Sara Mauskopf Knows What Child Care Needs
Hint: It's Not More Regulations
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In 2021, I was part of a team at the Better Life Lab that conducted interviews with various people at the intersection of child care and technological innovation. Our ask: in what ways could innovation shake up the child care sector for the better?
The culmination of these interviews was a report (and five part series on Early Learning Nation) that explained all the innovation in the world couldn’t really replace robust and sustained federal investment in child care. We phrased it more eloquently than that with more nuance - but you get the gist.
One of the innovators I spoke to understood this intersection well. Sara Mauskopf was already a rising star when she left Big Tech to create a startup of her own: Winnie, an online database of child care providers, including daycares, preschools and camps
Sara Mauskopf, co-founder and CEO of Winnie at the Child Care Innovation Summit in D.C. (photo courtesy of Sara Mauskopf)
I’ve met Sara a few times and admire how much she knows about child care from the providers’ point of view. Rarely is there someone who has tech expertise, a macro understanding of how the market works, and the insider knowledge of what providers struggle with day-to-day. (I’d like to think some journalists aspire to this too, but that’s another topic).
Sara agreed to be interviewed for
. A lightly edited conversation is below.
Sara, husband Eric, and their three kids: Brynn (9), Aubrey (6), and Ryan (4). (photo courtesy of Sara Mauskopf)
Q. Hi Sara. You know the economics of child care policy better than most people. Our current system is barely sustainable for many people who provide care for very young children. What have you found, in talking to providers, is workable for making child care more affordable?
Sara: At state and local levels we are seeing more dollars going to care. State and local governments are definitely putting money into providing subsidies to constituents, helping providers in that state, and even building their own child care finders. I am pretty excited about it. We are seeing real money get allocated there - whether it’s working is a question - but there is money there.
A lot of federal money is still going to Head Start, a good percentage of the child care market is Head Start dollars. That has always been happening and will continue to happen. I don’t know of other pockets of money that are coming to child care at the federal level. I’m pretty pessimistic that anything new will happen there in the next 4 years. It doesn't seem to be a priority for the Presidential candidates.
Q. What makes you so pessimistic about federal funds coming to the industry, even post-election?
SM: I haven't seen anything to indicate that new federal funding will come to the industry. There was some excitement during Build Back Better that there might be more federal funding for child care, but that didn’t pass and I haven't heard anything since then to indicate there is any sort of renewed interest.
Our government is broke - we’ve got a lot of debt. And I haven't heard child care mentioned by presidential candidates, only candidates at the state and local level.
There is a strong perception that the Harris administration will somehow allocate dollars to child care. They might expand the child tax credit, which would be wonderful, but that is really the only that I’ve heard as far as a concrete plan.
Q. With more federal funds comes additional interest from outside groups. Because child care does not function as a regular market good, what do you see as the guardrails needed to keep child care focused on the needs of kids?
SM: Guardrails are not what I’m worried about. I really worry about the regulations that the government puts in place at the state level that regulates the existence of child care businesses. These are detrimental to the child care industry.
Q. How so?
SM: The state regulations to open a child care center are incredibly onerous, and it already takes a pretty decent investment to start your own daycare. It turns people off.
For example, to work in child care in my home state of California, you need the right credentials. I have a computer science degree from MIT, and I have three kids, but I could not be an ECE teacher because I don't have the right credentials. This makes it very expensive and hard for centers to hire staff. It costs money to get these ECE credentials, and then people are going into a field that pays really poorly.
I would not want to suggest that we put more regulations in place. It doesn’t improve the quality of care or safety.
Q. What sort of regulations are the ones not helping quality or safety?
SM: Crazy stuff. Like how far away the cribs need to be placed from each other. I understand a lot of this stuff is coming from very strict regulations around sleeping conditions in a child care center - which makes sense, unsafe conditions can be detrimental.
One example is that in Montessori centers kids sleep on floor mats. But these places still need to have rolling cribs on the premises even if they never use them. They have to keep a crib for every child. Silly stuff like that that costs money and space.
When you read these regulations on centers and homes, there are these incredibly strict regulations on what is allowed, what isn’t allowed. These are the kinds of things that parents don’t even worry about in their own home, but are extremely strict when it comes to child care providers. Which just makes it really hard to operate a business. It becomes unreasonable and a really high burden to even know what the regulations are and you are almost always in violation of something.
If you are doing a good job taking care of them, you aren't thinking about where to put the crib.
Q. What would you like to see instead?
SM: Regulations need to be revisited. Everything that is not actually helping improve the quality or the safety of care provided should not be in there. A lot of the regulations are “nice to haves,” like the ratio of toys to students. There are all kinds of really onerous regulations that are not helpful, especially the regulations surrounding the educational credentials.
We do talk to a lot of child care providers, and we run a couple of Facebook groups. We see that many go out of business and close their doors because it gets to be too tiresome to run a business. [Our country] doesn’t make it easy for people to run a business in this industry.
