The Steep Cost of ‘Free’ Child Care

But political appeal is not the same as sound policy for young children. This sweeping plan to shift the care of America’s young children from their families to paid providers is wrong for children, not what most parents want, and undervalues the family’s irreplaceable role in early development. 

Child care increases parental workforce participation by decreasing children’s time at home with their parents, so the child care debate is fundamentally about where and with whom children spend the first years of their lives. Yet child care advocates rarely mention children themselves these days, beyond general assertions that quality child care supports children’s “healthy development,” generating large returns for “every dollar invested.”

Unfortunately, that much-repeated claim is unwarranted. Evidence supporting it is so thin that advocates still rely heavily on findings from two small-scale research projects—the Abecedarian and Perry preschool programs—that enrolled a combined total of 115 exceptionally high-risk African American children more than half a century ago.

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman has found that these experimental programs produced long-term benefits for their participants. But the relevance of his findings to current policy debates is essentially nil. Extrapolating from two tiny, highly controlled interventions to typical child care settings—much less a universal system—is deeply misleading. 

In fact, Heckman himself has never supported universal preschool, arguing instead that public programs should target the most disadvantaged children—those who truly benefit from high-quality care —and with good reason. A substantial body of directly relevant research has consistently shown that full-time child care produces negative effects for significant proportions of children.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Quebec, which launched a universal child care program in 1997 to give all children a “healthy start” while enabling their mothers to participate in the workforce full-time.

As the New York Times recently reported, Quebec’s program delivered major economic gains. Between 1997 and 2023, workforce participation among partnered mothers with children under 6 rose from 64 percent to 80 percent while employment among unpartnered mothers increased from 42 percent in 1997 to 73 percent.  This increased mothers’ earnings, improved their career progression, and boosted business performance by enabling firms to employ more “young, productive female workers,” as one recent study explained.

But Quebec’s economic gains came at a significant cost to its children’s well-being. Long-term evaluations showed that shifting young children’s care from home to full-time group settings was associated with lasting behavioral and social-emotional harm. Researchers observed higher levels of anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity throughout childhood; lower life satisfaction and self-reported health among young adults; and a striking population-level rise in crime, with conviction rates roughly 22 percent higher among cohorts exposed to the program.

Advocates often dismiss these findings by blaming the low quality of Quebec’s child care programs. But there are two problems with that argument.

First, we have no evidence that high-quality child care can be maintained at scale. In Sweden, long regarded as a model child care system, experts now report significant quality declines as universal expansion diminished the small-group, nurturing care that once defined the system. In Norway, researchers have similarly found that while high-quality, smaller-scale programs improved outcomes for disadvantaged children, as the system expanded to universal coverage, those positive outcomes disappeared due to “the larger operations and broader scope.”

We can find the same lesson in the United States. K-12 public education—our longest-running universal program—has struggled for decades to deliver high-quality schooling for low-income children, despite rigorous teacher preparation requirements, average salaries more than twice those of child care workers, and years of sharply increasing spending. Similarly, Head Start, a nationwide public program for 3- to 5-year-olds, has been unable to ensure consistently high quality—even while enrolling just a fraction of the children a universal system would serve.

Second, a substantial body of research shows that even very high-quality child care has adverse effects on some children. Advocates claim that any negative outcomes of child care are a problem of low-quality programs. But even in “gold standard” programs with small groups, low child-to-adult ratios, and well-trained staff, researchers have found positive effects solely for disadvantaged subgroups, including children from low-income, single-parent, and immigrant families, and with less-educated mothers.

Studies of carefully managed programs in Chile, France, Germany, and Norway have all found meaningful gains for disadvantaged children in language, school readiness, and/or social-emotional development. But none have found benefits for more advantaged children. Multiple studies have found negative effects, especially on behavior.

What explains these findings? Children’s divergent outcomes occur because the effects of child care depend on both its quality and the quality of the alternative. Children from disadvantaged home environments often benefit from high-quality child care. But even excellent programs can have adverse effects when they displace the higher-quality care children would otherwise receive at home. The underlying logic is simple: the impact of child care depends on what it replaces.

