Imagine if public K-12 education in America were no longer free, no longer a right. Parents would need to come up with tuition fees—an average of about $12,000 per child—or else figure out alternative arrangements. It would be chaos. Some parents would zero out their savings; others would leave the workforce to care for their children, or rely on family members to do so. A gray market of cheap, low-quality options would pop up. Parents would be gripped by stress, and the kids would suffer the most.

This is not an imaginary situation; it’s a reality for many families today, because child care is not a right. Yet even as this crisis has become national news, and Democratic candidates for president are offering competing solutions, the conversation still suffers from a lack of imagination. Even the boldest plans to address the problem don’t acknowledge what’s obvious to many Americans: Child care should not be simply “affordable.” It should be free and universal—a common good just like K-12 schooling.



The difference between a common good and a public assistance program is the difference between the nearly $700 billion a year America spends on universal K-12 education and the roughly $10 billion a year America spends on subsidizing child care for lower-income families (and still only reaching less than 15 percent of that population). Common goods—public schools, fire departments, roads, national defense—are those items which are so socially beneficial we don’t make the end user pay a dollar beyond their taxes. They are, instead, worthy recipients of what Thomas Jefferson called the “common expense.”



While recent proposals like the Child Care For Working Families Act and those put forth by candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Julian Castro are welcome, they all implicitly keep child care in the realm of public assistance. These proposals utilize the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ line of 7 percent of family income to define “affordable” child care (albeit with a sliding scale, so some lower-income families would pay nothing). Yet no one pays a maximum of 7 percent of their income to send their child to fourth grade, nor are there sliding scale fees for getting the fire department to come to one’s house. Accepting the premise that child care is ultimately a private burden keeps the sector stuck where it’s been for far too long—in what historian Sonya Michel calls “the shadows of charity.”



It’s perhaps understandable why child care was not considered a common good a half-century ago, when more than half of mothers didn’t work. But today, two-thirds of children have all available parents in the workforce, meaning they require some amount of outside care. For all but the most affluent, modern families cannot sustainably absorb the costs of care without major disruption to their ability to contribute economically. Our grasp of early childhood development has taken a quantum leap, and we now know the extent to which brain development is influenced by high-quality early experiences as well as family financial stability. Most importantly, our society’s ideas about mothers getting to choose whether they work outside the home—though still a source of ambivalence—have undeniably evolved.

