Childcare is an even bigger mess than I realized
The average family needs to spend 13% of their income on childcare
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One of the core ideas of this newsletter is that two parents, especially when one or both are working, are poorly equipped to care for their children on their own. It takes a village, as they say, but when it comes to raising kids a lot of people don’t have much of a village.
But a pair of recent reports shows just how bad the problem is. The first report comes from the Treasury Department and reveals that the average family with a kid under 5 would need to spend 13 percent of its income on childcare. The report adds that this amount is “unaffordable for most families.”
At the same time, many people actually working in childcare “struggle to make ends meet.” Most childcare workers are women and many are not white, the report also points out, meaning this problem is further compounded by existing discrimination. And the report notes that “many child care workers are paid so little that they rely on public services for their own economic needs.”
About a week ago, the US Census Bureau also put out data1 showing that in late summer millions of American adults had kids who couldn’t attend childcare (including daycare) due to safety concerns. Many of those parents coped with that situation by cutting back on work: 1.8 million took unpaid leave; 1.7 million used vacation or sick days, or other paid leave; 1.8 million cut their work hours; 1.15 million left their job; and more than half a million lost a job.
The point here is that the pandemic has added more stress to our already abysmal childcare system.
The Treasury report offers some insights into why the market has failed to solve this problem. For example, parents typically most need childcare when they are younger, meaning they have less work experience and smaller incomes. In other words, by the time you can afford to pay for childcare, you don’t need it any more.
Similarly, many younger parents have large expenses in the form of things like mortgages or, increasingly, student loan debt. Eventually most people pay off these debts, but by then their kids have outgrown the need for childcare.
All of which is to say, the people who most need childcare are the least capable of paying for it. And as the Census numbers show, there are millions and millions of people who are actively missing out on opportunities as a result of this situation.
The Treasury report goes on to argue in favor of President Biden’s childcare proposals, which include giving “universal preschool to all 3- and 4-year-old children and providing access to high-quality child care for low- and middle-income children.”
I’m not here to advocate for any particular political position, and I’ve intentionally tried to make this a nonpartisan newsletter. That said, I’m generally in favor of attempts to provide more support for families, and as the parent of one current and two future 3-year-olds, I would absolutely love something like universal pre-K. I’ve seen some compelling critiques of Biden’s vision, but given that the alternative (and current reality for most people) on this one issue is essentially no vision or policy at all, I’m inclined to root for the current proposals.
But here is my take on this entire situation: I’m not holding my breath for systemic change. I think the best case scenario is baby steps, which will maybe help future generations but will almost surely be too little and too late for most of today’s parents of small children.
A worse case scenario, but one I think is probably more likely, is that not much of anything happens. When I look at other issues this seems to be the pattern. For instance, when I lived in LA I was one of millions of people who voted for multiple initiatives meant to alleviate the region’s massive homelessness problem. But despite those initiatives passing and allocating hundreds of millions of dollars in resources to the issue, there are more than 20,000 additional people in LA County experiencing homelessness now compared to when I moved there. A similar story has played out in dozens of large American cities over the last decade.
Or take housing. Economists largely agree that one of the best ways to make housing more affordable is to build far more homes, especially in places where there are lots of jobs. But thanks largely to resistance from homeowners (NIMBYs) we’re actually building fewer homes than we have in the past. I talked to an economist in April who described this as a decade of “radical under-building.”
The same thing is happening with lots of other issues: income inequality, racial justice, environmental issues such as emissions and water use (especially in the West). The point is that progress isn’t coming slowly. It’s that in many meaningful ways, it’s not coming at all.
Now, it’s certainly possible that childcare will be the exception to this rule. But the root of the problem — an inability to afford childcare — goes back decades. As I’ve previously written, wages for American men peaked in the early 1970s when adjusted for inflation, and wages for women peaked in the early 2000s. This led to more dual income households, which increased demand for professional childcare, even as the ability to pay for that childcare was waning.
In other words this problem has been brewing for 40 years. Imagine being a parent in the 1970s — when the US nearly got a national childcare system 2 — and thinking, “maybe a solution is coming soon.” Today, some of the little kids from that era are literally grandparents, and we still haven’t figured this out. And when I look at the current composition of the US Senate and the courts, among other things, it’s hard to believe that any sort of sweeping change is coming for childcare.
Look, I’m not trying to bum anyone out here. I definitely hope progress, in some form or another, arrives3.
However, it’s worth being pragmatic. And if the prospect of some meaningful systemic change is tenuous at best, the pragmatic approach is to find some individual remedy that can at least hold you over in the meantime.
When it comes to childcare, I think the obvious application here is that people are going to have to build their own villages. Those villages may have a lot of different forms (alloparenting, family compounds, polygamy, etc.) and building them is hard to do (I haven’t really managed to make it happen, despite a desire to do so). And these individual solutions aren’t going to solve the broader social problem.
But my concern is that in the quixotic search for a big solution, we may overlook the potential of moving away from the nuclear concept where two parents are expected to do everything for their kids all the time.
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Headlines to read this week:
The Opposite of Toxic Positivity
“The antidote to toxic positivity is ‘tragic optimism,’ a phrase coined by the existential-humanistic psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. Tragic optimism involves the search for meaning amid the inevitable tragedies of human existence, something far more practical and realistic during these trying times. Researchers who study ‘post-traumatic growth’ have found that people can grow in many ways from difficult times—including having a greater appreciation of one’s life and relationships, as well as increased compassion, altruism, purpose, utilization of personal strengths, spiritual development, and creativity. Importantly, it’s not the traumatic event itself that leads to growth (no one is thankful for COVID-19), but rather how the event is processed, the changes in worldview that result from the event, and the active search for meaning that people undertake during and after it.”
Both houses of congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill of 1972. The bill would have created a national daycare system. But Nixon vetoed the bill and it never became law. So, we were actually closer to getting a meaningful and robust national childcare system in the 1970s than we are today.
In this way I think of myself as a proponent of tragic optimism, which is sort of a way to be upbeat while still being realistic about the various metaphorical train wrecks going on all around us.