Carrie Lukas joins the podcast to discuss this month’s policy focus: Parents—Not Government—Should Control Child Care. We address the very real need parents face—finding affordable child care—and we explore the ways policymakers can reduce government burdens that make it expensive. It is possible to create an environment that includes diverse, accessible, and affordable child care.
Carrie L. Lukas is the president of Independent Women’s Forum, vice president of Independent Women’s Voice, and a member of Independent Women’s Network. Carrie has worked in the policy arena for twenty-five years. She is the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex, and Feminism, Checking Progressive Privilege, and Liberty Is No War on Women. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and numerous other outlets.
TRANSCRIPT
Beverly Hallberg:
And welcome to She Thinks, the podcast where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg, and on today’s episode, we look at this month’s policy focus, parents not government should control childcare. We’ll address the very real need that parents face finding affordable childcare and will explore the ways policymakers can reduce government burdens that make it expensive. Yes, it is possible to create an environment that includes diverse, accessible, and affordable childcare, and Carrie Lukas is here to break it all down. Carrie Lukas is the President of Independent Women’s Forum, Vice President of Independent Women’s Voice, and a member of Independent Women’s Network. She is the author of the “Politically Incorrect Guide to Women, Sex and Feminism.” The author of “Checking Progressive Privilege and Liberty Is No War on Women.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, and numerous other outlets. Carrie, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.
Carrie Lukas:
Thank you so much for having me on Beverly.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I want to let all our listeners know that they can find this policy focus on iwf.org. I think it’s so important as parents are thinking through childcare for their kids, and I thought we would just start by breaking down the childcare needs, the childcare data that we have in this country. How many parents have to put their kids in childcare these days? What is the data?
Carrie Lukas:
I think that’s a great place to start because it’s important for people to know just how important childcare is in terms of allowing people to go to work. We saw this in spades during COVID that when childcare systems stopped, and that includes most importantly our public school systems, decided to shutter their doors that meant that a lot of people could not show up at work. More than half of all children under age five are in a childcare system, so this means they’re being cared for by somebody other than their parent while their parent goes to work each day. So it really is vital that we make sure that we do have childcare that is available for parents.
Beverly Hallberg:
And it is important. Are you finding that many parents during the era of COVID really started re-evaluating how they wanted to use childcare? And I’m sure many of them just didn’t have many options either.
Carrie Lukas:
Yeah. Well, I do think that it’s important. Recently, I feel like when we’re looking at the proposals that the left is coming out with and kind of the debate we’re having about childcare today, I do think that COVID has given us just a really important window into the challenges and the considerations we need to have. The debate right now about childcare is not everybody… There’s kind of universal agreement that we all want there to be childcare available for parents. We all know that this is important. That in many, many families there’s two parents are working, or there’s a single parent, often a single mom who needs to use childcare, so she can go to work each day. So that’s kind of not a question. The questions are about who’s paying for childcare and who’s in control of childcare.
And that’s really, I think, the most important one. And when we look at what President Biden, kind of building on what Senator Elizabeth Warren had proposed during her presidential, when she was trying to run for president back before in 2020, was this idea of kind of having the federal government come in and go from being kind of a relatively small player in the childcare space to being a huge player in the childcare space. And once the federal government becomes a huge player in the childcare space, the childcare that is available throughout the country will change dramatically. And particularly, I think when we see COVID, one of the small silver linings of this very dark cloud, is we got to see kind of around the country how different things worked, how things functioned, and who did better, and who did worse as a result of COVID policies both in blue states versus red states.
But I think most interestingly, in this case, to look at what childcare centers, what schools, what institutions that are supposed to help support families and care for children, support children, educate children, who stayed open and who didn’t. Who provided care and who didn’t. And who helped kids learn and who didn’t. And the real takeaway from COVID is that the more government was involved, the worse the programs did. And that’s why I think when we think about the future of childcare, we should say, the number one lesson is, do not put government in charge of institutions like schools and childcare centers because they’re terrible at their jobs. They’re the ones who failed families the worst during COVID.
Beverly Hallberg:
And when we look at some of those childcare centers that were shut down, are those the ones that were affiliated with the government? And what was the difference between private childcare versus public, as far as how soon kids were able to go back to childcare?
