As New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani have pledged to make universal child care available in the city over the coming years, starting with extending care to younger children, a new Robin Hood Foundation study looks at the potential for universal childcare to not just help strapped families provide for their children but also as a general anti-poverty policy. Spotlight spoke recently with one of the study’s authors, Danielle Wilson, a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy in the Columbia School of Social Work. The transcript of that conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Childcare is obviously an issue for most families, but in what ways does a lack of childcare actually push some families into poverty?
So, I would say the lack of childcare is not quite what we're measuring. We measure how childcare and the cost of childcare pushed families into poverty. The current Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) cannot capture the question of the impact of a lack of childcare, but the Child Inclusive Poverty Measure proposed by the National Academies of Sciences in 2023 sets a childcare need for all families and measures whether or not, if you do not meet that need, you fall into poverty. That measure could answer the question of how would a lack of childcare push you into poverty, The current tools that we have at our disposal and that we used for this publication can't quite answer that question, but we're definitely working on it.
Thanks for that clarification. So, the way that you did measure it, what did you find?
That in general, childcare expenses, as expected push families into poverty. Out of all the things that the SPM does consider, it is a primary component or a primary expense that does so. We also know from general research that childcare not only has the immediate effect of pushing families into poverty, but in the more medium and longer run, it brings disruptions to parental work, parental labor force participation, and just general progression in the labor force and salary earnings.
Are there numbers that would help our readers understand the scope of the problem?
In the report, which was specific for New York City, we focused on children that were two and three years old, and we found that about 3,400 children of those ages were pushed into poverty by the childcare expenses that their families incurred.
And if you had a universal childcare policy, how much would that number be reduced?
Again, just focusing on New York City and those two- and three-year-olds, we estimated that about 4,100 kids would be pulled out of poverty of those ages. And that's about a 9% reduction in poverty for those children.
New Mexico comes to mind, but are there places in the U.S. that have implemented a universal childcare policy where there are numbers that would help illustrate this point?
I'm not sure it's truly universal—it's a new policy, particularly in the United States, but there is a universal policy in Quebec that shows promising effects. There’s nothing similar in the United States regarding a universal policy, as, particularly in New Mexico, there are significant supply side constraints. Even if they were to offer all of these families this benefit, they couldn't actually serve them all tdue to limited space. And that's a problem New York City is also facing, but that they've promised to address with investments in the childcare labor force as well.
Finally, how would you compare the impact of universal childcare to other safety net programs that people more often think of being poverty alleviation, like WIC or SNAP?
In our report, again, focusing specifically on those two- and three-year-olds in New York City, we found that universal childcare was comparable to SNAP, which is one of the larger in-kind benefit programs that the country administers. And it's also bigger than WIC, which is a smaller program targeting children of those age groups and mothers. So, universal childcare can have a significant effect that is comparable to some of the other programs that we currently have.
And just to be clear, when you say bigger, the impact in terms of poverty alleviation is bigger?
Correct. In our simulations, we found that SNAP holds about 6,200 two- and three-year-olds out of poverty. In our childcare simulation, we found that universal childcare pulls about 4,100 kids out of poverty. For WIC, it's 1,200.
Were you surprised by those numbers?
I don't think I had expectations going in. I think the results show that childcare can have a marginal contribution in reducing poverty, but it's not the silver bullet; it's not going to drastically eliminate poverty without a broader social safety net for these families. It will help, but there are other things that can also help and complement such a policy, especially one that is targeted for a very narrow age group very much in need of care. To have the largest poverty reducing impact, you'd need to have a bundle of programs to best support these families.