Child Care is Critical
By Katharine B. Stevens
OP-ED
January 12, 2017
Throughout his campaign, President-elect Trump stressed one of the most critical issues confronting the United States: "The American Dream remains an illusion for too many families and taxpayers." He's right that a lot of American families are struggling. A recent Federal Reserve study found that around a third of families with children under 18 are just making ends meet or finding it difficult to get by. Almost half of Americans report that they don't have enough money to cover a $400 emergency.
And for many of the country's 12.7 million families with children under five, child care is the biggest financial problem they face. Most married-couple families today need both parents in the workforce simply to stay afloat, and over a third of children live with a single parent. As a result, two-thirds of the country's young children have all residential parents in the workforce, and millions of American children from birth to five are in out-of-home care for an average of 33 hours a week. The bottom line is that many young children spend much of their early years – often starting in infancy – in the care of people other than their parents.
Because a child's first five years of life lay the foundation for lifelong health and well-being, the quality of that care matters a great deal. Hundreds of neural connections are formed in a young child's brain every second, "wiring" its structure, driven almost entirely by ongoing interactions with adult caregivers. So while child care has long been viewed as supporting working parents, it also has a critical impact on children during the most vital phase of human development. The problem, however, is that millions of working families don't have access to the high-quality care their young children need to flourish.
Imagine the household finances of a four-person family in Cleveland, Ohio, as an example: two working parents with an infant and a three-year-old earning $49,000 per year (around the median household income for children under six). Their monthly take-home after taxes is about $3,400, which they use to pay rent, utilities and health insurance, buy groceries, maintain a car so they can get to work and purchase the rest of their household and personal necessities.
Making ends meet every month is tough – and that's without factoring in the cost of child care. In Ohio, care for a baby and a preschooler in an accredited center costs an average of $1,700 per month. Even unregulated, unlicensed family home care averages $1,100 per month – still way out of reach for families living on $3,400 a month.
These parents face a tough choice. They could leave their children with an available relative or neighbor and hope for the best. Or one of them could pull out of the workforce to raise their young children at home. If that parent was earning half the household income, though, the family is left with just a single salary of $24,500 – driven into poverty, in other words, by doing what they think is best for their kids. Half of American children under five live in families earning less than $49,000, many confronting this kind of no-win "Sophie's choice."
High-quality care for young children costs what it does for good reason. Early development is a time- and attention-intensive endeavor – accomplished through full-time maternal care for most of human history. Just as a plant's growth depends on sufficient water and light, young children's learning and development depends on hour-to-hour, day-to-day interactions with caring, responsive adults. A third-grade teacher can teach a class of 20 children; a college professor can instruct hundreds of students in a lecture hall or even thousands online. But one adult can't provide adequate care for more than three or four infants at the most.
The labor-intensive nature of raising young children means that good child care costs more than education for older children. Yet public spending on the care of children from birth to five is a tiny fraction of that for children from kindergarten on: less than $12 billion per year nationwide, compared to over $700 billion to underwrite K-12 attendance and over $157 billion to subsidize college tuition. The upshot is that even though children's earliest years are the most consequential for their future learning and success, that's when parents get the least help from government.
At the same time, Americans increasingly recognize the importance of early childhood. Almost three-quarters of respondents in a 2016 bipartisan poll identified the period from birth to age five as the most significant for developing a child's capacity to learn. A full 82 percent of Republicans, 86 percent of independents and 98 percent of Democrats said that "making early education and child care more affordable for working parents to give children a strong start" is important for our country. And almost 80 percent of respondents said that public investment should be made equally or more heavily in early childhood than higher education.
Growing numbers of American parents have to work outside the home to remain self-sufficient and ensure their children's material well-being. And many need our help to ensure their children's developmental well-being at the same time. Making high-quality child care accessible to these middle- and low-income parents will allow them to remain in the workforce while providing their young children with the foundation they need to thrive – giving millions of families a better shot at the American Dream.
See Also
Report ~ April 8, 2021
Op-Ed ~ June 16, 2020