In an instant, Blanca Carrillo and her daughter Aurys Hernandez lost everything.

Their home in Altadena was also the place they’d built a thriving daycare for young children. So when it burned in the , they were left homeless and without work all at the same time.

“Overnight our home and our livelihood is gone,” Carrillo said through a translator from a family member’s apartment in Arcadia.

It’s a disaster replicated thousands of times over, as many in L.A. County begin to confront how they’ll rebuild their lives after the fires. For childcare providers, this feeling is particularly acute: Many say they know that their work is critical to allowing families to find new housing or return to work.

But they’re also trying to figure out how they themselves will recover, or stay afloat at all.

“What we want is [to] continue working,” Hernandez said. “I need just a house … where I can have our daycare again.”

Crisis on top of crisis

More than 500 childcare spaces were in areas affected by the Palisades, Eaton and Hurst fires, . That’s almost 7% of all licensed childcare facilities in the county.

Some have already reopened, others await clean-up to clear all the debris, and some are gone entirely — refuges and second homes for some of the county’s youngest Angelenos turned to ash overnight.

Debra Colman, director of the L.A. County Office for the Advancement of Early Care and Education, said this comes as the childcare system in Los Angeles was already in crisis, with too few providers .

“We don’t have nearly enough licensed programs for all of the families in need,” Colman said, stating there are just under 8,000 facilities for more than 750,000 young children. (That’s almost 94 kids per facility.)

Homes and livelihoods lost

There is no one central childcare system. Instead it’s a patchwork of centers in living rooms, places of worship, educational centers and other spaces.

And all types of childcare have felt the effects of the fires. B’nai Simcha Jewish Community Preschool on the site of the . So did Altadena Children’s Center, which operated out of the now lost Altadena Baptist Church. Those centers both said that rebuilding will take time.

Shonna Clark, director of the Altadena Children’s Center, said around a dozen families with children at the center had also lost their homes.

“ So many of our kids have lost their home and their school. It’s absolutely terrible,” Clark said. “ We need safe places for these kids to be, and that’s all I’m concentrating on right now.”

B’nai director Carina Hu said that as families find new childcare, many are mourning the loss of the preschool’s strong community.

“ It’s really heartbreaking for the families,” Hu said. “It’s a catastrophe, and we’re just kind of spread out to the wind.”

What providers need now

Leslie Carmell with Options for Learning, an agency that works with childcare providers, said that the first priority in fire recovery is getting childcare providers into new homes.

“They need affordable housing. And as we all know, especially in SoCal, you know, ,” Carmell said.

Other questions about licensing, emergency financial support and other COVID-style aid all still lie ahead, according to multiple childcare experts.

“ Most of these programs operate on a razor-thin budget,” said Toni Boucher, the former director of Altadena Children’s Center. “Just like the government stepped in during COVID to provide relief funds for childcare programs to get them up and running again, we’re going to need that in a very big way with this effort as well to restore the number of spaces that have been lost across the community.”

The COVID-19 pandemic had a silver lining for childcare providers facing this current crisis: They are more connected now than they were before.

Susan Wood, the executive director of the Children’s Center at Caltech, said she and Boucher were part of a group that met weekly via Zoom during the pandemic. In the aftermath of the fires, they have implemented regular online meetings again.

Back at work

While some providers look toward rebuilding, others are focused on expanding capacity for families who need help as soon as possible.

Jodi Mason, who runs a daycare in her home in Pasadena, had to evacuate last week with some of the children she cares for in tow. But by Monday, she was back in her home, and her daycare was open. She has four new kids signed up because they’d lost their childcare to the fires.

“ It’s really been challenging because they’re out of their comfort zone. They love their childcare providers. They’ve been with them for years,” Mason said. “ Being taken out of your environment as a child is really devastating. … So I just try and give them as much love and attention that I can.”

K-12 senior reporter  contributed to this story.

“Oh, that’s so nice you both have that flexibility,” I said.

“Yes!” She said, “We don’t like the idea of someone else raising our kids.”

