Warner – changing economic thinking  

We have traditionally thought of child care as the private responsibility of families. And what’s happening now is we’re beginning to articulate child care as part of the public responsibility of society. And what makes early care and education a public as opposed to a private responsibility. And the link there is that we all are vested in the outcomes of early care and education. I want your children to be well prepared for school because that’s good for me in the long term: it reduces crime, it increases school performance, it improves their labour force performance, and eventually they are going to be supporting my pensions in my old age.  

So we’ve begun to take a longer, intergenerational view on the importance of children and realizing that they are, they have, child development has some public good aspects to it. We’ve long recognized the importance of kindergarten to 12th grade education. We’ve recognized the importance of higher education: colleges. And we give substantial subsidies to those pieces of the education framework. But we have not stepped up to the plate and given the kind of resources to early care and education that we need to do. And it turns those early foundational investments out that can yield even greater returns than the investments later in life. And so the societal value to this is in terms of employment, in terms of school readiness, in terms of reduced crime and other social ills. Children who get a good start in life tend to be launched better into adolescence and adulthood and that benefits us all.