The Perry pre-school experiment began in 1962 in Ypsilanti, a small city near Detroit, at Perry Elementary School. It enrolled three-year-old children from poor households who struggled in tests. The programme offered daily two-and-a-half-hour sessions with groups of five or six children; a teacher visited each family at home once a week. Participants were followed at ages 15, 19, 27 and 40. They were more likely to graduate from school and less likely to be arrested or convicted of a crime. James Heckman, a Nobel-prizewinning economist, calculated in 2010 that the Perry pre-school investment returned 7-10% a year to society. His study was the basis for President Obama's claim that society saves $7 for every dollar invested in high-quality early-childhood education.
The Abecedarian project started in 1972 in North Carolina. It offered high-quality, all-day care from birth for poor children and was associated with even greater benefits than the Perry experiment.
Tony Blair's Sure Start programme in Britain was inspired by these experiments.
Universal child-care programmes have proved much harder to get right than targeted ones. In 1997 Quebec set up a publicly funded scheme offering full-time care for C$5 a day. The share of children under four in care rose by 14 percentage points relative to the rest of Canada. The share of women in the labour force rose by eight percentage points, and Quebec's maternal employment rate is now 87%, one of the world's highest. But studies by Jonathan Gruber of MIT, Michael Baker of the University of Toronto and Kevin Milligan of the University of British Columbia found that the programme led to a rise in aggression, anxiety and hyperactivity among children, and later a rise in juvenile drug and property crime—a fifth more convictions compared with the rest of Canada.
In France, where centre-based care is well regarded and up to 85% of the cost is subsidised, research by Lawrence Berger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lidia Panico and Anne Solaz of France's national demographics institute found that children enrolled in a crèche at age one showed worse behaviour by age two compared with those cared for by an assistante maternelle or their parents.
In Finland, subsidised centre-based care is of high enough quality that when a stipend was introduced to pay mothers to stay home after ten months, child development and female incomes suffered. Finland spends much more than the OECD average on child care.
By school age, an adult can oversee 20-30 children. At pre-school the ratio drops to 12 or 15 children per adult. In the best nurseries a carer looks after just two or three. The gap in quality between targeted, well-funded programmes and universal systems expanded too rapidly appears to be the principal explanation for the divergent results.
In America, a household with two working parents and two young children can spend as much on child care as on housing. In New Zealand, since July 2025, middle- and low-income parents can claim rebates for 40% of child-care fees, up from 25% before. Australia is broadening access to subsidised day care. In Britain, 30 hours of free child care a week is offered to parents who bring in less than £100,000 ($130,000) after tax, during school term. New Mexico's governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, expanded free child care on November 1st 2025 to all families with children starting from six weeks of age; Zohran Mamdani, set to be sworn in as mayor of New York, plans to introduce universal free child care.
America's vice-president, J.D. Vance, has argued in favour of lower tax rates or cash handouts for families to help mothers stay at home.
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