See the inspiring stories Come meet us Time to legalize weed?
Child care

Americans want more babies in their lives. Biden's subsidized child care won't help that.

A booming labor force participation rate alone can't tell you if Americans are happy, if families are healthy or if parents can watch their children grow.

Kelsey Bloom
USA TODAY

In “Children of Men,” the dystopian novel made into an acclaimed 2006 film, no child has been born in a quarter of a century and no one can explain why. England, where the novel is set, is a dystopian heap of refuse without hope, without laughter and without love. There’s no future without children, after all. 

The year? 2021. 

We’re not there yet. But things don’t look good. 

In April, the Census Bureau reported that U.S. population growth slowed in the past decade to its lowest rate since the 1930s.

Then, this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that just 3.6 million babies were born in the United States in 2020, falling 4% from the year before. A pandemic baby bust might have been expected, but 2020 was actually the sixth consecutive year of decline. Now, the number of babies a woman in America is projected to have during her lifetime is 1.64, the lowest rate ever recorded.

So we know the cradle is empty. But, often, so is the rocking chair. 

Life expectancy declined for three consecutive years starting in 2014. And growing old seems increasingly perilous as every metric screams that something is wrong: Increasing use of antidepressants across all incomes, drug overdoses, suicides (especially among children and teenagers), alcohol-related illnesses. Not to mention COVID-19 and COVID-related deaths of despair.

It sounds like a land without hope. It also happens to be a land without children.

Or, at least, without as many children as Americans wish we had.

Wither the children?

Gallup has asked Americans what is “the ideal number of children for a family to have?” since 1936. In the late 1970s that ideal hit 2.5 and has stayed about there ever since.

In our own particular families, we are also falling short. Women throughout the developed world are having fewer children than they desire, and the “fertility gap” is higher in countries where fertility rates are lowest.

In decades of surveys, American women say the number of children they want is well above the 2.1 replacement rate. And the number of mothers who reached the end of their childbearing years with only one child doubled from 11% in 1976 to 22% in 2015. 

The contributors to our declining fertility are numerous and complex – bioethical forces like access to contraception and abortion; economic forces like education costs and the two-income trap; social forces like more highly educated women and less desirable men.

A child takes a break from playing at a South Austin child care center in 2018. Day care centers are reopening with reduced enrollment and additional safety measures because of the coronavirus pandemic.

So how to even begin tackling it? Well, policies that explicitly encourage Americans to form families, like an expanded child tax credit or cash benefits, are a good start. Versions of these policies have been proposed by President Joe Biden, severalRepublican and Democratic senators and others

But it is just as important that lawmakers not actively discourage Americans from having the children they say they want by nudging them, through public policy, to make different choices. By this standard, Biden has failed.

Child care vs. cash assistance

Biden’s American Families Plan includes $225 billion in subsidized child care for low-income and middle-class families with children ages 5 and younger, and is touted as intending to increase women’s participation in the labor force.

Subsidizing child care to free up parents for more work signals that the workplace is more important than the home. But this proposal doesn’t even liberate low-wage women, who prefer child care arrangements that don’t tie them to their jobs. 

A cycle of rockets, bombs and hatred:It's hard not to despair in Israel, with our sirens, safe rooms and never-ending hatreds

A recent YouGov/American Compass survey found that while well-educated Americans prefer family policies that included free or discounted child care to cash assistance, less-educated Americans prefer the flexibility of cash assistance or increased wages over subsidized child care. 

In families with children under 5, Americans without a college degree say the best arrangement for their family would be to have one parent working full time while one parent provides child care at home. The second best arrangement for them was one parent working only part time and providing child care part time. Either way, they desire family at home with children.

One parent at home full time was the best arrangement for well-educated Americans too, followed by both parents working and enlisting paid child care. 

Basically, Biden’s proposal forces managerial-class preferences on service-class families. If a woman working an hourly job would rather have the freedom to spend one fewer hour standing behind a cash register so she can make it home in time to have dinner with her children, who benefits from shoehorning parents into this inflexible arrangement?

A mother and child.

Upper middle-class Americans, who outsource their chores to people in the service industry, benefit. Companies selling consumer goods to childless women, who have more disposable income, benefit. Employers, who want parents spending that extra hour at their stations, benefit. 

Then economic metrics like the labor force participation rate improve when we have to hire more workers to staff day care centers, ensuring the person holding a young child as she takes her first unsteady steps is a hired hand rather than a proud parent. 

What a healthy nation looks like

In the short run, the economy appears to thrive on separating parents from their infants and young children. After all, a mother who is paid to clean a stranger’s house has created something of economic value; a mother who cleans her own house has not.

Clearly, economic metrics can’t tell the whole story of a nation’s well-being. 

A child benefit is certainly not enough to live on, nor should it be. It is meant to affirm that children are a demanding but necessary investment in the country’s future, and provide enough room for a family to decide what they need – sometimes that will be child care, sometimes that will be something else, like a car seat or an additional hour in the evening together. Those needs, and the appropriate benefit amount, will change over time. Subsiding child care cuts off choice. Allowances expand it. 

Changing priorities:Millennials like me waited to start families. Paid leave will let me spend time with them.

Contrary to some free marketeers, incentivizing parents to be present for a child’s earliest, most formative years is not a manipulation of people’s private lives equivalent to subsidizing pet ownership. Babies are not puppies.

And contrary to progressive feminists, acknowledging the fact that most women want more than economic status, that they want families, is not reactionary 1950s role-playing. Women are not merely workers. 

Poor children deserve to have their mothers tuck them into bed as much as children from wealthier families. And Americans of all income levels would be better off if they could more easily grow the families they say they want. Family policies that instead encourage alienation won’t make happy homes and loving families, only hopeless heaps of refuse.

Kelsey Bloom is voices editor at USA TODAY. Follow her on Twitter: @KelseyCBloom

Featured Weekly Ad