How can working families manage the sky-high cost of child care? Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has a plan for that—make grandma and grandpa do it instead.
“So one of the ways that you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is make it so that, you know, maybe like grandma [or] grandpa wants to help out a little bit more,” Vance said on Wednesday, during an interview with antisemite Charlie Kirk in Mesa, Arizona. “Or maybe there's an aunt or uncle that wants to help out a little bit more. If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that we're spending in day care.”
This is a special kind of bullshit coming from a guy who was lucky enough to have his mother-in-law take a yearlong sabbatical from her job as a biology professor to move in with Vance and his wife to help care for their new child. In 2020, Vance agreed with a podcaster that helping care for kids was “the whole purpose postmenopausal female.”
Vance wasn’t done talking “policy.”
Vance continued:
Let's say you don't have somebody who can provide that extra set of hands. What we've got to do is actually empower people to get trained in the skills that they need for the 21st century. We've got a lot of people who love kids, who would love to take care of kids, but they can't either because they don't have access to the education that they need, or, maybe more importantly, because the state government says, “You’re not allowed to take care of children unless you have some ridiculous certification that has nothing to do, nothing to do, with taking care of kids.”
Besides the fact that a large swath of the Republican base is calling every educator a “groomer,” the idea of deregulating child care as a way to lower costs does not add up. Such a move would lower the quality and safety of care, while also driving up the cost of insuring care facilities—costs that would surely be passed on to families—according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of early-childhood educators.
Vance is wrong on another count too. What’s really keeping potential workers out of the child care field isn’t “ridiculous certification[s].” It’s low wages. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the best-paid child care workers—those in the 90th percentile—earn an average of $43,270 annually. That’s the high end.
Meanwhile, for parents of young kids, the Republican Party has fought against meaningful legislation to codify paid family leave for years. Vance isn’t a serious person and his political party doesn’t have any serious answers.
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