Penna Dexter

There’s a proposal on the table to dramatically expand the government role in daycare. President Biden says he wants to spend $225 billion on childcare on top of the programs that already exist. Do we really want America to be a society where the state assumes the care of young children? The spending is massive. Giving government this role in family life is unwise. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, investor and author J.D. Vance and Wheatley Institution scholar Jenet Erickson write that “the substance matters more than the money.” They say that a “federal push to get droves of children into daycare” is bad for children and their parents. Experience and countless studies show that kids from two-parent families exhibit more anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity when they spend a good part of their days in daycare. The Biden plan is meant to help low-and-moderate-income families. But the Vance/Erickson column points out that it’s upper-class Americans who “are most likely to prefer a work-family model in which two earners rely on child care.” This is according to a YouGov/American Compass survey which found that poor working-class and middle-class respondents prefer a model with one parent working full-time and the other providing at-home child care.” If people can’t make that happen financially, they prefer to rely on family, church settings, or small privately run childcare arrangements. In her book, Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, psychoanalyst Erica Komisar says a mother’s full time presence in the home during as much of those first three years as possible “is necessary to regulate children’s emotions, buffer them against stress, and provide them with a sense of emotional security that lays a foundation for a lifetime of mental health.” Call me cynical, but I think the Left wants to get its hooks into our kids’ values and loyalties in early childhood. All the more reason to oppose this so-called ‘families plan.’