We Need More And Better Child Care

by Stuart Shapiro

Much of the attention on Labor Day has rightly focused on the need for higher wages.  But any single parent or dual earner couple knows that one of your major expenses if you work is child care.  And good child care costs money while bad child care costs lives.  Pamela Druckerman writes about her experience in France:

Before long, I was dropping her off at the crèche around the corner four days a week. To my surprise, it wasn’t a baby gulag. The people who worked there were caring and capable. It was subsidized by the state, with a sliding scale based on income, so I could afford it. My daughter seemed delighted. And I was getting my work done. Six years later, I’ve sent three kids through both the crèche and France’s free universal public preschool and come out converted.

Nowadays, when I describe this conversion to my American friends — about how I can’t believe that in the United States parents are practically on their own until kids turn 5 — I no longer feel like a brainwashed alien. Something is changing in America. A new interest in early childhood is driven by studies showing how powerfully and permanently children’s brains are shaped when they’re very young, and how the enormous gap between rich and poor children is already in place when they start kindergarten. The latest research by academics, including the Nobel laureate for economics James J. Heckman, says that fixing that gap is much easier when children are very small. Crucially, it’s also much cheaper.

Funding more and better child care is one of those policy solutions that reverberates.  It allows people to take jobs they couldn’t afford to otherwise.  It helps with gender equality. And it reduces the expenses needed to make up for lost time in primary and secondary education.  Anyone interested in reducing inequality, fiscal responsibility, or children, should be for it.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.