Why the U.S. Must Revamp its Child Care System: ‘People are Hungry for More’

Elliot Haspel’s new book Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care For All reveals a defective American child care system at the mercy of political rhetoric with a persistent past of racism and sexism that’s contributed to the loss of the American dream. 

While other countries, including Canada, Germany and Finland, have created systems to help support young families, the U.S. remains at a decades-long standstill with most of the conversation focused solely on economics, including how expensive a universal system would cost and the role it plays in bringing more people into the workforce.

“We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle,” Haspel said in an interview with The 74’s Jessika Harkay ahead of his book release. “One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that.”

A universal child care system wouldn’t solve all problems for families, but would be “a massive strike in the right direction,” Haspel said. 

Haspel said all Americans, even those without children, are stakeholders in the mission to reframe child care from just an economic or social issue to a crucial element of community building and one that supports the American value of personal liberty.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You open your book by quoting Bill Clinton back in the 90s, and use several examples of the history of American child care throughout the country’s history. Give a brief summary of the fight for child care, how it’s changed throughout the years and why it’s more important than ever now.

America has a checkered history with child care, and particularly this question of what’s the government’s role in child care, what society’s role and what’s the family’s role. … We actually have these pretty early examples of communities stepping up to help provide external child care: the infant school movement in Massachusetts in the 1820s and 1830s; the federal government sets up a child care center in Philadelphia during the Civil War for women who are working in hospitals and making clothes. … But, it often has this countervailing force that goes along with economic pressures, gender pressures, and part of that is because none of these are really resting on the core idea that child care is essential to the American experiment or an American value in the same way that public education and various other things are.

That thread is there, and I think that’s important to understand, because sometimes today we’re like, ‘Oh, this is the way it’s always been,’ … but, that’s not the case. 

In the modern era, kind of post 1970s when we’ve seen the majority of mothers of young children enter the labor force, we’ve kind of been fighting on the same terrain. At the same time, the problem is so acute right now. The pandemic, I think, shed a very bright spotlight on that. But, child care is a pain point that crosses every line of difference you can think of: It crosses ideology; it crosses geography, it crosses gender, it crosses race and class, so it is a really massive need that remains unresolved.

How has child care become the victim to politics? How has government mistrust contributed to this and are attitudes toward universal child care changing?

The 1960s and 70s were a really pivotal time in the US and across the western world where you’re seeing these tectonic shifts in the global economy, where manufacturing jobs are going down and it was really hard to run a family on one income basically. 

The debate that was happening here and abroad was what is the role of government? What’s interesting is this happens, and it’s a really historical quirk in some ways, that the battles over child care in the US coincide with the breakup of the New Deal coalition, the Vietnam War, the rise of religious fundamentalism in response to changing roles of women. This is also the same era when we’re seeing the rise of the birth control pill and Roe v. Wade and women getting many, many more rights than they had before. 

It really comes together in 1971 with President Nixon’s veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act, and it took this issue that was a problem everywhere, that wasn’t particularly politicized … and it made it this article of culture war.

By the time that bill comes back a few years later, there are chain mail pamphlets going around about how if Congress passes this bill, it’s going to let children sue their parents for asking them to take out the trash – literally. It’s written up in most major newspapers in the country, just about how wildly inaccurate this kind of smear campaign was, but it gives you this evidence of this free market family idea, that deep distrust of the government, people turn to the free market and it becomes much, much harder to have the debate because you can’t get past the first step of is this even something where the government has a role? 

I think sometimes, if the Comprehensive Childhood Development Act had just gone five years earlier, if you think about when Medicaid and Medicare were passed, we would have been fine. But by the vagaries of history, it happened to be going through at the time when there was really this political terrain that was shifting and, unfortunately, American families became a casualty of those shifts.

Another thing you talk about in your book is equity. How does the lack of child care affect equity, particularly for women of color, and concentrations of poverty?

It’s really important to say we’ve had a racialized child care system since the very beginning of this country, and some of the first child care providers were enslaved Black women and girls… There was always this two track view of ‘Women shouldn’t work outside the home when they have kids, except for if you’re a Black woman, or a woman of color, or immigrant, in which case that’s actually OK. And in fact, we’re going to put in work requirements and make sure that you have to jump through all sorts of hoops in order to get assistance with child care,’ and that is a two tiered legacy that absolutely shapes attitudes today. 

Many of the contemporary debates, and I mean the 2020 debates around child care, often hinge on Head Start, which is a program that is explicitly concentrated to low income populations and the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which is explicitly limited to families making below 85% of the state median income. So even today, we still have welfare terrain for child care, and it is a huge problem, and the ways in which it wraps into poverty and continues inequality are manifold.

We know that the lack of child care, when you combine that with low income backgrounds, typically have to work jobs with less job security, with more unpredictable hours, shift jobs, and often not unionized, target breakdowns that can easily start a cascading effect of negative consequences. I mentioned in the book the story of one woman and how child care was the reason that she was thrust into poverty. 

