Pay to Play

A Boston suburb wants to charge daycares that use public playgrounds. What does the elimination of shared spaces mean for children?

The Rogers Pierce Children's Center is a nonprofit daycare center that has operated for more than 50 years in Arlington, Massachusetts. Like other childcare facilities in the Boston suburb, RPCC sometimes takes students to public parks and playgrounds.

But following what Arlington’s Parks and Recreation Commission described as “complaints from residents about the constant use of parks/playgrounds by organized programs,” RPCC and other daycare programs are facing fees for public park use.

“At the absolute lowest end, our estimate is that imposing this fee would cost RPCC an additional $1,500/month, or $18,000 per year,” RPCC’s family board wrote in the commission in November, “and entail consolidating our classrooms for outdoor play and limiting it to shorter time intervals, which is not ideal for young children this age.”

Arlington is reinstating a pre-Covid policy (though some daycares like RPCC say they’ve never heard of it) of requiring private childcare facilities obtain permits and pay for hourly use of public parks, fields, and playgrounds. The town has defended the policy, noting that people who hold private events in the parks are also asked to pay a fee. But unlike a private birthday party (a fun but ultimately optional occasion), childcare is an economic necessity. Parents need childcare in order to work. Though some cities (Arlington isn’t one) attempt to address that need with universal pre-K programs, the majority of daycare centers are private due to lack of public funding, running on razor-thin margins that often leave both parents and childcare workers financially squeezed.

A more child-friendly society might make daycare as readily subsidized and available as a town park. Instead, America is often outright hostile to childhood, both financially and in attitude, steadily whittling away at the public spaces available to young people, while simultaneously bemoaning the fact that children don’t seem to play outside much anymore.

It’s rare that I’ll side with a private company in a fight over public resources. I’m critical, for instance, of the co-option of New York City public school resources by charter schools, and the massive diversion of public school funds to private and religious schools via voucher programs, especially in red states.

But daycares are not the same as private schools, which supplement a universal K-12 system. Daycares are a utility without public funding, private only for lack of alternatives. And in charging only childcare facilities for public park use (“fees to be built into tuition costs for 2024/2025 school year,” Arlington’s parks commission notes), local governments are engaging in a highly selective version of a libertarian fantasy, ticketing families for each hour their children use the playground.

“If our daycares start relying more on use of the bike paths to get our young children outside to exercise,” the RPCC letter reads, “will we begin to be charged for the use of bike paths and sidewalks?”

Children belong in public spaces. It’s a right so fundamental that I never questioned it during a childhood of hanging around the local park, nor as a summer camp instructor leading hikes through public woodland, nor as a New Yorker watching after-school clubs play in Central Park or preschool classes take slow walks on public sidewalks, the children taking up—yes, perhaps—more space than an adult might as they toddle around the block. Sometimes I take a midday walk in a riverside park near my home, and often find it busy with students from a local daycare.

I’m happy to share the space with them. Maybe it’s because my oldest kid is their age and I feel a preemptive nostalgia for these years. Maybe it’s because there’s something like an inherent goodness in hearing children at play. If adults on the right and left agree on anything about Kids These Days, it’s that their routines are too regimented, their activities too optimized, their environments too indoors. The park near my home doesn’t have a playground but it’s a rich site for unstructured play, the kids clambering over logs and scooping up river-smoothed stones.

Then again, despite adult hand-wringing about the indoor children of helicopter parents, the U.S. hardly fosters the freedom young people need. The park permit process suggested by Arlington officials might make sense for administrators filling out a timetable of playground usage, but it’s bizarre to anyone who understands the spontaneity of childcare. (Is craft time running late? Is it going to rain? Did it already rain and you’d rather relocate to a different playground that doesn’t flood?)

"The town has asked us to let them know when we are using it, or how much time we need to use it, then they plan to bill at the end of the month based off your usage," Jen Eisenheim, director of an Arlington nursery school, told WBZ News this month. “That was the last letter I got from the town.”

Publicly funded spaces are often battlegrounds for belonging. Public libraries are frontlines for culture wars, with right-wing voices arguing to cut back on resources over anti-LGBTQ+ panics. Public parks are sites of local anxieties over homelessness, with many municipalities adding hostile architecture that makes it difficult to sleep on a park bench, sit on the edge of a planter, or rest in a sheltered area.

Those interventions make shared spaces less welcoming for everyone, but they invariably hurt the people who most need support. While grabbing lunch with my two young children in Grand Central station after a recent train trip, I discovered that it is nearly impossible to find a table with chairs in the downstairs dining concourse. In order to reduce the risk of an unhoused person sitting down, the station has installed standing-height tables that are completely useless to small people. (You can’t sit down in the main terminal because all the benches have been removed for similar reasons, and a looping audio announcement reminds visitors that they are prohibited from sitting on the terminal floor or steps. Not a great situation for a preschooler whose short legs have already covered impressive ground at the end of a long day.)

There are, very simply, few places one is allowed to exist for hours on end without spending any money. Public schools are one of them, which is why so many parents who use private daycares long for universal pre-K, or for their children’s graduation to public K-12 schools, whereupon parents won’t have to fork over large sums in order for their children to inhabit a safe environment during the workday. (Kids, themselves, don’t have any money.)

Without universal childcare programs, or at least without subsidies that would allow private daycares to obtain their own outdoor space, it’s hardly surprising that private daycares end up prevailing on public resources anyway, bringing kids to the parks that are rightfully everyone’s.