Child Care Should Not Be Welfare

We must build an affirmative child care system that anchors a new era of family support. Biden’s American Rescue Plan is a start.

by Elliot Haspel

There’s a story about the real-world impacts of child care policy that I’ve heard too many times and in too many contexts. It goes something like this: A parent needs help paying for child care in order to work, but by the time her child care subsidy application gets processed, she has lost her job because she didn’t have child care. One iteration of this story appeared in a 2013 Washington Post article, featuring a Washington, D.C., resident named Andria Swanson. There was only one office in D.C. in which to apply for child care assistance, and she needed to appear in person. The article goes on: “Over the past two years, Swanson said, she has repeatedly waited in line at this office, once for more than nine hours as she missed work and college classes. She’s made multiple trips after caseworkers told her she needed more paperwork. At one point, she said, she missed so much work trying to get the child-care subsidy that she lost her job, landed in a shelter and went on [public assistance].”

This is what happens when you treat child care as welfare. Yet even as administrations have changed from Democratic to Republican and now back again, we show no signs of altering our approach anytime soon -- but we have an opportunity. President-elect Biden’s newly proposed “American Rescue Plan” is a breath of the freshest air in many years, and shows a willingness to embrace bold ideas. One of those ideas, moving forward, should be transitioning away from a child care welfare state towards a proactive system that meets the needs of all families and children.

The welfare nature of American child care policy is not a severable component. The welfare nature is elemental; it was baked into the philosophical and policy DNA of what has evolved into our current system—a feature, as they say, not a bug. The eminent historian Sonya Michel wrote last summer about the arc of federal involvement in child care. These roots are important enough to quote her at length. (The whole article is well worth a read.) Picking up the story in the late 1980s, Michel recounts:

Starting in 1988, Congress enacted several federally funded child care programs for welfare recipients that were designed to encourage them to either find jobs or pursue training or education....
In tethering child care subsidies to mandatory employment, lawmakers transformed what feminists had initially envisioned as an entitlement for all mothers—indeed, for all wage-earning parents—into a lever for punitive policy toward poor and low-income mothers....
As the major piece of postwar legislation concerning child care, the 1996 welfare law established the principle that federal support would be forthcoming only for the most disadvantaged mothers—and not to support employment as an option but as a condition of receiving public assistance. Along with Medicaid, the food stamp program (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Section 8 housing (vouchers for low-income housing aid), federal aid to the states for cash assistance and child care makes up what scholars call a “residual welfare state,” one that offers public support only as a last resort, when applicants implicitly concede that they are incapable of supporting themselves. A residual welfare state contrasts with a proactive or affirmative state that regards public provisions such as child care as a form of collective social good designed to achieve a consensual goal.

While the welfare frame heavily intersects the question of universal vs. targeted early care and education services, the implications run much deeper. It forces us onto a technocratic plane where policy battles are fought over what a benefits matrix should look like or which eligibility and accountability measures must be in place. This approach elides the deeper, rights-based question we should be asking: How do we create a policy framework that supports all families with young children having the opportunity to thrive?

California’s recently released Master Plan for Early Learning and Care is in some ways the best-case scenario for a welfare approach to child care, and it is instructive both for its strengths and limitations. A few caveats: my critique is not of the process involved in crafting this 113-page document. It was an enormous undertaking in a state that is basically a nation, and those involved deserve our gratitude. What’s more, there are many aspects of the Master Plan that are laudable and should be replicated, such as transparently naming the price tag and cost model of an improved system, as well as marrying paid leave and racial equity into the early care and education conversation.

I also say this is the best-case scenario because the Master Plan sets out goals that attempt to mitigate bureaucratic flaws. For instance, one goal is to “Create a system that has ‘no wrong door’ for parents through a common eligibility screener and enrollment application. Institute categorical and presumptive eligibility for programs to allow families easier access and more immediate services.” The Master Plan has thoughtful considerations for how to generate a sliding scale of parent fees that minimizes the “benefits cliff” and, for once, doesn’t attempt to push for increasing practitioner qualifications absent substantially increased compensation.

What the Master Plan doesn’t do, however, is consider whether there should be eligibility screeners or sliding scales at all.

While I am always wary of applying a K-12 frame to early care and education, it is useful here. When the time came to enroll my kindergarten-aged child in our neighborhood public school last year, there were flyers and advertisements and enrollment fairs. To complete the process, I went to an online portal, filled out some identifying information, uploaded pictures of her birth certificate and a utility bill that I took with my phone, and she was set for the next 13 years.

