Last year seemed like a pretty big one for breakthroughs in child care. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s promise of publicly funded care for young kids helped him win the keys to Gracie Mansion. Officials in Connecticut created an endowment to make care more affordable in that state. And New Mexico became the first state to commit to free child care for all of its residents. But as policy makers have begun hammering out the details of these ambitions, they’ve hit against a stubborn and formidable obstacle: babies.
Any child-care provider will tell you that “affordable infant care” is an oxymoron. Because babies need a ton of individual attention, they are the most demanding group to care for in formal settings. Most states require babies to be looked after by more workers and in smaller groups than those mandated for older kids; a day care’s infant room will typically have one caretaker for every three to four babies, whereas a pre-K teacher might look after more than twice that number of children. Many states and cities also have costly space prerequisites for infant care. In New York City, for instance, a day care’s infant room must have sprinklers installed and be on the ground floor to allow for easy evacuation. All of this drives up the cost of care; one estimate placed the monthly cost of “high-quality” infant care at more than $2,400, a price that only well-off families can afford.
At many child-care centers, the tuition paid for older children subsidizes the babies. “Infants are cute little loss leaders,” Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the moderate-leaning Niskanen Center think tank, told me. Some programs—because they subsist on razor-thin margins and can be prone to worker shortages—stay clear of babies altogether. (Consider 2-K, Mamdani’s new child-care program for the general public; as the name implies, it does not cover children under 2, even though families with very young children need affordable care as much as anyone else.) This can make infant care a rarity in the places that need it most, including low-income neighborhoods, where the cost of baby care far outpaces what many parents can pay, and rural areas, where day cares serving children of any age are few and far between.
States and cities are thus likely to “hit a wall” when trying to ramp up infant care, Brian Dew, an economic researcher who recently wrote a report comparing the U.S. and Nordic child-care systems, told me. Yet one fair, cost-effective solution could provide relief both to parents and to governments seeking to provide high-quality care: Pay families to keep babies home.
That idea might at first sound odd. But almost every country with universal child care provides a version of this benefit, which allows parents to spend more time with their young children or pay, say, grandparents or neighbors to do it. In the United States, this sort of allowance could help reduce the burden on governments trying to implement universal care and give parents with babies an option that many say they want. It’s also a proposal with growing appeal among a politically diverse set of policy makers.
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Traditionally, incentives to keep more young kids (and, by extension, their mothers) home have been associated with conservative politicians. Progressives have focused on increasing access to child care so that parents can work. More broadly, the notion of paying to keep some children home, specifically as part of an effort to offer universal child care, has been “an under-explored area of family policy,” Pete Nabozny, the director of policy at the advocacy organization the Children’s Agenda, told me. But in recent years, the idea has been catching on.
In 2024, Democratic Representative Ro Khanna of California proposed a child-care plan that would not only reduce the cost of formal care but also compensate caregiving relatives and provide a stipend for stay-at-home parents opting out of formal care. In July, Project 2029, the progressive effort to create a policy agenda for a future Democratic administration, released a proposal to allow parents to choose between free child care or a cash benefit of $1,000 a month “to provide care at home or help pay someone they choose to provide care.” And in a forthcoming report, the Niskanen Center suggests reviving a largely defunct effort from the 1990s and early 2000s, when Montana and Minnesota tested programs offering low-income parents the chance to stay home with their babies while receiving a stipend of about the amount that would have gone toward formal care.
Such plans should not be confused with the Trump administration’s recent proposal to redirect dollars from a finite pot of child-care funds to married stay-at-home parents—a move that is almost certain to give fewer, not more, families help in paying for child care. As Jessica Grose noted in The New York Times, it is especially likely to penalize single mothers. And it seems designed to coax married mothers out of the workforce.
Meanwhile, state and city officials who earnestly want to offer more families child care continue to seek solutions and shortcuts to create more spaces for babies. Last year, Vermont increased the reimbursement rates paid to providers for infants and toddlers as part of a bid to expand care for infants; this does appear to have helped generate additional slots for very young children, though still not enough to meet families’ needs. This year, New Mexico reduced zoning barriers to make it easier for licensed child-care programs to operate in private homes, where most infants are cared for.