I was at a loss for what to say back. Hearing her words, it was hard not to feel defensive, since my baby was in child care that very moment I spoke with her. And I, like , was in the midst of a somewhat desperate search to find and afford even more child care support than I currently had. I’d asked about her child care arrangements in part hoping to learn more about my options.

My wife and I currently pay for about 12 hours of professional child care per week, juggling care for our baby during the other 28 work hours between the two of us, and shifting work hours to late into the evening, and sometimes weekends, to get our work done. The centers we contact are full, (if they can find time to call us back) and the price of in-home child care is steep. We are constantly searching for that golden goose, a qualified caregiver whose schedule works with ours, whom our son likes and our paychecks can cover. We aren’t alone.

The Center for American Progress finds that more than , census tracts with at least fifty children and no licensed child care providers, or so few options that there are more than three children for every spot in licensed care. Where we live, in Utah, more people live in child care deserts than in any other state — .

My friends from outside Utah often assume that’s because of the religious and cultural backgrounds of Utahans, reducing the need for child care because of the commonality of traditional breadwinner/caregiver households. Yet in Utah, 62 percent of mothers of young children participate in the labor force, a number lower than the national average of 69 percent, but certainly not as distinctive as many would guess.

Are we all, 69 percent of the nation’s mothers, “letting someone else raise our kids”?

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this line — that someone who didn’t use professional child care services considered doing so to be some sort of abdication of parenting. I can even remember a relative of mine saying this about her own decision not to work outside the home when I was twelve or 13-years-old. I’d found it perplexing even then, because my mom ran a child care center in our home. My mom was a beloved caregiver, one that even today her former charges, now fully grown, will hug and warmly introduce to their own families when they see her at the grocery store or a family wedding. But she hadn’t become their parent, nor had she raised them. There was an enormous difference between my relationship with my mom, and her relationship with the kids she cared for while their parents worked to support them.

Back then, this idea confused me, but it didn’t hurt. Perhaps hearing this line stung a bit more that day because this was the first time I’d heard it since having my own baby. Still, like then, it didn’t hold up to scrutiny.

When this person’s older kids were in school for 6 hours a day, five days a week during the school year, were their teachers “raising them,” I thought about asking? Surely, she didn’t think dads who worked full time while their spouses cared for their children were ceding responsibility for “raising the kids” to their wives? And how many hours in child care did a child need to spend per week, before they were being raised by someone else? 40 hours? 30 hours? There are 168 hours in a week. Where was the line between socializing with and being cared for by trained early educators, and being raised by them?

I took a deep breath, and reminded myself my new acquaintance and my relative hadn’t invented this kind of thinking. Despite the modern realities of economic and family life requiring that most parents work for pay, antiquated thinking about child care is all around us. Just a few years ago, Idaho State Representative Charlie Shepherd voted against a bill that would increase support for child care in the state because he felt . “I don’t think anybody does a better job than mothers in the home, and any bill that makes it easier or more convenient for mothers to come out of the home and let others raise their child, I don’t think that’s a good direction for us to be going.” He later apologized, saying he’d misspoken and merely intended to praise mothers.

Amidst an ongoing child care availability crisis worsened by the rapid , and a , Congress has also failed to increase its role in creating a sustainable, affordable, high-quality child care system. Over several months, the news outlet The 19th contacted members of Congress to find out their views on child care policy, only one-quarter of legislators and .

I reflected for a moment on my own child care provider, the young woman taking a walk with, playing with or reading to my baby at that very moment. It had taken her just two or three days to establish a comfortable, sweet relationship with my baby. Now he giggles when she greets him after a nap and teems with excitement as she prepares the stroller to take him out on what she calls a “nature walk.” And how enriching for him that he has yet another kind, caring person to trust in the world and teach him about relationships and language and life.

I asked Cara Sklar, my colleague at New America and the director of the early & elementary education policy program, just what my baby is learning while he’s in child care.

