Raising a Nation: Elliot Haspel on What a Universal Childcare Movement Will Take
It is no secret that childcare in the US is, as Elliot Haspel puts it, “a hellscape.” Elliot’s new book, Raising a Nation: 10 Reasons Every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All, is a welcome addition to the growing and necessary conversation about our need for universal childcare.
As Elliot lays out in the book, we need to do the in-the-weeds work of building a universal childcare policy, yes—but we also need to build the case for it. To do this, Elliot outlines 10 “cases” advocates, policymakers, parents, and providers can make, as a movement, to push for what we really need on childcare. The cases range from solidarity to an antipoverty lens to family values to framing childcare as a part of the American Dream. We sat down with him last week to discuss the book.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Lena Bilik: Here at the Roosevelt Institute, we recognize how important it is that we get historic levels of significant, sustained federal investment to solve the childcare crisis. Your new book is a critical focus on what it will actually take to get us there—to build the movement required to fight for such a policy sea change. What is your biggest takeaway from the process of writing this book about how we need to rethink how we build the case for universal childcare?
Elliot Haspel: My biggest takeaway is that we need to talk about childcare as an American value. This is the thesis of the book—that as much as we have accurate arguments about childcare’s impact on things like the labor force, ultimately, given the type of system we’re trying to build and the amount of permanent public money that’s going to be required to build it, it’s going to require making a deeper case that redefines what childcare is and the role that it plays in society.
As I was writing this book, it really drove home for me the fact that, no matter where one comes from, whether or not one has kids, whether or not one is particularly comfortable with the idea of young children being cared for outside the home, there is a way into this idea that childcare undergirds everything we care about as Americans. And unless we start explaining that, and making that case on that emotional, values-laden level, I think we’re going to be stuck on a very slow, choppy path toward the system that we need.
Lena: Importantly, you spend time in your book on the workforce crisis within the childcare crisis. You note that “child-care educators make a median salary of $14.60 an hour, on par with parking lot attendants and dog walkers,” despite the immense social value of their work. You connect this undervaluation to broader cultural and political neglect. What do you think could most effectively transform childcare from undervalued labor into a recognized pillar of national infrastructure?
Elliot: I think it’s going to require both cultural change and policy change. Nothing is transforming without significant amounts of permanent public money. No country makes it work without significant investments from the government.
By one expert group’s estimation, in 2024 dollars we would need $175 billion a year for a really good, functional system. And that’s fine. We spend $800 billion a year on public education in this country. We spent over $500 billion on Medicaid and on Medicare each. So we can spend large amounts of money, because we know it’s not just an outlay. We’re getting all sorts of benefits back—both directly in terms of economic benefit and also more inevitably in terms of the impact it has on our society.
And so when I think about what it would take to win that level of investment, we’re going to need to start by asserting childcare as a right. That’s part of the cultural shift. If we see childcare as a right as we do for public education in every state constitution, that changes its role and its positioning in society. And then it becomes much easier to build the public will and get the cover, frankly, that politicians are going to need in order to pass the level of funding that’s required.
Lena: You describe the 1971 veto of the Comprehensive Child Development Act—a moment in which the country got tantalizingly close to universal childcare—not merely as a policy defeat, but as a fracture in national parental solidarity. That moment marked a shift from the possibility of us viewing childcare as a shared responsibility to seeing it as a local, individual concern. Given how political, regional, and cultural divides persist today, what messages do you think could build a resilient universal childcare framework that resonates across very different parts of the country, without losing coherence at the national level?
Elliot: I think it really starts with what value we’re asserting. Gallup did some polling recently, and they asked Americans of all stripes: What values do you hold dearest? And the value that dominated all of the other ones across all subgroups—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—was family. It beat out all the other values.
So I think we start out by saying: A good childcare system strengthens our families. It means that we can have more quality time with our kids. It means that we can stay rooted in the communities that we’re in instead of having to move because of the search for care. It means that we’re able to have families of the size that we want, instead of having the number of children that we’re having determined by the availability and affordability of childcare. It’s about messaging that families need to be able to raise their kids the way that they want to raise them. That feels very American to me. And I think we haven’t yet tied childcare to that value. So that’s something I’m hopeful about—that if we lead with that vision, it will be easier.
