Child Care was broken before Covid. Now it’s worse: How We Got Here and How to Fix It.

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Join Capita and Home Grown at 1 pm ET on October 7th for a conversation with providers and advocates about this paper and building a child care system worthy of our children’s future.

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How did the child care system get so broken and how can we fix it?  Without significant assistance, half of all current child care operators anticipate closing just as families scramble to find affordable care to enable their return to or continued work. In a nationwide survey, nearly 50% of families report that they have lost their pre-pandemic child care arrangement. Many parents are unable to return to their pre-pandemic child care arrangement due to program closures, their inability to afford care, and for fear of returning to a group setting. 

Why has the child care sector been so quickly decimated and how can we rebuild it to adapt to our new post-COVID realities? In considering the path forward, we must grapple with the core assumptions upon which the current child care sector was built - assumptions that no longer hold true for this moment or for our communities. Now is the time to revisit these assumptions, and to imagine a new set of founding concepts to move us toward a more inclusive and equitable child care system, one that meets parents’ needs while also supporting and compensating caregivers and providers. 

Pre-COVID, the child care system was not serving families well: the child care market, driven by the need to remain solvent, was ossified and excluded far too many families. Hardships in the business model and market have resulted in the following:

• Care is not accessible: Families cannot locate child care that is close to home; this is especially true for those with babies and toddlers, special needs children, and particularly for families of color.

• Care is not affordable: Families of all income levels are paying large portions of their income for child care. Unlike public education, which is largely taxpayer funded, child care is mostly funded privately by families. Child care is particularly out of reach for low-income families; the demand for child care subsidy greatly exceeds the availability, and only 1 of 5 families who qualify for a child care subsidy are able to access it.  

• Care is inflexible: while over 60% of families need some nontraditional hours of care outside of typical working hours, most child care is only available during traditional working hours.

How did we get here? 

What are the underlying assumptions, values, and history that led us to this patchwork of childcare?  Here are some contributing factors: 

• Child care and early learning are not seen or funded as a public good: Foundationally, the early learning and care of young children is not valued and invested in by the public and for the public. As a society, we have committed to publicly-funded education for children kindergarten through 12th grade. Most Americans support public funding for schools, and we do not expect families to be able to privately fund their children’s K-12 schooling. Yet despite the clear science on the importance of the early years for children, we leave it to individual families to privately fund care and early childhood education. We do not have a public commitment to ensure that all young children have access to high quality, accessible, and appropriate care. 

• Women are still expected to be the primary caretakers of their young children: Why don’t we have a public commitment to ensure that all young children have access to high quality, accessible, and appropriate care? In part, it’s because our society still believes it is the responsibility of mothers to remain home with their children, undervaluing the work of caregiving. In their piece on institutionalized sexism, Julie Kashen and Rakeen Mabud explain that our “ingrained cultural norms have resulted in a society that does not have comprehensive child care solutions and does not value care work as an important job. The undervaluation of this gendered labor, and the public underinvestment in child care, then prevents women from achieving economic and political power.” We are seeing this during the pandemic as working mothers, who already face a motherhood penalty, are now reducing their hours of paid work more than fathers, or leaving the workforce altogether to care for children.

• Our child care system has historical roots in racism: We must continue to examine and discuss the implications of structural racism in the child care sector. The role of slavery, when Black women cared for white children for no wages, contributes to our current undervaluation of child care and the undercompensation of child care workers and early childhood educators. 

• We mistakenly depend on the market to ensure supply and access to child care: Market rates for child care are primarily set based on families’ ability to pay, not the actual cost of meeting health and safety standards or high quality standards. As a result, the profit margins in child care are razor thin or non-existent, and their operations primarily rely on the labor of undercompensated women of color. To remain solvent, child care providers must ensure their programs are fully enrolled and attended in order to extract every cent available to support their child care business. This disincentivizes programs to serve families with unstable employment or facing other adversity. It disincentivizes serving children who need extra attention or support because of their learning style, physical or mental disability, or behavioral needs. The families who need the most financial support, those receiving subsidies, often net the smallest reimbursement to providers, making providers’ desire to serve at-risk or high need children a bad business decision. Solvency is in conflict with quality. 

