The Parent Trap: How To Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis

Outside of their own work, parents in the United States provide unpaid around-the-clock child-development services to more than 74 million children each year. According to Hilger (economics, Brown Univ.), if these services were provided at market value, the sum of output would be more than $5 trillion a year. Here he argues that the U.S. should consider child development a public investment or an entitlement like Medicare; he proposes “Familycare,” with a centralized organization, funding for research, and federal aid to parents. Parents who are isolated or don’t have access to parenting guidance or skill building—especially women, non-white people, and impoverished people—are at a disadvantage and often face compounding inequity, which further impacts the children they raise. For instance, a child raised by parents who are in the U.S.’s wealthiest 25 percent will, when they’re an adult, earn an average of $50,000 more, each year, than a person raised by parents in the poorest 25 percent.