THE U.S. CHILD-CARE SYSTEM NEEDS TO BE REIMAGINED

There’s a lot of buzz lately about how funding will revive our broken child-care system, but nobody is thinking about how we can advance it to the next level.

The current system — which fails families, children and businesses — needs to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. Solving the child-care crisis will take more than simply relying on federal, state and local resources and funding. We must be creative and agile in our approach and leverage existing technology. We need a real-time exchange of all the stakeholders.

We must continue to push our local, state and national leaders to adopt a longer lasting strategy, besides funding alone. They have a critical opportunity to consider what innovative solutions are most effective in supporting providers, children and their families in the short and long term, even after the pandemic is long gone.

Until we have a more robust universal child-care system, working families and early educators will continue to struggle — particularly those in our communities of color. Consider this: Even prior to the pandemic, 60 percent of Californians lived in a child-care desert with limited access to child-care providers, according to the nonprofit California Budget and Policy Center. California has also lost thousands of child-care providers during the pandemic

For many families, high-quality child care is not an option. That’s because there are not enough childcare providers to meet the demand. This particularly affects families of color, families living in rural areas, and children with special needs. We can strengthen our nation’s childcare infrastructure via technology to ensure access to quality care for all families.

It is also extremely difficult for parents who fall into the chasm — they make slightly above poverty levels but don’t qualify for subsidies, and can’t afford child care, and therefore they end up dropping out of the workforce. Just take a look at the millions of mothers who have lost or left their jobs due to child-care burdens caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Having a modern technology platform for child care is imperative to improve these statistics by supporting parents and their employers with affordable programs for their children and getting women back in