• We confuse qualifications with quality:  Training in child development is important for all caregivers and educators of young children, but credentials alone do not tell the full story.  The evidence is clear: healthy brain development and resilience in young children is grounded in their attachment to loving and available caregivers who engage in responsive relationships. Our quality frames should reward and support lasting, trusting relationships as the foundation of quality. Upon this foundation, we must build responsive and appropriate training, tailored to the ages of children and the places where they receive care, and credentialing to ensure that caregivers are abreast of current science, can implement effective practices, and can assess developmental concerns. 

Our nation’s history of undervaluing child care and early childhood education, combined with the broken market-based business model, leaves families and child care providers in a tenuous situation. The difference between earning a living wage or not is based on the number of children served, the setting in which they are served, and the age of the children served. This is simply not good enough. We can no longer allow the exploitation of the workforce tasked with supporting young child development. We can no longer expect parents to solve the child care problem alone. 

Where do we go from here?

We offer some ideas for moving toward action. Here we propose new opportunities to progress our child care system, resulting in better outcomes for children, families, and the child care workforce. 

1. Fund quality child care as a public good 

We must rethink the overall funding strategy for child care and invest in child care as a public good.

Funding for child care must attend to the following:

• Caregiver/educator living wage: All caregivers and educators regardless of the age of the child they care for, the number of children they care for, or the setting in which they offer care need to be paid a living wage and have access to essential benefits (paid leave, medical and retirement). The living wage should be adequate to ensure caregivers and educators are able to support their own families and be fully available to meet the developmental needs of young children they care for. Additional compensation for qualifications and specialized teaching should be additive to this “floor” wage. 

• All families need access: New subsidies, incentives, and support are needed to address overall affordability beyond simply making changes to the rates of current subsidy programs. Our nation needs a vision for affordability; the goal of federal leaders for affordable care is that child care should cost no more than 7% of families’ annual income. In reality, on average, family spending on child care is 40% higher than that recommendation. Families need to have various good options that meet their needs and are flexible to change as their needs change. New initiatives and incentives are needed to create supply in child care desserts. 

• Focus on child care services in centers, family homes, and family, friend and neighbor: Our current child care system prides itself on having what we call a mixed delivery system, where parents have choices that include school and center-based care, licensed family child care and family, friends and neighbors. With increased investments for both providers and parents, we can imagine an invigorated mixed delivery system composed of various care options supported by both public and private funds (in home, community and school settings). This supports child care options that meet unique family needs (expanded operating hours, mixed ages, special developmental needs, languages besides English, etc). A robust mixed delivery system will be supported by contract funding and cost-reimbursement mechanisms that are designed to assure that programs thrive and are not penalized for temporary shifts in attendance or enrollment, as seen during this pandemic. Likewise family care allowances can ensure families have the funds they need to afford more informal care arrangements. Effective system-wide support including professional development, coaching and credentialing efforts will address the needs of practitioners in all of these settings. 

2. Prioritize families facing adversity 

While all families with young children need support and assistance, we must pay special attention to families facing the most adversity. Children living in poverty and experiencing adverse childhood experiences are most at-risk for educational set-back and lifelong health consequences. We need inclusive and equitable child care programs and systems that prioritize the needs of these children and use public funds to ensure their access to high quality care. 

In addition to direct family support, we must reimburse providers at a significantly higher rate to serve priority groups and children with special needs; these funds will address the additional resource needs of providers and encourage the inclusion of these children and families. Contracts will enable broad support to programs rather than “per child” funding that undermines stability of the providers we need most in the system, those serving the most high-need groups.  Along with additional reimbursement, providers need robust comprehensive services and instructional support to meet the needs of all children in an inclusive environment. 

