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Experts estimate there’s a 3:1 ratio of kids needing care to kids in care. The highest quality options often have waitlists of a year or more. This lack of supply primarily impacts women, and specifically those with low incomes, single parents, and people of color.

Millions of families struggle to find high-quality daycare, even though they’re willing to pay high prices: on average, more than $9,500 a year, according to a 2016 report. It’s an opportunity entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have lately picked up on, with the media paying plenty of attention.

US child care is a $57 billion market (60% in-home, 40% in-center). An additional $22 billion is spent via government subsidies, and the amount of time spent and forgone wages by parents and family members providing unpaid care is orders of magnitude larger than the actual dollars spent.

In the past few decades, child care has been the fastest-growing component of housework. Since the 1980s, American parents—and particularly college-educated mothers and fathers—have nearly doubled the amount of time they spend raising, teaching, driving, and helping their kids. The economist Valerie Ramey chalks it up to a “rug rat race” led by mid... See more

This growing decline in familial support for raising children—and college-educated women becoming the lynchpin for knowledge work in America— meant that demand for paid family services has increased dramatically. In the 1990s and 2000s, this question of how to support working parents became another front in the culture war.

We have the second most expensive childcare system in the world, after the Slovak Republic, which makes it prohibitively expensive for many parents to return to work.3 Our own research of 20,000 mothers in 2021 found that a third pay more for their childcare than their mortgage, rising to almost half for respondents from a Black ethnic background.

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But disrupting the daycare system has turned out to be harder than it looked, with several of the startups hitting a basic problem: the platform model that is one of Silicon Valley’s go-to solutions may not work as well in daycare. “This is not your typical tech company where you can kind of fake it and make it,” Selke said. “You’re talking about c... See more