Consider This from NPR - What To Do About America's Child Care Crisis
Episode Date: February 26, 2022America's child care system is in crisis. Experts say it's a failed business model. Parents can't afford it, and yet, daycare providers are some of the lowest paid workers in the country. The problem ...is an old one - but there's new energy in the debate over solutions. In part, because of the proposed funding for childcare outlined in President Biden's signature Build Back Better legislation, currently facing roadblocks. But also because the pandemic highlighted how broken the system is. Brenda Hawkins operates a small home-based daycare in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. She's been taking care of kids for 24 years, but the pandemic brought new uncertainty and stress. She was able to keep her doors open, but works longer hours, without increased pay, to keep her kids healthy and safe. She has never considered leaving the business, but understands why child care workers are quitting in droves.Elliot Haspel, author of Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, outlines how the system broke down these past few years and the ways the US could fix it. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at considerthis@npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
Transcript
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Parents and caregivers of young children you already know, for most, it's one big, hot, stinking mess.
You know, this whole thing just has really put a lot of strain on us, like financially, emotionally.
Joseph Speyer is a dad with two kids in Washington, D.C.
He and his wife both work, and in December, they paid $1,000 on backup child care after their son's daycare closed for a quarantine.
And then in January, they needed backup again.
And it's not just the financial strain.
Spire says the hardest part is seeing the impact on his two kids.
I mean, it's the changing routine.
We've had to constantly, you know, just force them into a new day, every day.
Totally different on a two-year-old. Four-year-old.
And the people who provide that care, they're struggling too. Deirdre Anderson is CEO of
Early Start, a non-profit early childhood education program with three locations in
Kansas City, Missouri. I have classrooms that are closed due to quarantines, but also classrooms
that are closed because we cannot hire the teachers
to fill those classrooms. While I have families that are stressed to the max, as are our staff,
and it quite frankly is very overwhelming. There's still no COVID vaccine widely available
for children under five. And with all of the uncertainty and disruption, it's no surprise that for families and caregivers, the situation can feel like a nightmare.
Oh, I had somebody tell me to f*** off last week.
Corey Berg directs the Hope Day School, a church-affiliated preschool program in Dallas,
Texas. That four-letter word was from a parent who was angry that her children lost their spots
in the program. The parent later apologized. The pandemic certainly highlighted problems in the child
care system, but the problems and the frustrations of both parents and care providers are not new.
The first thing that people have to understand in child care is a business.
It's a failed business model because we have a product that costs more to produce
than most of the customers who need it
can afford to pay. Linda Smith directs the Early Childhood Development Initiative at the Bipartisan
Policy Center. She told NPR's Here and Now she thinks the United States has to do better. We have
got to rethink the model of child care in this country. Do we really think it's a public good, a shared responsibility?
And then what do we do about that? Consider this. America's child care system is in crisis.
It's a business where just about everybody is stretched. Parents can't afford it. And yet,
daycare providers are some of the lowest paid workers in the country. Experts say fixing child
care isn't just important for people with kids,
it's important for the American economy.
That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It's Saturday, February 26th.
It's Consider This from NPR. Brenda Hawkins has cared for a lot of children. She's operated a small home-based
daycare in Upper Marlboro, Maryland for the last 24 years. I actually work on the second
generation in some families. I'm taking care of my baby's babies. She's dealt with a lot over
many years in the business, but the pandemic brought a totally new set of uncertainties.
And so didn't know exactly what was going to happen because,
you know, this is our livelihood. If we don't work, we don't make money. Brenda Hawkins was
able to keep her daycare open for essential workers. And as quarantine orders were lifted,
she remained open until January of last year. Half of my little people actually came down
for case of COVID. She had to close down for two weeks.
It was the hardest phone call that I ever had to make to these parents
to let them know that their child was,
that they had come in contact with a child that had COVID.
So we made it through.
But, you know, there are people who, once that happens,
they don't want to come back to your daycare.
Brenda Hawkins says caring for children isn't just work, it's her calling.