“Children are actively learning from the moment they are born. And the way young children learn is through interacting with adults,” Sklar said. “These nurturing and responsive interactions, or their absence, shape the physical architecture of the brain that all future brain growth is built upon — from how we see and hear, to how we think and learn, to how we form relationships, and even to our future physical and cardiac health.” With stakes like these and the benefits to come, I hope my son will have not just one or two caregivers like the one he has now, but dozens of such teachers in his life.

Why are we so afraid of letting others join us in raising our children? Just what are we so afraid of?

My hope is that the current national conversation on the child care crisis and how severely it limits parents’ work options and well-being will lead us to build and fund a child care infrastructure that gives every parent access to this kind of nurturing and learning for their children. Maybe a system like that could transform our cultural biases about child care and end these myths for good. But if ever again someone tells me they don’t use child care because they don’t want someone else raising their children, I’ll know what to say:

I don’t want someone raising my child for me either. But I am so glad my family and millions of others have found trusted providers to raise them with us.

“I got a lot of attention when I brought Hodge to the floor of the House for the speaker’s vote,” Gomez told Early Learning Nation. So he decided to “use this moment,” as he put it, to funnel the attention he had stirred up into something more long lasting. In late January he the formation of the first-ever Congressional Dads Caucus, a forum for members to advocate for legislation that supports working families, with about 15 members.

The Dads Caucus is meant to “simply do our part…raising our kids at home and also advocating for family-friendly policies in Congress,” he said. “We’re going to try to mobilize dads in Congress to be more active and advocate on issues that impact working parents.”

It’s not the first attempt: Gomez noted that there was an effort to form a bicameral, bipartisan dads caucus several years ago that never got off the ground. Gomez and his fellow members decided to simply launch theirs in the House on a partisan level, for now. They hope to eventually get Republican sponsors on some of their legislation and perhaps even members down the road.

But it’s meaningful to have men talking about these issues so prominently. Having men in Congress speaking out about paid leave and child care “shows that these issues are not just women’s issues,” Gomez said. “They’re family issues.”

When men in Congress talk about these issues, it “helps push back on the stereotypes about who caregivers are,” said Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. “It is helpful for dads to come and step up and say, ‘This matters to us, too,’ because then it makes the case for a broad-based policy that covers all workers and helps to take it outside of the gender-specific silo that people often put these issues in.”

Having male members talk about paid family leave “really stresses the importance of showing, demonstrating that paid leave impacts all of us,” said Dawn Huckelbridge, director of Paid Leave for All. It’s “not just about new moms but it’s about health and labor and supply chains and, yes, it’s about new dads, too.” Gomez gave a concrete demonstration of the push and pull between work and taking care of children when he showed up to Congress with his son strapped to his chest. Representative Colin Allred, another member of the Dads Caucus, is and so far only member of Congress to take paternity leave.

“It’s always been the case that all of us are going to need to give or receive care in our lifetimes, but having more voices in this fight…is really important,” Huckelbridge said. “We’re going to need more and more stakeholders to get this over the finish line.”

Breaking these issues out of the “women’s issues” bucket, meanwhile, will likely help lend them more momentum. “It helps to counter the opposition that really does try to isolate these issues as niceties for ladies,” Frye said. That’s just a way to “diminish the urgent need for them,” she said, by making caring for one’s family something that women simply do. “It helps break past different silos, and it helps make it a workplace issue. It’s a labor standards issue.”

Representative Jamaal Bowman joined the Dads Caucus because “being a dad is awesome,” he said. He has three children and “it’s the most amazing thing in the world.” But he also joined because “mothers shouldn’t be the only ones fighting for family justice, child care justice, and all the things that are needed to support a healthy, nurturing family,” he said. “We want to make sure fathers step up and do their part.”

Gomez is aware of the “double standard” applied to fathers and mothers, he said. “Men are often praised for it when they take [their kids] to work, and women are criticized or their commitment to their job is questioned.” The Dads Caucus, in fact, follows in the footsteps of the Mamas’ Caucus, formed in 2019, of which Gomez is a member. The founder of the Mamas’ Caucus, Representative Rashida Talib, is also a member of the Dads Caucus. Gomez sees the work of his new caucus, in part, as supporting the mamas in their fights. “We do get an oversized amount of attention,” Gomez said, “because it’s still for some people a novelty.” So he wants to harness that attention and use it as a force for forward momentum.

