Policy experts note that public opinion about a particular topic is deeply shaped by at the time. These frameworks are frequently contested through implicit and explicit messages that go out through media, as well as topical debates in the political arena. The political scientist Deborah Stone puts it this way: “Ideas are at the center of all political conflict. Policymaking, in turn, is a constant struggle over the criteria for classification; the boundaries of categories, and the definition of ideals that guide the way people behave.”

A classic example . When nuclear power was primarily seen as a new source of cheap energy, it drew a great deal of support. When it became seen as an environmental danger — influenced by real-life accidents like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, as well as fictional media portrayals — public support cratered. Today, some environmentalists are trying to intentionally insert a third frame whereby nuclear power is seen as in reducing greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change; they face an uphill battle.

Or take a question closer to child care’s wheelhouse: public schools. While schools inarguably serve a child care function (sorry, ), that is not generally seen as their primary purpose. Instead, schools are defined by their educational impact. Whether that education is at successful careers, civic engagement, personal self-actualization or something else certainly remains contested, but the overarching frame of schools = education is set.

When it comes to child care, America seems to be experiencing what psychologist William James described as the first moments of an infant’s life: a “blooming, buzzing confusion.” Particularly in an era when child care is finally getting widespread attention instead of being relegated to a component of welfare, we have yet to answer the questions: what is child care and who is it for? In many cases, we have yet to even ask those questions.

Is child care primarily a work support for parents? Is it child development that helps kids with early learning and growth? Is it a way to reduce family stress and increase family functioning? Is it social infrastructure that connects parents, a la libraries and parks? Is it intended to promote gender equity? Who counts as a valid child care provider? Is the goal to have a minimum level of adequate child care that keeps costs low or to have abundant, first-rate child care settings with well-compensated educators? Heck, we can’t even agree on definitions: is child care policy about ages birth to 5? Birth to 8? Birth to 13? Birth to 18?

You’re probably thinking that child care is not just one thing, and that much of the above list is not mutually exclusive. You’d of course be correct. But ‘not just one thing’ doesn’t obviate the need, again, for a primary frame. Right now, we’re not even trying to hash out what that primary frame is, and so we often end up talking past one another.

Comments regarding child care made by Vance and Kamala Harris in recent months illustrate this societal confusion.

In an August Face the Nation , Vance responded to questions about his opposition to universal child care proposals: “what I’ve opposed is one model of child care. We, of course, want to give everybody access to child care. But look, in my family, I grew up in a poor family where the child care was my grandparents, and a lot of these child care proposals do nothing for grandparents. If you look at some of these proposals, they do nothing for stay-at-home moms or stay-at-home dads. I want us to have a child care policy that’s good for all families, not just a particular model of family, and that’s what I’ve said.”

Harris, meanwhile, the following during an appearance before the National Association of Black Journalists: “the state of affairs in our country that working people often have to decide to either be able to work or be able to afford childcare … they can’t afford childcare and actually do the work that they want to do because it’s too expensive, and it doesn’t actually level out in terms of the expense versus the income. My plan is that no family — no working family should pay more than 7 percent of their income in childcare, because I know that when you talk about the return on that investment, allowing people to work, allowing people to pursue their dreams in terms of how they want to work, where they want to work, benefits us all. It strengthens the entire economy.”

As you can see, these are not two sides of a coin. This isn’t, ‘I think public schools should get more money, you think we should universalize school vouchers’ or ‘I think there should be a single-payer health care system, you think we should deregulate health care and let the market work it out’. This is one side emphasizing child care as a form of broad-based family support and one side emphasizing child care as a way to strengthen parents’ preferred attachment to the labor force. (I do want to emphasize that actions speak louder than words: Vance skipped a Senate vote where his GOP colleagues a bipartisan House-passed expansion of the Child Tax Credit, whereas Harris is second-in-command of an administration that proposed , including child care, in American history — one that was, again, blocked by Republicans.)

Partially because of child care’s history, it has been subject to markedly less philosophical scrutiny than other issue areas. Frequently, we hear advocacy groups wanting debate moderators or journalists about their plans for child care. That’s fine as far as it goes (the recent Vice Presidential debate was on care issues) but I think we’d get a lot further if we first asked political candidates: Why do you think child care is important? What is your vision for an ideal child care system? I think we’d get a lot further, in fact, if we first asked ourselves those questions.

This article was published in partnership with The 74.

The issues that most directly affect children and their parents appear to be at the heart of the Democrats’ current campaign for the White House. “Right out the gate she mentioned child care, paid leave,” noted Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund. And then she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who signed a number of policies aimed at families into law, as her running mate. “She is positioning herself and positioning care as the issue that will in part define her candidacy.”

