Bigfoot vs. the Child Care Desert: Why Raising a Family Became a Luxury

Parents pay more than they can afford. Child-care educators earn less than they can live on. Providers still struggle to remain open. How can all three be true?

Dave Pederson talks with nationally recognized family-policy expert Elliot Haspel about why America’s child-care crisis isn’t a personal budgeting failure—it is the predictable result of treating essential social infrastructure like an ordinary private-market purchase.

Elliot explains the labor economics that make child care uniquely difficult to finance, how Richard Nixon’s 1971 veto helped establish America’s “free-market family,” and what the pandemic revealed about child care’s role as a load-bearing pillar of society.

They also explore:

• Why competition alone cannot fix the child-care market • What New Mexico and Vermont are doing differently • Why people without young children still have a stake in child care • The missing value of stay-at-home parents and unpaid caregivers • Why paid family leave must be part of the solution • Why a subsidy without an available slot is not genuine access • What a universal child-care choice guarantee could look like

ABOUT ELLIOT HASPEL

Elliot Haspel is a nationally recognized family-policy expert and commentator specializing in child-care issues. He is the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It and Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care For All. He writes The Family Frontier, serves as a senior fellow at Capita, and is a fellow with New America’s Better Life Lab.

WATCH THE VIDEO EPISODE https://youtu.be/0GHqj1rZw5I