I'm not saying you're saying this, but there's this fallacy/myth out there that if you don't want to spend 24 hours a day (or all waking hours of the day) with your child and responsible for their well-being, then you're a bad parent or damaging them or something. It's possible to love your kids, enjoy spending time with them, be a great parent, and also find it exhausting or even untenable to be responsible for them all the time.
There's also this idea floating around that people used to raise kids with an extended network of adult caregivers, and that that was good for everyone. That resonates with me. For people who don't have family around to help, daycare has sort of taken that place, for better and worse. (Daycare providers are not faceless service providers -- they become close members of your extended community!) The downsides of this are widely talked about. But I know folks who've had loads of family help ... with significant associated emotional burden.
In your words, this is a failure of the parent, but I disagree.
But the "higher class" family has a lot of extra income to be earned by having two parents working vs one. So its often bad economics for a poorer family to work two jobs and pay for regulated childcare. And good economics for a rich one.
And this is how it works out in reality too. I checked a bunch of census stats, and the percentage of children in childcare facilities in the US rises steadily with family income. (interestingly enough, the percentage of children watched by their grandparents also rises steadily with family income too)
Grandparents did this.
Unfortunately, these days, parents can't afford to keep living near the grandparents (because home prices have gone up too much, or because the grandparents are in a dead-end no-jobs town).
Your options are to fix the housing market (By which, I mean, utterly destroy the value of existing homes[1]), or to make it possible for a single breadwinner to feed a family again (again, this is largely driven by the cost of housing) or to make due with the status quo.
[1] That's going to be hugely popular among demographics that vote. /s
This happens with social security and other taxes too, just usually takes a bit longer and they wait until you owe a lot more. The violence is there, it's just under the polite veneer of pay up or get got.
Today 56% of the worlds population lives in cities. That means childcare is essential for socialising a child.
A child at home with a parent until kindergarten is probably going to spend the first 4 years of their life in a small apartment with one adult, bearing in mind that many young parents are generally not well off. This is not healthy situation for the child or the adult.
This is such a strange take. Do you really imagine you and the child will be locked up all day in your apartment? Most cities are not warzones or quarantine areas. Cities have playgrounds and parks, and the child will probably insist on going to one at the minimum daily. The local branch of the city library will have storytelling sessions at least once a week, likely more; and when the storyteller is done, there will be the shelves of early books your child will love to explore. Cities will have lots of kids of the same age group on your block, probably even in your apartment building; your child will inevitably play with them. There will be friends and relatives who will visit you and whom you will visit. Perhaps organized play dates with friends' kids who live further away. And some sort of local young family meetups, organized at the library or playground or via the local Facebook group. There will be parades, festivals, strolls through the historical center, beach days, museum visits, barbecues in the public park... Unless you make a deliberate effort to avoid all of that, your child will surely get socialized.