The communist system was far better, which is why we - after having dismantled it in the 90s for Eastern Germany - are now back to providing childcare for all children. Though it will take decades until it works again.
The GDR was basically the Apple Store equivalent of the USSR/comunist block in Eastern Europe. Life in the GDR was nothing like life in Romania for example which was closer to North Korea in how its citizens had food and other necessities.
That's true, but life in the GDR was still shit compared to the west, even if it was the least shit out of all the eastern block. You can powder a turd in sugar but it's still not gonna be edible, it will still be a turd.
That's why people from the est were risking to get shot/arrested to cross the border west. Better childcare wasn't enough to unshittify the life in the east.
A lot of things can be made better when the state can put their finger on the scale or use force to achieve that goal, while you actively choose to ignore the means and process through wich that is achieved, and only look at the end result.
For example, abundant housing for all workers was not a problem in communism, but ask yourself why? Because the state could commandeer any piece of land it wanted, bulldoze and relocate whoever lived there without their permission or compensation, then build cheaply using the crappiest materials that don't last, and using virtually unlimited free slave labor from prisons, military and schools/education institutions.
So now you can say "look, communism did affordable housing better, maybe we can learn something form that". Learn what exactly? That to get unlimited housing for everyone, you need to evict people off their land at whim and use slave labor instead of paying market rates for land and labor which leads to the supply shortages we have now?
Same with your "better childcare" example. Of course it's more difficult to get abundant childcare in a free market economy when you have to pay people what they want in order to convince them to come work in childcare, because those people now have much better paying and less stressful economic opportunities in the private sector, than working in childcare for the pay fixed by the state which was competitive in a centralized state economy but is not competitive anymore in the free market one, and you can't force people anymore into certain careers like before.
So yeah, communism did some things better only because there were some major compromises in the back-end that people with rose tinted glasses either forget about or ignore, i.e. you were not part of that underclass of people used as virtual slave labor to achieve those goals.
Communist states, being authoritarian states, sometimes happen to choose an optimization trade-off that does one or two things better than a free-market state - but then uniformly do everything else worse (such as human rights).
It's not that free market systems are perfect - it's just that they at least have the ability to occupy the best spots of the Pareto frontier. Communism doesn't, and saying that we can "take things from it" is incorrect.