86 kids. 3 adults.

Note: This is a very sober article, but I want to first draw your attention to three positive developments. (1) My Capita colleague Joe Waters has started a new Substack, Per Capita, to which you should subscribe. (2) My Better Life Lab colleague Rebecca Gale has a great new report on Vermont’s child care journey, which you should read. (3) My friend in the field Darby Saxbe’s new book Dad Brain is out, which you should buy.

Over the past week, news articles started popping up about one of the most disturbing child care stories I have heard in a long time — an unlicensed child care home was discovered with 86 children and three adults inside. As one reported:

When investigators entered, they found 86 children inside the building, 66 of whom were in the basement lying on mats separated by cardboard.

They say there was no fire escape except for the stairs that led down to the basement.

17 children were found on the ground floor, split between two rooms.

Three babies were strapped into car seats and placed in dark closets.

Court documents say there were only three adults at the unlicensed daycare to care for the children.

(This occurred in Elkhart County, Indiana, about 30 miles outside South Bend.)

I think sometimes we talk about America’s lack of family support far too obliquely. Child care is “unaffordable.” Paid family leave is “inadequate.”

No. We need to reclaim moral language. We need to be willing to speak up in terms of virtue and vice, to capture the righteous anger that animated so many great Americans of all political persuasions.

The fact that one in four women are back at work within two weeks of giving birth is barbaric. It is morally abhorrent. It is a stain on America’s soul and a failure of our national promise and we should and must do better.

The fact that eighty-six young children were in a single home — in a basement, with babies in closets — is nothing less than an indictment of the country’s sorry excuse for supporting the families who are the cornerstone of society and who are bringing up the next generation of Americans.

Is this a failure of regulation? Well, it was an unlicensed program seemingly operating illegally, so that’s sort of like asking if the person who is speeding proves that speed limits don’t work. (By the way, for all the radical deregulation proponents out there: if you eliminated maximum child-to-adult ratios, the numbers part of this horror show would actually have been legal. This is a glimpse of the worst-case scenario, other than child death, of going down that path.) It was perhaps a failure of enforcement, in that this home had apparently been subject to complaints in the past. I have no knowledge of the specifics of this case, but I can tell you that state child care agencies have been gutted over the course of decades and the overburdened remaining inspectors often have enormous caseloads.

No, this is a failure of two related issues: first, a failure to provide an abundance of affordable licensed child care options within close proximity to where parents need it. We’re going to talk about parents in a second, but let’s be clear that as much as child care doesn’t work as a capital-M Market good, some basic principles of markets still apply: give families a lot of choices they can actually use, and there’s cross-pressure to offer a reasonably good service. When there are only one or two offerings that parents can viably afford or find a slot at, those programs can get away with a lot; they have a captive customer base. And while the overwhelming majority of child care providers are doing their level best, these shadows give the few bad actors plenty of space to hide.1

Which brings us to the second: an utter failure to create the enabling conditions of policy and community support which allow families to thrive. While we might be tempted to condemn parents for putting their kids in such a situation (assuming they had any inkling that the home was heinously overcrowded2), can you imagine the desperation required to drop your child off at place like that? I don’t know the hearts and minds of the parents in Elkhart County, but my guess is the level of desperation where the other option is destitution or even homelessness. This episode reminded me of my colleague Brigid Schulte’s story about Kiarcia Schields:

As a single mother living far away from family in rural Georgia, there was no one else but her available to care for her children. That meant there was no way for her to do her job as a hospice nurse. No child care, no job. No job, no money to pay the rent.

What Schields couldn’t have foreseen was how the continued lack of stable, affordable child care would launch her and her children — ages 10, five, four and an infant — down a spiral of high-stress financial and housing instability.

For more than three years, Schields, a college-educated nurse, has bounced between precarious and poorly paid temp jobs including catering, tax prep, sorting packages and driving DoorDash with her baby strapped into his car seat.

By the summer of 2023, with her savings depleted and car repossessed, Schields and her kids had been bouncing between a homeless shelter and cheap motel rooms. “I began having panic attacks. But I have to remain calm because at the end of the day, I have kids to raise,” Schields explained. “Child care. That’s my issue.”

