Paying Parents to Watch their Babies

A controversial/commonsense idea

There’s been a bit of a whirlwind in Family Policy Twitter over a rumored proposal to shift around federal money that subsidizes childcare for low-income families. The proposal (which hasn’t been leaked to me, so I haven’t read it) allegedly allows parents to count as childcare providers, so that a household with one working parent could have the other parent stay home and receive the subsidy herself as a stipend.

Even without seeing the full proposal, I can tell there are some challenges to trying to support families using this tool: you’d be increasing the number of people eligible for funding without increasing the pool of funds and it’s not obvious a program Congress established to support working parents can legally support a non-working spouse.

But there’s a core idea here that I do support: it’s hard for parents of young children to be told the government is eager to support them… in having anyone but their baby’s parents watch their baby. So, in the Daily Wire, I gave my analysis (as best I could) of the rumors of a proposal, and also highlighted a policy tool that might be a better vector for this idea:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, some states experimented with an alternative to the CCDF funds called At Home Infant Care (AHIC) that, like this proposed rule, let subsidy payments go to parents, not professionals. AHIC was funded by states, since CCDF funds explicitly couldn’t be used to support parents directly. The programs were promising but ultimately lapsed. Instead of having states cover the cost, the federal government could exempt one parent in a household from CCDF’s work requirement for the first six months to a year of their baby’s life. Caring for an infant would be treated the way being enrolled in school is — an investment in the family’s future.

Encouraging states to resume pilots of AHIC-like programs with federal dollars would allow enthusiastic governors such as Spencer Cox to experiment while other states wait to see how the programs play out. Allowing parents of babies to care for them directly, as they most frequently desire, would mean the government was supporting the natural family, not forcing parents to contract out the care that matters most.

Because the idea came out of this admin, it’s been treated as primarily culture war, not family policy. But, as Kendra Hurley points out for the Atlantic, most countries with strong public support for child care pair it with payments to parents of young children who stay home.

It’s not ‘traddiness” that leads the Nordics to pay stay at home parents of young babies. It’s partly responsiveness to parents’ desires (many parents, abroad and in America, prefer very young children are cared for by family, at home). And it’s partly simple economic practicalities.

Infants are very very expensive to include in professional child care settings. They need very low caregiver to infant ratios. The baby rooms at a center usually can’t cover the cost of the caregivers who work there, and rely on cross-subsidy by overcharging the three- and four-year-olds’ parents. As Hurley writes:

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.

Let me round out this child care triptych with an excellent post from The Fifth Wave on what it takes for the state (or individual providers) to support flexible childcare. The post discusses several examples, but I’m pulling out just one below:

However, unless part of a well-designed hybrid offering or a public model built around drop-in, making room for flexibility is often burdensome for day care structures. Despite frequently having vacant spots when children are ill or on holiday, ECE staff struggle to reliably fill them, having to make individual calls to parents in their community who might need childcare. This takes time and energy away from their central responsibilities towards children. But vacant spots mean lost revenue, a crucial concern in a time where economic pressures and falling birth rates threaten many day care structures with closure.

Alban Gamot experienced that gap himself when his son, whom he and his wife registered for ‘occasional’ day care after missing the cutoff date for full-time, was only offered one half-day slot nine months after initially signing up. Digging into the issue, he learned that about 20% of the country’s half-a-million day care spots go unused every day, while 87% of parents see their requests for drop-in denied.¹⁰ In 2019, he founded Crèche à la demande (now CALD): a digital interface linking parents in need of drop-in care to structures with available spots.

Once signed up, families get matched with the childcare structure closest to them, and/or most adapted to theirs and their children’s needs. They become part of that structure’s “bubble”, a group of families known to and trusted by them. Crèches pay a monthly subscription to be registered on the platform. Whenever a regular spot frees up – up to a month in advance when a family shares their upcoming vacation dates, or down to an hour if a child is sick or unforeseeably absent – they easily enter that information into the platform, which notifies eligible parents. The latter can then reserve the spots on a first-come-first-serve basis, at the price of a municipal daycare…

Innovations of this kind fit within a broader trend we could call “systematising the village” – or, as I conceptualised it elsewhere, institutionalising fluidity. In a similar dynamic to that of de-institutionalisation in child protection and psychiatry, the shift towards the home in eldercare, or the growing popularity of birth centres, some systems are attempting to partly re-create the conditions of family and community care whilst ensuring high safeguarding and health standards. In this case, mobile or drop-in day care seeks to mimic the low barriers to entry and logistical ease of, say, dropping your child at their aunt’s for a few hours, but within an organised context. While they do not aim to replace those foundational structures, they can offer a quality alternative for those without extensive support networks.

I’d love to hear from you about what you think of At Home Infant Care, child allowances, extended paid leave, or other programs that pay parents who chose to be home with children in their first year.

Where have you seen attempts (successful or not) at “systematising the village” or “institutionalising fluidity” in Mélina Magdelénat’s framing?