Children Are The Future

Washington Post is out with a story about the high cost of child care. The title, Average child-care costs exceed in-state college tuitions nationwide, is sure to cause worry lines to form on the faces of new parents.

The average cost of "full-time, center-based child care in the United States" is now $9,589 per year. Despite this, studies often show that children are in environments that are "inadequate for their health and safety," and which "do not promote their cognitive and social-emotional development."

You'd think that dropping your children off into the company of strangers would produce more desirable outcomes.

But no. Not according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the National Association for Family Child Care. They are accreditation organizations for child-care businesses.

"Only a small percentage of centers are nationally accredited," the report notes.

Whether or not to use day care is a decision that parents agonize over. They know it's a trade-off. They know that it would be nice to be able to have a parent stay at home all day. They know that those families who can afford a live-in nanny have it good. But they need two incomes to make the mortgage.

And the issue no longer seems to be whether families get financial assistance for day care. It's how much. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have pledged some form of tax relief or subsidies to new parents.

And that's how it's going to be. But that's not going to make anyone better off. When you subsidize an activity, you get more of it. Subsidies for day care is going to pull more mothers out of the home and into the workplace.

This is federalizing an issue that is the last bastion of liberty, the nuclear family. It will make it necessary for us to have ridiculous licensing requirements and mandatory accreditation of babysitters. In California, you need a license if you take care of children from more than one family.

Soon, there will be hue and cry for national day care standards, like caregiver to child ratio. Three different cabinet-level agencies will be empowered to make inspections of every facility that cares for a child. Is your facility peanut-free? There goes your license!

When you think about day care, it's really just remote hands technical support involving complex autonomous networks. A child is hungry, you feed them. A child scrapes their knee, you bandage it. How long before regulations permit robots to take over some of these tedious, repetitive tasks?

That's not at all Orwellian, is it?

And this brings it all back to trade-offs and social-emotional development. You know how today's college students are so fragile that someone writing Donald Trump's name in chalk will send them scurrying for their safe space? This is a direct result of so many children being supervised in day care.

If you want children that are even less resilient than today's, then, by all means, let's continue to warehouse them all day.