Carrie Lukas:
Yeah. You know, it’s interesting when you look at the data. So in the height of the pandemic, when everything was closing down in March of 2020, when basically all public schools closed, the vast majority of childcare centers also closed. Some childcare centers and kind of working with their state and local governments were allowed to stay open. But I believe it was, it was about 70 to 80% of all childcare centers had closed kind of in the height of the pandemic. The thing that’s of interesting contrast though, is when you fast forward just a little bit, fast forward to fall of 2020. And that’s when you have the vast majority of public schools, of public schools serving kids K-12 in America, those remained closed to in-person learning in the fall of 2020.
But by that time, in contrast, you had over 70% of childcare centers had opened and resumed in person. So about 30% of public schools had opened compared to 70% of childcare centers. And I really think that’s quite telling because you wonder about the incentives. It’s certainly not that at that point… We now do know that babies or like the smallest kids were actually the least vulnerable to COVID, but that certainly wasn’t what people were thinking then, that wasn’t the reason why we weren’t opening public kindergarten, and we were opening these childcare centers.
The reason the childcare centers were opening is because the childcare centers wanted to stay open and serve their customers. You weren’t going to, if you were running a childcare business, yes, you were getting support from the government. Yes, they were providing subsidies to help keep doors open, but they had a different incentive structure than… I’m a mother of five. I have five kids in a public school system here in Northern Virginia. And my school system could not have cared less about the fact that I was a working mom with five kids sitting in home and having to zoom into school and learning essentially nothing during that time. My school system was going to, their teachers were going to get paid. Their administrators were going to get paid. They didn’t really care if they taught us or not. It was a very different incentives that our public school systems faced compared to childcare.
Childcare knew if they aren’t going to take those kids in and actually provide services for those parents, so those parents could go to work, the parents weren’t going to pay for it anymore. They were going to say forget it. I’m not paying tuition. I’m going to take care of my kids at my house or find somebody who will provide in-person childcare. I think it’s that real contrast, which is so important. And obviously, I’m talking about this and it goes vividly, we saw this with COVID closures and the decisions they made about whether or not or how quickly to reopen schools. But also this is about responsiveness to parents and to families in general, this goes far beyond just whether you’re actually going to open your doors. But you can derive it takes similar lessons about how they respond to parents, concerned about content, about curriculum and how their kids in overall performance. Our public schools don’t care because they don’t have to. We want childcare centers to have to care. And right now they do mostly care because they don’t have a captive audience like they would, if government basically was just totally footing the bill.
Beverly Hallberg:
And I think it really puts into picture the reason why those of us who like free market capitalism promote it so much, because it is about that incentive structure. And correct me if I’m wrong, but when government is in charge of things, what you’re doing is taking away like you were saying, parents, teachers, and schools, aren’t responsive to parents because that’s not who they answer to. We’re in a private system, which is often mocked as only caring about profits. Like, yes, they do care about profit, but in that process of caring about profit, that means they need to keep their customers happy. So is this just what you would say is a really good example of why the private system works better than public?
Carrie Lukas:
Yeah, absolutely. And I almost think about a spotlight where you’re turning the spotlight and right now for a childcare center to survive, they do have to, and we can talk a little bit about some of the regulatory burdens that childcare centers face because a lot of times certainly one thing they have to worry about is making sure that they are pleasing regulators and kind of staying in good standing with the government. Some of that makes sense. We obviously all want our childcare centers to be safe for children, but some of it’s really silly. And some of the regulations are just onerous and just make it harder for these places to operate and remain profitable or just keep their doors open.
But for the most part, a childcare center’s focus is on the parents, is making sure that the parents feel satisfied with the service that they’re getting from the childcare provider because they know that at any point you’re not, childcare is paid for on a month by month basis. You know people are capable of just saying, you know what, I’m out. You’re not doing a good job, I’m going to leave. Where obviously with schools, especially with public schools, for me to get my kids or to leave our public school system, I moved here for the public schools. So I have an option of moving but we all know that’s an incredibly expensive and cumbersome proposition, or I’ve got to find a private school. And after paying all the property taxes that I do to live in Northern Virginia, paying for five kids to go to private school is really hard.
A lot of families did make that choice, obviously during COVID we saw a decline in enrollment throughout the country, but particularly in public K-12 schools, but in particularly places like where I am in Virginia, where our schools were notorious about keeping kids from coming into school for as long as they possibly could. Politically enforcing our kids to wear masks and really politicizing our public schools. But man, that’s a big ask for parents. That’s something that takes a lot from parents to make those choices. Fortunately, with childcare, it’s easier. There’s still challenges. In a lot of places, there aren’t as many childcare slots as we would hope, but parents have options, which means the childcare providers feel a responsibility because otherwise they know they’ll go out of business. And you’re right on Beverly, it’s exactly why capitalism and every place where you would much rather be in a place where there’s three restaurants competing for your visit, business, than just one because we know if there’s just one restaurant then you got to take what that menu is. Where if there’s three competing, they’re going to be competing for your business and you’re going to get a much better product.
