Of course, staying in a job that pays less than the cost of care isn’t an economically sound decision either. “My big takeaway from that tool is that if you don’t have the resources to put in on the front end, you don’t get the benefit” either financially or in terms of your child’s well-being, said Katie Hamm, the senior director of early-childhood policy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the political arm of the think tank.

Parents of young children, by virtue of their own age, are less likely to be able to afford child-care costs than to afford college costs on the other end, Hamm says. In many states the cost of private child care equals the cost of public college tuition. Yet, far more is spent on financial aid for higher education than is spent on subsidizing early education. That holds true even for the poorest children. Despite the fact that more young children than teenagers live in poverty, the federal government spends three times as much on tuition coverage for poor college students in the form of Pell Grants than it does on Head Start for 3- and 4-year-olds.

“We have a huge disconnect between when people need money to invest in their kids and when they have the most resources in their life cycle,” Hamm said.

Early-education advocates have a whole raft of ideas to change that, from paid parental leave to expanded Early Head Start to universal preschool access. All of the proposals, including the one from the liberal Center for American Progress, are modest in comparison to what’s happening in Europe and much of the rest of the developed world.

Clinton has proposed subsidizing child care and preschool directly and through tax credits—which apply to income earners at every level—so that no family spends more than 10 percent of its income on child care. She’d like to expand Early Head Start and to provide states with more money to help them offer better and broader preschool programs. She’d also like to continue the expansion of home-visiting services started under the Obama Administration, create a national program to raise the quality of early education instruction and to offer every new parent 12 weeks of paid leave.

“Supporting families isn’t a luxury—it’s an economic necessity—and it’s long past time our policies catch up to the way families live and work today,” Clinton told The Hechinger Report.

Taken together, Clinton’s proposals would revolutionize how America treats its young children. And yet, even if the country acted on every single proposal, it would still be far behind a country like England, which educates its 4-year-olds at no direct cost to its citizens, subsidizes fully half of the cost of 3-year-old care for every parent and is beginning to cover care for 2-year-olds from lower income homes. That’s all on top of the fact that new parents in England get nine months of partially paid leave plus three more months of unpaid leave. To be sure, taxpayers cover these costs. And while England’s offerings are only average in Europe, it would take a complete overhaul of our tax code to bring in the revenue needed to get to the same point.