The caucus also signals a cultural shift in favor of men feeling more able and eager to care for their children and be part of their lives. Many of the Dads Caucus members are young and have young children. Having them publicly claim the mantel of dad only furthers that cultural shift. “When more people feel comfortable saying that, when public figures say that…it empowers more people to be honest in saying, ‘This matters to me, too,’” Frye said. Passing laws like the Family and Medical Leave Act, which just marked 30 years and allows Americans who qualify to take unpaid time off for a new child, sick family member, or serious illness or injury, helps spur cultural change by giving people the room to balance caregiving and work. But it also requires cultural change to spur more legislative change. “That’s why the caucus is so valuable, it is shattering all of these stereotypes,” Frye said.

The caucus has a basket of policies it already wants to champion. The child tax credit is a priority for Gomez, who is on the Ways and Means Committee, the chief tax-writing committee in the House. The credit dramatically decreased child poverty. It was “so drastic in helping working people that we have to take that on as a primary fight,” he said.

But he also noted that paid family leave is a priority as well, particularly for fathers. “Making sure that dads take that time off to bond with their child is critically important,” he said. Studies that when men take paternity leave they have stronger, more equitable relationships with their children later in life and that their wives see . He also has with the issue: he got pneumonia at age seven and his parents were nearly bankrupted when they had to miss work shifts to stay with him at the hospital. His home state of California was the first in the country to pass paid family leave in 2002, and he advocated for increasing benefits when he was a member of the state legislature. “A lot of these issues that face families are why I got into politics in the first place,” he said.

The dads will also champion child care. That’s the most central issue for Bowman, he said, who was a teacher and educator before coming to Congress. “I know how important the first years of a child’s life are,” he said. He was named as a cosponsor on universal child care legislation that Senator Elizabeth Warren on February 8.

They’ll even tackle some smaller scale fights. They’ll push the White House, for instance, to look at what it can do through regulation or executive orders to help working families. Gomez noted that some older buildings on Capitol Hill don’t have changing tables in the men’s rooms. He wants to see those added for families that visit with their children. “It is the people’s house and we want to make sure that people with kids are able to visit and enjoy their capitol building,” he said.

Many of their policy priorities, including paid family leave, child care investment, and the child tax credit seemed close to passage when they were included in the Build Back Better reconciliation package, only to be stripped out when Democratic Senator Joe Manchin refused to support them. But both Huckelbridge and Frye noted that paid family leave came closer to passage than it ever has before. “The energy isn’t going away, so we intend to take that momentum and grow it until we get the job done,” Huckelbridge said. Having the Dads Caucus talking about it only adds to that forward motion.

The caucus is so far just in the House, but members are actively considering how to bring Senators into it. Senator John Hickenlooper just in December, Gomez noted, and Manchin not only has three children but 10 grandchildren. “We have work to do in our caucus,” Gomez said of Democrats. “We have to go and have those conversations with the individuals in the Senate — even Democrats — to see if we can change their minds or get them to see things differently.”

Bostonians Sarah Siegel Muncey and Lauren Birchfield Kennedy recognize this landscape from multiple vantage points: as mothers who scrambled to find good care for their children, as professional women working in education and health care policy, and as citizens committed to a society that works. But rather than surrender, they have used their frustration to stoke the blaze in their bellies for systemic change. The result is Neighborhood Villages, a powerful Boston-based nonprofit designed to bring about systems change in early care and education — scaling their successes first in Boston, next throughout Massachusetts, and if they have anything to say about it (they demonstrably do), coming soon to an America near you.

Muncey and Kennedy got to know each other when they were pregnant. Their babies were born within a few days of each other, and soon they were experiencing firsthand the treadmill of concern any parent in the U.S. now experiences to some degree: How do I find child care? How do I work without child care? How do I continue my career in any meaningful way and have children? Why are we even having this conversation in the wealthiest country on the planet?