Lena: You invoke Robert F. Kennedy’s critique of GDP as a flawed measure of national well-being, arguing that childcare must be understood not just in economic terms but as a foundation for human flourishing, democracy, and community. You also aim to reposition the economic case, as a correction to what you call an “overreliance on the economic case” for childcare. I found this section to be a unique perspective you don’t always see, and overall quite persuasive. I am wondering if you could talk about how you think advocates should shift the conversation from simply an economic justification to more moral and civic imperatives—without losing those who are most persuaded by budgetary or market-based arguments?
Elliot: It’s an important question. I think we need a toolbox of messages that are deployed differently for different audiences, just like any sort of persuasive campaign. But what’s important to me is that they all exist under the overarching value set. I think we start with the why, which in my formulation is so that we have healthy children, healthy families, and healthy communities. My concern with the overreliance on the economic case is that it is a pretty narrow vision, which I think means a lot of people can’t see themselves in it. And I think it’s limited. It’s not that I’m telling anyone to stop using the economic argument for childcare investment, because it’s valid. It’s absolutely valid. But I’m asking folks to position it properly and nest it within the vision and the values.
Lena: You rightfully point out in the anti-poverty case section that means-testing childcare programs goes against a central value of your book: that childcare is a social imperative. Can you say more about universality, and why it’s critical not only to making a sustainable system but to building the movement to make it happen?
Elliot: It’s interesting; there has been a lot of talk in recent years about childcare as a public good. But you don’t means-test public goods. Bill Gates can send his child to the local public school for free. He gets to go check out a book at the local public library for free. He can have a picnic at the public park for free. He gets to drive on the public roads for free, and he gets to have the fire department show up to his house without paying for it. He could pay for all of that himself, but we don’t ask him to because we say there are certain pieces of our social infrastructure that are so important that we’re gonna roll up our tax dollars, and we’re going to pay for them all so it’s free at the point of service. And, hypothetically, we’re asking Bill Gates to pay more on the back end in taxes. (Now, whether that actually happens—that’s a discussion for a different day.)
But my argument is that childcare belongs in that pantheon. Because means-tested childcare is not actually a public good, and it’s not universal. I am strongly supportive of universal, comprehensive childcare that is free at the point of service, and that includes stay-at-home parents, family caregivers, and everyone in between. And when you make that case, when you say childcare should be a right, that it should be seen as as much of a part of a social fabric as schools and parks and libraries, it forces our opponents to explain why that’s not the case. And that is actually a harder case to make than you might think.
Lena: In your section on making the case for childcare as a part of the American Dream, you posit some really interesting ideas about care that I think we all need to be talking about more. You write that “care writ large offers one of the few universal human bonds and therefore one of the best opportunities to heal our fragmented nation and world.” You then make the case that we can fight for childcare as one way to move toward a future marked by “widespread flourishing.” I know you also think a lot about other types of care, including elder care. I would love to hear you talk more about your thoughts on how investing in a care continuum could be seen as an antidote to the deeply individualistic, deeply polarized times we find ourselves in?
Elliot: So I draw from Elissa Strauss here, who has a great book called When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others. She talks about this idea of dependency as actually a two-way street. When someone is dependent on you—a child, an elder, or a person with a long-term disability—you are also dependent on them. There’s something very connective about care. And it’s not always pretty, particularly when we talk about elder care. Care can be demanding, but it’s also deeply meaningful. It’s deeply human. And particularly, in an era when so much of our time is spent on screens of various types, this very core human interaction is all the more important.
Talking about care reinforces our interdependency. I quote FDR in the book on this. He talked about how in the US, as much as we have our independent streaks, as much as we like our freedoms, we actually do have deep interdependency. And we’ve lost that in some ways. And so I do think the more we invest in care, the more that we position it as not just individual family responsibility but actually something that society can work alongside families to support—not to take over the care, but to bolster families and help them in providing the care—it can be one of the things that can help knit us back together.
And with elder care, we still have a deep sense that it should be something that families handle on their own. There’s limited public support for elder care outside of Social Security and Medicare. So I do think broadening out this question of care writ large is really important. Care cuts across every single line of difference. From the richest person in America to the poorest person in America, no matter what state you live in, whether you live in a rural or urban community—at some point in your life you’re receiving care, and at some point in your life you’re giving care. There aren’t a lot of universal experiences left in our world today, and that’s one of them. Like we talked about earlier, family is a dominant and cross-cutting value—well, care is a dominant and cross-cutting need. So if we center care as a frame, as a value, as a policy goal, we really have the chance to move the country in a better direction.
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