The other side of the coin is that the providers of child care are almost all women, and they’re disproportionately women of color and they’re disproportionately immigrant women. Because of the constant neglect of child care as a value, we have them making poverty or near poverty wages themselves, which takes a huge toll and that has effects on the quality and the stability of the child care. It also affects those families of the providers themselves. 

How does American work culture work against community building and child care? Talk about general cultural shaming and the perception of “moral failing” for parents needing help in early childhood.

There’s a sense of rugged individualism.

I think what’s really interesting with child care, is here we’ve put it in this bucket of ‘It’s your job to figure it out, and if you don’t figure it out, there’s something wrong with you, and if you’re really terrible, if you messed up so badly, we might have a little bit of aid for you, but we’re going to be reluctant about it.’

Now, what I find fascinating about that argument is when those kids turn five what we do is meet them with constitutional rights for free education and care for at least seven hours a day, 180 days a year. It’s not, obviously enough, but there’s a very different way that we approach things like public education. We bucket child care as a private individual good. 

In your book, you also discuss how education is a more formal institution that’s harder to change because of bureaucracy, tradition and funding, but child care has more room for innovation. Why is that? What’s the big goal, and how can we get there?

Education in this country has been around for at this point 175 years and it has had a lot of time to grow. We all have a sense of what a school is and what it should be and what the structures are and there’s lots of veto points along the way if you try to change them.

A child care system is a much more open playing field in some ways. … Part of my argument uses a chance to say, ‘OK, based on what we’ve learned from things in the public school system, what do we need to do to build a child care system that’s going to work well for everyone, for all families and all kids and all educators?’

And one of the features … (that) is interesting in child care, particularly talking about early child care, but school age as well, is this idea of we need to be able to meet parents and families where they’re at, so that if a family wants to have a grandparent or stay at home parent, we should honor that… and support that in the same way that (if) they want to have a licensed child care center or a licensed family child care at your home… that supports going to look different. A pediatrician’s office and ER are both part of the health care system, but they’re not the same. 

Sometimes we draw a line around what is actually child care and what isn’t and actually we’re much worse off for it. That’s not what parents need.

That’s one place where we have an opportunity to think about a more inclusive and pluralistic system that, at the most fundamental level, we should guarantee families have access to the care and early learning experiences that they and their kids need to thrive. I think if we start there, it opens up a lot of doors and it cuts through a lot of the noise.

You discuss how one way we view children is through the lens of an “investable child,” or an investment that needs to perform rather than viewing a child as an individual. How would shifting our perspective on children change people’s view on child care? What would it involve? 

We’ve lost the child from child care in a lot of ways. It’s only and all about the parents and the parents attachment to the workforce – and this is on both sides of the political aisle. 

I do think there has to be some affirmative cases made that how a child experiences their childhood and what their day to day experiences are not only shapes their future selves, but there is actually something that is deeply important to the national soul in that as well. 

One of my fundamental problems with the economic case, while I think it is valid and it can be useful, is that it is morally impoverished. It has no particular claim on any values or deep human morality. I do think that that’s something that we can recenter if we talk about it like that. 

The fact that child care programs can come alongside parents and help them parent the way they want to parent and can help children to have joyful childhood – that is actually something that we should want. This will come, in some senses, from the top down. I do think the way that our leaders talk about child care is really important. 

One of the biggest underlying topics of your book and our conversation is also reframing child care from just an economic or social issue, but to one of the loss of the American Dream, which in recent decades has centered more on finances and material possessions than small freedoms. How can we make this shift and “lead with values first”? 

Gallup polled recently, in the past month or two, a bunch of Americans about what values… are the most important values to them. It was interesting that across all political parties, across all geographic regions of the country, across all income levels, one value dominated all the others, and it was family. It wasn’t freedom. It wasn’t like self determination with individuals, it was family. 

I think particularly in this era when there’s a lot of precariousness, a lot of uncertainty geopolitically and the environment, polarization, loneliness – all of these issues that we see around us – that people are really hungry for more. Something else can be seen in Gen Z and Gen Alpha as well, that there’s actually this pulling back, in some senses, from hyper materialism, and so the question is, what comes next? What fills that? And I think there’s an opportunity. 

Politicians need to…, realize that in a lot of ways, family and child care are a key part of where people want to go – they do really value that, not just about their bank account. And so to start talking about it, that’s really important. 

It’s a question too of the mechanisms of narrative change. There are a few levers to pull on for culture change and narrative change, and I think all of them will probably be pulled at once for a broader mind shift to this idea of what is the good life like? What are we even doing here?

The last chapter of the book is pretty philosophical for a reason. When we jump ahead, we are often just talking past each other, because we haven’t even grounded out what’s the goal? What is the ultimate goal with having an effective child care system? In my mind, it is not to maximize labor force participation. That might be a nice side benefit, but the more we say things like, ‘Child care is the workforce,’ or the more we talk about (it) only in terms of its effect on business productivity, the more we lose the American families… a lot of people are stumbling in the dark for meaning and for community and child care can be a really, really important part of that.

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