Beverly Hallberg:
And let’s get to the common complaint, understandably so, common problem we see is that parents are struggling to afford childcare. So that’s one reason why we often hear that the government’s answer should be government childcare to help especially single moms. You mentioned earlier, low-income families be able to pay for childcare. If both parents are working or for single mom is working, what do you say to that argument that it actually helps with the finances it’s only the wealthiest in this country that can afford private childcare?
Carrie Lukas:
Well I think when we talk about the costs of childcare, there’s several different things, kind of aspects of this to think about. Number one is the actual costs that a daycare center or a childcare provider faces. The Mercatus Center did a great study looking at different regulations that are common. And that like things like teacher certification, the number like caps that are put on the number of kids that can be cared for by any single teacher or childcare provider, and looking at all these regulations to see which were associated with higher quality and which just led to higher costs. And they found several that they said had no discernible impact on quality but just pushed costs up, often by a thousand dollars. So I think that looking at these regulations and if you look childcare regulations in general are set by states and localities.
I’ve written on this previously and gone through and found some of the really ridiculous examples of childcare regulations that are out there that make you think my goodness, how horrible to be a childcare provider and trying to follow all this. They had some places they stringently dictate the number of like balls. Literally say, you have to have this many of this size balls per child. And as a mother of five, I have no idea how many balls I have in the house because they lose them and destroy them half the time. And you know, who wants to keep track of all this? There was the kind of rules where you would think no parent would ever follow anything like this in their own home. And so there’s some things that obviously make it really needlessly expensive to run a childcare center.
So I think deregulation, it’s not just deregulation, but kind of making regulations sensible and rationalizing them would be really important and help lower those costs. But I also think we need to be realistic here, as any mom knows, raising a kid or taking care of a kid is time-consuming. There is only a certain number of when you have… Personally, I thought that the most kind of labor-intensive time with a child is when you’re in that crawler stage kind of late just as a kid’s turning one, you think of how many kids, someone could take care of. How many 10-month-olds somebody could take care of. And it’s only a couple. And to that person, it’s a real job. That person needs to be paid.
They’re going to be in a facility. It makes sense to me sometimes that I’ll read this kind of, at least these headlines that say, oh my gosh, like taking tuition for somebody to take care of a baby is higher than tuition at a state college. And I’m thinking to myself, okay, yes, it’s hard on people. The cost of caring for an infant or putting an infant in daycare are expensive, sometimes 12, $14,000, but you know what, taking care of an infant full time or 40 hours a week, that’s a lot of work. So it makes sense that this costs a lot. So I think that the real question is not how much it costs. The real question. And the left certainly knows this is who pays. The left, what they’re putting together in Build Back Better, it wasn’t going to make it cheaper to care for childcare. Oh, quite the opposite.
They were going to be requiring that childcare workers all had college degrees or certificates and education. All of which I think is absurd and totally useless. And as moms and dads know that when you think about the qualifications you want for somebody to care for your kid, mostly you want them to be loving and patient and have kind of a heart for it. It’s not whether or not you got a BA and you know, whatever from a college. So the left is pushing to make childcare more expensive. They just want to cost shift. So they want to make it 20,000 bucks per kid or whatever at a childcare center, but they want to cost shift that to taxpayers. And that’s what I think is not only dangerous and will change how childcare centers operate because parents will no longer be really the ones holding the keys and holding that money and the ones that they’re responsible to.
But it’s also incredibly unfair, not only to people who don’t have kids and who shouldn’t have to pay all these bills, but more importantly to parents. Parents who do not want to use government-approved childcare, and that’s not just there’s a lot of people who don’t want to use government-approved childcare. It’s not just wealthy people. In fact, wealthy people are more likely to want to use a formal childcare. It’s a lot of people who have relatives and who provide either keep a mom or dad at home to provide care for themselves or somebody who has a grandmother or an aunt or another loved one who steps up and are using family-based care. We should not be disincentivizing family-based care. That’s the wrong direction. It’s completely unfair, particularly unfair to like immigrant communities and low-income communities where this can be very common. Instead, we want to make raising children more affordable, we should focus on helping families, not childcare providers.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, I do want to take a brief moment to ask you, our listeners, a question, are you a conservative woman? Do you feel problematic just for existing in today’s political landscape, we’ll have some information to share with you every Thursday morning on Problematic Women, Laura Evans and Virginia Allen sort through the news to bring stories and interviews that are of particular interest to you, a problematic woman. That is a woman whose opinions are often excluded or even mocked by the so-called pro-woman left. Lauren and Virginia break down the news you care about in an upbeat and sharp-witted way to search for Problematic Women, wherever you get your podcasts.
