U.S. welfare programs, defined as social benefits to ensure a standard quality of living, have historically been reserved for the poor, effectively ensuring their stigmatization and inadequacy. Middle and upper class individuals have then been forced to demand social programs from the private sector, where competition ensures better quality but also considerable cost. The child care system in the United States has followed this pattern. The U.S. government developed public child care primarily as leverage for welfare reform, to deploy mandatory work programs and move poor mothers off welfare, rather than as a policy in itself. Targeting public child care to welfare recipients ensured its evolution into such an aforementioned public-private system. This system, generated by non-universal provisions and thus stratified by class, is failing, as evidenced by the present-day deficits in the costly U.S child care system. This paper will examine the history and current state of child care, as well as two government responses to these problems — the Child Care for Working Families Act and Ivanka Trump’s child care proposal — in the context of their universality and public-private nature.
Child care is inextricably linked to the interests of both mothers and children. A traditional conception of family structure, which Susan Pedersen terms the “Victorian Sexual Settlement,” excludes women from the wage-labor market and forces them to rely upon their husbands for financial support. This model defines women’s role within the domestic sphere as the responsibility for raising children. Yet, since the 1950’s, women have made significant strides in entering the labor force; today, more than half of American women work in the year after giving birth, as do 64% of those with children under 6. However, since women still bear the majority of the burden for household and child-rearing work, child care is essential in allowing women with children to enter the workforce and achieve economic independence. Additionally, the years between birth and the beginning of formal schooling, typically at age 4, are a formative period of development. High quality care is necessary to ensure a child’s healthy cognitive and social growth during these years.
Despite its importance, child care increasingly poses a burden to many families in the United States. The average American family spends 29% of its after-tax income on child care, with an average annual cost of $10,000 per child. In major cities like New York and Los Angeles, this cost can reach up to $30,000 per year, while in other states the cost of one year of child care can exceed that of one year’s college tuition. In comparison, the average family in other Western democracies spends only 10% of its income on childcare. In addition to rising costs, quality issues also plague the U.S. child care system. Child care workers struggle with low wages; their average annual pay is only $20,000, and many of these workers do not receive sufficient training. As a result, relatively affordable child care centers are often understaffed and overcrowded. These quality issues lead many middle- and upper- class families to choose private and more expensive child care alternatives, such as employment-based services, private nannies, or for-profit centers. This inequity in resources has not only led to a child care system in which many families struggle to satisfy their children’s needs, but also one in which care is stratified by class, exacerbating already-existing divisions and poverty.
Currently, the main source of government-provided child care is the 1990 Child Care Block and Development Grant (“the Grant”). Developed to help low-income parents remain in the workforce, the Grant provides low-income working families with child-care subsidies, funded and administered by states, territories, and tribes. The Grant was reauthorized and amended in 2014 in an effort to address issues with the quality and accessibility of child care programs. While the federal government created new standards and eligibility requirements for the Grant’s programs, it did not provide additional funds to states to meet these criteria. Thus, states were forced to become more stringent about eligibility in order to satisfy the new requirements. After reauthorization, 17 states limited enrollment to families earning 150% below the poverty level. By the end of 2014, the number of children receiving benefits under the Grant dropped to its lowest level since 1998, with only 10% of eligible children receiving benefits. In Connecticut, the Grant’s amendments required the state to extend the length of time during which it would provide families with subsidies to 12 months; due to these changes in enrollment time, Connecticut’s subsidies exceeded the state’s budget by $34 million in the year following reauthorization. This financial burden led the state to declare that beginning in 2017 only those families receiving cash assistance would be eligible to apply for subsidies beginning in 2017. As of 2017, 85% of eligible children nationwide remain excluded from the Grant.
