The abundance movement rediscovered something America had long forgotten: that scarcity is often a choice.
Bad zoning. Captured regulators. Tangled permitting.
Remove the obstacles, and housing gets built. Transmission lines proliferate. And infrastructure comes on line.
The diagnosis was clarifying. The politics followed.
But the movement has a glaring blind spot. There is a strange omission sitting quietly at the heart of the abundance agenda.
An empty chair at the table.
A silence where children should be.
Housing determines whether a family can put a roof over a child’s head. Childcare determines whether a family can afford to have children at all.
On this count, the abundance movement has come up short. The same artificial scarcity that distorted housing is quietly dissolving family formation — and that’s a problem.
The Manufactured Scarcity of Care
The math of childcare is brutal for families.
Today, the average cost of childcare is $13,000 per year for one child.1 For two children — an infant and a toddler — the average cost now approaches $28,000, more than a third of median household income.2
In 45 states, childcare for two costs more than a mortgage. In 49, more than annual rent.3
The federal government defines affordable care as 7 percent of household income. Not a single state meets that threshold for infant care.4
Not one.
Childcare isn’t expensive and scarce the way diamonds and rare earth minerals are. It’s not scarce like a biological ecosystem with a fixed carrying capacity.
Childcare’s skyrocketing costs are largely artificial. They’re manufactured through layers of law, policy, and institutional inertia that have transformed a basic human necessity into a financially destabilizing line item in every family’s budget.
This is the same genus of scarcity that turned San Francisco housing into a luxury commodity. It simply wears a different face.
The Daycare Cost Trap
The strange thing about childcare in America is that it is simultaneously too expensive for families and barely profitable for providers.
Parents feel crushed.
Workers feel underpaid.
Providers struggle to survive.
Most daycare centers operate on profit margins below one percent.5
Beneath these margins, several forces ratchet costs upward. Restrictive zoning laws ban daycare centers in residential neighborhoods, suppressing supply and inflating prices.6 Tort liability rules impose crushing insurance premiums on providers, raising cost and unaffordability for families.7 Fragmented procurement leaves daycares at the whims of consolidated suppliers, enriching vendors at the expense of families.8 Administrative reporting piles endless paperwork on facilities already stretched thin, pushing daycare prices even further out of reach for parents.9
These are real costs. They compound. They should be addressed.
But they are not the primary story.
Labor is the primary story.
Staffing costs consume fifty to seventy percent of a daycare center’s operating budget.10 Not some of it. Most of it.
The reason labor costs are so high traces directly to a structural feature of childcare that has no obvious parallel in most industries: strict statutory ratios of caregivers to children, ratios that are most punishing for the very youngest children. In many states, one adult may supervise only three or four infants at a time.11
The rationale is sound — infants require constant attention, feeding, diapering, emotional attunement, and sleep monitoring. The first years of human life are neurologically explosive, and brains develop through sustained, responsive interaction. The ratios exist because small children are not efficient, and civilizations that love their children accept that fact.
But the math is merciless. Every additional child eventually requires another human body. Unlike software or manufacturing, daycare has almost no scale economies.
These human bodies are themselves astonishingly underpaid. Median childcare workers earn roughly fifteen dollars an hour.12 Turnover reaches thirty to forty percent annually.13 In many states, childcare workers cannot afford childcare for their own children.14
The system consumes its own workforce and drains family pocketbooks.
Something structural, then, has to give — and the question is what.
Unbundling Care
Here is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.
To make childcare affordable for families, America must cut labor costs by rewiring the operational structure of daycares from top to bottom.
Modern daycare is unaffordable because legal rules bundle labor together in ways that increasingly resemble pre-modern guilds. The same childcare worker performs developmental education, emotional coaching, curriculum planning, diaper changing, attendance logging, bottle preparation, cleaning, parent communication, scheduling, and administrative paperwork simultaneously.
But here’s the key point: while daycare workers are required by law to complete all these tasks, not every task requires the same level of expertise.
Hospitals already learned this decades ago.15
A doctor does not perform every task inside a hospital room. Modern medicine unbundled labor into differentiated roles: nurses, phlebotomists, patient care technicians, medical assistants, pharmacy techs, and imaging specialists. Highly trained workers focus on high-skill functions while routine procedural work is distributed downward into lower-cost roles with narrower scope.
Daycare never made this transition — and because it never did, America effectively pays developmental-specialist wages for large quantities of routinized labor.
