Yes, this was the same thought I had. What about investing in children by making it easier for their own mother to actually care for them, instead of working outside the home and dumping the kid in an institution.

Your phrasing betrays your bias.

Having kids in childcare is not the downfall of society, and in some ways is similar to The Way Things Used To Be. My youngest goes to pre-school childcare where he gets to interact with kids and parents from his local community whom we see outside of childcare as well. He sees his “teacher” when he walks with me and his older brother to his school because her daughter goes to the same school as his brother. The people who work there are part of the community as well.

Childcare can be the modern form of the village collectively caring for the children so that not every parent is busy with child-rearing all the time.

It’s also good for kids to spend time interacting with people who aren’t part of their immediate family.

Not every childcare program is created equal, but there is a place and need for good ones.

Not once has it ever felt like “dumping him in an institution”. Your kids do not need you 100% of the time, and usually it’s better they’re not with you 100% of the time.

Their own mother or father. This is important for multiple reasons. Some fathers are better parents (I undoubtedly was), if you assume mothers do childcare it limits choices for both men and women. It is a barrier to equal childcare which I feel is ideal.

Even other family member will have a lasting relationship with them and give them more one to one attention.

Having had two kids go through nursery from an early age, they absolutely had a better time there, with more friends and a higher quality of entertainment, than they would have had at home with either of us.

Children being cared for solely by their parents isn't "natural": children used to be raised by entire villages

I'm deliberately not addressing the article as a whole, but I'd like to engage with your smaller point. My parents viewed all day care as "dumping [their] kid in an institution" and made massive sacrifices so that my mum could housewife for a decade+ with me and my younger sister. My wife and I have made a different choice with our son, and I honestly wish my parents had done the same - at least after we were two or three.

Admittedly, my wife and I are fortunate to be able to pay for him to go to an excellent pre-school (though the one local to my parents was similarly good), and I see him naturally acquiring a social fluency and confidence with his peers that I didn't have (if I even do!) until I was an adult. Furthermore, had I been cared for outside the home, my mum would have spent vastly more time with my sister when she was an infant and toddler, which I think would have been a lifelong benefit to her. I also think my mum would have been personally better off getting back to full-time work ~5 years earlier than she did: full-time parenting wore on her, and she and my dad would have been able to retire a few years sooner.

Those are all highly-dependent personal circumstances, so I'm not going to draw a universal rule - but I'm telling you this in order to caution you against doing the same. All families, and all individual circumstances, are different.

[Second thought] I am going to make one general point: the benefit my son draws is highly dependent upon attending a good school. Institutions absolutely exist where "dumping them" is an appropriate epithet to apply, but there is no reason why that has to be the case. I don't know where you live, but in my country the "pro-natalist" political party is also devoted to policies which make schools worse (cutting funding, lowering teacher pay, meddling with curricula, etc), which seems to me to be perverse.

how would that work? replacing her lost wages to be sure it's not an economic disadvantage sounds hard