Excerpts
Every so often, an article pops up that basically suggests liberals would really like the government (via government-funded child care programs) rather than parents to raise American children, perhaps because they would like to indoctrinate them as tiny socialists, perhaps because they’d like to use child care programs to suck money from the public teat.
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The Emerging Consensus Around Child Care Pluralism
Back in 2021, Patrick T Brown wrote a report calling for what he described as “child care pluralism.” Brown argued that pluralism in this context means:
[I]ncreasing the options available to parents based on their own vision of the good life, rather than imposing a particular model of child care as superior to all others, whether directly or indirectly through reforms meant to influence the tradeoffs parents face. Instead of a heavily-regulated, top-down approach to child care provision, Congress and state legislatures should empower community provision in a way that celebrates the kaleidoscopic diversity of America’s ethnic, racial, and religious traditions and scripts around family life.
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The policy and advocacy ground — for child care and every other policy area — is not static. And indeed, the ground has shifted. There was a time, in recent memory, when not all the above bullet points were true; the Democratic-led 2014 reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, for instance, made it harder for FFN providers to participate in publicly-funded systems. The child care conversation on the Left in 2026 is just not the same child care conversation on the Left in 2016.4 It would be nice if everyone could accept that.
No One Actually Wants 6-Week-Olds in Child Care Centers
I want to spend an extra minute on this persistent claim that Democrats are trying to effectively cause very young children to be separated from their parents by offering subsidized child care instead of giving parents money. It’s frustrating to me, not just because very few infants are actually in child care centers — but because this is a paid leave question, and Republicans keep blocking / not offering national paid leave laws!
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I have never, not once, met a child care advocate (or Democratic politician) who thinks it’s a great thing to have a whole bunch of two-month-old babies who can barely hold their heads up by themselves in non-parental care settings. The reason why child care is offered by some programs starting at six weeks is because only around a quarter of workers have access to paid family leave, so for those who don’t have a trusted FFN caregiver available, what, exactly, is the alternative?
Real Choice Requires Real Money
So we’ve established that these days, liberal child care groups and Democratic politicians are actually pursuing pluralistic child care policies that support families in acquiring the diverse types of care they prefer.
Here’s the thing: you can’t have real child care choices without public funding.
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