The implication is not that skilled caregivers matter less.
Quite the contrary. It is that skilled caregivers are currently trapped doing too many low-leverage tasks — like bottle prep, cleaning, and paperwork — at high cost because government rules prohibit them from delegating these tasks to other workers.
This structure isn’t inevitable. Future daycare could look very different. In an unbundled model:
Check-in coordinators handle logistics and parent authentication.
Hygiene aides specialize in sanitization and bottle prep.
Float staff cover transitions and breaks.
AI-assisted administrative software automates attendance, billing, and scheduling.
Lead developmental educators focus primarily on emotional development, curriculum, behavioral guidance, and parent communication.
This is not deregulation. It’s reorganization.
And it carries a corollary that tends to be underappreciated: unbundling could actually raise the wages of lead educators, who would be freed from the dilution of spending half their hours on tasks anyone with basic training could perform.
Unbundling is the single highest-leverage reform available to American families — and almost no one is talking about it.
The Progressive Objection
The progressive objection arrives here, and it deserves a fair hearing.
Childcare workers are already underpaid. The workforce is disproportionately female and disproportionately composed of women of color.
Any discussion of reducing labor costs risks sounding like another attempt to extract efficiency from already exhausted workers inside an economy that routinely asks ordinary people to absorb the costs of systemic dysfunction.
That concern is real.
But it also conflates two different moral frameworks.
For ordinary market goods — like consumer electronics, entertainment, travel, and clothing — worker compensation is a legitimate policy objective. Wages matter. Worker power matters. These are industries where affordability is meaningful without being existential.
But for civilizational necessities — like housing, healthcare, education, and childcare — the calculus is different. When the good is a precondition for human flourishing — not an enhancement of it — the question is not how to maximize wages within the existing cost structure. It is how to redesign the cost structure so the necessity itself becomes affordable.
Put more bluntly, a country where childcare workers earn modestly more while millions of families cannot afford children is not a success. It’s a failure that redistributes pain across society.
The Subsidy Paradox
This brings us to the question of subsidies.
The intuitive response to a crisis of affordability is more money. Pour enough subsidies into the system — tax credits, vouchers, block grants, and universal childcare schemes — and the cost burden on families should fall.
This instinct is well intended. Families need help now. Subsidies fill that void.
But there is a structural trap lurking beneath this generosity.
When money flows into a system whose costs are artificially inflated by bad rules rather than genuine scarcity, subsidies don’t lower the water level. They raise the tide.
A daycare center charging $20,000 per child has no incentive to innovate toward $14,000 if guaranteed revenue flows in perpetuity.
Inefficiency doesn’t get reformed — it gets underwritten. Supply doesn’t expand to meet demand — it calcifies around what the subsidy will bear. The dollars change hands, but the dysfunction remains, preserved in amber by the very intervention meant to dissolve it.
Families don’t see this failure on their monthly bills. The costs are diffuse — higher taxes, greater borrowing, and inflation quietly eroding the purchasing power of every paycheck. Politically invisible. Economically real.
And yet the case against subsidies is not absolute. Here, the evidence grows genuinely complicated, and intellectual honesty demands acknowledging it.
When subsidies are designed well — not merely as income transfers but as instruments of structural expansion — they can work. Quebec’s provincial childcare program, launched in the late 1990s, paired public funding with supply-side reform: state-backed facility financing, streamlined licensing, and aggressively expanded provider capacity.16
The result was not a perfect system — persistent waitlists and uneven quality remain — but it demonstrated that subsidies attached to supply side reform can scale access rather than simply inflate price.
There is also a subtler fiscal argument that deserves an honest hearing. Universal childcare, if it frees parents — disproportionately mothers — to enter or deepen their participation in the labor force, generates wages, tax revenue, and economic output that a purely static accounting of program costs will miss.17 Subsidies in this respect can partly pay for themselves under the right conditions — but they are not a substitute for genuine structural reform.
The lesson is not that public investment is futile.
It’s that sequence matters. Subsidies poured into a structurally broken system calcify brokenness. Subsidies paired with genuine supply-side reform — unbundled labor models, relaxed zoning, reduced administrative burden, and expanded provider capacity — can translate public dollars into real relief rather than institutional sclerosis.
America keeps reaching for the wallet before fixing the machine. It’s time to fix the machine first before throwing more money at the problem.
