Childcare shouldn't cost as much as a mortgage
We treat childcare as if the 1950s ideal of the family still functions. But it hasn't for decades.
One of the rudest awakenings after having kids in the US is discovering how much childcare costs.
Right now, I have friends who pay more than $2,000 per month on full-time childcare for their young children. Just days ago, I was talking with someone paying $1,700 for a single toddler. The pandemic appears to have made things worse, and this article from December includes accounts from people paying more than $5,000 per month.
The Economic Policy institute breaks down costs by state, and shows that in California — the most populous state in the US — the average annual cost of infant care is $16,945. You could buy a small Honda for that amount. It’s more than the annual cost of tuition in the University of California system. And it’s higher than the average American’s monthly mortgage payment1.
When I see these numbers, what occurs to me isn’t that we have a broken or poorly functioning childcare system. It’s that we just don’t have any system at all — at least in the sense that we have, say, an education “system.”
So why might that be the case?
Last week I wrote about how economic and social changes in the 1800s led to the demise of the multigenerational “corporate” family (think of a family farm) and replaced it with nuclear families organized around a single (typically male) breadwinner.
These same trends have contributed to today’s problems with childcare.
Prior to the mid 1800s, childhood was a very different thing. In the medieval period, for instance, babies might be swaddled for very long periods, and care might fall to a sibling, neighbor, family member, servant or whoever was around. Older kids might have been allowed to run somewhat free2.
More importantly, children were expected to contribute early in their lives to the maintenance and support of their family. Again, think of a family farm on which the kids have specific and economically meaningful tasks to do.
When wage labor became more common in the 1800s, however, it fell increasingly to fathers to do all the tasks that economically supported the family. At the same time, the Victorians redefined the meaning of childhood so that it was seen as a more distinct and ideally innocent time in a person’s life. Kids, at least among the upper and middle classes, gradually receded as components of a family’s economic strategy3.
This period also devalued the work women were doing.
Though women had long been subordinate to their husbands, the contributions they made to a family’s financial situation were at least considered “work,” with economic value. A woman in the country might do essential tasks on the family farm. A woman in town might keep the books for the family shop or interface with customers.
But over time, women were pigeonholed into a distinct “domestic” sphere, which was divorced from the “economic” sphere that men occupied. Here’s historian Stephanie Coontz:
Women’s traditional tasks — growing food for the family table, tending animals, dairying, cooking, repairing household implements, and making clothes — though no less burdensome, were no longer viewed as economic activities. In the older definition of housekeeping, women’s labor was recognized as a vital contribution to the family’s economic survival. Wives were regularly referred to as “help-meet” and “yoke mates.” But as housekeeping became “homemaking,” it came to be seen as an act of love rather than a contribution to survival4.
With men out earning wages, and with the idea of childhood expanding, more of the burden to raise kids fell on women. This was a costly and labor intensive task, but as part of the domestic sphere it wasn’t really seen as a “job.” These changes would’ve been subtle at first, but by the mid twentieth century the historically novel idea that men worked and women “stayed home” with the kids was widespread.
In that context, it makes sense that the US doesn’t have a real childcare system; why build a system to take care of kids when the assumption is that taking care of kids isn’t a real job? It’d be like building a system to give out hugs.
These assumptions still dominate American society5, even though — as I mentioned previously — wages have collapsed and many people no longer have the option of a single breadwinner, two-parent household6. Which is to say, the viability of our childcare strategy in the US rests on the viability of functional, single-earner nuclear families. One doesn’t work without the other, and they both appear to be breaking right now.
That there are failings won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I’ll eventually get into solutions. But my goal here is merely to make the case that there’s a problem. And to emphasize that the problem isn’t just an issue of policy or politics.
Instead, it’s tied to our deepest assumptions about how families should work. Those assumptions are misaligned with the reality of how they actually do work, and how they’ve worked for much of our history in the West. And along with friendship, it’s another way the idealized nuclear family is melting down and no longer serving us well.
“The average monthly mortgage payment by state, city, and year.” Liz Knueven. Business Insider. Aug 6, 2020.
The Family in the Western World. Beatrice Gottlieb. 1993. Page 139-140
Victorian Child Savers and Their Culture: A Thematic Evaluation. Thomas Edward Jordan. 1998
Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage. Stephanie Coontz. 2005. Page 155
“Home Building Survey Part II: Supporting Families.” American Compass. Feb. 18, 2021. NOTE: I want to delve into this particular survey in greater detail, but I’ll do that in a future post because it deserves more attention than I feel there’s space for it in this week’s piece.
The pandemic of course has impacted women especially hard, which is a topic deserving of standalone posts. Here’s some further reading on that topic, which I hope to delve into in the future.