Market failure? The demand for child care is a social and economic failure. Stay-at-home parents are no longer feasible for most families.
Historically day-care has been a service used by very poor single parents so that they can maintain a work schedule, or the affluent that want some free time away from the kids. With that said, I can totally understand why there isn't a very good way to balance that market that's split between the 'well-off' and the desperate.
My point is, which unfortunately isn't a popular one, that the parents are ultimately at fault for creating a financial burden that they have difficulty (in this economy, at this time) coping with. There is no stork-drop, it's their fault -- and this expectation for affordable childcare , which I hope becomes a thing sooner rather than later for the sake of the kids , is born from an inability to cope with poor planning and impulse control, and comes off as entitlement after thousands of years of parents' raising kids without a third party involvement.
I think fewer and fewer people view the raising of children as a privilege, and it's shifting into a given.
That's a problem.
P.S. yes, I know third-party child-care isn't new, but the drive to provide it for every mother is.
More than ever two working parents is a necessity for many families. To place blame solely on the parents for these circumstances ignores the larger picture of where we want to be as a society. Of course choosing to have children has consequences, but parents in the US should be able to have a reasonable expectation for affordable childcare, especially in a society and economy that demands multiple working parents.
But of course instead we could just blame the parents for creating the current scenario of unaffordable childcare.
historically, the extended family like grandparents, are the ones taking care of children while working age parents go out to actually work (the fields).
Historically, this works, because you tended to live with the grandparents, at least for a while - the household is multi-generation.
The recent "privilege" of buying your own separate home away from your own parents, before having children, is new. And if these people aren't rich enough to afford child care, it's because they've overstretched - they ought to really live with their parents imho (and make sacrifices like the old generations did).
I suspect many modern parents may have never experienced this.