| Earlier this month, Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance suggested that one of the best ways to reduce the cost of child care is to get grandparents to do it. "One of the ways you might be able to relieve a little bit of pressure on families who are paying so much for daycare is maybe grandma or grandpa wants to help out a little bit more," Vance said in an interview with conservative activist Charlie Kirk. "If that happens, you relieve some of the pressure on all the resources that are spent on daycare." This did not go over well with many parents. "I wonder which of my parents I should ask for help, my dead dad or my full-time working mom," a mother responded in a Reddit community for working moms. "Maybe I should ask my dementia diagnosed dad," replied another. "Ours are three states away so that works perfectly," joked someone on X. Grandparents are already a well utilized source of child care in America. A 2015 survey of grandparent caregivers, commissioned by the nonprofit now known as Child Care Aware, found that an estimated 60% of grandparents who live near their grandchildren provide some kind of regular child care while their adult children—the parents—work or attend school. All told, nearly a third of children under 5 (and 12% of kids ages 5-14) who have a working mother are in the care of their grandparents for at least part of the time. I've reported a lot about child care over the years and this tracks with what I've heard from families; in situations where grandparents are an option, parents are happy to accept their help.
But this doesn't necessarily translate to full-time child care for years on end. In its survey, Child Care Aware found that grandparents are usually not the primary source of child care for their grandchildren; instead, they're used to fill the gaps in their parents' existing child care arrangements. They watch their grandkids before or after school, for example, or cover for the working parent on sick days.
When they do provide full-time care it's often only for certain periods of time, such as during the summer when kids are out of school or if a parent has extenuating circumstances and needs immediate help. Earlier this year, when I reported on working mothers struggling to comply with corporate return-to-office policies, I spoke with an Amazon employee who couldn't find a daycare spot for her infant so her mother flew into town and provided back-up care until they could get a formal arrangement in place. Similarly, in a 2020 podcast interview with Eric Weinstein, then managing director of the venture capital firm Thiel Capital, Vance discussed how his wife, Usha Chilukuri Vance, started clerking for the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court just seven weeks after having their first child. "Her mom just took a sabbatical—she's a biology professor in California—just took a sabbatical for a year and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year," Vance said. "It was sort of easy for us."
In response to the blowback Vance received for suggesting grandparents could help solve the child care crisis, he elaborated, saying that he wanted to offer families more choices. "We should try to encourage whatever is best for each individual family," he wrote on X. "Right now we don't: we try to force or at least subsidize one model on every family in this country." He pointed to federal programs that subsidize paid child care, saying they penalize families who rely on unpaid family members.
"It's true that American child care policy to date has tended to focus on supporting families in accessing licensed external child care," says Elliot Haspel, a child care policy expert and the author of "Crawling Behind: America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It." "But it doesn't 'penalize' families who rely on a family friend or grandparent for child care any more than, say, funding a hospital penalizes out-patient clinics." In fact, in many states, relatives who act as caregivers can apply for reimbursement under the same state programs that offer daycare subsidies. It's just that the funding available to them is wildly insufficient—just as the daycare subsidies are. Haspel says that it can be as low as $15 per day. In an interview with CBS's Face the Nation, Vance proposed paying grandparents and stay-at-home parents for their child care work, although he didn't specify how much.
I found Vance's focus on grandparents interesting because he seems to have an aversion to daycare and prefers to talk about other kinds of child care instead. "Normal Americans," he once wrote on X, "want a family policy that doesn't shunt their kids into crap daycare." In the same thread, he shared a link to a poll by the public policy think tank American Compass indicating that 44% of people without college degrees would rather one parent stay home while the other worked.
Opinion polls aside, Vance doesn't necessarily want all mothers to quit working. "My wife is a working mother," he said in that 2020 podcast interview. "She loves her job, she's very good at it, I think it would be bad for the productive economy for her to be sort of taken out of it." (When Vance became the Republican vice presidential nominee his wife resigned from her law firm, but at the time of the podcast interview she was still working.) To make her employment possible, Vance said they hired "somebody who helps us take care of our kids." He didn't use the word "nanny" in the interview, though that's what it sounds like.
The problem, of course, is that nannies are prohibitively expensive for most families. A recent Care.com survey found that nationally, nannies cost about 1.3 times as much as daycare. This is why the discussion of child care costs and its impact on the middle class centers around reducing the cost of daycare. Interestingly, Vance has at times tip-toed around a policy that would help lower child care costs, although as far as I can tell he's never called it by its typical name.
"Why is it not a reasonable thing to say that we should, as a pro-family policy, make it easier for parents of small children who want to spend more time at home to do it? That seems to be a thing that's reasonable," Vance said in that 2020 podcast interview. This is also known as paid family leave.
In that Face the Nation interview, Vance proposed that the government send a check to parents to allow them to stay home. He went on to specify that same-sex couples and grandparent caregivers should also qualify for this benefit. Again, that is paid leave.
In fact, the entire discussion about skyrocketing costs for daycare stems from the fact that the US is the only wealthy country that does not guarantee women time off work after they have a baby. The earlier new parents go back to work, the earlier they need child care. In the absence of a grandmother who can take a yearlong sabbatical from her job, they're going to have to pay for it.
"If you go to a place like Finland, there are virtually no infants in group child care in Finland because they're all home with their parents. This is because their parents have great parental leave," says Haspel. (Finland has one of the most robust paid leave policies in Europe, offering 40 days of paid pregnancy or maternity leave for mothers, plus an additional 13 months of leave for both parents.) Sweden has even put into practice something akin to what Vance is proposing: it has tweaked its existing paid leave law to allows parents to transfer some of their leave to grandparents who care for their children. "If the real thing you're getting at is that infants should not be in group child care settings, the answer is paid family leave," says Haspel. Traditionally, Republicans have not supported the idea of paid family leave, saying it's too hard on businesses, although Trump indicated support for the idea during his Presidency. He has yet to offer a paid leave or child care policy during his current campaign.
I emailed Senator Vance's campaign to ask if his belief that parents should be able to stay home with their small children meant he supported paid family leave. They did not offer a comment. | 
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