> Daycare is suboptimal. Parents have a duty to and should have the freedom to take care if their kids.

Why should parents be the sole caretakers of young children? This is not the norm and never has been.

> A single income household is ideal over a dual income household with hired childcare.

Why should people have to choose between work and raising kids? Why not work less and do both?

Ideally we'd all have a lot of things we don't all have the means to have. Practically, the pitch is daycare offers a net cheaper option for society as a whole by allowing us to specialize roles in our communities, allowing the same means to do more similar to public education. Constraints aside, it'd also be great if, e.g., we all got our education via dedicated 1:1 time with experts instead... but that doesn't make it a practical possibility for everyone.

It's also worth noting the article opens with a single income family that used childcare. The options there were either don't have the family you want at the ideal age, don't go for a more ideal education/income prospects, or don't go for the ideal always-with-one-parent style of raising the kids. None of the choices would have left all ideals on the table.

A single income household with a homemaking parent requires that wages or salaries be offered that can support an entire family on a single income. In most states, minimum wage (and even most hourly jobs that pay above minimum wage) isn’t even enough to support living alone for a single person working less than 60 hours/wk.

> Parents ... should have the freedom to take care [of] their kids

I wonder if there is a path to making this possible for more people?

The dual income norm since 1971 is just a backdoor way the top 1% have stolen from the rest of the country.

The options are frequently a zero income household or a single income household with hired childcy.