On a policy level, much of the debate about childcare comes down to how best to shore up a failing system. While there is tremendous disagreement about what role government should play, everyone from democratic socialists to the US Chamber of Commerce to Republican senators acknowledges that childcare isn’t working for too many households and that it’s having negative ripple effects on both families and the economy. From the reddest states to the bluest, lawmakers are actively wrestling with that reality.

On an individual parent level, however, much of the debate is still stuck on whether sending a child to a daycare center is going to harm them for life. That argument — along with its counterpoint, that formal childcare is an unalloyed positive — gets in the way of a productive conversation about making sure every parent has the care they need to raise their kids the way they want while providing for their families.

It was helpful, then, when Phoebe Arslanagic-Little and Ellen Pasternack wrote a recent piece titled “Daycare pseudoscience” for Works in Progress, an outlet generally aligned with the “abundance” movement. Much of their ire is directed at daycare critics like the prominent psychoanalyst Erica Komisar, who regularly claims that formal childcare disrupts children’s normal brain development — claims that Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack dismiss as “pure speculation.”

As enjoyable as that takedown may be, the pair are just as hard on liberal leaders, who routinely treat early care and education as a near-miracle intervention capable of transforming children’s educational and later-life outcomes. Enough research has been done, the authors counter, that “if there were large, lasting impacts on children, either positive or negative, we would probably know by now.”

I study chidcare for a living, and Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack do make some valid critiques. Out of a well-intentioned zeal for helping young children, the early childhood sector has at times gotten out over its evidentiary skis; there has been a tendency, for instance, to lean too heavily on small-sample studies of unusually well-funded and rigorous programs from the 1960s and ’70s. And while early childhood is indeed a sensitive period for brain development, when many foundational neural connections are formed, the brain remains fairly plastic throughout middle childhood and well into adolescence.

That said, Arslanagic-Little and Pasternack also miss important points. First and foremost, it’s vital to remember that there is always a counterfactual at play: Where would the child in question be getting their early care and learning if they weren’t enrolled in a given childcare program? While the authors scoff at how hard global development groups push for early care and education investments in low-income countries, the alternative for young kids in many of those cases is neglect — if not outright danger.

Most US studies compare children who are generally getting adequate care and learning in one setting to children who are generally getting adequate care and learning in a different setting. There is certainly such a thing as high-quality early care and low-quality early care, and we should be pushing for as much of the former as possible. But it’s not shocking — especially given that healthy child development seems to require sufficiency, not optimization — that adequate versions of various formal and informal care settings don’t lead to fundamentally different outcomes on a population level (even while they can absolutely lead to different outcomes on an individual level).

That’s not evidence, however, that childcare writ large has no large and lasting impacts, and the counterfactual is also likely why the largest positive results of childcare accumulate for lower-income children.

It’s also worth noting here that a lot of the early childhood research in America relies on very old data. There has not been a major childcare-focused study that follows a cohort of babies through adolescence and beyond since the federal Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which recruited babies born in 1991. Yes, the kids in one of the most-cited studies we’ve got on childcare impacts were in care during the George H. W. Bush administration! If anyone would like to get on funding another one — especially after the Trump administration canceled a cohort study of kindergartners that was already underway, which was the closest we were going to get for a while — that would be very welcome.

Back to the topic at hand, many of the positive impacts of a well-funded childcare system seem to flow through the parents and not the child. Because young children develop in a family ecosystem, the stability of the family is paramount — both in terms of material stability, like having secure housing and food, and relational stability, like having parents who are able to be warm and responsive.

For instance, a study of extended-day pre-K in New Haven, Connecticut, found that parents who won a lottery to get a slot saw their earnings go up by nearly 22 percent on average thanks to the extra care access, with those gains persisting for at least six years. Even though researchers didn’t detect much lasting academic impact compared to the lottery losers (perhaps not stunning given the state of New Haven schools), it’s hard to imagine that level of improvement to family financial stability wouldn’t have a salutary impact on child well-being.

Similarly, a population-level scan misses all the ways in which childcare programs act as social infrastructure, facilitating friendships and creating vital neighborhood networks that can frequently be life-changing or even lifesaving.

But networks aside, those benefits aren’t unique to formal childcare programs: families can gain just as much from having real options to use family, friends, or neighbors as caregivers or to be financially supported to provide care themselves.

Starting from the principle that society does better when parents have viable childcare choices — and the ability to move between them as needs and preferences change — leads to a very different place than the quicksand of the daycare wars. This is a common arrangement internationally, as in several Nordic nations, where families can choose between a heavily subsidized (often free) licensed program and a monthly “home care stipend.” The key, of course, is that for licensed childcare programs to actually be viable and not constantly closing or paying skilled early educators a pittance that leads to sky-high turnover, they need permanent public funding.

That’s why it’s encouraging to see Democrats moving in the direction of a more pluralistic, inclusive, fully funded system, as with Project 2029’s “Child Care Choice Guarantee,” written by veterans of the last several Democratic administrations. So let critics like Komisar keep fearmongering; everyone else would do well to ignore the distraction and focus on building a system where parents can choose the care situations that work best for their families — without the irrational fear that picking wrong will cause permanent damage.