The other day, I came across an article about child care that felt so familiar I let out an exasperated sigh. Child care, the article announced, is now more expensive than college tuition and rent in most states. Many of us had just read another version of the article in March. And before that, in November 2024. Then there’s the one that dates back a little further — to 2013. 

Many of these stories, which seem to come out on an annual basis, fail to mention that this is a problem that spans decades. The real news is that it hasn’t gotten any better, and many American lawmakers don’t seem to care enough to take action. 

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.

“We have been having many of the same child care battles for a long time, for decades and decades and decades,” Haspel told me.

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.

As he writes, it’s clear why we haven’t made much progress as a nation, and why we remain behind nearly every other wealthy country in investing in child care: “We have never established that good child care belongs among the pantheon of American values.” 

While Haspel’s book focuses more on why we need more robust child care policy than how we get there, he provides a few ideas for the latter: giving child care educators a wage that could support their own families, investing in stay-at-home parents and informal caregivers along with licensed care, and including before- and after-school care and summer care in the system. While those seem like lofty goals, Haspel argues it is indeed fully “American” to embrace such policies. Access to high-quality child care, he argues, is not an “individual family obligation but rather a societal imperative.”

This story about child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.