Philosophical Considerations

There are several philosophical questions at stake with regards to employer-sponsored child care. Perhaps the most pressing is this: What is child care for?

The question is more complex than it may seem. While child care is frequently cast simply as a work support—a service that allows parents to work and thereby provide for their family, while keeping businesses and the economy writ large maximally productive—that is far from its only function. A partial list of child care’s other functions include:

• Supporting child development, including laying the foundations of socioemotional and academic learning as well as civic engagement;
• Enabling parents to choose where to live and how to invest in their community, choose the work-care situation that works best for their family, choose how many children to have, and explore entrepreneurial ventures;
• Lowering parental stress, thereby improving overall parenting along with family and child health, stability, and well-being;
• Improving community health and safety as well as the health of faith communities;
• Bolstering democratic participation of parents, and in particular the ability of mothers to run for and hold elected office; and
• Providing parents access to trusted parenting resources, connections to other parents, and a community hub.

None of the above functions are tethered to a particular place of employment, casting into doubt the philosophical underpinnings of employer-sponsored child care.

A useful analog can be found in the K–12 public school system. Schools inarguably serve a work-supportive child care function: If there remains any doubt, one need only consider the experiences of parents during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic when most schools closed for months on end.¹ Having to juggle remote schooling and work caused many parents, especially mothers, to experience acute stress; parental labor force participation temporarily plummeted.² Moreover, if there were no public schools—or if parents had to come up with the roughly $14,000 average per-pupil expenditure each year that goes into public education—the experience of parenting would look very different.³ Yet there are other major roles for schools, many an age-adjusted version of the list above.

For instance, schools provide learning that helps give children the skills and knowledge to be productive contributors to society, and they provide a common experience that undergirds our democracy. There is a reason that Thomas Jefferson argued in his 1778 Bill For the More General Diffusion of Knowledge that:

Experience has shown, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.⁴

That is not an economic case, nor is it a case that maps onto employer sponsorship of schooling. Indeed, suggestions that employers be responsible for offering employees benefits to defray the cost of the third grade—or, better yet, to offer an on-site elementary school—come across as farce. Yet despite child care carrying a similar (albeit not identical) rationale, running child care through the employer-employee relationship draws little comment.

Embracing child care solely as a work support can also lead to what I have termed the “minimum viable child care fallacy.”⁵ Simply put, if all one wants is a place for children to be so that parents can work, then there is no need to build a high-quality system of choice with well-compensated educators. In fact, sustaining a healthy child care system—which is inherently more expensive than a minimal one—begins to eat into the raw economic return on investment. The logic of a robustly funded and universal system is, I assert, not compatible with a view of child care that considers it appropriately provided by employers to their employees. This is one of several reasons why the U.S. spends nearly $800 billion in public money every year on K–12 education versus a mere $34 billion on child care.⁶

Services like schools and child care stand in stark contrast to benefits that are entirely tethered to work. Worker’s compensation insurance is a good example. It exists as insurance against injuries sustained on that particular job. There is no other function, and no reasonable application for worker’s compensation outside of the employer-employee relationship.

In fact, employer-sponsored child care benefits join worker’s compensation insurance as part of what scholars consider the “private welfare state.” This is not an oxymoron; as the historian Michael Katz has explained, “employee benefits fit within the framework of the welfare state because they have been encouraged by the federal government, which allows employers to deduct their cost from taxes, and are regulated by federal legislation. Without them, the public welfare state would have assumed a very different form.”⁷ (For instance, New Zealand does not have employer-linked worker’s compensation insurance but instead a public Accident Compensation Corporation that covers all residents.⁸)

While private welfare can make sense in some situations, it can be deeply troublesome in others. The canonical example of private welfare in the United States is health insurance. As I have written in a different medium:

We’ve been at this crossroads before, with health care. During World War II, companies began offering health insurance as a perk. This was done to get around wage caps established in 1942 to prevent the economy from going haywire as companies competed for the suddenly shrunken labor force. Coming out of the war, President Harry Truman proposed a national health-insurance system akin to what would become the U.K.’s National Health Service. The plan failed under opposition not just from business interests but from several major labor unions that had become invested in the idea of employer-sponsored insurance—a decision whose effects the country still feels today.⁹

While we will look in the next section at the practical problems with replicating the health insurance model, it is worth sitting for a moment with the distinction between public and private provision of services. There is a suite of services that American society has decided create enough widespread benefits to be paid for through taxation and distributed widely: Examples include not only public schools but libraries, parks, fire departments, roads, and so on. By contrast, there is a suite of services that society has decided do not meet this threshold and instead individuals are expected to obtain on their own, perhaps with some assistance from their employer. Examples here include not only health insurance but transportation, gym memberships, and pet care.

Indeed, reliance on the private welfare state is at odds with much of the messaging coming from advocates and legislative champions for child care. For years, these groups and individuals have been pushing the idea that child care deserves major public investment because it is a public or social good as opposed to a private one. A typical example comes from U.S. House Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who said in 2023 regarding COVID-19 pandemic funding for child care, “The reality is we have a long way to go to build a child care system that works for working families. But this relief funding has proved what’s possible when we invest in child care, when we treat it for what it is: a public good.”¹⁰

Such language explicitly attempts to place child care in the same category as schools and roads, while promotion of employer-sponsored child care benefits furthers its place as a private good. The lack of reckoning with this inherent contradiction speaks to the lack of reflection about what philosophy is necessary to build an effective child care system that works for all involved.