There is a small question hidden inside most family calendars: who has care covered?
It arrives as a creche closure, a child with a fever, an inset day, a school holiday, a late meeting or a grandparent who needs help. Then it becomes economic. Who loses work hours? Who turns down a shift? Who carries the plan?
A new NBER working paper by Serena Goldberg and Costas Meghir helps name that connection carefully. It develops a framework for how households make decisions, then reviews evidence from low and middle income countries on childcare, women’s work and child development. It is a working paper, not a universal promise, and it is not a study of Ireland. That scope matters.
Its finding is still worth sitting with: childcare can increase mothers’ employment. It can also free another family member who had been providing care to work or study. But care on its own does not create a decent job, undo a workplace that will not bend, or dissolve norms that make a mother’s paid work seem optional. And for children, measured outcomes are mixed and depend on the context and quality of the care.
Care is not a private scheduling failure
When care falls through, we tend to make it sound like a mother’s personal organisation problem. She should have booked earlier. She should have found a backup. She should have remembered the early finish. She should, somehow, have made two places at once.
But a childcare gap is not a missed calendar reminder. It is missing infrastructure.
The paper is useful precisely because it does not flatten the story. More available care can give women a real opening into paid work and increase household income. Yet that opening may still lead nowhere if suitable work is scarce, if the hours do not fit, or if the social cost of a mother working remains high. The authors also point out that when relatives provide care, formal childcare can change their possibilities too. A grandmother may regain time for paid work, education or rest. Care is a household system, not a two-person transaction between a mother and child.
That is also why quality cannot be an afterthought. “A place” is not the same thing as a good, safe, reachable and affordable place. The paper’s review finds mixed child-development results, shaped by both provision and context. It is not evidence for sending children anywhere. It is evidence for treating care seriously.
What a planner can and cannot do
I build a planner, so I want to be honest about its edge.
ReturnKit cannot make a childcare space appear. It cannot make an employer respect the school day. It cannot replace a public system that has been allowed to become brittle.
What it can do is stop one person having to carry every moving part invisibly. The closure date can live somewhere shared. The pickup, the packed bag, the payment date, the backup person and the question of who changes their work hours can be named before 7:40 on a Wednesday morning. Naming is not the same as solving. But it is the first condition for sharing.
The wrong product response would be to turn this into another score for mothers to manage. No care-preparedness badge. No shameful red warning. No promise that a neat plan makes a lack of care painless.
A useful response makes the load visible, gives it a shared home, and recognises that the system is sometimes the problem.
Make the care visible
Before the next closure, name the change together. What moves? Who owns each part? Who needs an update?
A care emergency should not silently become a mother’s double shift. When someone covers a sick child or a closure, something else needs to move too.
The action worth taking
For families, make the care plan shared and visible now, before it becomes a late-night negotiation.
For employers, treat care as operating infrastructure. Flexibility needs to be usable, not a favour granted after someone has already apologised. A job that cannot bend around ordinary care breaks will keep losing people who were never short on ambition.
For everyone building tools in this space, keep the promise modest. Help people see and share the coordination. Do not pretend an app has solved the shortage of care.
Childcare can open room for women to work. That matters. The harder truth is that the room still needs a job, a fair household, care of real quality and a world that treats mothers’ time as valuable.
Recommended citation: Goldberg, S and C Meghir, “The Effect of Childcare on Female Labor Supply and Child Development in Low and Middle Income Countries,” Annual Reviews of Economics: Submitted. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-economics-081426-102307. This is a working paper and literature review. The authors acknowledge funding from the Gates Foundation, the Cowles Foundation and ISPS at Yale. The views are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect those of NBER. Read the original paper before citing it.