Child care businesses navigate statewide crisis
Jasmine Lane has been working with children since she was 12.
“From the time I was able to watch children, I was,” she said. “I was always babysitting. That’s how I gained my experience primarily.”
Ms. Lane turned her passion into a career. She got a degree in social work from Pennsylvania Western University, California, and then worked at the Alliance for Infants and Toddlers for eight years as a service coordinator, until 2022.
As a 34-year-old single mother of two, and with her experience in child care, she understands better than most people the barriers many parents face when it comes to finding care for their children. So in 2021, Ms. Lane opened Babysitting Logistics, a child care service that offers full-time nannying, part-time babysitting, travel care, event care and more.
“Our model is a little bit more family friendly, because they only have to pay the membership fee versus if they were to contact any agency where they would have to pay that hefty fee,” she said. “So, our pricing is a little bit more flexible with not having to pay that fee right up front. We also do temporary care for when families are traveling here for business. You can have a sitter come to your hotel or your Airbnb.”
The average annual cost of infant care in Pennsylvania is $11,842 or $987 per month. Child care for a 4-year-old costs $9,773, or $814 each month, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Babysitting Logistics has a starting rate of $30 an hour for a sitter, but does not have an introductory fee, Ms. Lane said. They offer a “pop-up day care,” where sitters bring toys and entertainment to families to take care of their children during events or where families are staying, she said.
“I was just trying to think outside the box and see what I thought was needed,” she said. “Eventbased child care is a great thing to
offer. So we would bring everything to entertain children — bounce houses, jumbo games, tactile play, from infants to adolescents.”
Checking all the boxes
Child care facilities across the state have been facing major setbacks, forcing them to become more creative in the way they provide services.
In its 2023 report on the state of the child care workforce and resources for families, Start Strong PA, a child care advocacy group, found that more than 35,000 children in the state are on day care center waiting lists.
“This child care crisis costs working families, employers, and taxpayers $6.65 billion annually in lost wages, productivity and revenue,” the report stated.
Some employers have begun offering child care services, including the Pittsburgh International Airport which opened a child care center for employees in September, in an effort to support working parents.
Morgan Moody, 39, of Robinson, began looking for care for her 1-year-old daughter in March. She was “very hesitant” to pursue a traditional day care center, she said, and preferred a closer level of attention for her daughter until she could talk.
“I have a friend who had a baby, maybe six weeks before I had my daughter, and she had been on a traditional day care waitlist, had paid her deposit and then was told she could not start at the time that she had already planned because they had lost staff between then and the time that she had reserved her date,” Ms. Moody said. “She’d done all the right things and still couldn’t start at the time that they had planned. We knew from speaking to people that specifically traditional daycare was still recovering.”
Ms. Moody is originally from Virginia and does not have family to help out with child care when needed. But then someone recommended Babysitting Logistics and she’s been receiving nanny services through Ms. Lane’s business ever since.
“I was able to be honest with her [Ms. Lane] about what our needs were and what our expectations were,” Ms. Moody said. “And she kind of checked all the boxes of what we were looking for. Then we had an opportunity before we formally decided to go with her to interview and meet with our sitter and that sealed the deal more than anything. It was one of those things where you just kind of know.”
Addressing staffing shortages
Charmaine Moore, owner of Squirrel Hill-based Tots and Moore — a child care facility that offers permanent nanny placement, part-time care and event care and matches workers to child care centers — has been in the industry for over 30 years and has seen the field change drastically, she said.
She has expanded Tots and Moore’s services since opening in 1993 due to heightened demand, including adding event care.
And things have “definitely changed” since the pandemic, she said.
Before the pandemic, 63% of employers surveyed by Start Strong PA reported staffing shortages, according to its 2023 report. Since COVID began, staffing shortages were exacerbated with 91%of employers reporting shortages, a 44% increase.
“Trends were similar with employers that require second and third shifts, or weekends,” the report noted. “Approximately 72% of those employers experienced staffing shortages prior to the onset of the COVID pandemic compared to 95% of employers experiencing shortages after the pandemic started.”
Start Strong PA encourages an increase of non-traditional child care — defined as hours of child care provided to a child whose parent works on Saturday, Sunday, between the hours of 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., or during evening or overnight hours — as one out of three families in the state need care outside of traditional child care hours.
That includes Amy Tingle, of Upper St. Clair, who began using Babysitting Logistics last year for part-time care for her three children during non-traditional hours.
“I couldn’t find anybody that I trusted and felt comfortable with that was reliable,” she said. “I just wasn’t able to do that. There were a lot of issues trying to vet potential sitters and then have them actually show up. I had a really bad experience trying to find care on my own.”
Start Strong PA’s report noted that incentives to offer non-traditional care will “only be successful if child care providers have adequate staffing.”
“Therefore, any investment in improving the supply of non-traditional hour child care must also include measures to address staffing shortages,” Start Strong PA’s 2023 report said.
Thinking ‘outside of the box’
Ms. Moore thinks that offering more programs that can assist with child care costs, such as state-led programs like Child Care Works, could be a step in the right direction.
“The most important thing would be if something like that were available for working families, so that they could have even a portion of the child care subsidized,” she said. “It would be a great help, because then that would allow families to maybe offer a little bit more money for a spot at a child care center and that would just kind of open up more options for families, which would trickle down to the care.”
Another solution, Ms. Lane said, includes increasing pay for staff in traditional child care facilities, as many caregivers are leaving their positions at traditional child care centers in favor of babysitting or nannying.
“In a day care, they’re watching maybe 10 children versus at home you’re watching one to two,” she said. “There needs to be a fair wage across the industry because the pay is different. So an employee that’s working in a dayc are, they might be making $15 maybe $17 an hour, but being a nanny, you can make up to like $35 an hour. That’s a big difference.”
Until then, Ms. Lane continued, businesses will have to change the way they approach child care.
“People are doing nanny shares now to reduce the price because it’s half,” she said. “And people are creating more in-home day cares. People are really having to think more outside of the box.”