Towards Family Abundance
George Eliot wrote near the end of Middlemarch that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.”18
Childcare is full of unhistoric acts: exhausted workers tying tiny shoes, calming tantrums, warming bottles, wiping tears, and teaching language to children who will never remember their names.
A healthy civilization does not treat these acts as private luxuries available only to affluent households fortunate enough to absorb the cost. It builds family abundance and institutions capable of sustaining life at scale without crushing families and undermining the vitality of our society.
The path to family abundance will not emerge from ideological purity alone. It requires the courage to redesign the very structures that make care artificially scarce and the conviction that family abundance is not a policy footnote.
It is the measure of whether a civilization still believes in its own future.
Child Care Aware of America, “Child Care in America: 2025 Price & Supply,” May 14, 2026, https://uk.advfn.com/stock-market/share-news/Child-Care-Prices-Rival-Major-Household-Expenses/98529019.
LendingTree, “Households With 2 Kids Need to Earn Average of $402,708 to Comfortably Afford Child Care,” Jan. 20, 2026, https://www.lendingtree.com/debt-consolidation/child-care-affordability-study/.
“Paying more for child care than your mortgage? You’re not alone,” Oregon Capital Chronicle, Aug. 5, 2025, https://oregoncapitalchronicle.com/2025/08/05/paying-more-for-child-care-than-your-mortgage-youre-not-alone/.
National Women’s Law Center, “The Shocking Cost of Infant Care in Every State,” Feb. 6, 2025, https://nwlc.org/press-release/the-shocking-cost-of-infant-care-in-every-state/.
Bipartisan Policy Center, “The Child Care Business Model, Explained,” Apr. 1, 2026, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/explainer/the-child-care-business-model-explained/.
American Enterprise Institute, “Childcare Regulation and Affordability,” Oct. 21, 2025, https://www.aei.org/research-products/report/childcare-regulation-and-affordability/.
Bipartisan Policy Center, “The Perfect Storm: Child Care Providers’ Challenges in Accessing and Affording Liability Insurance,” Aug. 8, 2025, https://bipartisanpolicy.org/issue-brief/the-perfect-storm-child-care-providers-challenges-in-accessing-and-affording-liability-insurance/.
CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, "A Cooperative Future for Childcare Worker Power in NYC," Mar. 16, 2026, https://slublog.org/2026/03/16/a-cooperative-future-for-childcare-worker-power-in-nyc/.
NPR / Minnesota Public Radio, “Rising costs and red tape force home child care centers across the country to close,” Nov. 18, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5550271/rising-costs-and-red-tape-force-home-child-care-centers-across-the-country-to-close.
Niskanen Center, “States have room to experiment with childcare staffing ratios,” Oct. 30, 2025, https://www.niskanencenter.org/states-have-room-to-experiment-with-childcare-staffing-ratios/.
Niskanen Center, “States have room to experiment with childcare staffing ratios,” Oct. 30, 2025, https://www.niskanencenter.org/states-have-room-to-experiment-with-childcare-staffing-ratios/.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Childcare Workers,” Occupational Outlook Handbook, May 2024, https://www.bls.gov/OOH/personal-care-and-service/childcare-workers.htm.
Best Daycares Near, “What is the turnover rate among daycare staff and why does it matter?” Apr. 26, 2026, https://www.bestdaycaresnear.me/blog/what-is-the-turnover-rate-among-daycare-staff-and-why-does-it-matter/.
CACFP, “CACFP: A Critical Support for Child Care,” July 23, 2025, https://www.cacfp.org/2025/07/23/cacfp-a-critical-support-for-child-care/.
Peter L. Twohig, “Education, Expertise, Experience and the Making of Hospital Workers in Canada, 1920–1960,” Scientia Canadensis, 29, no. 2 (2006), https://releve.erudit.org/en/journals/scientia/2006-v29-n2-scientia3150/800522ar/.
Policy Options, “How to create early childhood spaces: lessons from Quebec,” May 15, 2023, https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2023/05/early-childhood-spaces-quebec-lessons/.
Michael Baker, Jonathan Gruber, and Kevin Milligan, “Investing in Mothers? The Long-Run Impact of a Universal Child Care Program on Maternal Work and Income,” Working Paper, Mar. 1, 2026, https://sites.google.com/view/kevin-milligan/home/research/bgm-childcare3.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–72), Finale, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/145/pg145-images.html.