Child Care in the Age of COVID

It’s worth a discussion on child care these days. Of course, our child care system is ludicrous to describe it to anyone. Hey, pay an insane amount of money for what could be very questionable care while the workers don’t make nearly enough to survive. All while the federal government basically doesn’t care! What is going on here? Well, we know what is in fact going on, but even before COVID, it’s obviously a complete disaster.

Now in the COVID era, you have both the collapse of the child care system and a general national indifference toward the impact of the lack of child care on childhood development. This is a report from CAP from last month.

In the spring of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic forced many child care providers to close, while others were thrust into the emergency response and called upon to provide child care services for front-line workers. But with the pandemic continuing throughout the summer and now into the fall, the child care industry is suffering unparalleled financial challenges. For decades, parents have struggled to find quality, affordable care that meets their family’s needs, and the child care industry has operated on razor-thin margins with limited revenues and insufficient public funding. This has left the industry extremely vulnerable to enrollment declines, as paying families are the major source of revenue in a sector that has significant fixed costs. A new CAP analysis of data from a comprehensive survey of Colorado’s licensed child care providers, conducted by Early Milestones Colorado, unfortunately shows that enrollment for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers had only returned to 52 percent of prepandemic levels as of July 2020, when the survey was conducted.* If child care were publicly funded rather than funded largely by parental tuition and fees, the industry’s ability to withstand the pandemic would play out more similarly to that of K-12 schools, which may close in the short term but will retain their staff and facilities so that they can reopen when it is safe to do so.

Despite having fewer paying families, many child care providers are contending with operating costs that are higher than before the pandemic. A recent comprehensive CAP model of child care provider expenses found that, on average, Colorado child care providers’ operating costs could be 60 percent higher than before the pandemic. This is because providers may need personal protective equipment and weekly professional sanitation, and they must keep group sizes smaller to limit interpersonal contacts. Some may even need to make physical infrastructure improvements to their air filtration systems and hand-washing stations. These are catastrophic conditions for an industry that has been battered by decades of persistent public underinvestment. The National Association for the Education of Young Children estimates that as few as 18 percent of child care providers say that they can survive a full year without federal relief funds.

Child care has always been a core support for the American labor force. It is part of the economic infrastructure that gives working families a better chance to achieve financial well-being. But with less revenue and higher costs, the child care system is at risk of collapse. This is already resulting in the worst labor market recession for women in history, as mothers are dropping out of the workforce at much higher rates than fathers. Without a sufficiently funded child care industry, the economic recovery will continue to stall for parents with care responsibilities who will be unable to rejoin the labor force.

The last year is going to have long-term ramifications through the lives of families for their entire lives. And like everything else, it has a greater impact on Black and Latino families than whites.

When Mary De La Rosa closed her toddler and preschool program in March because of the coronavirus pandemic, she fully expected to serve the 14 children again some day. In the end, though, Creative Explorers closed for good.

It left the families to search for other care options — and the three teachers to file for unemployment benefits.

“We kept trying to find a way,” said De La Rosa, who is of Mexican and Egyptian descent. “But eventually we realized there wasn’t one.”

The story of De La Rosa’s program in the Westchester neighborhood of Los Angeles is being repeated across the country as the pandemic’s effects ripple through child care, disproportionately affecting Black and Latino-owned centers in an industry that has long relied on providers of color.

Policy experts say the U.S. spends a small fraction of federal funds on child care compared to other industrialized nations, an underfunding exacerbated by COVID-19. Soon nearly half of the child care centers in the U.S. may be lost, according to the Center for American Progress.

“Prior to the pandemic, the child care system was fractured.” said Lynette Fraga, executive director of Child Care Aware of America. “Now, it’s shattered.”

On top of all of this is that lots of kids are not going to be prepared for kindergarten and that is also going to have racial ramifications that will increase inequality for decades,

Cheryse Singleton-Nobles knows her 2-year-old son is regressing.

While the toddler is getting the hang of colors, numbers and shapes, she says, “he’s back to the stage of ‘me, me, me.’” He doesn’t want to share anymore. He struggles to follow a routine and gets distracted by all his toys. 

Singleton-Nobles, 47, attributes this backtracking to the COVID-19 pandemic, which recently forced her son’s free Chicago preschool to close its campus. 

That preschool, an early-learning center that belongs to a national network of Head Start-funded programs called Educare, shut its doors in the spring but managed to reopen at limited capacity in the fall. The center had to revert to distance learning again in mid-November amid a surge in COVID-19 infection rates. 

Now, her son – like countless other young children across the country – is sliding in his social-emotional skills. And those losses could be devastating for these children’s long-term success. Preschool years are among the most formative of a child’s life. A student who starts kindergarten without preschool is more likely to repeat a grade, require special-education services or drop out. 

“Unfortunately, for children, the impact of this pandemic will be felt for years,” said Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrician who directs the Seattle Children’s Hospital Center for Child Health, Behavior and Development. 

The first step going forward is to pass a comprehensive child care bill that provides universal child care. This of course almost happened in 1971 before Richard Nixon vetoed it after Pat Buchanan and Phyllis Schlafly told him it would destroy American families. That it then disappeared from the top of the progressive agenda for a half-century is incredibly depressing. Short of universal health care, it’s hard for me to think of a single policy change that would transform the lives of more people than universal government child care.