So in 24 years, she says she's never thought about leaving the profession,
but she understands from firsthand experience why so many others are leaving.
Since the pandemic, there's a lot more work involved, and they're still making the same pay.
Let's talk about that pay. People who care for children are some of the lowest paid workers in the country for a job that carries tremendous responsibilities, not to mention long hours.
We work an average of 40 to 60 hours per week.
A lot of us work more along the lines of that 60 hours per week.
And when you're talking about spending $200 for child care,
that actually breaks down to an hourly rate of $3.33.
And many jobs in child care lack basic benefits. Brenda Hawkins says she's lucky because she has
health insurance through her husband's job. And so that's one problem that we have in child care.
Another is that there's a lot of providers that find themselves working well into their 60s and 70s
because they simply can't afford to retire.
The problem of low pay for providers
and high cost for families
didn't just happen in the pandemic.
It's been around for a while,
and for many right now,
it feels like the whole system
for taking care of kids in America
is at a breaking point.
Coming up, we'll hear from a policy expert on what can be done to fix it.
Elliot Haspel is an authority on child and family policy. He says America has a child care crisis.
The child care system in America manages to work for no one involved.
First, finding child care can be difficult.
Significant portions of the country are what are known as child care deserts, which just means
there simply aren't enough slots for all the parents who want them. And so you end up
with long waiting lists. You end up not being able to find a provider that serves their particular
needs. And as we noted, the costs just don't work for parents or providers.
And that's because providing child care is very, very expensive because you have to have very low adult-to-child ratios.
So, you know, you have one caregiver for, you know, four infants or for six toddlers.
And you can imagine the personnel expenses add up.
And so even though those parents are paying $10,000 a year, that provider is actually taking a loss because they need to be charging $20,000 a year.
And then the pandemic just came crashing down on this incredibly fragile equilibrium, you know, like the proverbial bull in a china shop.
So the problem is an old one, but there's new energy in the debate over solutions.
In part because of the proposed funding for child care outlining President Biden's signature Build Back Better legislation, which is facing roadblocks,
but also because of the pandemic. While in the beginning parts of the pandemic,
you know, child care programs were experiencing closures sort of alongside the school closures
in many cases. What's going on now is this huge staffing shortage that actually isn't simply
related to the pandemic.
So remember, you know, child care workers making $12 an hour.
Well, what did other low wage industries do over the past, you know, 12, 18 months?
They've raised their compensation.
You know, Amazon and Target are at a $15 starting wage.
You see McDonald's, Chipotle, right?
Like all across the board, these industries in retail and fast food are raising their wages.
Well, child care programs can't do that.
They can't keep pace because they don't have anywhere else to turn, and there's very little public money in the system.
And so we're seeing this exodus of child care workers. We've recovered to within 2% or 3% of our pre-pandemic employment levels.
The child care industry is still 11% or 12% below its pre-pandemic employment levels.
And when you don't have enough workers and child care programs, unlike a restaurant that might have to reduce its hours or maybe close one day a week,
what happens because of those legally mandated adult-to-child ratios, which are really important for safety and quality, is programs have to shut entire classrooms.
In some cases, they have to shut entire programs.
And so you're seeing the capacity be reduced even more.
And that's before you even get into the quarantines that you're talking about.
So this is one of those things that just makes people crazy who are engaging with this. On the one hand, the cost of child care can be absolutely crushing.
And yet you're saying that in the current environment, child care workers can walk across the street to a fast food restaurant and make more money.
So they're going to do that.
How is this possible?
I mean, because, you know, there are subsidies and grants available to some families for child care. Some states and even cities make free pre-K available. Why is it that this isn't working? we're treating what should be a social good, right, akin to a library or a public school or a fire
department, we've turned it into this private market good where families are basically on their
own. You're right that there are mild subsidies, but even before the pandemic, those subsidies were
so poorly funded, they were only reaching one in six eligible families. And these families were,
you know, those at the lower end of the income spectrum. So for middle class families, there's no help basically available. So the problem is,
again, the true cost of care in child care program, you know, a program needs to make to
be able to keep its lights on and pay its teachers well, is more than what parents can bear. And so
the way that we solve this in most other parts of our society is we say,
okay, public funding is going to come in, right?
