President Biden’s now derailed Build Back Better legislation addressing many critical social issues would have provided billions of dollars in payments to parents and to child care centers to help fix a broken system. The proposed measure would have subsidized child care and created a universal preschool program for 3- and 4-year-olds. The successful child tax credit expansion would have been extended for another year, and a change that permits low-income families to claim the credit would have been made permanent. But united Republican opposition and dissent from one lone conservative Democrat to the overall package killed the bill, so various constituencies are now scrambling to try to preserve their key priorities.
With an average national cost of $14,000 annually, millions of American families can’t afford child care. Child care workers, who are overwhelmingly female, have always been paid poorly (about $26,000 a year.) But with the increasing cost of living combined with poverty level wages, many child care workers have been forced to look for better paying jobs.
Between The Lines’ Melinda Tuhus spoke with Deborah Weinstein, executive director of the Coalition on Human Needs, based in Washington, D.C. Here she explains why the nation’s child care system is broken and what advocates are now trying to do to fix it.
DEBORAH WEINSTEIN: The child care system is broken. It’s unaffordable for many families but pays so appallingly little to day care teachers that thousands upon thousands have left the field. It was a mess before the pandemic, but the pandemic further fractured child care. More than 300,000 child care workers left. Many child care centers and family day cares shut down, and we still haven’t gotten all of those workers back. Why is that? Well, during the pandemic, because people had to stay home, including child care workers in some instances, there was much less child care available, and parents working at home either lost work or had less, couldn’t afford child care.
Now as we’re trying to revive the child care system, we’re still not back where we were. We haven’t gotten all the workers back who left, and about 8 out of 10 child care centers are reporting staffing shortages as of this past July, and costs have risen more than 40 percent for child care centers, and across the country the average rose from about $10,000 for one child to about $14,000 per year.
Why is this such a problem? Because unlike elementary school education, for instance, which we understand is a public good that needs public support, there’s been hardly any public support for child care.
MELINDA TUHUS: I know the Build Back Better act was going to include payments to parents, maybe you could say what the Build Back Better bill would have done and now, trying to rescue parts of it, what you are looking to get government support for.
DEBORAH WEINSTEIN: President Biden proposed, and is still proposing, a historic investment in child care. It would dramatically increase the number of families that get support. Families would save about $5,000 a year for children under age five. And it would vary by income; I can give you two different state examples. A two-parent family in Wisconsin at median income in their state – and that would be just over $100,000 – would save about $5,600 on their child care costs. If their income was lower, at about half of the state’s median income, they would save $12,700 on child care costs.
And teachers would get paid more. Right now they’re making only a little more, across the country, of $25,000 a year and they’d get paid more so they didn’t have to leave the field they love to earn above poverty wages. And the families with the lowest income would not have to pay for child care. What does that mean? It means that parents can work, and we’ve seen a huge number of mothers leave the labor force during the pandemic, and they’re not all back, because of this child care dislocation. It means that more children can be helped at the very earliest stages with their education so they can thrive, and it would take an awful lot of pressure off families, especially in a time of inflation where child care costs and so many other costs are going up, it would help families manage.
MELINDA TUHUS: Okay. So I just want to be sure, when you were giving the Wisconsin examples, you said a low-income person could save $12,000, which was double or triple what the higher income family would save. Is that right?
DEBORAH WEINSTEIN: That’s right, so that if they were at half the state’s median income, so about $50,000 a year income, they would save more because the assumption is that they can’t afford to pay it, and that means they would have access to child care that in many cases they just don’t have access to now, and at the same time we would start to recognize the value of child care workers, start to pay them enough so they don’t leave the field to work at Starbucks or someplace. We need their services – what’s more valuable than caring for and educating our young children? This proposal would do all of those things.
For more information, visit the Coalition on Human Needs at chn.org.