Then there is Mamdani’s plan for New York City—which so far mostly sidesteps the issue of infant care. His administration has said that it does not plan to extend universal care to infants during the current term, which some policy experts warn is shortsighted. Research on the national expansion of universal pre-K programs found that when public child-care programs for older kids move into a neighborhood, providers serving younger children tend to shift to serving the older, more profitable kids, intensifying care shortages for the youngest. Nabozny said that researchers closely watching the rollout in New York are concerned that Mamdani’s plan may replicate this trend: that it will make infant care even scarcer and, where it is available, more expensive.
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This is where offering parents a paid option to care for their babies at home—while also providing more infant care at centers and home-based day cares—starts to make sense. Such an incentive would help take the pressure off formal child-care systems to create more infant-care slots than may be possible. Reducing the number of infants in care outside the home would also make it easier to keep ratios lower for babies in traditional programs, giving kids a better shot at receiving the close attention they need. It would put money in the pockets of families who have recently welcomed a baby—an economically precarious time of transition, when expenses spike and working outside the home can be unfeasible for some mothers. And it would lower costs for states, cities, and counties looking to offer universal care programs, increasing their odds of success.
But arguably the most crucial benefit is that the paid option would give parents something they say they desire, Alyson Silkowski, a senior policy adviser at New America and a co-author of the Project 2029 proposal, told me. Silkowski co-wrote a recent New America report based on a nationally representative survey that oversampled low-income parents; it found that, given the choice, more than a third of parents with children younger than 12 months said they would like to care for their babies themselves throughout the day—a preference that declines once a child turns 1. More than half of those parents want their baby to be looked after by at least one of the child’s parents, Silkowski later wrote to me. Only 9 percent preferred formal care. “There is this higher level of discomfort,” Silkowski said, “in not being with your youngest child during those first 12 months.”
Most countries with universal child care make it easier for parents to stay home with their babies by using some combination of generous paid-parental-leave programs and child- and home-care allowances. In the Nordic system, public child care typically does not start until age 1, when paid leave tapers off. Parents in Finland can opt for a home-care allowance to continue caring for their children until they are 3, and almost all families take this option for at least a few months; many say that 1 year of age is too early for a child to enter formal care.
In the United States, by contrast, few parents have access to paid family leave to care for a newborn, and many can’t afford unpaid leave, prompting a lot of parents to either leave the workforce or return before their family feels ready. But some precedents do exist for paying low-income parents and their relatives to care for children in lieu of enrolling in subsidized care. New York is one of several states with a popular “friend, family, and neighbor” program that lets families who qualify for subsidies hire someone they know for care. And there was the pilot program in Montana and Minnesota during that earlier welfare-reform era.
McCabe, of the Niskanen Center, told me that although both Democrats and Republicans have proposed similar programs in the years since, those plans never took off—partly because they didn’t fit neatly into the policy buckets of welfare, paid leave, or child care, which prompted some advocates to fear that such programs would divert funds and attention from their core causes. In addition, some critics have worried that paying parents to keep babies at home could prevent mothers who want to return to work from doing so. (Research in other wealthy countries suggests that policies such as paid parental leave actually boost women’s workforce participation, though women with children under age 3 still tend to work less than full-time.)
To Nabozny, the idea that a child-care plan should come equipped with a stipend option for the youngest children is a “no-brainer.” “It’s kind of crazy to say the government will pay some other person $25,000, $30,000, whatever the cost of infant care is for a parent to go to work, but we won’t pay that parent a dollar to provide it themselves,” he said, especially “when that is often the family’s preference.” In recent years, a growing number of advocates and policy makers have argued that care work ought to be treated as an essential piece of American infrastructure. The secret to strengthening the country’s formal child-care infrastructure—counterintuitive as this may sound—may be to pay some parents not to use it.
The post A Better Way to Compensate Parents of Babies appeared first on The Atlantic.
