This Is What Childcare Could Look Like - Jezebel
By Tracy Clark-Flory
Imagine a childcare system that allows parents to send their babies and toddlers to high-quality care, regardless of their financial resources. Cost is determined on a sliding scale according to income; some families pay as little as $51 a week. Caregivers are paid competitively, given avenues for career development, and are eligible to receive medical and retirement benefits. Families working non-traditional hours have access to 24/7 services. For older kids, there’s care before and after school, and even during vacation and teacher training days.
This may sound like a dream from some distant Scandinavian childcare utopia, but such a program already exists in the United States. Only for members of the military, though.
In 1989, the Military Child Care Act paved the way for Department of Defense (D0D) employees to obtain sliding-scale care for their children from birth to age 18 in DoD-run child development centers and from contracted home-based providers. For all the wistful imaginings of a better system (if only), for all the hemming and hawing over solving the childcare crisis in this country, there’s a solid, working example right under our noses. “We already have hundreds of thousands of kids in a large childcare system,” said Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-founder of MomsRising. “It took a public investment.”