The Child Care Industry Is Too Important to Fail
The Child Care Industry Is Too Important to Fail
It’s past time to subsidize child care in America
This is the mid-week issue of Men Yell at Me. A newsletter that is opinions, essays, and journalism about politics and gender in the middle of America. You can read past issues here. If you like it, you can subscribe. If you don’t like it, you can still subscribe.
Maia Robinette runs one of just two day care centers in Circle, Montana, population 605. Robinette opened Lovebugs Daycare in January 2018 with just six kids. But within a year, she was able to hire a full-time employee, and now she has two full-time employees.
The majority of the families that come to Lovebugs have parents who are farmers, ranchers, nurses, and teachers.
In March of 2020, Robinette shut down her day care for two weeks. “I had people calling and begging me to reopen,” she said. “But I told them, first we need to quarantine. I honestly don’t know if any of them did, but I had to do what was right.” In the beginning of the pandemic, when so many day cares were closed, Robinette says she had families calling from Glendrive, 50 miles away, asking if she was open. “Everyone was pretty desperate. They were willing to drive 45 minutes out of the way just for child care.”
Montana is a child care desert. The Center for American Progress states, “In Montana, 60 percent of all residents live in a child care desert. Child care supply is especially low among certain populations, with 73 percent of rural families and 63 percent of low-income families living in areas without enough licensed child care providers.”
What this means, is that if Robinette shuts down, it affects the entire town. “If I don’t open, the hospital doesn’t have enough nurses or the school doesn’t have enough teachers,” she says.
But keeping Lovebugs open has been a struggle, and it’s come at the cost of her health. “I got COVID,” Robinette says. “My staff has had COVID. We’ve had kids and whole families with COVID.”
In order to keep her staff, Robinette pays them $13.00 per hour, which is more than the median pay for child care workers nationwide. Robinette told me she called the hospital to find out what nurses make, and they told her it was also $13.00 an hour. “Basically, for our town, it’s as good a job as being a CNA,” she said.
The other day care in town pays $9.00 per hour; Robinette knows because she used to work there. Despite her paying more, she and the other day care charge the same rate. “I’ve thought about raising our rates, but it’s just so tough for people right now. It doesn’t seem right,” she said.
As the pandemic continues, child care in America is in crisis. According to the Washington Post, child care workers are quitting their jobs at an incredible rate. And child care centers are struggling more than restaurants to fill the vacancies. The Post quotes Janet Yellen, who said, “Child care is a textbook example of a broken market.” The article continues,
“She pointed out that families spend, on average, 13 percent of their income on child care for young kids, yet day care workers earn so little they rank in the bottom 2 percent of all professions.”
The pandemic has made all of this worse. Parents can’t work because of a teacher shortage. Families are forced to quarantine for weeks on end. Robinette told me of a family who had to quarantine for six weeks as one after the other got COVID. “They still had to pay for daycare, because I still had to pay for staff. It’s hard, but I don’t know how else to keep the doors open.”
As a result of this child care crisis, working mothers have dropped out of the workforce at an alarming rate. And a new study out of Germany published by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that, “After a mass layoff, women’s earnings losses are about 35% higher than men’s, with the gap persisting five years after job displacement. This is partly explained by a higher propensity of women to take up part-time or marginal employment following job loss, but even full-time wage losses are almost 50% (or 5 percentage points) higher for women than for men.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. America has had a child care problem for centuries, and the solution has always been to rely on the uncompensated work of mothers to fill in the gap. Only during World War II, when men were at war and women were forced into the workforce to keep the war machine going, did Congress act. In 1940, Congress passed the Lanham Act, under which the American military began setting up child care centers to support the war effort.
But the whole experiment fell apart when men returned from war and women were told to go back to their homes.
Angie Maxwell is the director of the Diane Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society and an associate professor of political science at the University of Arkansas. She is working on a project studying the time when America had free government-funded day care under the Lanham Act, and she explained to me that the child care was not motivated by progressive values. But a literal need for bombs.
“It’s not that we cared that women needed to work,” she told me in a phone interview. “The government needed women to work to produce materials for war. What happened is that America faced a labor crisis. We needed bodies to produce the materials we needed for war. And because so many men were at war, we needed women. And the thing keeping women back from the workforce was that they didn’t have child care.”
She points out that the government moved to stop funding the day cares the moment WWII ended. “So many employers and women had to protest for an extension. Men weren’t even back home before this experiment got cut short.”
