A Better Way to Compensate Parents of Babies

Last year seemed like a pretty big one for breakthroughs in child care.

In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s promise of publicly funded care for young kids helped him win the keys to Gracie Mansion.

Officials in Connecticut created an endowment to make care more affordable in that state.

And New Mexico became the first state to commit to free child care for all of its residents.

But as policy makers have begun hammering out the details of these ambitions, they’ve hit against a stubborn and formidable obstacle: babies.

Any child-care provider will tell you that “affordable infant care” is an oxymoron.

Because babies need a ton of individual attention, they are the most demanding group to care for in formal settings.

Most states require babies to be looked after by more workers and in smaller groups than those mandated for older kids; a day care’s infant room will typically have one caretaker for every three to four babies, whereas a pre-K teacher might look after more than twice that number of children.

Many states and cities also have costly space prerequisites for infant care.

In New York City, for instance, a day care’s infant room must have sprinklers installed and be on the ground floor to allow for easy evacuation.

All of this drives up the cost of care; one estimate placed the monthly cost of “high-quality” infant care at more than $2,400 , a price that only well-off families can afford.

At many child-care centers, the tuition paid for older children subsidizes the babies.

“Infants are cute little loss leaders,” Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the moderate-leaning Niskanen Center think tank, told me.

Some programs—because they subsist on razor-thin margins and can be prone to worker shortages—stay clear of babies altogether. (Consider 2-K, Mamdani’s new child-care program for the general public; as the name implies, it does not cover children under 2, even though families with very young children need affordable care as much as anyone else.) This can make infant care a rarity in the places that need it most , including low-income neighborhoods, where the cost of baby care far outpaces what many parents can pay, and rural areas, where day cares serving children of any age are few and far between.