Is Child Care Truly the “Big Thing?” Or are Fathers?

I’ve had several reasons for taking a break from prospericity.net over the last few months—three preps at school, wanting to make my novel project a success, not knowing what to say about the chaos and immorality already wrought by the new Trump administration, and, oh yes, a cancer diagnosis. Perhaps I’ll write more here at a later time about the cancer piece. Or perhaps not. The important thing is that I’m doing fine right now. I’m both hopeful and grateful. 

But I’ve come to realize lately that I’ve also fallen into silence for another reason that’s more internal to what I’m trying to do with this blog. This additional, somewhat embarrassing-to-admit reason is that I’ve felt intimidated to write about child care; the logical next topic in my “baker’s dozen” list of policies that affect families and children, and the last before I finally get to launch into a series of ideas I have about K-12 education.

Why so intimidating? Well, for one, I felt shut out of the opportunity to choose an optimal work-life balance in my late thirties and early forties when my beautiful sons were young, and so this topic is intimidating in part because it’s still painful. But another reason child care feels intimidating as a policy issue is that I’ve learned through hard experience to be hyper-vigilant about criticism from my left, and on child care policy (unlike say baby bonds or paid parental leave) my personal take differs from progressive left orthodoxy. 

As a person who has spent the last two decades primarily working as a stay-at-home father and as public school teacher, I certainly agree with the orthodox perspective that taking care of children is crucially important. I’ll even readily admit that it’s pleasant to imagine a fantasy world where family contributions to child care are capped at three percent of income, like in Sweden. But I don’t live in Sweden, and my heterodoxy here is at the level of policy strategy. I’m uncertain whether investments in child care institutions would make good strategic sense as an area to focus new public spending in a US context. This would be true even if we weren’t living in a time when public and government institutions at large weren’t under such vicious, haphazard attack.

A Prominent Economist’s Perspective

It’s always useful to find a case where a smart person you genuinely respect has a point of view different from your own instincts. I was struck then, seven days after my cancer surgery, to read Heather Long’s February 18 Op-Ed in the Washington Post on the ideas of Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Claudia Goldin related to what might be driving low birth rates internationally. 

Here’s a quote from Goldin, who Long impressively managed to ring up on the phone, that made me realize I might finally have found an entry into this long-delayed child care essay:

“Child care is the big thing. People talk about parental leave. That’s minor. That’s nothing compared with child care.”

This is a strong statement. It’s a statement that, as I just said, I tend to disagree with. But it’s also a statement that, curiously, does not flow in an obvious way from the main focus of Long’s article, which is on a paper Goldin wrote in December of last year. This paper is not about out-of-home child care, but instead about how the combination of rapid economic growth and “gendered conflicts” related to household labor affect fertility rates. 

Long summarizes the basic thrust of Goldin’s paper, amusingly titled Babies and the Macroeconomy, in a very pithy way:

“In places where men do more around the house, fertility rates are higher; where they do less, rates are lower.”

To summarize in a slightly more detailed fashion than a single sentence, I can say that if you read Goldin’s paper (which is very engaging as a piece of academic writing and worth the time) you will find that it focuses on two groups of nations. “Group 1” countries such as Denmark, France, the U.S., and several others mostly in Northern Europe experienced relatively steady economic growth throughout the twentieth century. Because of slower industrialization and urbanization, and perhaps also because of cultural and religious factors, “gendered conflict” around the distribution of household and childcare labor in these nations is less than in “Group 2” countries like Spain, Korea, Greece and several others mostly in Southern Europe and East Asia. These “Group 2” nations mostly experienced very rapid economic growth only after World War II, are more likely to be Catholic or Orthodox in culture and religion, and as noted above suffer from greater “gendered conflict” as measured by the gap between the number of hours women and men spend on household labor. 

Put another way, men in “Group 1” countries like the U.S. or even more so Denmark tend to be much more willing to put in time working on household management and child care than men in “Group 2’” countries like Portugal or Japan. In turn, women in “Group 1” nations appear to be more willing to bear children than women in “Group 2” countries. Here’s how Goldin puts the matter in her own words as an economist:

“Children take time that isn’t easily contracted out or mechanized. Therefore, much of the change in fertility will depend on whether men assume more work in the home as women are drawn into the economic marketplace. If not, women must reduce something.”

Is the “Big Thing” Actually Around Family Structure?

As a man, I can say that it’s refreshing to read a paper by a female Nobel Prize-winning economist that takes so seriously the importance of men and men’s identity when it comes to family structure. But then again, this kind of refreshing perspective has long been part of what makes Goldin’s work interesting to me. As an example this article by Marina Bolotnikova in Harvard Magazine from nearly a decade ago focuses on the much-discussed gender wage gap, and on Goldin’s perspective that “the pay gap arises not because men and women are paid differently for the same work, but because the labor market incentives them to work differently.” This in turn connects to a big motherhood penalty for part-time work, especially in elite professions that reward long hours on the job.

