The drive for government-funded child care policies is gaining momentum. New Mexico has become the first state to guarantee child care for all residents. In New York City, Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani made child care a central promise of his campaign, and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has expressed her support, although the specifics of a viable plan remain unclear.
It is not surprising that a growing number of elected officials are turning their attention to child care. At a time when more Americans are worried about affordability—from housing to education—the cost of paying a person or facility to care for children is one of the biggest challenges facing families. While average child care costs amount to about 9.4 percent of median family earnings for an infant in South Dakota, that share climbs to nearly 21 percent of annual income in New Mexico. In cities such as New York, the cost can be more than $20,000.
Child care is more expensive in the United States than in most other countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In 2021, the United States spent 0.2 percent of its GDP to support the care of children who were 2 years old or younger, compared with an average of 0.7 percent of GDP. in other wealthy OECD nations.
As Lauren Hilgers wrote in Harper’s, “It takes a village to raise a child, as the saying goes, but you will have to pay the village.” Not only is child care extraordinarily costly, but shortages of providers persist because the expense of running facilities is so high.
With all the momentum at the state and local levels, what remains missing is any serious discussion of a federal policy that would move beyond the existing patchwork of private facilities, federal tax credits, and programs targeted toward low-income families—a system that has proved to be wholly inadequate for meeting the needs of the nation.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon killed the best opportunity that the country had to establish a federal program that would have greatly diminished the burden facing working families after having children. Despite bipartisan support in Capitol Hill for the Comprehensive Child Development Act, Nixon vetoed the legislation, putting a nail in the coffin of future efforts to confront this massive dilemma.
The campaign for child care is not new. Since the early 20th century, numerous coalitions have formed to lobby for government programs to support families with preschool-age children.
There have been a few notable efforts. During the New Deal in the 1930s, the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt financed “emergency nursery schools” through the Work Progress Administration (WPA), a program that aimed to put Americans—including teachers—back to work. These facilities were open to the children of the unemployed, and WPA workers also depended on them for support.
The number of schools dramatically increased during World War II, when the federal government expanded into areas that were extremely difficult to address in peacetime. Between 1943 and 1946, through the Lanham Act, Congress allocated billions of dollars to transform the emergency nursery schools into full-time child care centers. The decision was driven by the influx of women into wartime defense production; when the government needed women to build planes, bombs, and other armaments, it found a way to help care for children who were not old enough to be in school (“war nurseries”) and provide extended hours after school ended.
The care was open to everyone. “The services were open to high-income, low-income, high-education, low-education, married mothers, unmarried mothers, the employed and the unemployed,” said scholar Chris Herbst.
Yet the program was insufficient. There were too few slots—only 3,000 centers, which could care for 130,000 children, were available in 1944, even though 2 million needed care. Many of the facilities were in poor condition and lacked well-structured programs. And when the war ended, so did initiative. There was not enough support in 1946 to pass the Maternal and Child Welfare Act, which would have made the wartime program permanent.
Rather than creating a solution built on federal facilities, federal funding, and federal standards, the government instead subsidized the private market. The Revenue Act of 1954 introduced tax incentives that allowed low- and moderate-income families to deduct child care expenses. This became part of what the political scientist Christopher Howard called the “hidden welfare state” of indirect “tax expenditures” bolstering private markets. During the 1960s, President Lyndon Johnson expanded support for low-income families through programs such as Head Start.
But the pressure continued to build for a better solution. As more women entered the workforce and feminism challenged the gendered hierarchies embedded in the economy, a growing coalition began calling for a federal plan. Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights activist and lawyer, played a key role in building political support for legislation. The National Education Association and the National Organization for Women also the backed the bill.
In 1971, Minnesota Sen. Walter Mondale, the liberal lion who had replaced Sen. Hubert Humphrey, and Indiana Rep. John Brademas, an affable Rhodes scholar whose mother had taught at an elementary school, joined forces to move legislation through Capitol Hill. They believed that it would be possible to win the support of the Republican president, Nixon.
Not only were there many Republicans who backed a child care policy, in part as a preferred alternative to welfare, but Nixon himself had also been speaking about the issue since starting his presidency in 1969. “So crucial is the matter of early growth that we must make a national commitment to providing all American children an opportunity for healthful and stimulating development during the first five years of life,” Nixon proclaimed to Congress in February 1969, just a few weeks after taking office.