Members of both parties have acknowledged the current crisis in child care and have proposed solutions. In September of 2017, Washington Senator Pat Murray and Virginia Representative Bobby Scott, both Democrats, introduced the Child Care for Working Families Act (“the Act”), which was co-sponsored by 27 of the 48 House Democrats. The Act is subtitled as an amendment to the “Child Care and Development Block Grant of 1990 and Head Start Act;” it aims “to ensure that no low to moderate-income family pays more than 7% of its annual income on child care.” To do so, the Act would create a federal-state partnership and offer subsidies to all families on a sliding-scale scheme; these subsidies would be based on a state’s cost of living and effectively make child care an entitlement for all Americans. The Act would also aim to create a universal pre-school program and promises to fund pre-school for low-income families when their children are ages 3-4. Additionally, Murray and Scott outlined a plan to address the quality issues in public child care; the Act would establish new regulations for federal child care centers and raise the standards of compensation and training for workers. Critics of the Act point to its cost, which estimates have placed at roughly $60 billion each year. However, advocates hipoint to its potentials for universalism — it would serve 24.2 million children, approximately 13 times the number eligible under the Child Care and Development Block Grant.
Ivanka Trump has also been lobbying for a new child care plan. Under her proposed program, all individuals with an annual salary of up to $250,000, and couples earning a combined income of up to $500,000, would be able to deduct their state’s average cost of childcare from their taxable income. The plan would also incentivize employers to provide workplace child care and create dedicated savings accounts in which individuals could invest pre-tax income for child care. The benefits outlined under this program would be modest for all families, but especially for low-income ones, who have less tax liability; since the benefits would be based on a tax break, approximately two-thirds of the funds would go to families earning $100,000 or more annually. Additionally, Ms. Trump’s plan would fail to help those without wages, such as unemployed parents or those in work-training programs. Despite these inadequacies, it would cost $115 billion over 10 years.
To analyze the potential implications of these programs and their ability to address current child care crises, one must first consider the history of child care in the United States and how its development has led to many present day flaws. In the late 60’s and 70’s, welfare rolls increased exponentially, to the anxiety of many reformers. One method proposed to address the growing number of welfare recipients was the implementation of mandatory work programs. These programs required welfare recipients to enter job training programs or the workforce in order to continue receiving benefits. The Public Welfare Amendments of 1962 was the first implementation of these requirements for welfare mothers; they included child care provisions for those “in need,” to incentivize poor mothers to move from welfare to “workfare.” Other similar bills followed, such as the Work Incentive Program of 1967, Title XX of the Social Security Act in 1974, and the Aid to Day Care Centers Act in 1976. All of these government programs provided child care to low-income individuals — as long as they were working. By employing child care to enact mandatory work programs, and thus by extension to reduce welfare use, policymakers forged a link between the public provision of child care and poverty alleviation. This pattern has continued to today. The Child Care Block and Development Grant, both in its original issue and reauthorization, provides child care to only the most needy, as a means of incentivizing them to work.
As government funded and administered child care programs were targeted to the poor, middle and upper class families had to look elsewhere for child care. In conjunction with the free-market, “small government” policies of the Reagan-era, the 1980’s witnessed the growth of privately provided child care for the middle class and the wealthy. As part of his program to reduce government spending, President Reagan cut child care funding and shrunk public work programs, as well as eliminated standards for federal child care centers. While slashing funding for low-income families, Reagan also increased federal spending for child care for the middle class through tax cuts and breaks, such as the 1981 Economic Recovery Tax Act; between 1980 and 1986, sacrificed taxes were the government’s greatest outlay for child care. In response to the increased liberty provided by these cuts, more middle class women entered the workforce. Yet, while publicly-provided child care had always been associated with the poor and, thus, stigmatized, the current administration’s child care cuts further exacerbated the idea that public provisions were low quality programs for the poor. Therefore, middle-class families turned to the private sector to meet the increased demand for child care that the tax cuts had spurred; this led child care to become a product of the market and evolve into a “big business” enterprise. The policies of the 80’s created a multi-tiered child care system, in which the middle class and the wealthy used money from tax breaks to pay for proprietary or in-home care, respectively, while low-income families could only afford to enroll their children in publicly-funded centers, which struggled with inadequate resources and standards.