Joining the millions of their peers in the U.S. who ask those questions and are desperate for change, Muncey and Kennedy had the resources and background and, as they will admit, the privilege to take the issue on in a big way. Muncey, Neighborhood Villages’ co-president and chief innovation officer, has a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and spent 12 years at Boston Collegiate Charter School, first as a 7^th grade English teacher and ultimately as Director of Family and Community Relations. Kennedy, the nonprofit’s co-president and chief strategy officer, holds a law degree from Harvard, served as Director of Health Policy at the National Partnership for Women & Families in Washington, DC, and oversaw advocacy strategy for key policy initiatives including implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Together, they had the chops and the will to tackle the ganglia of issues surrounding child care in a strategic, targeted way.

They knew that child care is foundational to our economy, our communities and our country. They knew that the U.S., unlike every other developed nation, makes no meaningful public investment in child care. Readers of Early Learning Nation are no strangers to this story.

No One Is Coming to Save Us

In looking at the situation, Muncey and Kennedy realized the first of what Muncey calls their three “fundamental guiding principles.”

“Somebody’s got to figure this out, and no one is coming to save us.” she says. “There’s lots of talking and meeting and declaring that it’s a problem, but we want to do it — actually do it. We can’t put any more chewing gum in this dam.”

The brokenness of the system also offers freedom and possibility, which is the space Muncey says Neighborhood Villages is claiming.

“If you look at K-12, there are so many things that will never change because they’ve been done that way so long. It’s just accepted as the way things are. But because child care infrastructure is so hollowed out and missing, we can start from that nothing and create from there.

“This devaluation and lack of professional value given to child care is a very direct line to the racism and misogyny on which we’ve built our country,” she says. “It’s time for an entirely new system that’s not built on that racist, patriarchal foundation. We can start from elegant. We can start from operationally efficient. We can start from anti-racist. It’s an amazing, exciting opportunity. At Neighborhood Villages, we feel like we have the greatest job in the world — to actually fix �ٳ󾱲Բ���.”

How the nonprofit goes about fixing things is to work with five early-learning partners in Boston to pilot and test programs. This is “the Neighborhood,” comprising 13 child care sites around Boston that serve a highly diverse population. All Neighborhood Villages (NV) programs are designed to scale statewide to demonstrate the infrastructure needed to create a workable, high-quality early education and care system. Funded by philanthropy, government grants and public investment, the Neighborhood is both an innovation lab and proof of concept for scalable solutions.

“We show that it can be done because we’ve done it,” Muncey says. “For example, when folks started back to work during the pandemic, it only took a few weeks to realize that we were going to have to figure out Covid testing because every time a teacher coughed, she was out for eight days trying to isolate and find a test. We found a philanthropic partner to pay for tests, worked with the people who had set up the nursing home testing in the state of Massachusetts who knew what they were doing, worked with health economists from Berkeley and MIT and created a really, really good program.

“Then we sat in my living room with cardboard boxes going, ‘I guess everyone needs this many swabs …’ We made the tests happen—in a scientifically sound way—and then we said, ‘This is ready for the state.’ When we went to the state, they said, ‘You can’t do testing in child care. It’s not possible because the sector is 7,500 small businesses.’

“We took them data from our evaluators at Boston Children’s Brazelton Institute and said, ‘Actually, we’ve been testing 700 teachers…’ We were able to show that it was suppressive testing, was keeping people safe and within about two weeks we were getting to the point where no one was getting sick.” Massachusetts deployed the program for ECE statewide.

A similar scalable innovation was Neighborhood Villages’ development of professional pathways for the ECE workforce. The nonprofit found that, though free certification classes were offered through community colleges, that model didn’t work well for early educators who were required to attend a 7 pm class on Tuesday in a completely different neighborhood after spending all day working with children and possibly needing to get home to their own. So, NV brought the course to the teachers and the essential certification, Child Growth, was taught at five sites around the city every Saturday, with each site offering three or four classes—in Haitian, Creole, Spanish, Mandarin, English and Portuguese. The program is now available to all child care providers in the state of Massachusetts.

