Centering Immigrants in the Search for Child Care Solutions

When I arrived in Ohio from Vietnam in 1995, my sister and I worked alongside my parents at a factory that primarily made parts for cars. My sister was nine; I was seven. Afterhours, we usually had the entire place to ourselves to ride on our father’s lap as he drove the forklift, eating McDonald’s as a family (we could only eat at places that allowed us to order with numbers), and listening to my parents tell stories about Vietnam as we worked.

In contrast, my American-born brother spent much of his childhood alone. After the factory closed, our mother began to work as a manicurist for twelve hours every day. He often entertained himself, did homework, ate, and processed being bullied by his peers, in isolation, with the belief that he couldn’t complain because, after all, our parents have lived through far worse conditions. He knew to stay away from the windows so that neighbors wouldn’t know he was home alone and call social services.

Which of us had the better experience of early care and learning? My brother, who spent his non-school hours at home, but alone, or my sister and I, who spent our evenings and weekends in a setting many American parents would deem “unsafe,” but surrounded by love and learning from our own parents? What would a public solution to the ongoing child care crisis look like, if it centered experiences like my family’s?

Early education contributes to school readiness, social integration, and the overall health and well-being of children. Yet it was not an option my family — like many immigrants — considered or even fully understood. Child care, as most Americans think of it, is culturally and financially inaccessible to families for whom maintaining basic safety and earning income are chief concerns; it’s even more so for immigrants, with limited context for or exposure to the web of complicated, invisible, and expensive child care options Americans navigate.

Children of immigrants and refugees account for one in four of all those under age 6, according to the Migration Policy Institute. By 2025, children of immigrants will make up nearly one-third of the US child population. Many of them face a variety of circumstances, such as low family income, low parental education, and language barriers that place them at risk of developmental delay and poor academic performance once they enter school. In addition to the limitations of affordability and availability many families face while finding child care options in the U.S., immigrant families also face language barriers, bureaucratic complexity, distrust for government programs, and cultural preferences for familial care at home.

Immigrant early educators and other childcare workers are an answer to mitigate barriers immigrant children face. With a shared background, they can promote language and cultural continuity between the home and learning or care settings, contributing to positive cultural identities.

It’s a desire to understand the complexity of these problems from those facing them firsthand and to discover innovative solutions that work for them that has brought me from academia to New America as part of the ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship program. As a working-class immigrant and an expert in Asian American studies, refugee narratives, and disability justice, I center the stories of refugees, immigrants, disabled, and low-income families like my own, as critical knowledge for adopting strategies and methods for advancing child care options for all children nationwide.

My previous research has been an exercise in achieving cultural change through shifting the stories and storytellers we center. In my dissertation “The Right to Pain and the Limits of Testimony,” I attempt to answer questions about citizenship, disability, race, trauma, and belonging that I find urgent for a more compassionate society. Those questions center on silenced people of the Vietnam-U.S. War, and the ways in which their bodies act as testimonies to violence that Vietnam and U.S. forces have either denied having committed or have justified or appropriated into a nationalist agenda. I interviewed disabled people in Vietnam and analyzed first-person narratives of Vietnamese Americans who have been disabled by the Vietnam-US War, and in so doing, shifted the interpretative power away from the listeners (Vietnamese government officials, US government officials, and American people) to the testifiers, by prioritizing their language, frame of reference, unique vision, and particular demands.

At the Better Life Lab, I intend to shift interpretive power to the marginalized voices that are often left out of the “child care crisis” conversation. I plan to also publicize Native, disabled, and transgender experiences of child care, their unique needs and innovative solutions. I recognize that the very act of sharing stories reflects a relationship of trust and calls on a common goal of social transformation, and thus, regard these stories as gifts and important interventions to our current early education and childcare infrastructure.

Solving the child care crisis will be a momentous step toward justice: not only will it promote education equality, narrow growing economic disparities, decrease the numbers of women leaving the workforce, and help us build a more robust democracy; but solving the child care crisis is also ultimately an act of love toward communities whose needs have been overlooked for far too long. It is, on one level, a matter of looking into a little boy’s eyes, my brother’s, for example, and telling him that he matters to our society; that he’s smart, he can and should play with other children, and he can carve his path in life, rather than being forced into a dead-end simply because of where he started.

Universal child care requires equitable, sustained public policies, and also a shift in how we orient ourselves to other parents, care workers, and children.