Conservative Solutions for Child Care's Problems

Earlier this month, Sunny Hostin claimed that a household needs to earn $400,000 per year in order to afford child care. Patently incorrect in her numbers, she touches on a grain of truth: Child care consumes a significant portion of family income, oftentimes outpacing wages and the cost other common expenditures such as housing and groceries. For those with young children, the difficulties of finding and affording quality child care are all too real.

To fix the system, many on the left have proffered universal, zero-fee child care. Most notably, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has made headlines for pledging free child care, raising taxes for New York City residents and adding more government subsidized grades preceding kindergarten. Before Mamdani, former Mayor Bill de Blasio led a similar crusade, ousting community-based childcare centers and affixing a few extra grades onto the floundering K–8 public system.

However, universal, free preschool isn’t an exclusively progressive cause. In 2005, Florida instituted a voluntary pre-kindergarten for all four-year-olds in the state, regardless of family income. Other red states, like Oklahoma and Georgia, have models that offer state subsidized care for four-year-olds who wish to enroll in public, pre-kindergarten programs. Other states, including Florida, but also Colorado and New Mexico, subsidize care for participating providers who are both public and private. In this way, and unlike Mamdani’s vision for New York, community-based mom-and-pops and faith-based preschool providers are still included in the early childcare market.

But solving this complicated problem not only entails addressing questions of eligibility and access, but also questions of funding. Any solutions that crowd out private providers—shrinking an already dwindling supply —or that create expensive, bureaucratic bottlenecks like in New York City are inadequate, unsustainable, and oftentimes, the penalties are greater than the perks.

So, what’s the path forward?

In a recent report for the Conservative Education Reform Network, Emily Anne Gullickson outlines how the Commonwealth of Virginia has created a robust public-private marketplace of quality early learning options, introducing a new, portable early learning digital wallet centered on the premise that the funding should follow the child.

The Virginia digital wallet offers families a portal wherein they can receive funds from their employers, philanthropies, and other entities to support child-care costs, allowing for centralized management of payments while also enabling multiple funding streams. On top of that, the state also provides generous assistance for households up to 85 percent of the state median income (or up to $113,000 for a family of four in 2025). In many ways, the Youngkin administration’s early child care reforms have set in motion an innovative system delivering broad access to early learning for children across the Commonwealth.

While many states offer a mixed delivery system where families can choose from a range of public pre-k, Head Start, private providers, and home-based centers, the idea that money follows the child is an innovative way to inject the struggling infrastructure with a parent-driven solution that encourages competition and promotes transparency.

Frederick Hess and Michael McShane outline a similar fix in Getting Education Right, arguing for state-based education savings accounts for preschoolers, so families have the flexibility to spend funds on a diverse selection of approved providers. What Virginia is doing, and what Hess and McShane propose, introduces a portable subsidy that gives parents the opportunity to decide what learning environment works best for their child as well as what works best for them, from a practical vantage point.

The benefits of such a system are numerous: It expands access, without damaging supply, creates competition, and includes a funding approach that folds in contributions from public and private entities. By opening the door to employer contributions, private corporations are incentivized to offer stacked benefits for parents while simultaneously reducing the reliance on state subsidies. For companies seeking to boost labor force participation, chipping into child care costs makes a whole lot of sense.

This is the next frontier of early child care reform. Universal state funding does not require an exclusively public delivery system of education and is not at odds with a choice-based architecture wherein parents are empowered. Virginia’s early childhood reforms are instructive, and other states should take note and consider ways to make child care subsidies accessible and portable for parents. And importantly, recentering child-care debates on families should not be made out to be an ideological exercise—it’s common sense.