The cost of childcare is bankrupting America’s parents. But providing free, universal childcare for all parents is easily affordable by simply cutting a small handful of military programs whose absence almost nobody would notice.

Joy Richmond-Smith is a full-time social worker and mother of two small children. Her husband also works full-time, so daily childcare is essential to the couple. In the Boston area, where she lives, Richmond-Smith pays $400 for four days of childcare per week just for her 3-year-old son. If she were to put her 1-year-old daughter in childcare for two of those days, the cost would jump to $500 per week. And if she were to pay for both children to have full-time daycare at that same facility, the cost balloons to $700 per week. Richmond-Smith says her household’s childcare costs are more than double the amount she pays for her mortgage.

“These early years of life and brain development are so important,” she says. “I’m not skimping on childcare, so I’ll pay whatever I need to pay.”

She’s right. Between birth and the age of three, the human brain is forming most of the neural connections it will depend on for life. According to the Urban Child Institute, 80 percent of brain development takes place before kids turn three. A 2008 joint study by Arizona State University and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that, on average, children with access to quality early childhood care and education have higher test scores, have a lower chance of having to repeat the same grade and are less likely to commit crimes as teens and adults.

High-quality childcare and early childhood education are largely inaccessible to middle-class parents such as Richmond-Smith, who doesn’t qualify for federal childcare subsidies under programs such as Head Start. To qualify, a family of four needs to make less than the incredibly outdated federal poverty limit of $22,000. Worse still, families that do qualify for a low-income childcare subsidy have to get in line — according to Richmond-Smith, more than 500 low-income families are on the Head Start waiting list in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. In 2010, Head Start workers were penalized for enrolling middle-class families who couldn’t afford childcare, but didn’t meet federal qualifications for subsidies.