Day care, economically important as it may be, was created in the interests of the labor market, not the cohesion of the American family. Even the indisputably successful Head Start program has functioned as a way to free parents to go to work. Intentionally or not, and it has often been intentional, the government has forced parents to choose between the unity of the family and financial survival. What the government has not torn asunder, the people have done informally on their own. Once having embarked upon a marriage, which fewer young people are doing, fewer and fewer are having children.
Children compete with grown-ups for money, resources, for love.
You can talk about the extended family or the differently constructed family, but those are not the traditional ideals in the American imagination. When political candidates exhume the American family, they mean Ozzie, Harriet, and the boys. The trouble is that Harriet is working full-time, the boys, if they exist at all, are out on the town, and Ozzie has probably deserted them. Maybe he has become a deadbeat dad, the faintly cute term the press invented for irresponsible criminals, perhaps to take the sting out of the crime. One could go on and on, but the matter is fairly easy to prove.