Q. What specifically makes running a child care business so hard?
SM: The work done by the providers is incredibly undervalued, and it’s predominantly done by women. We are constantly having a conversation about ‘child care is too expensive. How do we make it less expensive?’
Rather, what we should be saying is that it’s the most expensive thing you pay for because it's one of the most important things you purchase. What else should be more expensive? Maybe a house? Not a car or vacation, things that we don't bat an eye at to pay money for.
Yes, child care should be expensive. It's a really critical service being provided.
The question should be: how do we pay for it? It could be the government or it could be employers, but that is what we should be asking.
We don't question why college is so expensive. We talk about forgiving student debt because it's so unfair, but we don't forgive debt that parents go into for providing child care.
Q. You’ve been doing this for 8.5, almost 9 years, running Winnie through Covid and you made it through. In that time, what have you observed has changed in the child care field?
SM: When we started in 2016, we said we want to start this company because we see that women drop out of the workforce when child care is hard to come by. And everyone thought we were crazy - they would say ‘it's not just women, everyone is affected.’ Now, during post-covid world, with remote work, we see it’s women working remotely and taking a step back to care for a household. We see that this is falling on the shoulders of predominantly women. If we want to keep women in the workforce, we have to make child care more accessible and affordable.
There is even cause for concern that we may have taken a step back with remote work, because why are more women than men working remotely? It might be because they are doing child care and household responsibilities, and if so, is that actually helpful to them? If it's just women that are doing it, that worries me. What does that mean for their earning potential and future career prospects? I am obviously a fan of remote work but I worry that if it's something women are disproportionately doing then what does that mean?
There is also a greater recognition that child care is not just for parents to work but for education and enrichment for children, which is also helpful and we have felt that all along. The reality is that there are real benefits to children being in a group environment before entering kindergarten. Because families had to stay home with their kids for a year or more, there was a recognition that something was missing: ‘my child is not thriving the way they were when they were interacting with other children.’
Also, the child care businesses have moved online. This has helped our business and other startups in the child care space. We wouldn’t have made it through without this. It was incredibly hard prior to Covid because child care providers were really reluctant to use any technology to run their business. Now they are using all sorts of technology to run their business. It has made a lot of the startup ecosystem in the child care industry easier and better and now more funding from Venture Capital and Private Equity.
Q. When you talk to people about your start up -if you can call it that- how do you frame child care as an issue? Economic? Social? What have you found generates the most response?
SM: It's really divided. In fact, some people really dislike me because I talk about how childcare is a huge market and there’s money to be made. It’s a $60 billion market in the US alone for 0-5, and that doesn’t even include camps, babysitters, private school and tutoring. Let’s attract more people to innovate in the space - there can be businesses that make a lot of money.
People feel like child care should be a public good and we shouldn’t talk about making money - the government should cover it like public school. I wish that were true, I would gladly retire and move on to something else. It’s not the case that the government is covering the cost of child care, so we need to attract interest in the space and attract businesses in the space to open and be successful. Just like any thriving market, we need businesses at all ends of the spectrum, just like elite private schools and public schools.
I have found when I talk to nonprofits and people that want to see child care as a public good, they think they can only achieve change through political action, but there are other paths too. We can make these businesses attractive and profitable and attract employers to cover some of the cost of it. State and local governments, especially at the city level, are very interested; they are really incentivized to provide more child care. It makes economic sense for their city.
At Winnie we are seeing a big trend in terms of what parents are searching for - they are searching less for full time, 9-5 child care which had traditionally been the only thing the market provided. Now they want only certain days of the week, or drop in care, or something that takes place on the weekend. A lot more diversity and less full time care. A lot of this is driven by the economy and many can’t afford to do it full time, so they are seeing if they can get by with less. Not sure this is a good thing for everyone but it's the reality of what people are searching for. Part of our job is to help businesses know what parents want.
Sara, (right) and the team at Winnie (photo courtesy of Sara Mauskopf).
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This is definitely an interesting perspective and I appreciate that both of you took the time to interview. I’d really challenge Sara to provide data to support the assertion that crib spacing or toy ratios are keeping an economically significant portion of potential child care operators/workers out of the market. She talks about deregulation, but some of the most expensive regulations are the ones around staffing ratios - exactly the area that I, as a parent who is concerned about the quality of childcare my children receive, don’t want deregulated or reduced. The federal government recommends 1 caregiver to every 3 infants, but some states allow 1 adult to care for 5 or even 6 infants. I know I would struggle to provide high-quality care to 4 or 5 infants at once and I have three children of my own.
I also think caring for young children in a formal, group setting like daycare is a different skill set and knowledge base than providing 1-1 care like a primary caregiving parent or grandparent does. We don’t expect that someone with an MIT degree is automatically qualified to be a kindergarten teacher, so I’m not sure that educational requirements (which are already only present in some states) for early childhood caregivers aren’t necessary.