Short story: Child care workers growing scarce

Dearth most acute in expensive urban areas

SEATTLE — A dire child care workforce crisis amid a booming U.S. economy is compelling many industry players to turn to business tactics more closely resembling Wall Street than “Sesame Street,” including noncompete clauses for child care workers and client families, college tuition incentives for the workers and nonrefundable wait list fees for desperate parents seeking day care slots.

Underlying the phenomenon is a shrinking pool of child care workers, with employers still offering low pay while demand for high-quality child care programs skyrockets, particularly in expensive urban areas like Seattle.

Child care workers in the U.S. make less than parking lot attendants and dog-walkers, said Marcy Whitebook, co-director of the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment.

“If you can’t get workers to do the job, then it’s hard to expand the supply. And when the economy is good, that’s when you need to expand the supply,” Whitebook said. “The economics of early childhood in the United States are quite broken.”

Some child care centers in Seattle, New York and San Francisco are so popular that parents pay to get on waiting lists while still trying to conceive.

Aubrey Zoli, 38, said she loves working with 4- and 5-year-olds at the popular Wallingford Child Care Center in Seattle but struggles with the $16.90 hourly pay, especially with a bachelor’s degree.

“I love the job but I can’t afford to live it. A lot of our teachers have second incomes from second projects because it’s impossible to live on these wages in Seattle,” said Zoli, who also does work as a musician and event planner.

Her boss, Jenny Cimbalnik, concedes that the nonprofit Wallingford center can’t afford higher wages because it already puts 80 to 90 percent of revenue into staffing costs.

The median annual pay for child care workers, including those in formal facilities and home-based centers as well as private nannies, increased by 13 percent between 2014 and 2017, to $22,290, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the same period, the pool of U.S. child care workers dropped to 562,420 workers, down 21,000 people, or 3.5 percent of the workforce.

Experts say public policy and demographics have exacerbated demand. Dual-income households headed by millennials are more often concentrated in urban centers. Parents also increasingly favor high-quality early education programs with trained teachers and academic philosophies instead of the mere babysitting functionalities of yesterday’s “nursery” day care systems.

The shift comes as a growing body of brain development research shows children who attend good preschools are better off as adults, with higher incomes and healthier lifestyles.

Some child care centers now use noncompete-like and “hold harmless” policies to combat family “poaching” of child care workers to become their personal nannies and to address other outside work arrangements by child care workers.