President Barack Obama visits a pre-kindergarten classroom at College Heights Early Childhood Learning Center in Decatur, Ga. AP Photo/ Evan Vucci

In both his 2013 and 2014 State of the Union addresses, President Obama called for universal preschool access. His focus on early childhood education and care comes in response to a national emergency: the United States ranks 28th internationally in preschool access; childcare now costs more than college for some families; and yet the quality of care in the majority of American preschools and daycares ranks abysmally low.

“Most middle-class parents can’t afford a few hundred bucks a week for a private preschool. And for poor kids who need help the most, this lack of access to preschool education can shadow them for the rest of their lives,” Obama said in his 2013 address. “Every dollar we invest in high-quality early childhood education can save more than seven dollars later on — by boosting graduation rates, reducing teen pregnancy, even reducing violent crime.”

Today Obama is holding a summit on early childhood education. As part of the summit, he will announce the release of $1 billion dollars in funding to support early childhood programs, and the beginning of the “Invest in Us” public awareness campaign.

Limited access to high quality preschools impacts children, persistent class divisions in the United States, the quality of life and marriages of working parents, and gender inequity in the workplace. My current project, a parenting memoir entitled Richard Nixon Gave Me Chocolate: A Meditation on Motherhood with An Indian Twist emerges from this crisis. In 2007 when my first son was born, my husband and I were living in the East Bay of California. I taught community college and he was a graduate student. We were comfortable living within our very limited means until we were pregnant and were faced with the prohibitive costs of quality daycare in our area. Because of our income, we had two choices: upping my work hours so that we could afford to send our son to a depressing daycare just down the road from the neighborhood liquor shop; or having me trade in my beloved teaching job for state-subsidized, full-time motherhood.

Me, my husband, and our one-year-old son Liam in Tamil Nadu, India, where we spent the first two years of Liam’s life, in part to avoid the prohibitive costs of American daycare.

We settled on a third, albeit unconventional, option: we outsourced the exorbitant cost of raising a baby in America and we moved to India where we could afford to hire a part-time nanny and where I could take afternoons off to bond with our child. The memoir is about those two years with a baby in India, as well as my research into the history and attitudes that have shaped America’s systemic failure to support young families.

Though India proved to be a good home for our family in those first two years, I applaud President Obama for his current efforts and look forward to a day when the prospect of an American family moving around the globe in order to afford raising their child truly is an absurdity.