U.S.’ economic recovery could hinge on improved child care infrastructure

Apologizing for the echoes of a tantrum in the background. Trying to negotiate deadlines with bath time. Taking a work call while anxiously eyeing a baby monitor.

A year into the coronavirus pandemic, this feels routine even as it has upended life for many parents. They’re the lucky ones: the parents who have been able to keep a job, work from home and find, however tenuous, some sort of patchwork solution to child care.

Many others are not so fortunate.

No better number illustrates this than the current unemployment figures. More than 4 million people have left the workforce since last year, most of them women. Some of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic, such as retail and hospitality, employ a disproportionate share of women workers. But other women are being driven out of their jobs to take care of their children.

Policy advocates see this moment of crisis as a prime opportunity to fix child care, when so many Americans have been forced to recognize its role in the economy, said Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

It’s “the invisible work that makes all other work possible,” Kashen said.

The United States has put in place temporary universal child care programs before, and even came close to making it the law of the land in the 1970s. But now the idea is gaining ground again. Republicans and Democrats share more common ground on child care than they have most other issues, and the pandemic has spurred them to stabilize the child care sector. President Joe Biden has also said he will prioritize repairing U.S. infrastructure; experts expect the administration will push through a major infrastructure bill during his term.

“We build infrastructure like roads and bridges and communications systems so that people can work,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., at the Democratic National Convention in the summer, when she made the case for taking a different approach to child care. “It’s time to recognize that child care is part of the basic infrastructure of this nation. It’s infrastructure for families.”

Policy advocates argue that treating child care as infrastructure would have a twofold benefit to the economy: Not only would it allow parents to continue working, it has the potential to create new employment opportunities and convert hundreds of thousands of existing roles into “good jobs” - offering benefits, protections and high enough wages to support a family.

Even pre-pandemic, many parents were priced out of the options that did exist in their communities.

One 2017 survey found parents across the country paying between $9,000 and $9,600, on average, for a year of day care for one child (in big cities, like New York or Washington, D.C., this cost is much higher). At the same time, almost half of American workers were toiling in low-wage jobs.

Nina Perez, the national campaign director for early childhood at the advocacy group MomsRising, pointed out that even before coronavirus closures, the high costs of child care were driving moms to leave their jobs and stay home.

“It was not uncommon for us to get stories that child care costs were as much as someone’s mortgage,” said Perez. “Those stories existed before the pandemic.”

Without government subsidies, it is hard to bring down the cost of care, explained Kashen. There must be adequate staff, especially for young children, who need constant care. Facilities must be safe, and provide a healthy and nurturing environment.