Childcare is the infrastructure that makes other infrastructure work. A road network without childcare moves fewer commuters because one parent in each household cannot commute. A factory without childcare runs fewer shifts because workers cannot show up. A hospital without childcare cannot staff its night shifts because nurses cannot leave their children unattended. The point can be made with any sector of the economy that depends on labor, which is to say with any sector at all. Childcare is not an industry that exists alongside other industries. It is the condition of possibility for all of them to function with a workforce that includes parents.
The economic reframing of childcare matters because the conventional framing, in which childcare is a private household expense, has produced a market that does not work and a political conversation that goes nowhere. The market does not work because the price that parents can pay is bounded above by what households can afford on family wages, and the cost of providing care is bounded below by what workers in the sector can survive on. Between these two bounds there is no equilibrium that pays caregivers a living wage and charges parents an affordable rate. The market exists, but it exists in a state of perpetual crisis, with providers closing, parents on waiting lists, and workers exiting the field for any other employment that pays better, which is most other employment. The crisis is structural. It cannot be solved within the framework that produced it.
Treating childcare as infrastructure changes the math. Infrastructure is funded by the public because its benefits accrue to the public. Roads are not priced at marginal cost because the toll booths required would impose more economic friction than the roads relieve. Childcare presents the same logic. Parents who can work pay taxes, employ services, build careers that generate further economic activity. Children who receive quality care perform better in school, enter the labor market at higher productivity, and impose lower social costs over their lifetimes. The returns on childcare investment, measured across the full life course, are among the highest of any public investment that has been studied. James Heckman's analyses of early childhood programs have produced return estimates in the range of seven to thirteen percent annually, which exceeds the long-run return on equity markets. The estimates are contested at the margins. The order of magnitude is not.
The infrastructural framing also clarifies what kind of policy is required. Markets do not build interstate highway systems. They build toll roads in profitable corridors and leave the rest unbuilt. Markets do not deliver universal childcare. They deliver expensive care in affluent neighborhoods, inadequate care in working class neighborhoods, and no care in many neighborhoods at all. The market failure is not a failure of effort. It is a structural feature of the good being supplied. Care work is labor intensive in ways that resist productivity gains. The famous Baumol cost disease applies in full force. A teacher cannot teach more children per hour without degrading the service. A caregiver cannot care for more infants without violating ratios that exist for good reason. The cost will rise relative to other goods over time, and the only mechanism that can sustain access in the face of rising relative cost is public subsidy.
The Connect law in this domain points to an obvious fact that the American policy debate has been remarkably slow to absorb. Childcare is collective work, and it has always been collective work. The notion that childcare is naturally a private household responsibility is an artifact of the postwar suburban arrangement, a brief historical period in a particular kind of household. Across most of human history, children have been raised in extended networks of kin and community. The privatization of childcare into the nuclear household was the deviation. The current crisis is the result of attempting to sustain that deviation against rising female labor force participation, declining extended family proximity, and the relentless cost dynamics of care work. The infrastructural model is not a radical departure. It is a return to a more honest accounting of what raising children actually requires and who actually does the work.