Child Care Has a Branding Problem

Let’s Elevate Care Language, Not Abandon It

Note: While The Family Frontier is getting started, I wanted to thank you for being an early subscriber at any level–so we’re going to unlock On Incrementalism, Part II for the next week. Enjoy!

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I was recently asked why I have such “devotion” to calling the policy area in which I work “child care.” The term is not a given: many in the sector have since moved on to calling what we work on as “early care and education,” “early childhood education,” or some variation thereof–and there are valid reasons behind their decision. My answer, though, is as simple as it is fundamental: we lose out as a society when we devalue care, and there is a desperate need to rehabilitate the image of care and its place in a healthy society.

There is little question that the phrase “child care”–and its cousin hated by many in the field, “daycare”¹–can conjure up unimpressive images of low-skilled supervisory work worthy of meager respect or public support. Dead wrong as those images may be, there is a reason why in the 2000s there was a big campaign for pre-K expansion where “advocates began to strategically phase out the terms ‘child care’ and ‘daycare’ and replace them with ‘child development’ and ‘early education’.” My friend, author, and all-around early childhood maven Dan Wuori made a maximalist argument for this in his 2024 book The Daycare Myth, writing:

Daycare doesn’t exist. And I don’t mean it’s in short supply and difficult to access. I mean it literally. Conceptually. As in, it isn’t a thing … I’m going to argue that the term child care is every bit as worthy of banishment from our collective vocabulary -- a concept just as pernicious and divorced from reality as daycare itself.

I respectfully disagree with Dan about the concept of child care, but descriptively, these critics are right about child care often being a bad brand. Much of the public, to my analysis, still approaches child care with a certain degree of reluctance. As in, yeah, we realize that many parents need that, but we mostly wish they didn’t. This isn’t helped by a history that tracks back to racist and classist approaches offering incredibly low-quality care for poor children², as well as events like the sexual abuse hysteria of the 1980s. In many ways, it’s a negatively reinforcing cycle: child care funding is neglected, child care programs suffer in quality, there is bad press about child care, the public and politicians don’t want to support such an ineffectual system, and the wheel turns again.³

But here’s the thing–and remember to not lose the family policy forest for the trees–care needs extend far beyond the early years of life.⁴ There are school-aged care needs for after-school and over the summer (don’t us parents of school-aged kids know it!). Schools themselves, of course, serve an enormously important care function: if the early years involve early childhood care and education–which they do!–then in truth the elementary school years are middle childhood care and education, and the secondary school years are adolescent care and education. And even if you want to lean hard on the fact that all of the care that happens for children is inherently developmental and educational–which is Dan’s point, and which it is!–then you run into the problem of care for those with long-term disabilities and for elders.

I sometimes think it is instructive to consider the case of an 85-year-old stricken with Alzheimer’s. The care being provided to that individual produces little future economic value. There is no educational element at play. And yet, I would argue that such care–as painful, labor-intensive, and heartbreaking it may be–is immensely valuable.⁵ There is meaning in dependency, and as Elissa Strauss and others have written, dependency is not a one-way street: if someone is dependent on you, you are tethered to them. If we lose the core concepts of care, whether care of children or care of spouse or care of neighbor or care of the elderly, we lose some of ourselves. Hence my devotion.

So there are two options: abandon care language altogether, or work explicitly to elevate and reposition care in society. I come down on the side of repositioning.

How to Change a Culture

Much of the needed repositioning work is about cultural change as opposed to policy change (though the two aren’t truly severable, as I’ll discuss in a bit). Some deep-set cultural assumptions about care need to be challenged. To be sure, that includes inculcating the value of child care as more than mere custodial babysitting, and emphasizing that child care carries widespread social benefits as more than just parental work support.⁶ But even beyond that, there remain assumptions that care lies primarily in the individual family sphere, separate and largely inviolable by the public or state. As a pair of scholars, Elizabeth Palley and Corey Shdaimah, wrote in 2014:⁷

Caring for very young children in the United States has not been framed as part of larger universal policies to support families. As a result, it has been left on the sidelines of major political discourse...Outside of the narrow context of addressing child care for the poor, child care has largely been seen in the United States as an individual problem that each family must resolve on its own.

How do we change cultural mindsets? There are, of course, multiple angles of approach. One involves working through pop culture channels like entertainment. You may have heard stories about how Latin American telenovelas have influenced stunning amounts of cultural change⁸; the same goes for TV shows in the U.S., especially during the years when network TV was dominant. Given the fractured media consumption landscape of the 2020s, the modern story undoubtedly involves “influencers” as well. There is exciting work being done in this arena by folks like Vicki Shabo at New America’s Better Life Lab and at Caring Across Generations–work which likely deserves a far higher place in the movement and funder priority list.

Other theories of changing mindsets involve getting in people’s faces a bit. Consider the work of Truthout around cigarette smoking, or ACT UP’s “kiss-in” strategy in the ‘80s to reduce stigma around homosexuality and AIDS. Imagine a campaign that put up large signs with child care prices next to gas station price signs, or billboards contrasting the cost of care (or practitioner pay) for serving a three-year-old versus a six-year-old, or a Super Bowl ad driving home these points. I’m about as far from Don Draper as you get (in… well, basically every way imaginable), but you get the idea.

