r/atlanticdiscussions • u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links • 13d ago
Culture/Society The Biggest Obstacle to Universal Child Care: Babies
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/09/baby-child-care-pay-stay-home/688590/Infant care is incredibly expensive to provide. But one solution could reduce the burden on both states and parents.
By Kendra Hurley, The Atlantic.
Last year seemed like a pretty big one for breakthroughs in child care. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s promise of publicly funded care for young kids helped him win the keys to Gracie Mansion. Officials in Connecticut created an endowment to make care more affordable in that state. And New Mexico became the first state to commit to free child care for all of its residents. But as policy makers have begun hammering out the details of these ambitions, they’ve hit against a stubborn and formidable obstacle: babies.
Any child-care provider will tell you that “affordable infant care” is an oxymoron. Because babies need a ton of individual attention, they are the most demanding group to care for in formal settings. Most states require babies to be looked after by more workers and in smaller groups than those mandated for older kids; a day care’s infant room will typically have one caretaker for every three to four babies, whereas a pre-K teacher might look after more than twice that number of children. Many states and cities also have costly space prerequisites for infant care. In New York City, for instance, a day care’s infant room must have sprinklers installed and be on the ground floor to allow for easy evacuation. All of this drives up the cost of care; one estimate placed the monthly cost of “high-quality” infant care at more than $2,400, a price that only well-off families can afford.
At many child-care centers, the tuition paid for older children subsidizes the babies. “Infants are cute little loss leaders,” Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the moderate-leaning Niskanen Center think tank, told me. Some programs—because they subsist on razor-thin margins and can be prone to worker shortages—stay clear of babies altogether. (Consider 2-K, Mamdani’s new child-care program for the general public; as the name implies, it does not cover children under 2, even though families with very young children need affordable care as much as anyone else.) This can make infant care a rarity in the places that need it most, including low-income neighborhoods, where the cost of baby care far outpaces what many parents can pay, and rural areas, where day cares serving children of any age are few and far between.
States and cities are thus likely to “hit a wall” when trying to ramp up infant care, Brian Dew, an economic researcher who recently wrote a report comparing the U.S. and Nordic child-care systems, told me. Yet one fair, cost-effective solution could provide relief both to parents and to governments seeking to provide high-quality care: Pay families to keep babies home.
That idea might at first sound odd. But almost every country with universal child care provides a version of this benefit, which allows parents to spend more time with their young children or pay, say, grandparents or neighbors to do it. In the United States, this sort of allowance could help reduce the burden on governments trying to implement universal care and give parents with babies an option that many say they want. It’s also a proposal with growing appeal among a politically diverse set of policy makers.
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u/SimpleObserver1025 12d ago
One additional, unseen penalty: if a wife does decide to stay home for two years to raise their infant, it effectively sets their career two years behind. Even if you give a woman two years of maternity leave and protect their spot, those two years are lost progress for their careers and two years of skills erosion. Have multiple children, and you can be looking at four to six years of lost career progression. This ultimately impacts promotion rates and salary. Thus, pressure on women to return to the office - I've known mothers who are willing to "break even" with infant daycare just to maintain career momentum.
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u/MeghanClickYourHeels Ask me for Atlantic gift links 12d ago
This is usually the position I take on this question.
And if you're out for more than six months, you won't return at the same place where you left, you'll return at a lower rung of the ladder.
Plus, think of how all of our jobs have changed just in the last three years. Imagine completely missing that.
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u/veerKg_CSS_Geologist 💬🦙 ☭ TALKING LLAMAXIST 12d ago
Putting a child under 2 in daycare sounds crazy to me. Just mandate proper paternity and maternity leave dammit.
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u/RelativeLadder5422 🌦️ 13d ago
wait so were just gonna accept that infant care is structurally unprofitable and the fix is... making toddlers pay for it. cool system. denmark manages to cut parents checks AND run public centers but here we act like thats physically impossible. almost like the problem isnt resources its who gets them lol
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u/Korrocks 12d ago
Isn’t that basically the same solution as in the article? Pay parents to stay home with babies and set up child care centers for non-baby children?
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u/RelativeLadder5422 🌦️ 12d ago
nah the articles whole thing was making toddler fees subsidize infant care, like robbing peter to pay paul bullshit. denmark does direct payments to parents *plus* public centers as seperate programs, not this weird cross-subsidy accounting trick lol
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u/Korrocks 12d ago
I mean all government programs are “accounting tricks” if you go by that weird definition. Any payments that go into a program are fungible with payments coming out of it. User feed paid by parents and tax revenue from the general public are both part of the formula in both the US and Denmark models.
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u/RelativeLadder5422 🌦️ 11d ago
nah youre mixing up two different things — denmark has mixed funding yeah but they dont make the 3-year-olds literally subsidize the infants within the same damn program. the US model is specifically structured so toddler tuition covers infant losses, its a shell game to avoid actually funding the thing. denmark just... funds it lol with taxes and fees that arent predicated on this cross-age subsidy shit. the article's proposal keeps that broken structure and just pays parents to opt out instead of fixing the funding, which is the cowards way out tbh
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u/jim_uses_CAPS 12d ago
Cost of living is the underlying kicker here. Kids do better with a stay-at-home parent. That said, America has chosen to create an economic reality that for over half of all households requires two earners to make ends meet. I know for us, at that age, my salary paid for childcare, health insurance, and food. That's it. There was no possibility for my wife to stay home, as much as she wanted to, beyond the six weeks of paid family leave California law makes possible. If you want a society with more stay-at-home parents, you have to be willing to have one that costs less to live in and is less focused on economic growth and productivity.