Excerpts
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I asked Elliot Haspel his thoughts on this a few weeks ago when I interviewed him about his new book, “Raising a Nation,” which will be available Aug. 11. In the book, he presents 10 arguments — some of them well known and others less intuitive — for why child care needs to be a more supported part of American society. His book starts with an anecdote that echoes my observation on the dispiriting lack of momentum around the issue: In 1998, President William Jefferson Clinton stood in the Rose Garden and declared in an address that child care was essential to the nation’s economy. President Barack Obama made the same argument in 2015. President Donald Trump did the same in 2019. Yet as the years go by, little changes.
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Haspel’s arguments in “Raising a Nation” include “The Economic Case,” where he digs into how child care affects business productivity and the labor force; and the “The Patriotic Case,” where he presents parenthood as patriotic and argues child care is important for American democracy.
He cites numerous worrisome examples of the consequences of insufficient policy and investment. In making “The Community Case,” for instance, he tells a jarring story from Montrose, Colorado, where the lack of child care has led to difficulties recruiting and retaining police officers. That, in turn, negatively affects the city’s crime rate and response time to emergency calls. And in arguing “The Antipoverty Case,” he highlights extensive research on how a lack of child care is a key theme for families who are unable to move out of poverty.
“Care is, in fact, just as important to our social infrastructure as having a public education system, having public libraries, having public parks,” he told me.
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