Family Abundance - by Matthew Steiner - Proliberal

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Markets<br>Family Abundance<br>Why America Made Childcare Artificially Scarce

Matthew Steiner<br>May 22, 2026

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The abundance movement rediscovered something America had long forgotten: that scarcity is often a choice.<br>Bad zoning. Captured regulators. Tangled permitting.<br>Remove the obstacles, and housing gets built. Transmission lines proliferate. And infrastructure comes on line.<br>The diagnosis was clarifying. The politics followed.<br>But the movement has a glaring blind spot. There is a strange omission sitting quietly at the heart of the abundance agenda.<br>An empty chair at the table.<br>A silence where children should be.<br>Housing determines whether a family can put a roof over a child’s head. Childcare determines whether a family can afford to have children at all.<br>On this count, the abundance movement has come up short. The same artificial scarcity that distorted housing is quietly dissolving family formation — and that’s a problem.<br>The Manufactured Scarcity of Care

The math of childcare is brutal for families.<br>Today, the average cost of childcare is $13,000 per year for one child.1 For two children — an infant and a toddler — the average cost now approaches $28,000, more than a third of median household income.2<br>In 45 states, childcare for two costs more than a mortgage. In 49, more than annual rent.3<br>The federal government defines affordable care as 7 percent of household income. Not a single state meets that threshold for infant care.4<br>Not one.<br>Childcare isn’t expensive and scarce the way diamonds and rare earth minerals are. It’s not scarce like a biological ecosystem with a fixed carrying capacity.<br>Childcare’s skyrocketing costs are largely artificial. They’re manufactured through layers of law, policy, and institutional inertia that have transformed a basic human necessity into a financially destabilizing line item in every family’s budget.<br>This is the same genus of scarcity that turned San Francisco housing into a luxury commodity. It simply wears a different face.<br>The Daycare Cost Trap

The strange thing about childcare in America is that it is simultaneously too expensive for families and barely profitable for providers.<br>Parents feel crushed.<br>Workers feel underpaid.<br>Providers struggle to survive.<br>Most daycare centers operate on profit margins below one percent.5<br>Beneath these margins, several forces ratchet costs upward. Restrictive zoning laws ban daycare centers in residential neighborhoods, suppressing supply and inflating prices.6 Tort liability rules impose crushing insurance premiums on providers, raising cost and unaffordability for families.7 Fragmented procurement leaves daycares at the whims of consolidated suppliers, enriching vendors at the expense of families.8 Administrative reporting piles endless paperwork on facilities already stretched thin, pushing daycare prices even further out of reach for parents.9<br>These are real costs. They compound. They should be addressed.<br>But they are not the primary story.<br>Labor is the primary story.<br>Staffing costs consume fifty to seventy percent of a daycare center’s operating budget.10 Not some of it. Most of it.<br>The reason labor costs are so high traces directly to a structural feature of childcare that has no obvious parallel in most industries: strict statutory ratios of caregivers to children, ratios that are most punishing for the very youngest children. In many states, one adult may supervise only three or four infants at a time.11<br>The rationale is sound — infants require constant attention, feeding, diapering, emotional attunement, and sleep monitoring. The first years of human life are neurologically explosive, and brains develop through sustained, responsive interaction. The ratios exist because small children are not efficient, and civilizations that love their children accept that fact.<br>But the math is merciless. Every additional child eventually requires another human body. Unlike software or manufacturing, daycare has almost no scale economies.<br>These human bodies are themselves astonishingly underpaid. Median childcare workers earn roughly fifteen dollars an hour.12 Turnover reaches thirty to forty percent annually.13 In many states, childcare workers cannot afford childcare for their own children.14<br>The system consumes its own workforce and drains family pocketbooks.<br>Something structural, then, has to give — and the question is what.<br>Unbundling Care

Here is where the conversation becomes uncomfortable.<br>To make childcare affordable for families, America must cut labor costs by rewiring the operational structure of daycares from top to bottom.<br>Modern daycare is unaffordable because legal rules bundle labor together in ways that increasingly resemble pre-modern guilds. The same childcare worker performs developmental education, emotional coaching, curriculum planning, diaper changing, attendance logging, bottle preparation, cleaning, parent communication, scheduling, and...