Working parents face continued chaos despite reopened schools
Kelly McCormick thought she’d be back on the job long ago, but the coronavirus pandemic continually finds ways to keep her home helping her two young children.
One day in December, her son’s Maryland school told her to pick up her 10-yearold immediately: He had been exposed to COVID-19 by a classmate who sat near him in a workgroup and at lunch. When she arrived at the school, she found other parents who had gotten the same midday call.
“That’s when I realized what an effect this has on parents,” she said in an interview with Stateline. “I never could have done this with my job. There are too many people depending on you to just drop everything and walk away like this.”
McCormick quit her job as a social worker in August 2020 to help her children with their virtual schooling. And like many parents, the suburban Olney, Maryland, mom thought school reopenings this year would free her to get back to her career. But that prospect has been delayed again and again as waves of variants have sent children home after classroom exposures or illnesses.
Similar situations are happening all over the country. A Stateline analysis of a January U.S. Census Bureau poll found 6% of parents of children ages 5-11 were not working because they had to care for children not in school or day care. That hit as high as 13% in Illinois, where Chicago schools closed temporarily, and 14% in Idaho, where an omicron surge combined with a flu outbreak to force school closings.
And federal data analyzed by Stateline shows that parents of small children have left the workforce in much higher numbers than other working adults during the pandemic.
In the last quarter of 2021, 6% fewer jobs were held by parents of children ages 5-12, both mothers and fathers, compared with the same period in 2019, while other prime-age workers were only 1% short of pre-pandemic job levels, according to a Stateline analysis of census numbers provided by ipums.org at the Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation at the University of Minnesota.
Last month, 6% of parents of children ages 5-11 said they were not working because they had to care for children not in school or day care. Parents, especially mothers, have lagged in returning to work, partly because of periodic school closures due to COVID-19 outbreaks.
MomsRising, a web-based organization of mothers, is advocating for more paid family medical leave that would allow parents to stay home from work in emergencies such as a pandemic. Nine states and the District of Columbia have general paid family and medical leave laws, though they won’t take effect in Oregon until next year and in Colorado until 2024.
Delaware and Maryland are considering similar legislation. “This way moms can keep that connection to the workplace and all their benefits and also have these caregiving roles,” said Namatie Mansaray, senior director of workplace justice for MomsRising.
The state laws and proposals vary, but generally offer a set number of weeks of leave at a percentage of full pay, funded by insurance paid by the employer or employee.
The Maryland legislation failed last year after testimony from small businesses that it could worsen labor shortages for them. The Maryland Chamber of Commerce will oppose it again this year, CEO Mary Kane wrote in a February oped, because it wouldn’t give employers enough control.
“The employer has no ability to verify the need for leave, to challenge leave as fraudulent or abusive, or to take into account the impact of the leave on business operations,” Kane wrote.
Some parents feel their struggles disappeared from public consciousness when schools began reopening.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, at least everybody was on the same page and realized we were all in this terrible thing together. Now it feels like parents are alone in this. We’re forgotten,” said William Scarborough, a University of North Texas assistant professor who has a 3-yearold son in a pre-K program that’s often canceled. Children under 5 years old cannot yet be vaccinated, making them more vulnerable to COVID-19.
From December to midFebruary, Scarborough faced at least one day a week without child care. “You get the email in the morning, and I’d be juggling meetings, moving things around, missing sleep,” said Scarborough, who co-authored with federal sociologist Christin Landivar a February study showing the effect of school closings on women in the workforce.
The study found that losing more days of school was associated with mothers leaving jobs, particularly in states such as Maryland where schools went mostly remote in 2020.
Even now, with schools open almost everywhere, daunting challenges remain for parents who must work.
“The care infrastructure that parents depend on is not fully restored,” said Landivar, the study’s main author and a sociologist and senior researcher at the U.S. Department of Labor, adding that mothers still take the brunt of child care challenges. “Mothers continue to take on additional caregiving responsibilities when schools close or child care is unavailable.”