The COVID-19 pandemic has been highlighting structural problems in the way communities care for people—including those providing the care. Early childhood education is no exception.
Dan Harris is executive director of the Illinois Network of Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies (INCCRRA). He said child care costs are continually growing, to the detriment of families and workers alike.
“Some of the cost analysis that I've seen shows that to provide high-quality care for an infant in a center-based environment costs around $26,000 to $28,000 per child per year,” Harris said. “That's really, really expensive. And because of how care is structured, it's still the case that the person caring for those kids makes minimum wage, typically.”
Harris said while that’s a lot of money for families—often times the equivalent of a mortgage payment—it’s still insufficient to cover the expenses of providing care.
About 65% of child care fees goes to personnel costs, according to analysis from the advocacy group Child Care Aware of America. About 25% goes to supplies and administrative costs, while the rest usually goes to rent and utility costs.
But personnel costs are divided among the relatively large number of staff members needed to provide adequate supervision. If a facility is open 10 hours a day and cares for 40 children, Child Care Aware of America estimates it requires about 10 employees on site. Many facilities have more than double that number of kids on their rolls, making staffing needs even greater.
Harris said that translates into low wages for child care workers—the majority of which are women of color—who also rarely receive benefits like health insurance, retirement contributions and paid time off. Couple that with the mental and physical strain of herding dozens of toddlers all day, he said, and workers become prone to burn out.
“Like any low-wage industry, there's a lot of fluidity—both within the field, as well as into and out of the field,” he said. “If I'm working at the Kiddie Corral and I'm making $12.50 an hour, and the Kids Academy in the next neighborhood over offers me $0.25 more an hour to work there, I'm going to go there. Because $0.25 an hour is noticeable when you're not making very much money.”
Harris said there’s also a lot of outmigration. He said it’s not uncommon for child care employees to look for opportunities in their local school districts, which typically offer better pay and benefits. Many work toward additional certifications and educational programs while employed at a child care center. Others leave the workforce entirely because they can’t afford to put their own kids in care centers.
Staffing shortages make availability and accessibility of care even tougher, Harris said. Many centers have long waiting lists of children they can’t accept because the staffing levels aren’t there.
“Like any low-wage industry, there's a lot of fluidity—both within the field, as well as into and out of the field ... Because $0.25 an hour is noticeable when you're not making very much money.”
Harris said the needs of American families have changed over the years, but public policy has not evolved to respond to those changes.
“Sixty years ago, there was not that much of a need for the kind of care that there's a need for now,” Harris said. “The average family was a two-parent family where the dad went to work and the mom stayed home with the kids. And if you look over the last 50 or 60 years, you'll see a significant increase in women participating in the workforce... as well as an increase in single-parent families.”
Even if it's a two parent family, he said, in most families both parents are working.
Harris said many parents still rely on a patchwork of child care options. It’s common for kids to be watched by a neighbor or relative in their homes, he said. Parents also rely on school-based kindergarten and pre-K programs, as well as government-supported Head Start programs. But Harris said the pandemic has made all of these options less consistent.
Even in pre-pandemic times, he said, this “mixed-delivery system” was difficult for families to navigate.
“When your child turns five, you know ‘ my kid’s going to kindergarten at this school.’ But up until then … where do I take my kid in the morning when I go to work?” Harris said. “There's a lot of decisions to be made. It's not like, ‘Oh, I live in this district, so my kids go to this school.’ Parents have to devote resources to figuring that out.”
There often aren’t a lot of community-based options, he said. In addition to being expensive, parents often have to add a half-hour to their commute to drop their kids off at the nearest center.
Harris said there is hope. Reforms for early childhood education have bipartisan support at the state and federal level. The American Rescue Plan, for example, includes $40 billion specifically for child care programs.
The governor’s commission on early childhood has identified three main initiatives to improve child care in Illinois, Harris said. They are centralizing funding streams to make it easier for centers to apply for and receive money, creating a central state agency to oversee all early childhood education programs and significantly boosting the amount of money the state puts towards these programs.
Harris said some argue there’s another route:
“For $26,000 for one child for a year, why don't you just pay the mom to stay home?” he asked. “That's what a lot of other industrialized countries do: they make available to new families paid family leave. And that's an idea that has been gaining some traction in Washington.”
To read the INCCRRA’s latest report on Illinois’s early childhood education workforce, visit this link.