“Once these things are piloted,” she says, “you realize the second it starts, ‘Well, that was doable. So, moving on …’”

It’s Not Rocket Science

There’s a certain “Hold my beer” quality to NV’s approach. Someone says it can’t be done; NV starts asking providers what they need and builds those missing pieces of infrastructure. It’s like building with Legos, Muncey says. The goal is a child care system that functions beautifully at the state, regional, school and family level.

“We’re building all these pieces with a great sense of urgency,” she says. “Deliberate urgency. No one is coming to save us; and we have to do it. Our second guiding principle is: It isn’t rocket science. All of this is doable. Even stuff that’s hard — like rocket science — is totally doable. We do it every day. We can do hard things.

“Big government programs are complicated and take thoughtful work and iteration,” Muncey says. “The Affordable Care Act is complicated and hard, and yet, we do it. The U.S. military child care system did it. Legislation (creating military child care) was passed in 1989 and over the next 10 years, the military set standards and provided incentives and … all of a sudden, you have a system. It’s not perfect, but the system is in place. We know how to do this.”

We’re Not Magicians

All of this leads to NV’s third and final fundamental guiding principle. The most basic reality of a functional child care system is the fact that educators must be paid real money. They’re not magicians. They can’t pull education, labor and love out of thin air and pay mortgages and groceries with pixie dust.

“If we don’t start paying teachers professional wages by funding ECE as a public good, none of the stuff we’ve been talking about matters at all,” Muncey says. “If we’re going to keep paying people nothing, they’re going to leave. If we keep training teachers and they can’t pay their bills, they’re going to leave.

“The most important thing for people to understand is that this is so doable, but we are not magicians. A functioning child care system takes money and will.”

Building the Will

The pandemic revealed the brokenness in America’s child care system like nothing before. Every issue associated with it was held up in stark relief, like shining a floodlight on that intransigent mess in the back closet. People who thought they had no stake in solving the problem suddenly found themselves invested. And, as we’ve seen over and over in the U.S., when enough people are invested in a problem and put their energy, insistence and money into it, elected officials start looking at solutions.

“They will have to,” Muncey says. “We’ve learned from so many other movements what it takes. Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America — often called Moms Demand Action — wore their red tee shirts and physically attended every state house when a piece of gun legislation was being talked about. We’ve seen what angry moms can do in this country many times.

“When Lauren Kennedy and I made the podcast (—give it a listen!), we knew we needed to give people a vocabulary around the issue. People don’t know how to talk about it. Let’s say you have feelings about guns or abortion. Regardless of what side you’re on about it, if someone looked at you and said, ‘Tell me what you think about guns…’ you’d have a little speech prepared with all the things you’re demanding from government about that.

“Child care isn’t like that. People don’t know what to ask for or how because we’ve been told to deal with it privately. ‘You went and got yourself pregnant, figure it out.’  We don’t have the words to say, ‘I don’t think I should have to pay more than 7 percent of my income for child care. How about that, Legislator?’”

In a very brief time, the podcast grew from a venture the two creators thought might be a “wonky, niche thing” to being the # 13 podcast in the U.S. (beating out Prince Harry on Armchair Expert, Muncey’s proud to say). Plainly, child care is a conversation whose time has come.

To harness that energy, NV’s affiliated 501(C)4 organization, Neighborhood Villages Action Fund, works to make sure policymakers hear the voices demanding change—and the demand to deliver that change now, not a few more years down the road.

“We have to let them know we expect them to fix this immediately,” Muncey says. “I’m 42 and my mom had pretty much the same level of support that’s available to us now.

“C�󲹲Բ��� is coming. Everyone wants this and it’s coming, one way or the other. Our job is to know how to do it well when it does.”

And that, as Neighborhood Villages has shown, is doable: Determine specifically what’s needed; build that solution; test it; when it works, fund it and scale it. It’s not rocket science.