It reminded me of a section of Jonathan Cohn’s 2013 New Republic cover story, “The Hell of American Daycare”:

"Even egregious violations don’t always lead to shutdowns. Sometimes, that’s because parents, lacking alternatives, fight to keep notorious places open. An inspector [in Texas] named Carol McGinnis told me she’d recently visited a center in 'total disarray,' with 'feces smeared on the walls.' Nevertheless, if the agency closed it, McGinnis expected some parents would resist, because it was one of the few places offering care on weekends."

It reminded me of part of Brian Goldstone’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book There is No Place For Us: Working and Homeless in America where he writes of one mother, “Michelle desired nothing more than to be working — both for financial stability and for her sanity. But a lack of childcare remained an insurmountable barrier.”

And look: this is on one level a child care story, but on another level it’s a story about how America treats the working class. In the Jenga tower of life, when you start pulling out building blocks thanks to low wages, brutal working conditions, little scheduling control, no mandatory paid leave, almost unreachably expensive health care, housing that’s a combination of scarce, substandard, and unaffordable, to say nothing of a Kafka-esque bureaucracy of would-be assistance that takes its toll in what precious little time and energy remains, can we pretend to be shocked when child care comes along and causes the tower to tumble? When parents, many of whom are working low-status jobs that ensure the rest of us can have our burritos or shirts or batteries delivered to our door in a matter of minutes, are forced into unimaginable choices?

I wish I could tell you that what was found in Indiana has never happened before, but you only have to go back to last year to find an illegal child care center operating underneath a vape shop in Rockland, NY (a suburb of NYC) with 69 children inside. According to officials, the site was “filled with dozens of cribs. The sleeping area was set up near a boiler, propane tanks, paint cans, other combustible materials, and loose electrical wiring. The basement had one way to enter or exit.”

One father whose baby went to the Rockland program told a local news station, “I’ve never been inside. We just drop off the kids outside.” What series of things have to have gone wrong, you must ask yourself, to get to such a point.

(I would also like to take a moment to say to all those who suggest that licensed child care is solely some elite feminist-driven preference or special interest boondoggle or that “universal daycare is class war against normal people”: please take a seat. Or better yet, get up from behind your computer and go talk to some working-class families who are scrambling and scrabbling every day for purchase while their government keeps raining boulders on their head.3)

There can be a temptation to look away from these kinds of stories, not just because they are haunting, but because they may seem to reinforce the idea that non-parental child care is dangerous and low-quality. While we absolutely need to highlight that “child care programs can be AMAZING,” I’d argue we also have to reckon with just how dystopian child care can get if we keep refusing to provide adequate public funding for a functional system and keep refusing to provide parents with good soil so they can flourish. No parent should ever even have to consider sending their little one to a child care program where they aren’t solid in the certainty he or she is in good hands.

Jerusalem Demsas of The Argument had a great piece the other day, “you have to love America to save it,” where she harkens back to the great liberal tradition of the jeremiad. Demsas writes that,

Making the public conscious of the ways in which we are failing to meet our stated moral, political, or religious commitments can move us toward resolving those contradictions in the direction of progress.

But this is a process that requires political and moral leaders to believe in — or at least espouse — a commitment to the American project.

America is a special country; I am proud to be an American. And America can do so, so much better by its families. We can do better. We must do better. As Jia Lynn Yang wrote recently for the New York Times Magazine:

For half a century, American parents have tried to be exceptional individuals, contorting themselves into every possible shape to make the raising of children possible. They have saved, they have delayed, they have settled for smaller families in smaller homes. They have tried to survive under the strangest logic that the act of caring for others, of all things, should be seen as an individual pursuit or even indulgence. The help that is needed never seems to come: There is no amount of private exertion that can overcome public indifference.

86 little kids and 3 adults might as well be shorthand for a sick society. Setting out a renewed vision of a nation with the conditions for all families to raise their children into the self-determined good life is a worthy place to start the healing.