3. Ensure parents and providers drive decisions

The current systems do not adequately engage parent and provider voice and do not share decision making with these groups. Addressing systemic racism and incoherence and market failure in early learning is not possible without the voices of parents and providers at the forefront of decision making. 

We need explicit, structured methods for engaging parents and providers in governance and decision making. There are existing public system models that can inform our thinking including the Head Start and federally qualified health center governance mandates. From the private sector, there are models of worker-owned cooperatives and worker board representation that contribute to our thinking. We can learn from these frameworks to develop a system approach that is appropriate in the child care sector across various funding mechanisms (both family-facing and provider-facing). 

4. Commit to Quality

We have a lot of work to do to unpack the ways we define quality, the power structures that created these definitions, and the existing accountabilities that enforce them. Again, the science is clear. Learning, development and thriving depend on reciprocal, loving relationships that stimulate child development. We must prioritize relationship-based caregiving and continuity of care. Upon this firm foundation of loving care, we can build opportunities for cognitive skill development by upskilling caregivers and teachers through effective professional development and coaching and leveraging innovation (there are a myriad of promising technological tools and shared resources ready to scale) to ensure that both loving care and appropriate learning occur.  

5. Scale and support home-based child care 

As we progress toward expanding the options available to families, we recommend scaling and supporting various forms of home-based child care. This care has proven remarkably durable during the pandemic, with over two thirds of home-based providers continuing to provide care to essential workers during the pandemic. In this moment and beyond, this care, when adequately resourced, offers various opportunities to meet the needs of families of all demographics and backgrounds. Home-based child care:

• Nurtures young children’s physical, cognitive, social and emotional development;

• Offers flexible scheduling to meet the nontraditional hours needed by many families; 

• Is located near to where families live and work; 

• Shares families’ cultural, linguistic, and child-rearing practices creating stability and affirming identity;

• Has the same caregiver providing consistent care to children over many years of a child's life, often with siblings in the familiar, welcoming, and supportive environment of the home; and, 

• May be provided by community members or relatives with multi-generational relationships with families.

In home-based child care settings with adequate resources and supports, parents do not have to choose between affordability and quality, stability, and convenience. There is much we can do to scale and support this care. This starts with re-envisioning the home-based child care sector. We must acknowledge and support the many family, friend and neighbor caregivers who provide care and ensure systems fully include these caregivers in resources and policy. We also need to invest in a new infrastructure that assures the quality and stability of home-based child care. Comprehensive networks, sometimes called staffed family child care networks, are this infrastructure. Home Grown has developed a guide to support states and communities in envisioning and developing their own networks.

This, along with systemic reform to expand resources and increase parents’ ability to pay and the salaries and working conditions of providers, are essential to creating a sustainable child care system.

Conclusion 

Our current child care system is not working. It is not adequately serving the families who need care and it is not adequately compensating those who provide care.  We need to re-examine our assumptions about child care and make a public investment in the future of our nation’s children and our economy. Quality home-based child care- a flexible, affordable option- must be an essential piece of a better solution.

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Karen Tylek is the Program Manager of Home Grown. She has 15 years of experience in the education sector, including online learning, project-based learning, out-of-school time, and early childhood education. She holds a bachelor's degree from Loyola University Maryland, and a M.S.Ed from the University of Pennsylvania. 

Natalie Renew is the director of Home Grown, a national initiative focused on improving the quality of and access to home-based child care. Natalie is an early childhood professional with over 15 years of experience in the nonprofit and social service sector supporting children and families furthest from opportunity.  Prior to joining Home Grown, Natalie led the expansion of the early childhood education group at Public Health Management Corporation in Philadelphia. Natalie has overseen the development of large programs, secured sustaining funding for major initiatives, and supported local systems change in the early learning sector. Early in her career, Natalie worked in child welfare and food access.