Progressives frequently pine for the type of universal child care system found in Nordic countries. But earlier this month, the White House released new child care guidance illustrating that one doesn’t need to dream of Stockholm to meaningfully expand choices for working families.
In a set of new guidelines, the Trump-Vance administration sought to rein in some of its predecessors’ eagerness to impose ever-more regulations on federal child care assistance programs. Their vision, instead, offers conservatives a useful path forward — recognizing that many families need some kind of child care when both parents work, that child care is often expensive, and that the design of a child care system matters.
The White House’s policy documents champion parental choice, offer a high degree of flexibility, and celebrate a pluralism of values and approaches. More moves along these lines could give an administration and a party seeking an authentically “pro-family” approach to early childhood a more solid footing.
To start with, the administration tried to resurrect much of what has traditionally given the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) bipartisan appeal, before it got loaded down with various progressive wishlist items. The CCDF gives parents who qualify a voucher (or “certificate”) to take to the provider of their choice – essentially, it’s school choice, but for child care.
In theory, this means parents could receive assistance to have their child attend a for-profit day care, a church-run preschool, an after-care program run out of a neighbor’s basement, or, in some cases, the care of a grandparent or relative. That was always the purpose of the federal child care assistance program.
But over the years, red tape has grown. In its waning days, the Biden administration sought to further tie the hands of states that wanted to experiment with different administrative approaches and weaken the emphasis on parental choice. They also forced states to reimburse providers prospectively, rather than after the fact — a method that would prove controversial in the wake of the viral claims about daycare fraud in Minneapolis.
The Trump-Vance administration capitalized on those stories to turn the spotlight on a politically potent angle of fraud and abuse. And, of course, unwinding overweening federal guidance fits firmly within a conventional conservative approach to policy questions.
But what’s most interesting in their guidance is how robustly they champion the principle of parental choice within child care. As Alex Adams, assistant secretary for the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), wrote in a letter to state human services directors, the administration’s overriding principle is that “parents should be the primary decision-maker of the care that works best for their family and children.” To the untrained ear, that may sound like boilerplate. But it actually represents a shift in emphasis from the traditional progressive emphasis on “universal, high-quality child care.”
For many parents, the right child care provider isn’t the one that scores highest on a clipboard checklist of various “quality metrics.” It’s the one that speaks the same language as their child, shares their faith, is located near the office, or is the one their child’s friends all attend as well.
This is the spirit that animates ACF’s guidance. While care by relatives, friends, or neighbors is provided for in the statutory text of the child care block grant, it tends to be given short shrift by too many states, whose accumulated regulations and red tape naturally favor larger, more established providers. The administration stresses that making parents aware of this kind of informal care “could expand the supply of home-based child care,” and reminds states that they can exempt certain informal care arrangements from licensing requirements so long as they do not endanger a child’s health or safety.
The guidance also specifies intriguing new angles for states to explore with more flexibility. In particular, the administration suggests tapping into Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) dollars, a move that could help hundreds of thousands more families access child care support.
For the small number of two-parent households receiving TANF assistance, the administration’s guidance suggests allowing parents to share the work requirement, rather than requiring each parent to engage in paid work. This would give low-income married families more flexibility in ensuring both a connection to work and the ability to care for their child, and would also free up more child care money to help serve even more families.
Many advocates on the left wish for a massive expansion of federal spending on child care that raises wages for child care workers and treats the years of early childhood as an expansion of our existing K-12 public school system. Yet parents’ wants and needs vary, particularly in the earlier years when care is expensive, and many parents want to take a step back from full-time work.
In place of these Scandinavian welfare-state fantasies, the Trump-Vance rollback of federal red tape offers a practical start to expand parents’ options without putting a thumb on the scale in favor of a particular vision of child care or of families’ decisions about work and family life. Resurrecting an emphasis on parental choice — and shifting the focus away from federal mandates that handcuff states’ ability to pioneer new models and approaches to supporting parents — is a welcome and necessary step toward expanding child care support for America’s families.
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Patrick T. Brown (@PTBwrites) is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he works on advancing a pro-family economic agenda and writes the weekly newsletter “Family Matters.”