Maxwell notes that, historically, America has always viewed women’s work as optional. “We continue to see women’s work as a choice. When the reality is, it’s not optional for the vast majority of women.”
When the ERA gained steam and was, for a while, part of the Republican platform, Maxwell notes that it wasn’t about making it easier to work, but was out of a paternalistic regard for those poor, poor women who had to work. “What undermined the ERA for conservatives was the idea that women would be forced into labor. An idea successfully promoted by Phyllis Schlafly, who by the way was a working mother. Who was used as a mouthpiece for traditional gender roles and believed she’d get a position on Reagan’s cabinet. She didn’t. Because there is only so far you can go.”
“We continue to see women’s work as a choice. When the reality is, it’s not optional for the vast majority of women.”
It’s going to take a fundamental reimagining of the American family to change our mindset toward child care, Maxwell argues. But she points out if that happened, half of Americans would support it. But the other half would see it as so threatening to the very foundations of their core beliefs, it would become a culture war.
“That’s because we haven’t realized how much traditional gender roles are a fundamental part of our culture and politics,” Maxwell notes.
Even as the pandemic raged and feminists and mothers and politicians, and people who were all three of those things at once, argued that child care is crucial infrastructure and part of the economy, culturally and politically, we are still far more willing to bail out banks and airlines and restaurants rather than day cares.
I ask Maxwell why this is. After all, we are in a crisis like WWII. Why not now? But Maxwell points out how hidden the disease is. And how it’s more likely to kill people who aren’t insured or suffer from underlying conditions. “Basically,” she argued, “if COVID only affected men and there was a labor shortage because all the men were sick and then the women had to fill in, only then would America find the political will to fund free universal daycare, once again.”
More than 92% of child care workers are women. Middle-class families can afford to jerry-rig solutions to this problem, with nannies or having a partner drop out of the workforce. But the rest of American families don’t have those options or luxuries. As American Progress explains, “This is an especially important issue for parents of color, who due to decades of occupational and residential segregation, have less access to telework and the flexibility it affords families with young children. Indeed, many workers of color across the country have worked through the pandemic in essential frontline occupations.”
Every economic argument shows us that investing in child care has huge economic rewards. Dollars spent on American families are not wasted. Studies consistently show that every dollar invested in early childhood programs has at least a four-fold return, if not more.
Yet, the best that the Biden administration has done so far is tax credits for families. And is sending states Federal money to help with child care providers impacted by the pandemic. But it’s not a long-term solution for a long-term problem. And, as in Iowa, lawmakers can limit how that money is spent.
There is little political will to fix the child care problem because it’s been sidelined as a woman’s issue. And America has always been willing to sacrifice the bodies and livelihoods of women on the political altar.
The problem is, we know all this. Americans know this. We live this everyday, the juggling of children and the cost of child care. The problem is, we think it is fine. Fine that women have to quit their jobs. Fine that we expect women to work for free. Many women think this is fine, too, because they have partners and spouses who have jobs, so it works for them, which is their choice.
But it isn’t fine. Divorce rates are skyrocketing. Birth rates are dropping. The entire system of the American family is imploding, and it’s too big to fail.
Edit: This newsletter has been edited to add a bit of context about federal pandemic relief for childcare providers.
Men Yell at Me is a newsletter about the places where our bodies and politics collide and yes, the occasional yelling man. Learn more about it and me (Lyz) here. You can sign up to receive the free weekly email, sent on Wednesdays, which includes interviews, essays, and original reporting. The Friday email is a weekly round-up of dinguses, drinks, and links. On Monday I have a subscribers-only open thread where we discuss politics, food, dogs, our bodies, and more.
Lyz I *really* liked and agreed with this. My only question is--there's a point where you talk about the middle class jerry-rigging solutions, and tbh I have noticed that it's really the wealthy (not like the uber wealthy, but still the well-off) who. Are able to do that without slipping into at least temporary poverty. We were lucky enough to be able to cover the costs (and just made our last daycare payment EVER), but I have friends who had to downsize apartments, put off home-buying, put off having a second child, etc due to childcare costs and I guess I wonder: at what point does childcare push families out of the middle class, even if they can "make it work"?
I am a child-free woman long infuriated by the lunacy of the lack of government funded childcare. Either pay for childcare so women can support their children and contribute to the workforce, or pay for social services so those families can live on the fringe of poverty. Seems like a no-brainer.