Researchers are especially concerned about the cumulative effects of long hours in child care, particularly when that care begins in infancy. The largest U.S. study on this issue, by the National Institute of Child Health and Development, found that children’s total exposure to non-parental group care across the first four and a half years of life was linked to worse social-emotional and behavioral outcomes that persisted into adolescence. Strikingly, these findings were independent of either program quality or type.

By age 4 and a half, only 2 percent of children who had averaged fewer than 10 hours per week in child care since birth had significant behavior problems, compared with 18 percent of those who had averaged at least 30 hours and 24 percent of those who had averaged a “full-time work week” of 45 hours or more. Cumulative hours in child care continued to predict negative outcomes into elementary school. By age 15, the association was nearly as strong as it had been in preschool.

Physiological evidence helps explain this pattern. Studies consistently find that a significant proportion of children experience chronically elevated cortisol—a biomarker of stress—in full-time child care, regardless of program quality. These levels return to normal when children are at home.

For a substantial subset of children, the 40-hour-a-week child care promoted as “economic infrastructure” can be a source of sustained physiological stress that no amount of quality can eliminate. While older children can thrive in group settings, the noise, peer conflict, and constant stimulation typical of child care can overwhelm a young child’s underdeveloped stress-regulation system. The long-term effects of this stress are not yet fully known, but persistently elevated stress in early childhood is an established risk factor for later emotional and behavioral dysfunction.

Developmental science helps explain why the findings on child care’s effects are not surprising. For most of human history, early development took place at home, usually with full-time parental care. And while the world children are born into has changed, what children need for healthy development has not.

Young children are biologically “hardwired” to develop within a small circle of familiar, loving people and require consistent, one-on-one nurturing relationships to develop well. Ongoing, intimate interactions within these relationships shape a child’s rapidly developing brain with enduring effects on emotional, social, and cognitive growth. Deep human connection is the primary engine of young children’s growth. 

The push for universal child care ignores the unique developmental needs of young children. The loving relationships that drive early brain development cannot be delivered “at scale.” Unlike K-12 schooling, where group settings are developmentally appropriate, non-parental group care in the first years of life carries a measurable behavioral cost for some children, even in high-quality programs. 

Child care advocates frame parental workforce participation and child well-being as aligned interests. They often are not. For most young children, the optimal early learning environment is their own home.

In fact, this developmental reality is reflected in the care preferences of most parents. The case for universal child care rests on the assumption that families view caring for their own children as a problem to be solved. Surveys show otherwise.

Three national surveys—by American Compass, the Bipartisan Policy Center, and the Institute for Family Studies—all found that most parents do not want their young children cared for by paid providers, whether in centers or home-based programs. The majority favor care by a parent or close relative. Only professional-class parents—those with higher education and higher incomes—consistently prefer non-parental group care. 

That is, the current child care debate is largely shaped by the preferences and priorities of affluent professionals. Most families want something different: policies that make it easier for parents—not paid providers—to care for their young children.

The research reviewed here points in one direction: Young children’s development is driven by consistent, one-on-one, loving relationships. When substantial time in non-parental group programs displaces parental care, some children pay a developmental price—one that cannot be engineered away through quality standards alone.

None of this means that child care is unimportant. High-quality programs can be profoundly beneficial for children from disadvantaged households, who often face high stress and fewer developmental supports at home. These children have the least access to quality care, and expanding high-quality programs that serve them well should be a central priority.

But a universal system is the wrong approach. It is not what most parents want. It is not what the evidence says children need. And it directs limited public resources away from the most disadvantaged families. 

The universal child care narrative frames raising young children as household work best outsourced to paid professionals, defining “public investment” as spending on non-parental care. Policy should do the opposite: empower families by directing resources to parents and letting them decide how—and by whom—their children are cared for. A flexible child tax credit, for example, could allow families to draw forward a portion of existing tax benefits into their child’s earliest years, giving parents real options—staying home, working part-time, or choosing higher-quality care—without increasing federal spending.

Love matters. A society that treats parents’ care of their young children as an obstacle to economic efficiency is undermining its very foundation. Policy should elevate the family’s irreplaceable role in early development—not displace it.