On Dec. 2, 1971, the Senate passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act bill by a bipartisan vote of 63 to 17, and on Dec. 7, the House approved it by a vote of 211 to 187, also with bipartisan support. Liberal Republicans such New York’s Jacob Javits, Pennsylvania’s Richard Schweiker, and Oregon’s Robert Packwood boasted that the legislation would “strengthen the family” while remaining “fiscally responsible.”
The sponsors even managed to overcome criticism from liberals such as New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm, who argued that the bill did not go far enough to assist women. “There are 32 million working women in the United States who have over 5 million children under the age of 5,” Chisholm said. “Because of the day care shortage only 2 percent of these women use group day care facilities. The rest face a nightmare hodge-podge of arrangements with elderly relatives, a rapid turnover of sitters and bleak custodial parking lots euphemistically called family care centers.”
The final legislation, part of a $6 billion extension of the Office of Economic Opportunity—the centerpiece of Johnson’s “war on poverty”—would have invested more than $2 billion in its first year (worth more than $11 billion today) in grants for high-quality programs required to meet federal standards. Every child would have been eligible. The centers would be free for poor families, with a sliding scale for contributions from middle-class households. The programs would have offered a wide range of services, from prenatal care to educational classes. The editors of the Washington Post praised the final legislation as being “as important a breakthrough for the young as Medicare was for the old.”
But by late 1971, the political landscape had shifted. With Nixon’s reelection campaign on the horizon, the president was becoming concerned about criticism from a growing number of conservative Republicans, particularly as opposition to his policy of detente (easing relations with the Soviet Union and China) mounted.
Although the criticism was still limited, Nixon feared that his upcoming trip to China, part of a major diplomatic breakthrough with the communist superpower, would intensify these tensions. There was also right-wing frustration with Nixon’s having imposed wage and price controls to combat inflation. Taking a firm stand against the left on child care offered a useful way to shore up his conservative credentials.
Activists such as Phyllis Schlafly, the founder and head of the Eagle Forum, were increasingly critical of feminism and voiced alarm about the stability of the “traditional” single-wage earning American family. (She didn’t mention to the public that she employed domestic help to raise her six children while she worked.) In the view of these conservatives, national child care resembled the policies of socialist countries, with the state controlling family life. Opponents distributed leaflets comparing the proposal to Nazi youth programs of the 1930s.
Through child care, warned South Carolina Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond, Washington would “mold the characters of our nation’s young.” The plan, argued New York Conservative Party Sen. James Buckley, the older brother of the National Review’s William Buckley Jr., “threatens the very foundation of personal liberty.”=.
On Dec. 10, Nixon vetoed the bill, and supporters lacked the votes needed to override him. He denounced the program not only on the grounds of cost and government expansion, but also—taking the advice of speechwriter and advisor Patrick Buchanan—on ideological and moralistic grounds. Buchanan later said that he felt that Nixon had a “real problem with the Conservative Movement.”
Nixon depicted the child care proposal as essentially a communist invention—a reckless attempt by Washington to take over child care and, by extension, the family itself. Like national health care, he claimed, it represented a slippery slope that would inevitably lead to a totalitarian regime within the United States
“For the federal government to plunge headlong financially into supporting child development,” Nixon said, “would commit the vast moral authority of the National government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”
Outraged, Brademas said that Nixon “seems more interested in appeasing his radical right-wing critics than he does in making good on his commitment to America’s children.” Mondale described the veto a “cruel blow to children and working parents.”
After the bill died, no subsequent federal proposal ever gained comparable traction. Instead, the federal government continued to expand its patchwork system that left costs rising, most families without meaningful federal support, and child care dependent on a private and profit-driven market.
In 1971, the same year that Nixon vetoed the bill, Congress extended tax reductions for private care. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed legislation passed by the Democratic Congress, the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which provided more than $800 million dollars to the states. Six years later, President Bill Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which expanded support to various programs assisting low-income families.
The path that the United States chose has not worked. The nation continues to lag behind many others, including Finland, Norway, Iceland, Sweden, Germany, and Canada, as well as Denmark, Luxembourg, Austria, and France, where governments invest much more into early childhood programs and guarantee high-quality care—an investment that most experts agree is beneficial to the development of healthy and productive citizens. These countries maintain policies that treat child care as a public good.
American families are struggling to keep up with rising child care costs. States and cities are trying to fill the gap, yet without expanded and direct federal support, they cannot meet the scale of the challenge.
