Not every problem has a federal government solution. Many working parents have a real problem — day care is expensive, and quality day care even more so. But that doesn’t mean it’s a problem for the federal government to solve. Solutions closer to home — within families, communities and states — are better.

“The concept of the American family unit still centers around the notion that child care is supposed to be borne on the backs of each parent, who’s expected to make the necessary sacrifices to provide care,” writes Suzy Khimm in the liberal New Republic. “But finding child care for working families isn’t just a personal dilemma; it’s also a policy problem, and an economic one.”

Now, that’s true enough — working families do struggle economically with the cost of day care. But here’s where we get all “It Takes A Village” about the problem.

“A group of advocates is making a full-throttled attempt to turn child care into a collective, social responsibility,” Khimm writes. “On Thursday, the Make It Work campaign unveiled a proposal for federally subsidized child care that would dramatically expand the scope of government aid to 26 million lower- and middle-income working parents, at an estimated cost of $168 billion per year when it’s fully phased in over 10 years.”

She knows there’s little chance of such a program passing now, with Republicans in control of both the House and the Senate.

“But the point isn’t whether such a government program could pass Congress now — or any time in the near future — but that we need to fundamentally reconsider the way we think about child care,” she contends.

And she makes it clear that we should begin to think of day care as another federal entitlement program.

That’s wrong.

There are better ways to respond to the (again, very real) problem of expensive day care without creating another layer of federal bureaucracy.

First, we should look to families and communities. As with education, local is better. No one in Washington D.C. will care about our children as much as our own family members, our own churches and our own communities will. There’s already an underground child care industry in place, as the New Republic points out — from undocumented nannies and informal, unlicensed arrangements to grandmothers caring for multiple children.

We can legitimize much of that system by reducing regulatory burdens and even offering some tax breaks to help family members who are caring for nieces, nephews and grandchildren.

Second, we can let the states step in. If indeed day care is a policy problem, then the states are the proper level of government to respond — not the federal government. The 10th Amendment has a real function here; states are the laboratories of democracy, it’s often said, and can try different things to see what works.

Meanwhile, there’s one thing the federal government can do to help working parents. It can increase the child tax credit from $1,000 to $5,000.

Day care costs are a real problem. But the solution isn’t federal.