Affordable Is Not Enough: Child Care Should Be Good for Kids, Too

Child care is having a moment in the national dialogue. After years of being treated as a private family problem, the cost of care is now widely recognized as a crisis for working parents, employers, and the economy. Policymakers, think tanks, and advocates are putting forward proposals to make care affordable, expand the supply of providers, and pay early educators a living wage. Recent examples include the Child Care for America Working Group launched by congressional Democrats in March 2026, the Roosevelt Institute’s vision for universal public childcare, and the Child Care Choice Guarantee from New America’s Tara McGuiness and Alyson Silkowski with Katie Hamm and Mario Cardona for Project 2029. 

That momentum is long overdue. But as the national conversation focuses on affordability, something essential should not slip out of view: the experiences of the children themselves. 

If the federal government is going to make a large new investment in child care, as most of these proposals suggest, it should make sure the care it pays for is not only consistently safe and stable, but also promotes children’s development. We can do both—make care affordable and make it good for kids—but only if federal policy is intentional about it from the start.

Straightforward standards built around children

Current federal child care funding has few requirements related to child experiences. Federal rules mostly cover basic health and safety, leaving the rest to the states to determine. As a result, there is a patchwork of mostly voluntary quality systems that are cumbersome, confusing, and vary widely from state to state. Few providers, parents, or administrators like those systems. That’s no surprise: states have had to define, measure, rate, and support the improvement of quality with little federal guidance and serious underfunding. 

A large new federal investment changes the equation. It removes much of the scarcity that drove past fights over quality, and it creates a fair expectation in return. If we ask for a historic influx of public resources, we must embrace a system that includes accountability for young children’s experiences, ensuring that children receive enriching and supportive care.

That doesn’t mean simply expanding the systems we have now. Standards in a new federal program should:

• Ensure children receive care that promotes their long-term growth, not just care that is safe. The goal is to raise the floor to a level of care we would all be comfortable with for our own children.
• Rest on solid child development science, focusing on the features of care proven to matter most.
• Be simple to understand and follow, so providers know what is expected and families know what they are getting.
• Minimize unnecessary burden on providers, and work across the different types of settings parents prefer, including home-based care, center-based care, and school-based programs.
• Right-size the role of government. Government should set clear expectations and hold publicly funded programs accountable for meeting those expectations. That means finding the balance between too many rules and too few, carrying forward lessons and tools that have proven useful, and considering empowering the early childhood education field to set its own industry standards for quality, as many other professions do. 
• Provide support for ongoing improvement in the field. It will take time to move the field in this direction, and new policies should provide both the runway and the resources needed to move providers toward higher quality. In other large federal programs, such as Medicaid, the federal government does not stop at setting standards or requiring accreditation. It also invests in quality improvement and ongoing research so the field can keep learning and growing. 

Planning for a future with simpler, aligned standards that free providers to focus on children

Every child deserves a high-quality experience, no matter which program pays for it. Yet, the many different public funding streams that support affordable care come with different requirements for quality, even when providing the same services. Each funding stream has its own standards for quality, eligibility requirements, and unique monitoring and reporting systems. Providers spend countless hours on paperwork, tracking several sets of requirements at once and preparing for multiple monitoring visits that measure many of the same things in different ways. Meanwhile, children in the same program can have very different experiences, depending upon whether their care is funded by city or state pre-K dollars, the federal Head Start program, federal child care subsidies, or private pay by parents.  

Every hour spent sorting out overlapping rules is an hour not spent with children, coaching teachers, or talking with families. The answer is simplification, not deregulation: one clear, high bar for quality, with aligned monitoring and support across programs. That would allow providers to spend less time on compliance and more time on what matters most, the children in their care. It would also make every public dollar go further. The choices policymakers make now to expand access should pave the way to that vision, not stand in its way.

Families need care that works for them and for their children

Affordability and quality should not be framed as competing priorities. For parents, they are inseparable. Parents need care they can afford, close to home or work, during the hours they work. They also need to know that while they are at work, their children are safe, healthy, happy, and learning.

Care that falls short on the second need does not reliably meet the first. A program with constant staff turnover, chaotic classrooms, or unsafe conditions is not care a parent can count on. Quality care is reliable care, and reliable care is what lets parents stay at work, assured that their children are thriving.

Children’s early years are also when the foundations for later learning are built. With concerns about students’ learning and well-being running high in the US, a major public investment in the settings where millions of young children spend their days is a rare chance to strengthen those foundations. 

Yet too often, the conversation stops at safety. Basic health and safety rules make sure children aren’t harmed, lost, or unattended. Those protections matter, but they are a bare minimum. Children in publicly funded care should have warm, responsive caregivers who support their social-emotional, physical, and cognitive growth, in settings where they can explore, play, and learn. That should be true in every state and for every child. That includes dual language learners, children with disabilities, and children facing hardship at home, who may need extra support.

Paying for the workforce gets us most of the way, but not all of it

Many child care proposals already acknowledge the importance of ensuring that child care providers and teachers are well qualified and compensated for those qualifications. After all, these are the adults we trust with our youngest, most vulnerable children. That is a significant step toward better experiences for children, especially since many child care providers currently earn poverty-level wages. 

Educators who earn a living wage are more likely to stay in their roles, and stable relationships with qualified, consistent caregivers are among the most important ingredients of good care. Qualified educators are better equipped to support children’s development.

Wages and credentials alone do not guarantee that every child’s day is safe, stable, and stimulating. Good care also depends on having enough teachers to attend to children’s needs, daily interactions that are warm and responsive, learning experiences that stimulate children’s brains, and support for educators to learn and improve their practice.

Here’s the good news: once we fund a system that promotes a well-qualified workforce that earns a living wage, it does not cost much more to make sure children get nurturing, stimulating care. The payoff, for children and for taxpayers, is big. Leaving out standards for high quality would mean taxpayers and parents are paying for quality without ensuring children experience it.

Making this happen

This blog is the first in a New America series that aims to put children’s experiences at the center of the child care debate and to give federal policymakers and advocates concrete ideas for getting there. Over the next few months, as a new Congress takes shape, we will publish pieces informed by conversations with public child care administrators, researchers, advocates, philanthropists, and other experts in the field. They will explore specific ways to support children’s experiences in child care, including standards for care, connections to existing early childhood programs such as Head Start and public pre-kindergarten, and more.

The nation is closer than it has been in decades to treating child care as a public good. As federal policymakers write the next chapter, we urge them to keep children at the center: every dollar spent to make care affordable should also buy care that is safe, stable, and good for children’s growth. Every child deserves the opportunity to learn and thrive—this is our moment to deliver it.