Childcare

MS NOW -   President Donald Trump may be a self-proclaimed “student of history,” but he probably should have paid closer attention in class.

At a lunch on Wednesday at the White House, Trump argued that “The United States can’t take care of day care” because “we have to take care of one thing: military protection — we have to guard the country.” Essentially, Trump thinks the federal government can’t afford to invest in child care because we’ve got a war to fight. Yet history shows that the one time the U.S. government did “take care of day care,” we did it because of a war, and we used the defense budget to pay the bill.

Families in the U.S. pay, on average, more than $1,000 a month per child.

During World War II, the U.S. could not find enough women to fill factory jobs. Therefore, Congress used funds allocated for defense infrastructure under the Lanham Act to build child care centers in more than 600 communities across the U.S. Those investments led to a dramatic increase in maternal employment because they offered moms access to full-time, high-quality care for young children, as well as summer and after-school care for older kids, all for less than the equivalent today of $10 per day.

After that war, we could have expanded federal child care centers across the U.S. That is what moms wanted — and what our European allies did. Instead, fiscal conservatives and allied religious leaders convinced U.S. policymakers that child care programs were not worth the investment if families — and especially mothers — could be forced to provide or pay for that care themselves.