The Child Care Anniversary That Could Have Been
Over 50 years ago on December 9th, Nixon vetoed our country’s chance for comprehensive child care. We’re still bitter about it.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was once bipartisan support for comprehensive child care infrastructure.
But actually this was NOT so long ago, nor so far away: it was only 50+ years ago and right here in the United States, in the shiny white-domed capital of D.C., with a majority of Congress voting for it.
On December 9, 1971, President Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act (CDA), which would have created federally-funded public child care centers across the U.S. The legislation would have provided universal child care to three and four year olds, with lower income families paying nothing out of pocket and the higher income families being charged on a sliding scale.
Essentially - this was the proxy model for the same sort of universal child care programs that other wealthy industrialized nations enjoy, and a similar model to what states like Vermont and New Mexico are now rolling out.
And Richard Nixon had been ready to sign it! His advisors even encouraged him to do so, arguing that the “working women” electorate may find this favorable, as reported by Brigid Schulte in her book: Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has the Time.
It wasn’t until the conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan, himself a father of exactly ZERO children, decided to mobilize the right wing to kill the bill that it faced major opposition. Buchanan, as he told Schulte, recalled a recent trip to the USSR, and claimed such child care infrastructure would “Sovietize” American children.
Cold War anxieties meant that any attempt to provide social services to American families would turn the kids into Soviet-style automatons. Never mind that social services, i.e. public education, kicks in at age 5. If a child received care earlier than that, it was “governments raising children and trying to control families.”
Buchanan found an eager home for those anxieties, and Nixon even allowed Buchanan to write the veto statement. As he told Schulte: “We wanted not only to kill the bill. We wanted to drive a stake right through its heart.”
The Cold War anxieties far pre-date my time, but watching child care crumble under Build Back Better makes us ask what else has to change before Americans recognize that quality child care is a vital part of raising our kids and a thriving economy.
We know, and evidence supports this, that high quality child care better prepares children for kindergarten, can provide crucial support and wrap-around services for families, and allows more parents to participate in paid work if they choose, which has the potential to further lift more families out of poverty AND improve our economy.
And yet, we still fight against this.
The support of working women was not enough for Nixon to be swayed. He was concerned about a 1972 primary challenger from the right, one that Buchanan would have likely marshalled his support for had Nixon rebuffed him. Years of working in and alongside politics has shown me that policymakers will tack to the far right or left on a position if they feel their election is in danger.
It didn’t matter for Nixon in the end. He may have won re-election but within two years was impeached and subsequently resigned with a tarnished political legacy. It’s not like his veto of child care did anything to save his political career in the end, but it certainly made life much harder for millions of American families for 50 more years and set in motion the uniquely American ideal that child care is an individual issue and not a collective one.
I’m reminded of a story about President Obama and the Affordable Care Act (ACA), his landmark health care bill. The ACA has now improved so many lives in this country that it has become very difficult to dismantle, no matter how hard opponents have tried.
Members of Congress who voted for this legislation were facing tough races at home - some of whom would not survive the midterms. Obama reportedly told them that voting for this legislation was something worth losing your job over. And one Congressman, Tom Perriello, who did in fact lose re-election, says he still does not regret that vote for ACA. Why? Because some social policies are worth fighting for, even if it means you lose re-election in the end. Such policies have the staying power to prove that their supporters were doing the right thing by voting for it.
I’m no Nixon apologist. I’m not surprised he has never done a public mea culpa on child care, nor would I expect anything from Pat Buchanan, who, as of a decade ago when Schulte published their conversation in Overwhelmed, still views this as a victory for him. But I do think that history has shown us how shortsighted the veto was and how things have been set in motion since.
Will it take 50 more years for us to have the kind of bipartisan support for care infrastructure? Maybe. But it also might take more policymakers willing to make the same wager that Perriello did. And that may be many more years off, but as we keep child care in the conversation, we are slowly working to push that timeframe for change a little sooner.
Notes, News and Thanks
Last week I had the honor of moderating the Zocalo Public Square panel: “What Makes a Good Job in Child Care?” One of the major takeaways for me came from Ai-Jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations, who said that child care workers will play a major role in 2025 and need to have their voices heard. 100 percent agree. You can watch the video here.
Vermont Bound
I’m traveling to Vermont next week to talk to more of these providers, so please subscribe or share this newsletter to hear more about what child care work is like and how we can keep child care in the national conversation going forward. The Pat Buchanans of the world can always play on fear, but we have the power to keep this conversation going, and not let the next chance for a bipartisan child care initiative pass us by.
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I can attest that as a father of kids in state funded childcare in Australia, any communist tendencies they have acquired are strictly traceable to our parenting 🙄😆