 | | Jaylen, 5, hugs his grandmother at the ACCA Child Development Center in Annandale, Va.Cheriss May for The New York Times |
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"The child-care providers are really the unsung heroes of the pandemic." |
— Sara Mauskopf, a co-founder and the chief executive of Winnie |
In suburban Ohio, a decades-old child-care center that was thriving before the pandemic shut its doors for the final time in August. |
In Michigan, a child-care facility has been running at less than half its pre-pandemic capacity, bringing in less income, even as the costs of Covid-19 safety protocols continue to add up. |
In Virginia, a child-care center for the children of essential workers found itself taking in the community's school-age children, but without the kind of guidance from the government that schools get. |
In California, the owner of an in-home child-care center lost 70 percent of her clients and has burned through her savings to stay open, leaving her about two months away from having to close permanently. |
Initially, as parents pulled their children out of child-care centers in the first months of the pandemic, revenue plummeted. Then, as child-care centers opened back up, the burden of safety for the community's children — including, in many cases, schoolchildren whose parents couldn't help them with remote learning — fell on providers that were already struggling to survive on thin budgets. |
 | | Children playing at Kinder Kare in Midland, Mich.Valaurian Waller for The New York Times |
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About 360,000 child-care jobs simply vanished between February and April last year because of pandemic lockdowns, said Jessica Brown, an economics professor at the University of South Carolina. Employment in the industry in February this year was down by 16 percent compared with a year ago. In contrast, overall employment fell by 6 percent in that same time. |
This scarring is likely to outlast the pandemic. "When the economy does worse, the child-care industry declines," said Professor Brown, who published a study on the industry in January, "but when the economy improves, the child-care industry doesn't recover as quickly as the rest of the economy." |
And yet, the industry's health is interwoven with the health of the overall economy. Before the pandemic, almost 90 percent of parents in dual-income households took advantage of some kind of child-care arrangement, according to an analysis by the Department of Education. Many leaned on a family member who could stay home with the children, or on a nanny, but almost 60 percent turned to a center-based care arrangement. So for parents to get back to work post-pandemic, child-care centers need to exist. |
"The biggest fear is that the supply's not going to be there when the market's ready to recover," said Rhian Allvin, chief executive of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, an advocacy organization. By the time a center is back up and running, parents may have made other arrangements — whether that's grandparents stepping in or mothers quitting their jobs — trapping many day-care centers in a vicious cycle. |
 | | A student asking Elba Machado to read a book at the ACCA Child Development Center.Cheriss May for The New York Times |
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At the root of this crisis is America's relationship with child care itself. Unlike every other developed country, the United States has never, with the exception of a few years during World War II, treated child care as an essential service. Since at least the 1970s, when President Richard Nixon vetoed a bipartisan effort to implement a universal child-care system because it had what he called "family-weakening implications," the industry has been cast as a personal choice — more specifically, a mother's choice. |
"We have never valued the work that goes into caring for our families — we've never accounted for it, we have made it invisible and have always taken for granted that women will shoulder the responsibility," said Ai-Jen Poo, senior adviser for the nonprofit Care in Action and an expert on the care economy. In fact, the whole industry "is still often referred to as 'help' as opposed to a 'profession,'" underscoring the overall perception that caring for children is not a job of any real value, she added. |
And the federal government has largely stayed out of the matter. |
In that vacuum erupted a fragmented and sprawling patchwork of day-care options, essentially small businesses, that are simultaneously expensive for parents (care for one infant can eat up almost a third of median family income) and yet persistently low-paying for their predominantly female workers (the median hourly wage for child-care workers is $11.) |
Though many child-care centers receive public funding, the majority of funding comes from tuition fees. Only families in the lowest income brackets receive government subsidies, but how those are meted out depends on state and local governments. And while public schools receive funding from the government for every student enrolled, day-care centers get government support only for the exact number of days a child attends. If a child is out sick, for example, that's lost income. So, during the first months of the pandemic, when parents pulled their children out of child-care centers, many lost out on thousands of dollars of income. |
And labor is the biggest cost for a child-care center because of the number of teachers needed per child. The standard across the country for high-quality care is one teacher for four toddlers. The older a child gets, the fewer teachers needed. So, for 100 toddlers, a center needs 25 teachers, all working over 10 hours a day. |
In order to make even a slight profit, enrollment has to remain high and extraneous costs have to stay low. It's a precarious model that even in the best of times wasn't very stable. |
When the pandemic hit, there were mixed messages on whether providers should stay open, with rules shifting day by day and state by state. Local governments offered Band-Aid fixes, like small business grants. And the stimulus packages passed by Congress last March and December fell far short of the $50 billion that advocates had hoped would go to the child-care industry. |
 | | Nicole Lazarte working at the ACCA Child Development Center.Cheriss May for The New York Times |
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The $1.9 trillion relief package that Congress passed in March includes an additional $25 billion to bail out providers, which is "urgent and important," Ms. Poo said, "but it's just the beginning. We have to stabilize what we have, but that is not going to be sufficient for what we need for real economic recovery." |
On Wednesday, President Biden unveiled the first half of a sweeping, two-part infrastructure plan that earmarks another $25 billion to help upgrade child-care centers and build new ones. The second half of the president's plan is expected to include an ambitious proposal to create a universal prekindergarten program. "For too long, caregivers — who are disproportionately women, women of color and immigrants — have been unseen, underpaid and undervalued," Mr. Biden said. |
In the interim, the industry's workers have improvised; they signed petitions, they cut back on costs, they worked out how to engage toddlers in socially distant play time, or they stayed in touch with parents over Zoom, checking in on the children they were supposed to be caring for but no longer could. |
"The child-care providers are really the unsung heroes of the pandemic," said Sara Mauskopf, a co-founder and the chief executive of Winnie, an online search platform for child-care centers. "They have been showing up for work, in person, since Day 1 of the pandemic, and they did it at great personal risk and cost. They really deserve a lot of recognition for that." |
In the coming weeks, In Her Words will highlight the stories of child care providers from across the country. |
Here are four articles from The Times you may have missed. |
 | | Placards outside the James Allen's Girls' School in South London denouncing sexual violence.Henry Nicholls/Reuters |
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- "Rape culture is real." On a platform called Everyone's Invited, thousands of young women and girls in Britain have recently been sharing frank accounts of sexual violence, sexism and misogyny during their time as students, both within the school walls and outside. [Read the story]
- "He said he would count to three and if I did not take off my clothes he would kill me." Rape is being used as a weapon in a civil war in remote parts of Tigray, a mountainous region in northern Ethiopia, with reports of more than 500 women subjected to sexual violence there and new cases emerging every day. [Read the story]
- "All sorts of long-buried memories of touch have been rising to the surface lately." A year of isolation made the author, Melissa Febos, reconsider all the unwanted touch women endure — and why it can be so hard to refuse it. [Read the story]
- "If I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work." At the dawn of the Harlem Renaissance, Augusta Savage fought racism to earn acclaim as a sculptor, showing her work alongside de Kooning and Dalí. The path she forged is also her legacy. [Read the story]
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In Her Words is written by Alisha Haridasani Gupta and edited by Francesca Donner. Our art director is Catherine Gilmore-Barnes, and our photo editor is Sandra Stevenson. |
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