The federal government should be investing billions to make care affordable and accessible for families nationwide, not abdicating its role.

Across the country, families are straining to afford child care, on average spending $13,128 a year per child. This cost consumes roughly 10 percent of household earnings for the median dual-earner households, and a staggering 35 percent of earnings for the median single-income household.1 In the absence of deep federal investment to support child care affordability, some states and the District of Columbia are raising revenue to fill the gaps. The federal government should be investing billions to make care affordable and accessible for families nationwide, not abdicating its role.

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On its own, the private child care system has proven unable to provide child care at a cost that all families can afford while paying educators a living wage.2 Relying on private financing and very limited public subsidies, child care providers across the country are struggling to stay open, operating on very thin profit margins.3 Meanwhile, families are straining to afford to care.

The cost of care does not have to be this high.

The cost of care does not have to be this high.4 Child care is a public good, and investing in it adequately, as our peer nations do, would yield important benefits to children, their caregivers, and the economy as a whole.5 But, for generations, the federal government has underfunded and devalued child care and other forms of care. This is in large part because when Congress passed precedent-setting legislation around the treatment of care, domestic care work was mostly done by Black women.6 In the 1930s, as a direct result of racism and sexism, New Deal legislation codified lower standards for these domestic workers, excluding them from federal benefits and protections.7

Learn more about federal funding for child care

The federal government can, and should, set a different precedent by treating and funding child care as a highly valued public good that is essential to the economic and social well-being of the country. Dedicating recurring funding that grows with demand to fund child care for all children is critical to advancing public well-being, bolstering the economy, and reversing a long history of inequitable economic and health outcomes across racial lines.