Non-violent protest actions have also been shown to increase visibility and public understanding of issues; in Ireland, a 30,000-strong march down the streets of Dublin in February 2020 is credited for helping make child care a far greater government priority. While there have again been nascent and promising efforts in this direction, most notably the Morning Without Child Care in Connecticut which has led to an annual Day Without Child Care, there is far more envelope that could be pushed in this space.

Finally, there is a theory that suggests culture change emanates primarily from societal elites. The sociologist James Davison Hunter writes that:

[T]he deepest and most enduring forms of cultural change nearly always occur from the “top down.” In other words, the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large, the work of elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. Even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites … [the capacity for changing how societies define reality] is not evenly distributed in a society, but is concentrated in certain institutions and certain leadership groups who have a lopsided access to the means of cultural production. These elites operate in well-developed networks and powerful institutions.

I think Hunter, writing in 2010, may be somewhat overstating the case now that Mr. Beast and Joe Rogan can reach millions of Americans with the click of a ‘go live’ button. But his overall point is valid. Take the institution of public education. Even with recent shifts, around 85% of American children still attend public schools. The curricula in those schools help shape children’s developing view of themselves, the country, and the world. What messages are public schools currently transmitting about care? Are they implicitly reinforcing ideas of the isolated nuclear family or are they positioning families in the context of their communities? Are there any lessons whatsoever on the history of child care? (Answer: probably not. At least there’s usually a lesson or two on Horace Mann and the common school movement!). Culture change is often a long game, but an intentional strategy to change how care is conveyed via elites and institutions, across all elements of society, seems in order.

Of course, culture and policy are inseparable. What messages are being used in the rebranding–and I would argue they need to center somehow around the idea that child care is an essential part of the social fabric and of healthy families and healthy communities, and thus is as universally needed as schools, libraries, parks, and fire departments⁹–need to be reflected in the proposals on offer. So when we narrow in on licensed child care programs to the exclusion of family, friends & neighbor caregivers or stay-at-home parents, when we carve up needs between the early years and the school-age years, or when we double-down on incentivizing employer-sponsored child care, how do those actions or proposals influence cultural views about what child care is for and about its place in society?¹⁰

I often use the term “pluralism” because I think we need to be nuanced and meet families where they’re at: if care is to become truly seen as a social good, people need to be able to see themselves in it.¹¹ It’s going to take a thoughtful, comprehensive, well-funded, sustained effort to reposition care in society. I can think of few more worthy allocations of resources. Our goal should not be to abandon care, our goal should be to save it.

1. As the line goes, ‘we care for children, we don’t care for days.’ (plus plenty of programs offer care in the nighttime!)

2. In 1918, a magazine described conditions in Cleveland child care programs (known then as “day nurseries”) thusly: “One woman occupying four dark, poorly ventilated rooms was crowding into them thirty or forty children each day; another was caring for twelve children in equally bad surroundings; a third, with less than one-tenth vision, was receiving fourteen children in her two rooms; and a fourth was caring for eight children whom she was in the habit of shutting behind two locked doors on the second floor while she did her marketing.”

3. The bad press continues even now: do a Google News search for the word “daycare” and you’ll get a cascade of local news articles about legitimately awful events -- such as when a child recently fell asleep on a KinderCare bus in Chicago and was left for almost three hours in subzero temperatures (she is OK)–many of which, I would argue, connect back to understaffing and poor compensation.

4. And even within the early years, care needs extend beyond the need for external sources of care & education–paid family leave is surely the first part of the arc of family support and child development!

5. As sociologist Robert Bellah has written, “The distinction needs to be drawn between caring as a sentimental psychological attitude and caring as a responsible practice, aware of its own limits...Genuine caring is a practice based on moral commitments with which certain subjective feelings may or may not be associated, but it is not primarily a psychological orientation. Genuine caring does not see those in need primarily as victims. Genuine caring involves a profound sense of moral responsibility, but it does not imagine that caregivers have the technology or the power to heal all wounds and cure all ills.”

6. Basically the thesis of Raising a Nation, coming your way July 2025!

7. This is also true of elder care, by the way.

8. As one example, a popular Mexican show in the ‘70s had a storyline that involved a character going to a doctor who explained various birth control options. One article reports that, “During only 12 months of the 1977 telenovela’s air-time, an additional 32.5 percent of women in Mexico began using birth control for the first time and the sale of contraceptives rose by 23%.”

9. Research done by the Frameworks Institute and Leading For Kids suggests that the public may indeed be open to concepts of ‘collective caregiving’ as a way of thinking about what children and families need.

10. Another question: What messages are we sending when we cast child care in mainly instrumental terms (what I call the “minimum viable child care fallacy”) instead of emphasizing that all children deserve the opportunity to develop and receive care from attentive, well-supported adults in sterling, love-rich settings we can all be proud of?

11. The process of mapping solutions to a new problem onto existing ways of seeing the world is what sociologist Sandra Levitsky calls “discursive integration.”