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Petula Dvorak September 5, 2024

Why didn’t we think of that?

That’s the big idea coming from the GOP campaign for lowering the cost of child care in America, according to vice-presidential nominee JD Vance.

This isn’t like his incendiary T-shirt-and-meme-launching comment back in 2021 about “childless cat ladies” that the senator from Ohio now calls a “thought experiment.”

And it’s not him agreeing back in 2020 with a podcaster’s theory that the role of a “postmenopausal female” is child care.
»» This is what Vance said on Wednesday in an interview in Arizona, when the host asked him about child care.

“One of the ways you might be able to relieve pressure on people who are paying so much for day care is to make it so that maybe Grandma or Grandpa wants to help out, or there is an aunt or uncle that wants to help out,” he told Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA.

Slap me on the forehead, where was Vance’s brilliant idea all those years we were paying more for child care than my paycheck could cover and it still meant a crazy scramble of pickups, drop-offs, carpooling and nanny-sharing, held together with Scotch tape and spit?

It’s especially tone-deaf in this region, where a swath of professionals don’t live anywhere near family. Heck, only 55 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew Research Center study, live within an hour’s drive of extended family.

So Mamaw isn’t always nearby for free child care.

The lack of affordable child care is a crisis in the United States.

“New Childcare Data Shows Prices Are Untenable for Families,” was the frank titleon a recent data dump by the U.S. Department of Labor.

It showed that in some parts of our nation, infant day care can run about $15,400 a year.

And then families are stuck with the dilemma of derailing one career to stay home with the kids or simply sucking it up until grammar school starts.

Give up on the ambition, you say?

It’s not even ambition or the pursuit of fulfillment and happiness we’re talking about here. It’s survival. The living wage for a family of four in America — this includes housing, food, transportation, health care and bare necessities — is $104,770 a year before taxes, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage Calculator.

Take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average salary chart to get a feel for who can afford this (a neurologist’s $271,470 salary can make this work; a dental assistant’s $47,350 haul cannot).

Even if a family member were to quit and stay home with the kids, that means thousands of dollars in day-care costs will be saved for those few years, but the gap still can’t be filled in most American households.

“Quality, affordable, accessible childcare supports higher employment and full-time work hours, reduces poverty, and reduces socioeconomic disparities in employment and early care and education,” according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

We’ve solved this problem before.

I come back to it every few years in this column, and I think it’s time to revisit this important piece of history again.

When America needed women in the workforce for the war effort, the U.S. government stepped in to make it possible for all those Rosies to leave the kids behind and head into factories to rivet.

It was called the Lanham Act. In 1943, Congress gave $20 million to create the nation’s first and only universal child-care program, known as “war nurseries,” which enrolled more than 550,000 children.

“The Lanham program broke ground as the first and, to date, only time in American history when parents could send their children to federally-subsidized childcare, regardless of income, and do so affordably,” according to the Friends of the National World War II Memorial.

The day cares had smart curriculums and caring workers, and some of them even sent mom and kids home with a hot dinner.

“By late 1944, a mother could send a child of two to five years of age to childcare for 50 cents per day (about $7 today),” the World War II history folks said. “That included lunch and snacks in the morning and afternoon.”

It was, according to the National Park Service, “the first time the US government acknowledged childcare as critical infrastructure.”

It took war for America to acknowledge this.

And today, we’re still having a hard time figuring how to be pro-child.

• Vance joined Republicans in refusing to vote for expanding a child tax credit that could help families with children pay for child care.
• Meanwhile, the Republican Study Committee has proposed raising the full retirement age — when seniors can access their Social Security benefits without penalty — to 69.

So that probably means Grandma and Grandpa won’t even be available to fill the child-care gap that Vance is proposing — they’re going to be at work, too.

He’s surely reaching back into his own dinged-up childhood that he portrayed in his bestseller, “Hillbilly Elegy,” when his “Mamaw” helped raise him.

But let’s go back to the book to see how that — what he’s asking Americans to do right now — sat with him. Because, in his words, he felt bad for his grandmother’s reprise as a primary caregiver.

“Mamaw had her dreams but never the opportunity to pursue them,” he wrote. He said she wanted to become a lawyer who represented abused and neglected children, but possibly “didn’t know what becoming an attorney took.”

And when he lived with her as a child, he said there were “whispers from a lot of people to Mamaw that she just needed to take a break and enjoy her golden years.”

Vance wrote that he felt guilty about being her charge.

“That feeling of being a burden to Mamaw wasn’t something I imagined; it came from a number of small cues, from the things she muttered under her breath, and from the weariness she wore like a dark piece of clothing. I didn’t want that …”

But it’s okay for the rest of Americans?