If there’s one thing Democratic and Republican politicians can agree on, it’s that childcare is the workforce behind the workforce. “Our child care workers are the workforce behind the workforce, risking their health and safety on the front lines to ensure that parents can go to work,” then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in 2020. Republican representative Ashley Hinson echoed Pelosi in 2024, asserting that childcare staff “are the workforce behind the workforce, and I don’t want to see parents having to make that choice between working or staying home because of the availability” of slots.
Yes, childcare helps the economy hum. But childcare does so much more than just keep parents participating in the labor force. It is an essential piece of social infrastructure. As social cohesion declines, so too does the American quality of life — and this trend hits parents hard, with two-thirds of parents reporting feeling socially disconnected. Childcare centers are one of the few supports available to connect parents of young children to each other and their broader communities, easing the burden of isolation. The “workforce behind the workforce” line misses that richness and sets the childcare system on the path to corporatization.
According to former US surgeon general Vivek Murthy, the country is going through an epidemic of loneliness, and parents in particular are struggling. Their “disproportionately high levels of loneliness,” Murthy has said, “compound the day-to-day challenges they face.” When people become isolated and disconnected, community bonds fray and it becomes much harder to forge the solidaristic movements needed to improve conditions for all.
Childcare programs stand out as a potential beacon amid this dark forecast. Sociologist Mario Luis Small studied childcare centers in New York City and found that they “tend to be a remarkably effective broker for the mothers whose children they service. They broker both social and organizational ties, and their brokerage is associated with greater material and mental well-being.” In his analysis, Small found that among mothers who utilized centers, “about 60% made at least one friend, and more than 40% made three or more friends in centers.”
Childcare educators frequently function as a source of stability that keeps families from spiraling into crisis. They can offer emotional attunement and practical help, like connecting parents to food programs, keeping children’s routines steady during family upheaval, or stepping in with extra guidance when a child struggles emotionally or academically. In the childcare documentary Make a Circle, preschool educator Dan recalls how important his childcare providers were as he grew up with a single mother and struggled with learning disabilities. “My mom was both my parents, and my other parent was my preschool teachers,” Dan says, voice thick with emotion. “They helped my mom when she needed assistance. They helped me. They helped my family. They, in essence, I feel, saved my life.”
Childcare also helps keep families rooted in their communities rather than having to move away in search of viable care options, which can be scarce in both rural and urban areas. As Qweyonoh Parker, a public-school teacher and mother of three in the Minneapolis region, wrote in a 2024 letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, “I can either sideline my career to care for my three children or go into debt to pay for child care. . . . I am seriously considering moving to Illinois, where I have family, not because I want to, but because I cannot see a path that allows me to work and raise my children in Minnesota.”
Childcare programs can even be key players in disaster relief efforts. A 2023 report from the US Early Years Climate Action Task Force recounts the story of one such provider:
Susan Gilmore runs North Bay Children’s Center, a California child care network with 13 locations. Her network contended with wildfires and their effects. She and her staff tracked children and families: who was evacuated, who lost their homes, and who needed resources. They set up a command center and created a spreadsheet to track every family—a difficult feat since many of the families they serve don’t own their home, or had evacuated, or were staying with relatives. Many families lacked power and food. Staff linked them to food banks and, when it was safe, brought resources to them.
Seeing all of the different ways childcare programs contribute to healthy families and communities makes it all the more concerning that the system is under so much strain, facing widespread closures and high staff turnover while profit-seeking investors like private equity firms circle overhead.
Many politicians and advocates have responded to this strain by doubling down on the economic case, defending childcare programs on the basis that they ensure companies have workers and workers have paychecks. Yet perhaps counterintuitively, overemphasizing the economic benefits of childcare can get in the way of the larger mindset shift needed to reposition care in American thought and policy. Valuing childcare slots primarily for their function in attaching parents to the labor force can breed indifference to how those slots are supplied.
For instance, big investor-backed companies like KinderCare and Bright Horizons are regularly welcomed by Democratic politicians despite the fact that their business models inherently rely on a market-based, commodified view of care — and the fact that they have actively worked against goals of universal childcare. These chains are clear in their financial filings that they benefit from the existing market system with sliding-scale government subsidies and few guardrails on profit-seeking (a design present in the dominant Democratic childcare bill, the Child Care for Working Families Act) while being threatened by any governmental guarantee for free or low-cost care. If the argument is simply that the economy needs more available childcare slots, regardless of the particular characteristics of providers, then KinderCare and Bright Horizons are unobjectionable.
There is an inherent tension in speaking of childcare as a public good deserving of large outlays from the public purse while reducing it to an instrumental enabler of work. If its only utility is to help people participate in the workforce, then people might be expected to secure it themselves, the same way people buy cars to get to their jobs. As sociologist and Canadian childcare advocate Susan Prentice has written, “Economic reframing displaces the justice-based rationale for child care. . . . The business case for child care builds an ideological/conceptual bridge to contemporary wealth production, not to social transformation.”
This may also be why the fastest-growing part of the childcare sector is large for-profit chains backed by institutional investors, or why policymakers are increasingly turning to voluntary employer-provided benefits as a would-be solution. If the guiding principle of childcare is merely to help parents work, then there is little value in cultivating excellent programs with well-compensated, trained, reliable educators; little value in foregrounding community-based programs with deep attachments to the neighborhoods they serve.
Proponents of corporate childcare provision often argue that there is value in standardized brand-name trust, and that economies of scale help chains maintain supply in a financially difficult sector. Yet as the writer Noelle Bodick has written, “Altogether, corporate day care reverses the natural order of human allegiances: you can’t trust in fickle individuals, but you can trust in LLCs, vast systems, corporate oversight and the cameras.” While chain sites can be high-quality and at times do integrate themselves into the community, many aren’t and don’t. Either way, it’s difficult to square a form of care that was in its early days compared to fast-food chains with what a truly abundant and community-driven childcare system should look like.
This is a moment to step back and alter course. There is no reason to continue pushing the same workforce-behind-the-workforce messaging or embracing overly means-tested, technocratic policies that have little resonance with the public and frequently exclude relative caregivers and stay-at-home parents. It’s notable that not only did New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani win his primary with an agenda that includes universal, tax-funded, free-at-the-point-of-service childcare, but that other candidates were falling over themselves to offer big, bold childcare plans. Mamdani’s stated rationale has less to do with the city economy and more with allowing families with children to stay in the city they love.
To be clear: the economic and workforce arguments for childcare are valid and have their place. But they need to be nested properly within a values-laden, family- and community-centered vision. We won’t get the childcare system American families need and deserve until we loudly make the case that childcare is as much a part of a community’s social infrastructure as schools, libraries, and parks, and equally deserving of public support for the same reasons. The good news is that when you let the full benefits of childcare come into focus, it’s a rather easy case to make.
Great Job Elliot Haspel & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