This historical context illuminates the roots of today’s child care crisis. While child care grew in prevalence between the 1950’s and 1980’s, it also became increasingly stratified. As Peter Baldwin asserts in The Politics of Social Solidarity, solidarity between classes is essential to a social program’s success because when different social groups see a policy as advantageous to meeting their needs, they will unite behind it. A prerequisite for widespread solidarity is the universal application of social programs to all individuals within a society, which the U.S. child care policies clearly failed to do. Creating means-tested, targeted programs to the poor, often for the ulterior motive of reforming welfare, precluded the possibility of a universal, government-provided programs. By effectively leaving middle and upper class Americans out of public child care programs, the U.S. government ensured that child care would develop into a public-private system in which public programs are reserved for the poor while the private sector serves the better off. Public programs lacked the support of the middle and upper classes, who hold more power in pushing for high quality, accessible programs. Thus, public programs for the poor received minimal backing and funding and developed into “poor” programs. The 2014 reauthorization of the Child Block and Development Grant exemplifies this trend; in an attempt to better the situation of the poor, the government effectively excluded more individuals from benefits and, in turn, exacerbated already existing divisions in class and quality. Additionally, the private sector response to the demand for child care has also had unintended consequences for the better off. Placing child care, a necessity for most families, into the market made it a highly-demanded commodity and enabled competitive suppliers to spike costs. Therefore, private voluntary or proprietary child care centers, as well as in-home nannies, have become increasingly expensive and unaffordable for even those in the middle and upper classes.
The Child Care for Working Families Act might be able to address these issues because it provides the most universalistic approach to child care provision yet. The Act would respond to current inadequacies in public child care by expanding eligibility and ensuring that all needy families would be able to receive subsidies. The guarantee that no low to moderate-income family pays more than 7% of its income on child care would be essential in lessening inequality because it would enable both parents to work; it would also ensure that all children develop strong socio-cognitive skills, in an attempt to equalize educational opportunity across classes. Yet, even more important in the context of this analysis is the Act’s goal to create a universal pre-school system, which would grant all families with children aged 3-4 access to publicly provided child care, regardless of income. Thus, the Act would work to destigmatize government-administered child care because its benefits would not be means-tested and limited to the most needy; instead, their universal nature would create solidarity between the lower and middle classes in support of the program. This expansion of eligibility, when combined with the Act’s promise to improve the quality of centers and the training of teachers, would strengthen publicly provided programs and decrease demand for private responses.
In contrast, as aforementioned, Ivanka Trump’s program would be based on tax breaks and thus primarily serve the middle and upper classes. Considering the historical pattern of middle and upper class families channeling their tax breaks into the private sector, Ms. Trump’s plan would predictably worsen the differences in quality and cost between public and private child care sectors. As mentioned earlier, dual-parent households with significant earnings would reap the majority of this program’s benefits, in the form of foregone taxes. Ms. Trump’s plan does not aim to expand access to or improve the quality of public centers so, in turn, these families would most likely use the funds from their deductions to pay for private, expensive child care. As occurred during the Reagan era, a program based on tax credits would be costly but would actively undermine efforts to create a universal public system. Instead, it would place more power within the private sector, further widening the divide between public and private and thus between the lower and middle to upper classes.
The U.S. government first provided public child care as a means of reforming welfare, by offering it to the poor on the condition that they entered the workforce. These mandatory work programs, in conjunction with means-testing, created an association between public child care and poverty alleviation. Rather than creating a universal system, the government excluded non-impoverished families from public programs and instead granted them child care tax breaks, which the middle and upper classes used to purchase private child care. The stratified system that emerged from these policies has survived to today, at a time in which public child care is insufficient and substandard, while private child care is increasingly unaffordable. This segregated system can only be fixed through universalistic social programs because of the solidarity that they inspire; solidarity is necessary to generate the support needed for the implementation and success of high quality, effective welfare benefits. Thus, the Child Care and Working Families Act is a preferable government response because it represents a move toward comprehensive application. In contrast, Ms. Trump’s plan would increase the need for a private alternative and perpetuate an unequal, divided child care system..