CNBC says that these are the five best countries for working parents:

The editors make sure to note that “the U.S. isn’t on the list,” thanks to a relatively skimpy welfare state and scarcity of day care. But here’s something to consider: the 2023 estimated birthrates of the six countries in question according to the CIA World Factbook :

The U.S. is easily in the top half of that birthrate ranking, much closer to Iceland than to Estonia, Germany, or Canada. That suggests that the measures used here to determine friendliness to working parents don’t really make it easier to be a parent. They just mean it's easier to work.

The CNBC piece is based on a study by Bloomberg Businessweek, which is really all about day care, not parenting. How much does the government subsidize day care? How much does the government invest in making day care high-quality?

Day care subsidies don’t subsidize family. They subsidize work. That’s why these rankings don’t correlate with birthrates.

A study in the European Journal of Population, probably the most comprehensive study on pro-natal spending in countries around the world, couldn’t find any effect on birthrates from government day care spending. While day care enrollment (but not subsidies) did seem to slightly increase birthrates, the economists found that it probably only moved births earlier in women’s lives (which is great) but did not result in more children.

If you subsidize professional day care, you are telling parents not already interested in professional day care — say, a parent who wants to stay at home, or to ask grandma to be the nanny — that they are doing it wrong. You are paying couples to adopt a dual-income lifestyle while outsourcing parenting to full-time professional daycare workers. In other words, these government subsidies are trying to create job-friendly families rather than family-friendly jobs.