Universal Childcare Could Hurt New York’s Kids

Earlier this month, Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced an ambitious, multiyear plan to make childcare free for all children under five in New York City. The multibillion-dollar proposal would phase in a universal “2-Care” program for Gotham’s two-year-olds, further fund the city’s existing 3-K program, and provide “additional support to ensure truly universal Pre-K for all four-year-olds in the State.”

Governor Hochul claimed that the plan would make New York State and City “the best places in the nation to . . . raise a family.” But evidence suggests that universal childcare is often unsustainable and leads to worse outcomes for children.

New York is not the first to try such a scheme. Beginning in the late 1990s, the Canadian province of Quebec rolled out one of North America’s most comprehensive childcare systems. While the program increased the number of parents in the workforce, it also yielded negative impacts on children’s behavior and self-reported health, increasing children’s anxiety and aggression by about a tenth of a standard deviation.

Evidence from Bologna, Italy, points in the same direction. There, children entered public daycare according to enrollment rules that, by design, allowed researchers to measure how early childcare affected otherwise similar children who entered at different ages. In Bologna, some children entered daycare as toddlers while others stayed home longer.

In that study, children who spent more time in daycare later scored lower on cognitive tests and had more negative personality traits. For children who would have received consistent attention and exposure to language at home, daycare replaced a superior option.

Young children need time, stability, and one-on-one interaction. Even the best childcare systems struggle to replicate those conditions once they expand beyond a limited scale. Scale problems are particularly acute in the public sector. Because staff-to-child ratios and supervision are key to program success, childcare doesn’t scale well. When programs expand quickly, they stretch their existing resources by hiring faster, reducing training, and relying on less experienced staff.

Gotham’s experience with universal pre-K and 3-K under then-Mayor de Blasio revealed related challenges. While the programs expanded access to care, their rollout also exposed staffing, quality, and fiscal-sustainability challenges. Since early-childhood teachers in public schools earned more than those in “community-based” programs, community providers struggled to retain qualified staff. After federal relief funds expired, the city had to absorb a growing share of the costs.

Mamdani made early childcare central to his campaign for a reason. Voters like immediate financial relief and higher workforce participation, both of which are easy to measure. But while advocates often minimize the trade-offs, they eventually show up. The policy’s long-term effects on children take much longer to manifest. So do other relevant results—staff turnover, caregiver consistency, daily stress levels for young children, and the cumulative effects of long hours in group care.

Supporting parents’ ability to work is a legitimate goal. Many women in New York have careers and economic independence that depend on out-of-home care. But making work possible does not require building a universal, state-run system. Policymakers have cheaper, lower-risk ways to ease financial pressure on families, such as targeted tax credits that give parents real choices about how to arrange care.

Supporting work and supporting children should go hand in hand. The question is whether universal childcare is the right tool to accomplish both. New York should consider that question carefully before committing itself to a system that is expensive and hard to reverse, and that carries real developmental trade-offs—especially since it will shape how tens of thousands of children spend their earliest years.

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