And Carrie, question for you, going back to the plans that progressives have for childcare, it seems that other problems in K-12 would also trickle into childcare. So issues related to curriculum, use of pronouns, sex education. So we’re not just talking about the cost where your taxes would go up if there is government-run childcare, we’re also talking about ideology that seeps into childcare as well, correct?
Carrie Lukas:
Yeah, absolutely, Beverly. When I talk to parents, I think this is what really gets them because you know, the issue of cost of childcare that’s important. But I think we all know there’s a lot of ways that government could solve that without kind of taking over the childcare system. The reason that the government wants to take over the childcare system isn’t to help parents, it’s to control childcare and particularly control the content of childcare. And while you look at the proposals that are being put forth by this administration and Democrats in Congress, it’s very explicit. They would not just be giving parents vouchers to use wherever they see fit. They would be saying that you could only use government-approved childcare providers. How do you become a government-approved childcare provider?
You need to follow government rules and use the government-approved curriculums. They talk about it’s all given in kind of code words, but they use terms like “developmentally appropriate” and “inclusive curriculums.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in that, in the K-12 battles and I’m familiar enough with some of the language that’s used to know, okay, when you start talking about inclusive, you start talking about developmentally appropriate. You’re quickly starting to move into the realm of what’s known as CRT, but this very kind of loaded race-conscious curriculums and the kind of stuff on gender that is going to make most parents say, you know what? I don’t want my two-year-olds, literally my two and three-year-olds to start to be exposed to some of the materials that people are trying to foist on their kids and that we see around the country being pushed. So, absolutely I think curriculum and content is really kind of the crux of what we should be concerned about here.
Beverly Hallberg:
And final question for you, people who are listening who agree with your take on this and what needs to be done, how concerned should they be that government is inching closer to taking over childcare? Do you think that’s legislation that could get passed anytime soon? And if so, what should people do to try to raise the alarm?
Carrie Lukas:
You know, not only has this been proposed by Build Back Better, but this remains kind of a feature of kind of the left both in states and nationally. So while I don’t think there’s an immediate threat, I think that Build Back Better that fortunately Senators Manchin and Sinema have expressed that they’re not going to be taking up some of the proposals that were contained in Build Back Better. So I don’t mean we have to worry in the really short term, but definitely long term we need to talk and I would really encourage people to talk to other moms and dads and make sure they understand what we’re talking about. So much of this is cloaked in the idea of, hey, wouldn’t it be great to have some free childcare? And everyone around the country says, yes, how wonderful, it’s so hard to pay for childcare. Kids are so expensive. I need help.
Fine. We can talk about help, do not have that help come in the form of a government takeover because that’s problematic in so many ways. And just one final kind of thought on that is another thing you’ll see is absence from this conversation is Head Start and the existing government programs that are out there, and that are supposed to be providing childcare. Democrats and those advocates for government taking over childcare don’t like to reference Head Start. They don’t like to talk about the results from some of the big state programs that have said, hey, we’re going to create this government paid for childcare, and it’s going to be so great. Kids are going to be doing better academically, but that’s because consistently these studies of these programs show that there are no lasting benefits. That kids are not better off in school. They are not better off socially. And in some case there’s negative impacts. So we need to be really careful about those. They’ll try to find one super old study of a really small program and say, oh, that returns seven to one. Often you’ll hear that. That’s totally not true. Ask about Head Start, which is the largest federal childcare program. And you’ll see there’s just no evidence there that this is that this is the panacea that they suggest.
Beverly Hallberg:
Well, it’s an important topic that impacts so many people in our country, which is why this month’s policy focus is so important. Do read it. Carrie Lukas, the author of “Parents, Not Government Should Control Childcare.” Carrie, thank you so much for joining us on She Thinks.
Carrie Lukas:
Thanks so much, Beverly. I appreciate you having me on.
Beverly Hallberg:
And thank you all for joining us Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you. And investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. So please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org/donate that’s iwf.org/donate. Last, If you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks do leave us a rating or review. It does help. I would love it if you shared this episode, so your friends know where they can find more She Thinks. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum, thanks for watching.