We're going to pay for our public schools.
We're going to pay for our libraries, for our fire departments.
The U.S. puts in the third lowest percentage of our GDP to early care and education of any developed nation.
We put in almost nothing to fill that gap. And so
as a result, we're in this, again, this untenable situation, which hurts parents,
which hurts the economy, which hurts child care providers, and ultimately, which hurts children.
So President Biden's Build Back Better Act proposed free universal preschool and a program that would allow states to expand
subsidized care to about an additional 20 million younger children. The act itself is currently
stalled in Congress. Now, you know, the president has said that he'd be open to breaking it in
pieces if that's more palatable to people. If that's the case, what piece would you recommend that he break off first? Yeah, that's a good question. So, I think, so child care and pre-K largely move
together. You can't do one really without the other. But in terms of breaking it apart, right,
when you talk about all of the other things that are in there, I am a personally a huge supporter
of the child, expand child tax credit. I'm personally a huge supporter of paid family leave. But if those things do not have a political path forward, child care has been
shown to have bipartisan support, right? You mentioned pre-K, you know, the first states to
adopt universal pre-K systems were Oklahoma and Georgia. The state with the currently highest
rated system is Alabama. You know, we've had President Trump hosted a White House summit on
child care in December 2019. It was not very long ago where he was talking about how backbreaking
the costs could be for families. So this actually shouldn't be as controversial as it is.
Child care, it really powers most of the rest of the economy. It largely pays for itself because of the increased maternal labor force participation.
It makes businesses more productive.
You know, it really, truly is this infrastructure that powers all the other sectors.
So if they do have to break apart the Build Back Better bill, you know, a bill centered around child care, it would be a big win for American families. Before we let you go, you're calling on businesses to step up their
efforts to help provide affordable child care. You've called businesses freeloaders for not
paying into the child care system. And you're in support of efforts by some in Congress to tax
business to pay for child care. Could you explain what's your rationale for that and how would that work?
Yeah, absolutely. So I feel strongly about this. Businesses benefit from child care in the same
way that they benefit from there being public schools. They benefit from it because the current
generation of their workers need somewhere for their kids to go so that they can be productive.
And it matters for the future generation because those kids are eventually going to become the next generation of workers.
And we let businesses get away with not paying into the child care system, so they pay into
the public schools via primarily business property taxes, which if you kind of aggregate
them up, it's about $300 billion a year.
They pay $0 in any dedicated funding for early care and education.
And so we do, we let them be free letters. They all benefit from it. There isn't a business in
America that doesn't have a workforce today or in the future that is going to rely on some level
on child care. So yes, I do think we need to talk very seriously about other ways to get businesses
to step up because this is a social good.
We don't want child care to be a job-linked benefit like the way that health insurance is.
You absolutely don't want it to be you only get child care because the business you work for happens to provide some child care benefit.
Because that means when you lose your job, you lose your child care, and that's terrible for you.
It's also terrible for child development.
Children need consistency and reliability. But we need businesses paying into a
child care system so that any American anywhere who has a young child has access to that care
so that they can thrive. Again, this is, to me, it very much goes back to our core American values.
We talk about self-determination. We talk about choices. But when we don't have a functional child care system,
what we're really doing is limiting the choices and limiting the freedoms of many, many, many
families who are constrained for no other reason than we have decided that providing care for
children is a completely individual responsibility and that society doesn't need to step up.
And I just fundamentally think that's a misreading
of what families need and who America is.
That was Elliot Haspel.
He is a former teacher and a child and family policy expert.
And he's author of the book,
Crawling Behind, America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It.
Additional reporting in this episode came from NPR's Anya Kamenetz.
It's Consider This from NPR.
I'm Michelle Martin.