National help for child care is overdue

Rosie the Riveter got federal support; must it take a war?

My daughter Anna was always organized. At 4 she insisted on laying out her clothes at night for the following day. She continued that practical streak when she became the mother of an energetic, take-no-prisoners daughter, Ellie, who is now nearly 4.

So when Anna and her husband Rob started thinking about having another child, I wasn’t surprised when she showed me a spreadsheet highlighting the financial implications.

Ellie sharing her lunch with friends. Who knew that elephants like grapes?

But my eyes bulged at her calculations. The cost of full-time day care for an infant and a 4-year-old would total about $28,000 a year. Mind you, their choice of day care, while high quality, isn’t even the most expensive option where they live. And her figures were in line with the $28,232 average cost of child care for an infant and 4-year-old in Connecticut, as this interactive website from the Economic Policy Institute shows. (It also shows the price of child care in every region nationwide. Check out the cost in your state if you want to break out in a cold sweat).

So I inwardly cheered when Commerce Secretary (and former Rhode Island governor) Gina Raimondo announced that companies would have to provide to employees affordable, high-quality child care if they want a slice of the nearly $40 billion in federal subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing. The move also makes up slightly for the administration’s dropping child care help from its ambitious Build Back Better proposal due to the opposition of the likes of Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia.

Conservatives may protest that this federal requirement is the dinosaur foot of Big Government crashing down on companies. I say, bring on the Tyrannosaurus Rex, baby. Such a move is decades overdue.

Having children should not be as hard as it is in America. It’s one reason why our birthrate has plummeted below replacement level fertility since 2007, which keeps economists awake at night as we face the prospect of too few workers to support an aging population. Our country is the richest on the planet, but its lack of support for families is shortsighted, immoral and unmatched for sheer stupidity.

Out of 190 member countries of the United Nations, the United States is the only wealthy nation that provides no guarantee for paid parental leave. Countries with one-thousandth of the money we have somehow manage this. Very few other nations withhold support, but the company we keep mostly adds up to tiny dots on the world map: Palau, Nauru, Tonga, Micronesia, Marshall Islands and Suriname. Those are the only nations that do not guarantee paid leave. Besides us.

Our country’s insistence on expecting parents to manage with virtually no help continues when child care is needed. Other well-to-do countries contribute an average of $14,000 annually to families for child care. But the United States? Five hundred bucks a year, which would pay for less than two weeks of care for an infant.

This is not a woman’s problem, but women are the ones who usually bear the burden of these choices and suffer the negative ramifications. To be clear, I’m not worried about my daughter’s ability to navigate these shoals. But what of women who work at minimum-wage jobs or struggle with marginal employment? Even women who have decent jobs are daunted about paying, for child care, the equivalent of buying a new car every year. It’s a good investment; high-quality child care has a proven, positive impact for decades, as demonstrated by the mid-1960s Perry Preschool Project for low-income children. Researchers associated with this program, which provided excellent child care for poor children between 1962-1967 in Ypsilanti, Mich., surveyed the children as they aged into adulthood for 50 years. The results showed measurable, positive impacts of early education.

No doubt there will be those who say that parents, meaning women of course, should just stay home. That is an absolutely honorable choice for those who want to do so. But many parents, particularly women, stay home because the financial dilemmas in this country make having a family so damn hard. It isn’t a free choice.

Women who sacrifice their careers to stay home also often risk being far less able to support their families. And those whose careers are thus derailed find it harder to get back in the workforce. The price they pay follows them into retirement. More women than men are poor in retirement already, and years of not making a taxable income reduces Social Security payments, making it that much more likely that women will face poverty in their elder years.

Polls show majorities of both parties support more federal assistance for universal preschool and child care subsidies. And why not? We’ve done this before. During World War II, Rosie the Riveter and millions of her sisters were offered help for their children in an American system of more than 3,000 day care programs, freeing up women to work in the war effort. In a country with a population of 138 million in 1944, an estimated 600,000 kids attended these programs, most of which were opened in schools.

Our country has backed the need for child care before. It shouldn’t take a world war to do so again.