With several states attempting to reopen their economies by forcing people back to work under threat of losing their unemployment benefits and health insurance, many Americans may soon be scrambling to find adequate child care. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has already forced most child care centers to close, and a lack of public funding threatens to decimate the entire industry, leaving millions of Americans without any safe or viable child care options, just as they are being urged to return to the workplace.
Even in normal times, the summer months are challenging for working parents with school-age children, as they struggle to find affordable child care that will permit them to work while their kids are out of school. To satisfy this demand there are usually local summer camps and day care services provided by local municipalities and private organizations. Some people rely on sitters or nannies during the summer.
But as any working parent soon finds out, the problem of child care doesn’t just go away in the fall, nor is it limited to parents with very small children. Many school-age kids of working parents need after-school care as well. Child care is not only a matter of convenience, but an absolute necessity for millions of American families. As Jessica Guynn reports, writing for USA Today, 60% of all children under the age of five participate in some type of weekly care, and 40% of all working adults have children under the age of 18. Somehow, juggling schedules and pickups and dropoffs, American families have up until this point managed to navigate an imperfect system just to accommodate two-income or single-parent households.
But this year is different.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, the problem of obtaining child care has suddenly become a major obstacle looming for parents who will be trying to re-enter the workforce, even if and when it becomes reasonably safe to do so. As both public and private schools face an uncertain prognosis this fall, the issue of obtaining child care is also intertwined with parents’ legitimate concerns about their children’s safety. This problem cuts across class divides, affecting all households where a single parent is the only source of income, or one in which both parents work. And in the context of the pandemic, it is poised to become another glaring example of the weakness of our social support structure, in which public needs are relegated to the private sector.
As Lauren Birchfield Kennedy and Katie Mayshak write for The New York Times, as a result of COVID-19, child care in most of the U.S. has dried up, as centers have closed doors and laid off employees. Most American child care programs are run as small businesses and few can rely on any meaningful public funding, in spite of the fact that, among employed parents with children under the age of six, over three-quarters (76%) of mothers and nearly all (96%) of fathers work full time. Once the lockdown orders started, and parents were home full-time instead, like any other business without income, the child care industry began going belly-up.
[W]hen the coronavirus forced centers and family child care providers to close, day care fees were cut off and the business of child care quickly collapsed. Child care providers operate on razor-thin margins with very little cash reserves, and the partial or complete loss of revenue these small businesses have experienced has pushed most to the brink of insolvency. Across the country, child care providers are going under; early educators have been laid off en masse without wages or health care benefits; and some providers offering in-home care risk losing their housing in addition to their businesses.
Even those providers that manage to reopen are almost certain to be initially under-enrolled, as many parents just returning to work will have insufficient means to immediately pay for child care; parents also may simply opt to forego returning to work rather than risk putting their children into a potentially dangerous environment. As Guyyn observes, many parents are placed in a Catch-22 situation between working and risking their children’s (and their own) health. Assuming they can even find a provider, the very nature of the child care business is difficult to reconcile with state or CDC guidelines for “social distancing.”
It’s also unclear how many providers will be able to afford to reopen or at what capacity with strict new health protocols that vary from state to state. Some new rules limit the number of children that can be in any group – and in many cases require the same children and adults be placed together every day. Child care centers also face higher costs for additional staffing, personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer and cleaning supplies. [...]
Anxieties are running especially high for parents whose children have health conditions that put them at higher risk for the coronavirus. Many can’t afford lower-risk options such as babysitters and nannies or having one parent stay home. These parents say even if they can find child care, they don’t know if they should send their kids. Some employees can take sick leave or expanded family and medical leave if they are caring for a child when schools and day care centers are closed under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, which was signed into law in March, but not everyone has that option.
“Parents are being forced into this Catch-22,” says Keri Rodrigues, founding president of the National Parents Union, a network of parent organizations across the country. “They feel a desperate need to go back to work but at the same time they are terrified of this deadly virus.”
Meanwhile, as states effectively order employees back to work, many child care workers—among the lowest-paid people in the country—may opt not to return, even if their employers survive. Kennedy and Mayshak believe that unlike the taxpayer-funded public schools, many preschools and day care centers will not survive the pandemic at all. So what’s the alternative?
Would we be content to hope and pray for the return of public school? K-12 schools will take time to reopen, but they will weather the storm, because they are publicly financed. Teachers will be at the front of the room, welcoming students, because their jobs are publicly financed. There’s no such guarantee for child care and preschool programs.
The economic impact of allowing the child care system to collapse would be felt immediately. Households previously dependent on two incomes would be forced to make do with one. Among heterosexual, cohabiting couples, the woman will be the one to stay home, with all the drastic negative economic consequences that entails. Single parents would be without recourse, assuming they could not find a friend or family member willing and able to assist them with child care. Another, less immediate but just as real consequence would be falling onto the backs of the nation’s children; because they won’t have the benefit of preschool, those children compelled to stay home because of lack of child care services would be at a serious disadvantage when they eventually go to regular schools.
According to Kennedy and Mayshak, child care centers start out at a disadvantage compared to other businesses—most have no store of readily available funding to keep them operating in this type of crisis, and they typically don’t have an operations infrastructure sufficient to solicit or bid for the type of PPP loans authorized by the federal government’s stimulus legislation. A recent survey conducted by the National Association for the Education of Young Children suggests that only 11% of all child care centers in the country could withstand an indeterminate period of closure without any government support. As reported by CNBC, that means nearly 4.5 million child care slots could vanish—about half of the child care capacity in the United States.
Nor do these businesses have much lobbying clout, even though they arguably provide services at least as important to Americans as, for example, the airline industry. But, as the authors note, they are probably the most “essential” businesses imaginable in the context of restarting the economy.
Before the crisis, you might not have given a lot of thought to how the child care sector operates in America. The fact that closures because of the coronavirus may cost the country half of its child care capacity no longer allows anyone that luxury, whether that’s because we are parents in need of care, employers trying to bring businesses back online and employees back to work or governors trying to make up billions in lost tax revenue.
As the authors of the Times article argue, the solution is public financing of the child care industry. Most developed nations in the world—including Japan, Germany, the UK, Finland, Norway, Sweden and France—provide publicly funded child care in some form to their citizens. Yet our country has lagged far behind, with minimal child care assistance for very low-income individuals and only a small tax break for those able to set aside income from their weekly paychecks for dependent care. Neither of those half-measures are enough to keep the businesses themselves from shutting down as a result of this pandemic; keeping them open is going to be key to any economic recovery.
The Republican Party and the corporations that prop it up seem to be trapped in the “denial” stage of grief over what is now, thanks in major part to their own ineptitude, a thoroughly moribund and rudderless economy. Throughout this crisis, the GOP-controlled Senate has behaved as if this pandemic was simply another Great Recession, requiring nothing particularly different or unusual in the way of a policy response.
But as the unpredictable spillover effects of this pandemic become clearer, the usual bromides that Republicans have become accustomed to prescribing have proved woefully insufficient to pull working Americans out of the abyss. If this country is to survive at all, we are going to have to make some major, fundamental policy changes. We can make them now, or we can make them later, but they will be made.
So Republicans have a choice. They can agree to public funding of child care now, or they can hamstring an economic recovery that they know is essential to their own survival, all for the pretext of maintaining their conservative orthodoxy. If they choose to continue to ignore the problem, they can expect millions of Americans unable to find any child care—even as they are being pushed back into the workplace—to, when casting their vote, whether in-person or by mail, take their frustration and anger out on those responsible.