Day care: the problem

National Review, July 8, 1988 by Milton Friedman

Day Care: The Problem

THIS TOPIC is not my idea. It is the editor's. He has the curious notion that a nineteenth-century-liberal economist who has no special competence in the area of arrangements for child care is the right person to suggest and evaluate conservative alternatives in that field. Since I always do what Bill tells me to (even on the ski slope), here are some uniformed reflections.

The obvious first choice of everyone (other than a dedicated socialist) is care by a mother and father in a stable household -- which, of course, includes the participation of grandparents and other relatives and friends and the use of family income to pay for supplementary care in other facilities when the parents believe that the benefits are worth the cost.

I exclude the dedicated socialist because, as Igor Shafarevich stressed, destruction of the family has long been a key item in the socialist litany. The family is the most important independent center of power capable of threatening the unlimited power of the state. It must be destroyed if the socialist ideal of an all-powerful state is to be achieved. Twenty-four-hour care in communal centers from cradle to adulthood is therefore the ideal socialist arrangement -- one, indeed, that was adopted by some kibbutzim in Israel but that I understand has long since been abandoned.

Whether or not the idyllic arrangement of home care in a stable two-parent family was ever as widespread as nostalgia leads us to believe, it clearly is less common today. A disturbingly large percentage of children grow up in one-parent families or in two-parent families in which both parents work. Most working parents make reasonably satisfactory arrangements for child care, but many do not, and geographic mobility has made it more difficult to call on a frequent second-best -- care by the extended family.

The practical counterpart of the first choice is to put the responsibility for child are wholly on the parent or parents, including the financial responsibility for care outside the home. This traditional arrangement does not of course rule out the use of private charity to provide assistance to families in distress, or the use of government welfare subsidies to pay for child. It also involvves treating failure to discharge this responsibility as a form of child abuse, subject to the same government sanctions as other forms.

A fatal flaw in currently promoted proposals for government financing of child care is that they penalize the family in which the mother stays at home to provide child care under first-choice conditions. In effect, such families would be taxed to pay the child-care expenses of other families. We already have enough government policies that penalize the traditional family. We surely do not need any more.

The only thoroughgoing way to avoid this flaw in a government-financed program is to pay a per-child subsidy for child care, regardless of whether that care is provided at home or outside the home -- in effect, treat parents who care for their children at home as paid civil servants assigned to child care. Such universal child benefits are paid in many countries, have often been urged here, and as often rejected -- as most conservatives believe that they should be. Moreover, a subsidy sufficient to wupport any tolerable level of paid child care would be inordinately expensive.

Unlike direct government funding, a government mandate that employers must provide day-care facilities for employed mothers of young children does not penalize stay-at-home mothers. Instead, by raising the cost of hiring mothers, it would reduce the demand for them and lower the direct wages they could command. Indeed, tax effects aside, it would encourage mothers to stay at home, since wages partly in the form of a specific kind of child care would be less attractive than money wages. The defect of this arrangement is precisely the disadvantage of any form of wages in kind compared to wages in cash. Nonetheless, this proposal attracts support because bad economics leads to its being regarded as a benefit rather than a burden to employed mothers.

In short, after much scratching of my head and consideration of all sorts of far-fetched schemes, I have been able to come up with none that comes close to matching in attractiveness traditional parental responsibility. I conclude that parental responsibility, plus penalties for child abuse, is the firs, second, and third conservative choice.