Now is the Time for Universal Child Care
This is the third blog in a series exploring a shared vision for universal child care and CLASP’s efforts, alongside partners, to turn this vision into a reality. The full series can be found here.
By Stephanie Schmit
Despite chronic underinvestment and the Trump Administration’s efforts to weaken the child care system, the case for universal child care has never been stronger. The challenges families and providers are facing make it increasingly clear that incremental fixes are no longer enough. A universal child care system that guarantees free, high-quality care for every family while ensuring providers earn meaningful compensation, including wages and benefits, is an achievable solution, and the conditions to advance that vision are coming to fruition.
| A universal child care system is one where every family who needs child care can access it. To create the supply needed to make care universal, providers must be adequately compensated and supported to stay in the field and provide high-quality care. Through fully funded public investment, a universal system ensures cohesive and clear availability and accessibility to care and learning for all families with children, regardless of race, immigration status, income, disability, geography, and other factors that have historically impeded access. A universal system also ensures that the child care workforce is well-paid; provided with benefits like health care and retirement; and has access to training or higher/continuing education if desired, advancement opportunities, and more. To achieve this, the lived experience of the families and providers who rely on and sustain the system is centered in policy design and implementation. Ultimately, a universal system ensures that child care is a public good, not a family’s private responsibility. |
Many factors make the potential for universal child care viable, including:
- A broad, coordinated, and growing movement laying the groundwork for federal action. National advocates, providers, labor organizations, researchers, parents, and policy experts are already aligned around a shared vision and are actively developing legislation that can serve as a durable roadmap for transformational federal investment.
- State progress where policymakers have expanded investments and demonstrated growing political support for treating child care as essential public infrastructure. New Mexico and New York City’s victories are creating policy models and proof points, strengthening implementation capacity, and building a bench of champions who can help accelerate federal action.
- Growing Congressional support and champions who have listened to their constituents to recognize the need for better access to affordable care and reflecting the importance of action. In Congress, there is increasing awareness across a growing number of members that the child care crisis is as much an economic issue as a family one, creating greater momentum for ambitious federal solutions than existed just a few years ago.
- Public understanding of the child care crisis has grown tremendously, and there is eagerness for change. Families increasingly recognize that the challenges they face are not individual failures but the result of a broken system, and they are demanding structural solutions rather than temporary relief. Parents, providers, and community leaders have built a powerful grassroots movement that continues to elevate stories of families forced to make impossible choices between work, financial stability, and quality care for their children. As awareness of the economic and racial equity impacts of the crisis grows, support for bold federal action continues to expand among the public, advocates, and elected leaders alike.
The combination of an organized movement, state-level progress, growing Congressional support, and energized parents and grassroots advocates makes universal child care not simply an aspirational goal, but a viable federal policy agenda in the years ahead. The child care crisis has long been a major problem facing this country, but we now have the opportunity for federal investment in a system that will improve people’s lives.
To learn more about what it means to build a truly equitable universal child care system, please join us for CLASP’s next installment of Equity Matters, “What if the Current Fight to Protect Child Care is also an Opportunity to Transform it?” on October 22 from 1-2:30 pm ET. Register here.
