Federal child care policy is among the most highly charged of contemporary political issues in the United States. The proportion of young American children currently receiving a substantial amount of care from people other than their relatives has risen to historically unprecedented levels. If the nature of child care arrangements has an impact on children's cognitive and emotional development, this situation could have profound long-term implications for American society.
The steady secular increase in the labor force participation of wives with preschool children and the shift from parental/relative to non-parental child care have led to growing demands for government policies that increase the supply of child care services, lower their cost to parents, and enhance their quality by establishing more stringent standards for providers. The proponents of expanded public involvement in the child care industry argue that child care can provide additional education to children at a critical phase in their development, thereby improving their chances for success in school and in the labor market. Affordable child care can also make it easier for many parents to augment their job skills and to work, both of which represent typical first steps toward an improved, and for many families, a more dignified, standard of living. Finally, it is argued that child care subsidies, by removing a barrier to employment for many women in low-income families, can reduce the government's welfare burden and broaden its tax base.
At the other end of the policy spectrum are individuals and organizations who claim that the well-being of children has deteriorated over time, according to many indicators, in tandem with increases in women's labor market activity and the provision of an increased proportion of child care by non-relatives (and perhaps less care overall, especially among school-age children). These groups argue against expanding governmental involvement in the child care market; some even argue that there should be cutbacks in current levels of governmental involvement. These recommendations are based on the claim that there is no evidence that freely-operating private markets fail to provide the socially optimal quantity and quality of child care services. Child care subsidies that cannot be applied to parental care or to child care sponsored by religious institutions are also cited as being inherently inequitable, leading to