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Most of us don’t appreciate the horrendous costs of early childhood poverty; they are beyond our intuition, unless we become far more mindful of the poor. The biggest scientific finding of recent years in human development is the vital role of the earliest years of life, from pregnancy through age six, the period known as early childhood development (ECD). The early childhood years are the foundation for all that follows. When mothers are healthy and properly nourished during pregnancy, when childbirth is safe, and when the young child is properly nourished, provided with quality health care, raised in a safe and nurturing environment, and afforded the chance to learn and socialize in preschool, the child is likely to reap lifetime benefits of better health, higher school attainment, and higher labor-market earnings. When, on the other hand, the child is born underweight; raised in a dangerous and stressful environment; subjected to environmental hazards of pollution, noise, and other threats; and precluded by poverty from preschool and quality child care, the consequences can be disastrous, not just in childhood but for decades onward. Early childhood undernourishment, for example, can lead to chronic poor health in adulthood and greatly reduced productivity at work.

Another key finding is that our failure to invest in our children at the crucial stage, ages zero to six, can be very hard to compensate for later on. If a skyscraper stands on shaky foundations, extra efforts on the higher floors are never going to make the building secure! This means that many of our educational efforts in the United States, for example in reforming high schools, are coming far too late in the day. We might be able to help some kids along through compensatory actions and should surely try to do so, but we will be much more successful if we start at the start, ensuring healthy early childhood development for all kids.

In a brilliant essay, Gösta Esping-Andersen, the leading expert on Sweden’s social welfare state, asks why social mobility is now so much higher in Sweden than in the United States.15 He notes that in all high-income countries, the parents’ socioeconomic status shapes a child’s educational and earnings prospects, but much less so in Sweden than elsewhere and much more so in the United States. In Sweden, even a child growing up in relative poverty has almost the same education and earnings prospects as a child growing up at the top of the income curve. Esping-Andersen suggests convincingly that Sweden’s distinction lies not in its support for public education, which is roughly matched by other countries, but in its public support for families and their children from the earliest age, even before formal schooling.

All of Sweden’s families have access to affordable high-quality day care, which is publicly provided. This enables mothers to work without leaving their children behind in an unsafe environment. Female heads of household, a group marked by a high rate of poverty in the United States, are not poor in Sweden. Remarkably, their poverty rate in Sweden, according to Esping-Andersen, is only 4 percent, compared with the United States, where the Census Bureau recorded a 30 percent poverty rate in 2009.16 Similarly, all of Sweden’s children are afforded high-quality preschooling.

The main point, according to Esping-Andersen, is that it is the provision of public services, notably the universal access to affordable day care, even more than income support to families, that is key to the elimination of poverty among families with children. Sweden’s public services, of uniformly high quality, ensure a decent start for all children.

Sweden’s public financing for child care, preschool, and preprimary school amounts to 1 percent of GDP, compared with just 0.4 percent of GDP in the United States.17 The needs in the United States, of course, are even greater than in Sweden, given the vastly higher proportion of children growing in poverty. Yet in the United States,