Moving back to my own core focus for this post on child care, I wonder whether Goldin is shying away from the logical sequelae of her own research in making such a strong statement to Long about formal, presumably out-of-home child care being the “big thing” in terms of policy. Maybe, instead, the big thing that would flow naturally from her research might have to do with family structure, and in particular with cultural and labor market roles for fathers. 

Normative Visions 

One factor that I think may underlie Goldin’s (and implicitly Long’s) policy take about child care being the “big thing” is a certain normative vision of the good life. This sentence from Long’s article is telling:

(Goldin) “points to Sweden, where women are employed in a wide variety of jobs and are not disproportionately working part-time. Men and women share household and parenting tasks. They take time off to care for babies, and then government child care starts from age 1. ‘That’s the closest we get to the best type of outcome—both in terms of what individuals do and how government is supportive,’ Goldin says.”

Maybe this is truly the “best type of outcome.” But there are other positive outcomes. I stayed home not until age one, but roughly up to elementary school age, and then took a job in K-12 education in part so that I could continue to spend lots of active time with my sons. This was almost certainly not the best outcome for me professionally. It wasn’t what either my wife or I thought we wanted when we first had children. But looking back, our decisions led to what may have been the best possible outcome for our children, given the circumstances we faced at the time. I can certainly say with pride that both of my sons are now independent and thriving and responsible and adventurous young men, at a time in history when a lot of young men are floundering.

Put another way, maybe a normative vision where two parents participate full-time in the formal paid labor market starting when their children leave infancy isn’t actually the ideal, or at least not the only ideal? Maybe my own family’s experience, which frankly involved a certain allergy to institutionalized child care, is another possible ideal? Maybe “conservative”-identified visions of greater reliance on extended family and church institutions can make a lot of sense when it comes to the childcare issue? Maybe “liberal” and non-heteronormative visions around family of choice and polyamory can make equal sense? My wife and I were able to make a very traditional nuclear family structure work effectively for us, though with largely reversed gender roles. But as David Brooks famously points out, this kind of (mostly) enclosed nuclear family, while still a kind of social gold standard, is becoming unworkable in practice for all but the most privileged parents. 

A Cost Crisis

I truly want to be a bit humble about what I have to say on the child care issue, and to be sensitive that this is an enormously complicated and touchy and high-stakes policy topic. In this vein, I’ll point readers to this easy-to-use webpage from the Economic Policy Institute, which details child care costs by state and compares infant care with the cost to attend college. 

Child care cost burdens are frankly stunning (especially in blue states) and outrageous as a matter of both morals and public policy. For instance, here in California, EPI estimates that average child care costs for a four-year-old run to $1,085 per month, and that infant care costs are substantially greater than the cost of in-state tuition to attend public college or university. For a society that supposedly places high value on children and parents, these kinds of costs are unsustainable. Most families, it should also be noted, are not in a position to cover the costs of child care through one parent staying home, as was true when my kids were small. One piece of evidence backing this last claim is the finding that almost 39 percent of births in California were to unmarried women in 2022. It may also be worth noting in this regard that the percent of births to unmarried women tends to be even higher in supposedly culturally conservative red states. 

Elon’s Witless DOGE Heightens Risk of Flood and Food Supply Disaster

As I said in the beginning of this essay, I don’t know how to respond to the chaos and immorality being wrought by the Trump Administration. But as a Californian living below a gigantic dam built in an earlier era when US government institutions were empowered to create cost-effective infrastructure, I was struck earlier this week by this Los Angeles Times article detailing planned cuts at the Bureau of Reclamation. Then I was struck just today by this Washington Post article describing Trump’s demand to release water from California reservoirs seemingly for no other purpose than to create a false impression that stored water was being used to fight the Los Angeles fires.

Water supply management is serious business in California, literally deadly serious. Just look at this aerial photo of Folsom dam, managed by BOR and only 17 miles upstream from where I am writing this essay. The aerial view gives a sense for the sheer volume of water held behind the dam—more than a million acre feet, enough to spread 1.5 feet of water evenly over the entirety of Rhode Island. Folsom is a truly gargantuan and critically important piece of civil engineering infrastructure. It is also, it might be worth noting, only the ninth-largest dam and reservoir system just in California. The aging water infrastructure of the American West is mission-critical for both urban and agricultural water supply, and helps undergird the high-tech economy that Mr. Musk’s tech brothers depend upon every day. 

Also every day, like every other person in greater Sacramento, my life and safety depends on professionals managing Folsom dam to the best known standards. By toying in such a cavalier way with an institution like the Bureau of Reclamation, Mr. Musk and President Trump display their lack of concern for everyday people, as Sly Stone once described us commoners in Sacramento. They also show their fundamental unfitness for positions of significant governmental responsibility.