The COVID Childcare Crisis

Anna North has a very comprehensive analysis of the extraordinary toll COVID-19 is taking on parents, with needless to say women bearing the vastly disproportionate brunt. The bottom line:

And a huge part of that life is being able to get reliable care for children. However, that aspect of life has been seemingly forgotten in many reopening plans, as governors and other officials open restaurants and bars without a clear strategy for safely reopening schools — or for testing and tracing to keep community spread low so that schools can open.

The result is that, in addition to the enormous cost to children’s learning and the overall health and well-being of families, the economy can’t recover because parents can’t work.

The solution, experts say, isn’t simply to throw open the school doors and let the virus range free. Rather, it’s to actually acknowledge the value of child care and education and develop our public health and economic policies accordingly.

Right now, “teachers are trying to take on the burden of teaching students in a totally new way,” and child care workers are “massively shifting how they do their jobs,” Bahn said. “These workers are helping carry our society through to the other side of this pandemic.”

But these workers have also been historically underpaid, their concerns often ignored, and the work they do devalued. “There is a clear economic value to caring for well-being, but we have not necessarily accounted for it in our statistics or in our policy priorities as a nation,” Bahn said.

If we could begin to value that work, we might be able to craft a future in which children and the workers who care for and teach them could be safe, even amid a pandemic.

But “what’s so tragic in this moment is that there is no plan,” Mason said. “States don’t have a plan, schools don’t have a plan, families don’t have a plan.”

And while we don’t yet know the full extent of the pandemic’s impact, economically or otherwise, Mason said, “above all, what’s true is that families are not okay.”

Because the federal government and most state governments gave up before the virus was suppressed, months of personal and economic sacrifice have been in complete vain. As a result, the only “plan” to deal with the family crisis — re-opening schools in the fall — is in complete tatters. It is enormously likely that schools won’t re-open in the nation’s largest state in 2020, and most blue states are going to follow suit either by closing schools completely or going to hybrid models that are only marginally better for most working parents. Red states will mostly open their schools, but many of these openings will collapse mid-semester as teachers and students start getting sick if not dropping dead. None of this was necessary, but with one of America’s two major parties being a plutocratic death cult it was probably inevitable.