For Working Parents and Child Care Providers, Help Cannot Come Fast Enough

For nearly a year now, child care providers and working parents have pleaded for help from lawmakers, calling for at least $57 billion of the $90 billion experts say it will take to shore up the U.S.’s already tattered child care system during an unprecedented public health crisis. But in the three COVID-response packages Congress has passed since March, the child care industry has received just a fraction of the funds it requires, totaling just $13 billion (for context on those big numbers: the airline industry has received approximately $40 billion in relief).

Now, new research shows how working parents, especially working mothers, are paying the price. A report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) shows that Covid-19 has simultaneously wrecked the child care industry, resulting in a significantly diminished workforce, and severely constrained parents’ ability to maintain full-time paid employment.

At the outset of the pandemic, as states went into lockdowns and schools and workplaces closed abruptly, the child care workforce lost nearly 400,000 workers. Since then, they’ve regained about half those workers, but as CAP shows, rehiring has since plateaued.

Even before the pandemic, there were far too few child care providers to serve the U.S. workforce. A 2018 CAP report found that 51 percent of Americans live in “child care deserts,” places where there are “more than three young children for every licensed child care slot.”

The Better Life Lab’s 2016 Care Index found that across the U.S., “care can be difficult to find, and that, though quality is difficult to measure, only a handful of centers and family homes are nationally accredited for quality.”

And as child care options diminish and many schools remain remote, the pressures of the pandemic on working parents have only mounted. Those without the ability to work from home, or whose child care and educational demands are too heavy to allow them to continue working, are missing work, losing income, and in some cases losing their jobs entirely. CAP’s analysis shows there are now 700,000 fewer working parents of young children in the workforce than last year. Working mothers continue to lose jobs at a rate faster than working fathers, but fathers of young children too have taken a hit to their employment.

Black and Latinx workers, especially women, are also particularly vulnerable to this ongoing jobs crisis due in part to the disproportionate share of low wage jobs they held prior to the pandemic as well as their lack of access to quality child care. The National Women’s Law Center finds that 154,000 Black women left their jobs in December, “marking the largest one-month drop in their labor force size since March and April 2020.” And Black and Latinx women child care workers, roughly 40% of all child care workers, have also been hardest hit by the pandemic.

At the end of another difficult week for U.S. families, however, there is new reason for hope that Congress will be pushed to address these growing crises. Last week, the incoming Biden-Harris administration promised to prioritize major economic relief for U.S. families, and outlined their plans to rebuild America’s care systems and its economy in detail. In addition to renewing and expanding paid leave guarantees for workers and reimbursements for employers, it would also provide an additional $40 billion of support for the reeling child care industry, additional child care support for families, workers and providers and more funding for Pre-K. It would also provide funds for schools to re-open safely, which is critical both for children and for their working parents.

While care advocates are celebrating the proposals for their responsiveness to the care burdens American families are facing, the plans are almost certain to face challenges ahead in a deeply divided Congress, as well as opponents who will emphasize what they see as the exorbitant cost of supporting Americans’ child care infrastructure. But this pandemic has shown clearly that child care infrastructure is essential economic infrastructure. Like roads, public transportation, or broadband internet, child care enables U.S. workers to do their jobs. The cost of maintaining these systems is far and away justified by the work they enable and the economic security they create for families. Though the cost of a child care system that works may seem high, these latest jobs numbers show that families cannot get by without it.