The American Government Once Offered Widely Affordable Child Care ... 77 Years Ago

Rachael Shannon gets nostalgic when she thinks of the life she lived in Germany until just a couple of years ago. While she and her husband worked, their children spent their days in child care, creating awesome crafts, building pillow forts and going on outings to farms where they'd dig up potatoes.

"It was like wow times 10," says Shannon, who worked for a U.S. government contractor.

For this highly imaginative, full-time care for two kids, the Shannons paid about $750 a month, roughly a quarter of the cost of comparable care in the Washington, D.C., area where they returned to in 2018.

Today, in the middle of the pandemic, Shannon is one of millions of parents at their wit's end over the lack of good child care options here in the U.S. Safe, reliable child care was already expensive and difficult to obtain before the pandemic. Now it is even more so. With increased costs due to social distancing and sanitation requirements, many day care centers have been forced to close.