”; single-earner arrangements were most popular among the working class.
And would more professional child care be beneficial for kids? That’s an area of social science that’s hardly settled, and a lot would depend on which kids got put into day care and preschool, how good the care and instruction ended up being, and so on. Almost certainly, however, at least some kids would be worse off in some ways.
The most compelling studies in this area focus on “natural experiments,” in which some kids are more or less randomly put into day care — such as when new subsidies abruptly go into effect, or when a child just barely makes the cutoff for a program. When Quebec started providing extremely low-cost day care, the kids experienced heightened behavioral and emotional problems that persisted for years. A study of Bologna, Italy, also found poor outcomes for kids, though these were concentrated among the richest families. And a study of the crèche system in France found mixed results: “Crèche attendance has a positive impact on language skills, no impact on motor skills, and a negative impact on behavior.”
Let me be clear about a few things here. I’m not against professional child care; I currently work part-time so I can watch my three kids, but my family has used day care and preschool in the past and will again in the future. Additionally, I don’t think current federal policy does a good job of treating all parents fairly. In some ways the status quo is quite favorable to stay-at-home parents, who, for example, get an especially good deal from Social Security and Medicare.
But it should shock the conscience for the government to bribe parents to put their kids under the care of professionals. Parents who watch their own children eliminate the need for others to do so, and they should reap the financial rewards of that decision, just as they suffer the financial consequences of working less for pay.