Child care needs boost from Congress
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the critical role that our child care system plays in the lives of working families and in our economy. The current nationwide labor challenges are, in part, due to families struggling to find quality and affordable care options.
This is especially true of single parents in the labor force. A parent not being able to work due to child care concerns has a profound impact on families’ financial well-being and businesses’ bottom lines. In short, the lack of affordable, quality child care is a threat to our current and future economic security.
The Build Back Better Act before the Senate includes a transformative investment in child care and prekindergarten that will expand the reach of these essential programs and help get America’s parents back to work.
The essential role of child care for families is not a new concept for those of us who have served in the military. In the 1980s, the changing composition of the armed forces made child care a military readiness issue. The child care system for military families was marred with long waiting lists, serious deficiencies in quality, and low pay and qualifications for teachers and staff. It was obvious that problems in the child care system would negatively affect recruitment and retention of troops and overall national security.
In response, Congress passed the Military Child Care Act in 1989. It invested in much-needed reforms. Today, the military child care system meets national accreditation standards, provides higher wages for teachers and care providers and costs less for military families. But there is always room for improvement, which is why the military continuously assesses the need for child care and develops long-range plans to expand capacity.
In turn, Congress includes provisions nearly every year in the National Defense Authorization Act and Appropriations packages to ensure military families have access to high-quality child care in safe environments. When it comes to the health and safety of military children, our work is never over.
The Military Child Care Act is an example of a time when Congress recognized the essential importance of child care. The Build Back Better Act represents the next step in this effort. Child care is essential for all families but remains inaccessible for too many.
Pennsylvania’s child care system is facing many of the same challenges of quality, access and affordability that the military system faced decades ago. Across the commonwealth, 57% of kids live in child care “deserts,” meaning an area with three or more children per licensed child care slot, and only 42% of care providers meet high-quality standards. Low wages and lack of benefits for teachers are causing a staffing shortage that impacts most providers and contributes to more than 25,000 children waiting for care in Pennsylvania. Where quality care is available, it’s often too expensive for working families.
The Build Back Better proposal would provide greater subsidies to help working families afford care. It would stabilize child care providers and build the supply of quality programs by ensuring payment rates that would reflect true costs and ensure a livable wage for child care teachers. Like the Military Child Care System, Build Back Better would utilize grants to accredited quality child care providers in child care deserts to operate without being dependent on enrollment or attendance, while also subsidizing parents based on income level.
Build Back Better would also grow the availability of high quality prekindergarten in Pennsylvania by more than 200,000 students. This would bring to scale a decades-old bipartisan goal of fully funding our state pre-K program.
Just as Congress embraced child care as an essential readiness issue for military families, Congress must act now to strengthen our civilian child care sector making quality care available and affordable to America’s working families as part of a broader effort to get America back to work.
U.S. Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Democrat, represents the 6th Congressional District in Pennsylvania. Thomas J. Wilson III is a retired Navy rear admiral who serves on the PA Executive Advisory Council of the nonprofit: Mission: Readiness — Military Leaders for Kids.