Our newsletter has previously touched on how subsidizing child care is good for the economy and why we should not be afraid to use deficit spending to pay for this. But as David Fielding put it in his recent essay, it’s important to ask: how is inaccessible and inequitable child care also bad for the poor?
In my work representing children in foster care in Oakland, California, I saw many daycare centers while visiting clients. Some were licensed and located at schools, churches or other institutions. Others were unlicensed in private homes.
It was not unusual for a foster parent to supplement their income by running a small daycare in their home, either by themselves or with the help of a relative or friend. Some of these home daycares seemed organized, but most appeared chaotic and unstructured. Sometimes teenaged clients placed in the home would tell me that they were asked to help out in the daycare after school.
The reason for the proliferation of unlicensed home based daycare is obvious: there is high demand for cheap daycare. Low to middle income parents often have to work, and cannot always juggle work schedules with the availability of their own family members to babysit. Women with children under six are 22% of the workforce now.
Let’s put this in perspective. The average cost of daycare per child in the U.S. exceeds $1100 per month. This is 13% of average family income in the U.S., making it unaffordable for many. Some parents report spending far more than their rent or home mortgage costs on childcare.
Even in licensed daycare centers, staff pay is typically less than the pay at fast food restaurants. So staff turnover is high, which makes the quality of the care low. How does this translate into outcomes? Kids with no preschool or inadequate preschool, typical of kids from low income families, start kindergarten at a disadvantage compared to their peers and most never catch up. That means lower lifetime earnings on average than their peers and more dependence on social welfare programs, not to mention higher rates of criminal justice system involvement.
What about Head Start, the preschool program for children living in poverty begun in 1965? Every dollar invested “makes 5.4% to 9.1% per year for at least 30 years for every child going through Head Start, due solely to savings on public assistance and a small increase in tax revenue from higher wages earned by participants,” according to a study of educational attainment “and economic productivity of about 22.5 million 25- to 54-year-olds born between 1950 and 1980.” In 2017, there were roughly three million children in the United States living in poverty, but only one million enrolled in either Early Head Start, eligibility for which starts at age six months, or Head Start. Long waiting lists for enrollment are typical in most areas. And most families that cannot afford quality childcare are not eligible for Head Start.
As has been widely reported, the U.S. is last among developed nations in spending on child care. The U.S. contributes an average of $200 a year per child under 2 in the form of tax credits, and just $500 for toddlers. By contrast, government spending on child care for toddlers in other developed countries ranges from a few thousand dollars a year to as much as $30,000 in Norway.
President Biden has a plan to greatly increase spending on early childhood education. He just can’t get it through Congress.
This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0