Of course, pre-K and child care have effects on parents as well as kids, which surely loom large in the Democrats thinking.
Any parent who has paid for child care wouldn t mind paying less, which is part of the political appeal here. But by specifically funding child care and pre-K rather than supporting all parents equally, these subsidies privilege some types of family arrangements over others.
Stay-at-home parents get the short end of the stick. When a parent stays home, that parent eliminates the need for someone else to watch the kids. In a sense, these parents are paid by not having to pay for outside child care. When the government provides funding for parents who use child care but not parents who watch their own kids, it eliminates this benefit and tilts incentives in favor of both parents working at the risk of pushing kids into care arrangements that, as the Tennessee study shows, might be worse for them.
