This is basically a recognition on the part of everyone from Japan to Norway to Canada that having a child isn’t just a random consumption choice that we should leave entirely up to the free market. Parents have a special social role to play, and it’s important to all of us to put them in a position to play it well.
I looked quite a bit at these sorts of issues a few years back, and the truth is that there are a lot of fairly minor things we could do to make things vastly easier on parents. We could, for example, change the school day so that it corresponds with the work day--i.e. 8 to 5--and the extra time will mean that important stuff like the arts and P.E. will be safe. This would be better for kids all around, and it would be easier on parents, and save them a bundle on child care. We could further help by expanding the school year so that parents don't have to find arrangements for their kids for the ~3 months they're off school. Plus, since kids lose intellectual steam during vacations, this would help alleviate that. Obviously, these changes would cost money--we'd have to pay more to keep schools open longer and to pay teachers for more time worked. So they'd require some tax increases. However, they would help parents a lot, and I would think that this would be a compromise that society like ours would be willing to make.
I wonder how potent a political issue this would be. I suspect that these would be pretty swell issues for Obama to run on in 2012, after global warming and healthcare are done.
