But What About Child Care?
Could this be the issue to rise from the ashes from this election?
There are so many excellent Substacks out there on the post-election feelings that I’m not going to try and emulate them - but I’ll add that whatever referendum happened on Tuesday will be felt very deeply for the next four years.
Child care is in an unusual position and I want to take a minute to explore why it has the potential to stay part of policy conversations and what that could look like.
This isn’t an attempt to offer silver linings, or even to proffer a “some good could come out of it” theory about the election results. (Read
for a better version of that, or on how to move forward, with some intriguing analogies from couples therapy).These are just some crisp, cool policy notes on an issue that I follow, and why I need to make sure it stays top of mind in the coming months.
Child care is still a bipartisan issue. Red wave be damned, it’s voters from both political parties that feel a sense of urgency around the need for affordable, quality child care, according to a poll from Public Opinion Strategies and the First Five Year Fund. And in that same poll, 95 percent of voters said it was important for working parents of young children to be able to find and afford quality programs. And while the Republicans and Democrats differ on their delivery systems and ways to finance it, there are Republican proposals for making care more affordable that could see some movement in a red wave government. Republicans have introduced various measures to increase who is eligible for child care subsidies (Elliot Haspel has a great breakdown of those proposals here). Pushes for additional federal funds for child care have both R and D policymakers signing on as supporters, and governors of both parties express this as an issue they want to address. One report by the Center of American Progress noted that more than half of the 36 governors, both R and D, who gave State of the State addresses this year mentioned child care and preschool as high priorities. In the absence of federal leadership on this issue, what the states do and say (and fund) matters a great deal. How this translates to the White House is unclear, but it shows that both parties have a critical mass that acknowledges additional child care funding is needed.
The Child Tax Credit may be getting a boost. A great line from Moriah Balingit’s AP story:
“Never before in a presidential election cycle has there been so much discussion of the child tax credit — a tool many Democrats and Republicans have endorsed as a way to lift children and young families out of poverty.”
And while this is not a substitute for robust child care investment, it’s one of the proposals that the incoming President and VP have said they would look at expanding. More to come on this.
Businesses have an economic interest in child care. We are seeing this play out in states that have made substantial investments in child care - it’s often the business community realizing that this is a necessary expenditure to shore up their workforce. It was the business community that advocated for the passage of near-universal child care in Vermont, and it is funded by a payroll tax so that retirees and people not in the workforce aren’t shouldering the burden. In Kentucky, it was business interests in Owensboro that joined forces to create more substantial investment in child care, as reported in Rachel Haseley’s documentary-short, “A System on Life Support”. Across the country, including in the ruby-red rural south, hospitals are becoming child care providers because they know their workforce needs this to be able to do their jobs. As more businesses see child care investment as advantageous to their bottom line, their willingness to support federal investment (in what is likely to be a business-friendly White House and Congress) should also increase.
Investment in child care is a win for women. Full stop. Yes, men are parents too, but it’s women whose workforce participation is likely to be negatively affected with child care woes. And, as seen in many cases with ARPA funds directed to child care and in Vermont: investment in child care brings higher wages for people who work in the field. Child care workers are disproportionately women, many of whom are women of color, who are paid poverty level wages. The median wage is $13 an hour for child care workers, hardly enough to live on. When D.C. raised the wages of child care workers, it was the women with kids working as early educators who benefited most.
Stay-at-home parents may get a win. Citing the report that Elliot Haspel and
put out - SAHP are a diverse group of people that don’t fall in a single category of political party or economic situation. Some are opting for this care role by choice, others by necessity due to the lack of care options. In some situations, the parents are staying home with kids while working full time (!!). But what Elliot and Ivana found is that this group overwhelmingly wants support, recognition, and even access to some child care too. While this stay-at-home parents model may be more of a talking point for conservatives, the political affiliations of people doing the care work is more evenly split. Stay-at-home parents, too, are overdue for an acknowledgement that they are doing a great deal of unpaid labor that makes our economy run, and deserve resources and support to make their very heavy load a bit lighter.I believe deeply in a care economy that supports families and pays providers a living wage and gives children the sort of deep emotional connection we know they need to be ready for kindergarten. The good thing is that I’m not alone in thinking this, a majority of Americans do too.
My goal: keep child care in the conversation as much as possible for the next two years as the new party in charge tries to rack up as many legislative wins as they can. The more we tell these stories and the more we emphasize how much we as a country - and this includes our people, our kids and our economy - stand to gain from robust child care investments, the more we can start to move in that direction.
Or so I hope.