Moreover, I could have done that at any point between April and September (and at literally any point in the school year if I was homeschooling and decided I wanted to enroll her). If I was confused, I could have gone to the school and they would have helped me. That is an “affirmative state that regards public provisions...as a form of collective social good designed to achieve a consensual goal.” On the other end of the age spectrum, enrolling in Medicare is a similarly affirmative process. Note that these affirmative social goods do not equate to “no paperwork or red tape”—I had to dig up that birth certificate—but the contrast with Andria Swanson’s story is stark.

The other problem with the welfare frame of child care is that it conflates being in the external labor force with needing child care. If the only people eligible for child care assistance are those with a job outside the home, care becomes a purely economic function; it has no value outside of enabling external work. That not only has the consequence of isolating stay-at-home parents. In many cases, it also forces the hands of families, rather than allowing them to curate a care situation that best meets their needs and preferences. This construct creates deep threats both for families and American society writ large.

As philosopher Nancy Fraser has put it, “Between the need for increased working hours and the cutback in public services, the financialized capitalist regime is systematically depleting our capacities for sustaining social bonds. This form of capitalism is stretching our ‘caring’ energies to the breaking point.” Indeed, as modern parents (at almost all income brackets) become increasingly stressed out and forced to claw for financial purchase, forcing inadequate subsidies through a vise of work requirements is unhelpful at best, actively harmful at worst. In addition to being arduous and creating a perpetual bureaucracy, it fails to honor the labor and value of caregiving.

The alternative is to flip child care on its head. Increasingly and hearteningly, advocates are using the language of child care as a “public good,” but it’s worth unpacking what that actually means. Public goods are by their very nature ungated. Parks and fire services don’t have sliding scales; public schools are not available only to those who work outside the home (to be fair, Medicare does have fees, but that’s to ward against frivolous overuse of medical services; that concern does not apply to child care).

Strategies like expanding subsidies -- even substantially -- or boosting tax credits are in essence attempting to pour new wine into old wineskins. The American Rescue Plan understandably proposes using existing mechanisms to surge a desperately needed $40 billion to the child care industry. This is wholly appropriate given our state of emergency; child care programs and families needed money flowing many yesterdays ago. It should not, however, be seen as a lasting strategy.

As Matt Bruenig has explained, families would be best served by simplifying our web of tax credits into permanent monthly payments for all American parents, akin to the child benefits of nations like Canada. Similarly, Michel notes that to truly move beyond a welfare frame, “Congress will probably need to replace the child care block grant, which, though very helpful in the past and given a second life in pandemic relief, is still framed as support for low-income families rather than as a universal program.” Discarding the old wineskins also opens up revenue levers that are generally considered off limits to welfare programs, such as payroll taxes or progressive income tax increases on the wealthy.

A new approach would also place families at the center. As Capita’s Joe Waters has said to me, the first step in fixing America’s family policy would be for America to actually set a family policy. We need to lead with values and principles, and from there consider a comprehensive rights-based framework of supports—supports that bolster families in all of their caregiving forms, as well as the care workforce.

After all, the residual welfare state atomizes the various elements of life, but families do not experience child care, food security, worker protections, and housing as separate issues. A “Master Plan for Families With Young Children” would necessarily break down these bureaucratic barriers, but we are too often beholden to our systems’ hereditary myopia. Among other ills, those blinders cause us to miss key causal links such as the fact that school readiness and academic achievement are far more linked to family income and relational stability than anything else.

I will readily concede there is a chasm between the status quo and an affirmative state of caregiving. Indeed, it may surprise you to learn I am actually quite supportive of President-elect Biden’s broader care plan, including its focus on multigenerational caregiving concerns. I consider proposals like this and the Child Care for Working Families Act to be a necessary and hard-fought “transition fuel,” if you will. For instance, tripling the current federal investment in child care will allow us to start boosting educator wages, and widening access to pre-K for three and four-year-olds will necessitate building out needed physical infrastructure. However, we need to be explicit that we are headed towards our “net-zero emission” goal, to extend the analogy, or we will end up declaring victory before we have arrived.

To put a fine point on it: Policymakers should declare that the welfare-based child care block grant will be phased out by 2030 or 2035. Until then, we must build, in parallel—like a new bridge beside the old crumbling one—an affirmative child care system that anchors a new era of family support.

Elliot Haspel is a former elementary school teacher and early childhood policy analyst who writes about early childhood and K-12 education policy. He holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured on The Washington Post, The New Republic, Romper, The 74 Million, and other sites. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, “Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It,” was published in November 2019.

Thanks to Nancy Vorsanger for her assistance editing this piece.

Joe WatersJanuary 15, 2021