Opinion | Parents Who Stay Home Should Get Public Child Care Support Too

In some European countries, parents can choose between sending their children to heavily subsidized day care or receiving a stipend from the government to take care of them at home.

In most parts of America, parents of babies and toddlers have neither option. The United States is a global outlier among developed countries for its lack of government support for child care.

That’s why it’s notable that New York State is on the cusp of expanding access to affordable child care. New York lawmakers on Saturday announced the approval of a budget that would help provide subsidies for families making up to 300 percent of the federal poverty level, around $83,000 for a family of four. With the average price of child care for an infant in New York sitting above $15,000 per year, such subsidies are urgently needed.

But child care outside the home is only half of the equation, and the New York plan includes no public child care support targeted at families who choose to care for young children themselves. It gives the day care option, but not the option for parents to stay at home.

New York is not alone in leaving this option out. The child care proposal in President Biden’s Build Back Better legislation, now stalled in the Senate, and most such plans promoted by politicians and advocacy organizations also provide no support for this type of in-home child care.

As other states take up the child care question in the years ahead, they should opt for a more expansive policy that provides public support to all children, not just those enrolled in formal child care centers.

It would be possible to give parents with young children a choice between heavily subsidized child care services or a cash benefit to compensate them for care at home. Finland and Norway already do it.

It would also be popular. Around half of children below the age of 3 are cared for by their parents, and a majority of parents say they want this option. This arrangement is most prevalent among parents with lower levels of education and households with lower levels of income.

If New York’s plan included a home care option, it would take some pressure off the child care sector during the rollout of a new subsidy. Child care providers are already struggling with labor shortages, and proposed efforts to attract more workers seem unlikely to end those shortages. A home care option would result in fewer kids vying for scarce slots and ensure that those who failed to snag a seat would still get some benefit out of the program.

Providing benefits for parents working inside the home is not without its critics. The feminist writer Kathleen Geier has argued that home child care benefits reinforce gender inequities by encouraging traditional gender roles.

It’s possible that more mothers may opt for home child care benefits than fathers, so that gender inequality, when measured by things like employment rates and labor market earnings, might be higher in a system with these kinds of benefits.

But there is also a long history of left-wing feminist thought that favors paying for labor inside the home, dating back to the International Wages for Housework Campaign in the 1970s, which argued that unpaid home care labor, primarily done by women, was a form of capitalist and gender exploitation. On this point, the feminists in favor of reimbursing care within the home appear to have the upper hand. Studies in countries with home child care benefits show that the payments have only a modest impact on the number of women who work in the formal labor market. Thus, these benefits mostly determine whether home child care is paid, not whether parents choose to rely on it.

Some parents provide in-home care out of personal preference. That preference may be rooted in the desire to have more time with their children or the belief that they can provide them more attention than a child care provider might. (There’s certainly little evidence to suggest that home care is worse for children than going to day care.) Some parents may also prefer spending their days taking care of their young children rather than doing the kinds of jobs that employers are willing to hire them for.

The idea that success should be defined by one’s labor market status should provoke skepticism. Not everyone wants to climb the corporate ladder and not everyone can. Forcing parents to stock shelves when they’d rather watch their toddler is a victory for no one. And depriving all would-be parental child caregivers of personal income in order to nudge a handful of them into the labor market is not a sensible way to pursue equality, gender or otherwise.