My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically given the bare minimum of attention while the older children consumed all of the time from the staff. The focus was on parental retention, so her job was to focus on changing the diapers of the infants to prevent diaper rash, and this took precedence over actually holding them and interacting with them. At no point is it remotely similar to how homo sapien mothers parent their OWN infants.

Daycare is to parenting as processed food is to nutrition. They are modern developments that prioritize economics over quality.

A study done in Canada (a "natural experiment", where a lottery determined eligibility for free daycare and allocated it at random) allowed researchers to track children who were enrolled in daycare versus children who were parented by their mothers, found that (adjusted for income) the infants who lost out on the lottery and were raised by their mothers in early childhood were healthier and better adjusted adults years later.

In most countries it's 80% if your household salary is such to support it + household expenses, and approaching 0% if it's not.

And it's intense just for the first few youngest years, when the ratio of daycare employee : baby is 1:2 to 1:4. That doesn't last more than a few years, in which most parents/grandparents want to spend a lot of time with the baby anyway, and less at work.

But from age 4-18 school takes care of the vast majority of daycare hours while you're at work. Even after-school programs become cheap, a group of fifteen 12 year olds can be managed by one daycare employee.

Europe's fifteen minute cities also help, I was going home from school/activities by myself from a young age, because the whole town is walkable/bikeable easily and safely.

In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.

The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West

Tax payer paid childcare is known for its low quality. There was an article in The Economist about it.