Both Harris and Walz not only have extensive track records on these issues, but have frequently gone outside the political consensus to push for bold policies. Their past stances, and the way they talk about the issues now, illustrate not just that they are likely to prioritize them, but what kind of policies they might champion if given the power.

As a candidate in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary, Harris had to find a way to distinguish herself. One important way she did that was with her children’s agenda, and one of the boldest planks it included was a paid family leave proposal that went far beyond what others in the primary were backing. She to guarantee six months of leave, offer 100 percent wage replacement for people who made less than $75,000, and cover leave taking to take care not just of a new baby or oneself but also an expansive list of family members, including siblings, grandparents and “chosen family,” all with job protection built in. Her policy would have covered all Americans, including independent contractors and part-time workers. It was “the strongest, most inclusive, longest proposal for paid family and medical leave of any of the candidates in that race,” recalled Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for gender equity, paid leave & care policy and strategy at New America.

Harris has also backed other family leave proposals. As soon as she arrived in the Senate in 2017 she signed on as a of the FAMILY Act, Democrats’ longstanding paid family leave bill that would guarantee 12 weeks of leave with partial wage replacement, and she continued to cosponsor it until she left the Senate to become vice president. Endorsing legislation so quickly, instead of waiting, is “not necessarily something a freshman senator would do,” Shabo noted.

Walz has his own strong track record on the issue, too. When he was in Congress he also the FAMILY Act. Then in 2023 he into law Minnesota’s first paid family leave law, and it’s a compared to other state laws. It guarantees 12 weeks of medical leave, including for pregnancy and childbirth, and 12 weeks for other needs, including caregiving as well as safety from domestic violence and sexual abuse; workers can take up to 20 weeks a year for both categories in a year. Workers can take leave to care for family members including siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, and people who also have a relationship that isn’t codified by living together. Their jobs are protected when they take leave, which is not always the case in other state laws, forcing many people to risk losing their jobs while away from work if they don’t qualify for the Family and Medical Leave Act. Wage replacement is progressive, starting at 90 percent of the lowest weekly wages and tapering for higher ones. The benefits are also portable from job to job, which means that if someone switches work the leave they earned from their previous job still counts.

“It builds on lessons from the other states,” Shabo noted. In California, for example, low-wage workers to take advantage of the program because it only offers them some of their wages. Research has also found that workers need to be assured that they will be paid of their normal incomes for low-income workers and fathers to take it.

Walz also signed paid sick days into law, guaranteeing that employees who put in 80 hours a year can accrue if they fall ill or need to care for a sick loved one. The leave can also be used for medical appointments, absences due to domestic abuse or sexual assault, and if inclement weather closes children’s schools.

Walz was, of course, not the only state lawmaker responsible for getting these laws passed, and advocacy campaigns had been waged for years before they did. But he was a vocal champion of them. “He enthusiastically was part of this effort,” Shabo said. Paid leave was part of his platform when he ran for office, and he’s tweeted about it . When what legislation Democrats should pass first if they hold the White House, Senate, and House in 2025, Walz responded, “I think paid family and medical leave.” He continued, “It is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude—strengthen the family.”

“I’m feeling bullish about their commitment,” Shabo said, “because of how prominent it’s been.” That could mean a lot, especially if Democrats control Congress next year. In the face of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition, paid family leave was the first thing to be winnowed out of Biden’s Build Back Better legislative package before it ultimately failed, but he’s leaving the Senate, and Harris and Walz may not be so willing to trade the issue away next time around. “There’s real power in having the president and the vice president so committed to something,” Shabo said. She thinks “this issue would stay at a higher priority level.”

The two politicians have also been champions of child care and early childhood education. The children’s agenda Harris released when running for president in 2020 included the passage of Democrats’ Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap many families’ child care costs at 7 percent of their income, improve compensation for providers, and work toward universal, high-quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the legislation when she was in the Senate. Her children’s agenda called for more funding for Head Start and Early Head Start.

As vice president, she was the one to issued by the administration that caps copayments for families receiving federal child care subsidies, encourages states to waive copayments for low-income families, and offers more financial stability for providers who accept federal vouchers. She has talked about child care as “kitchen table economics that families are grappling with day to day,” Boteach said. As a senator, she the very first federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Walz has also championed the issue. He a $6 million grant program to expand child care access, which his administration estimated would expand capacity by 2,200 spots. “Only a few states put in their own money after the pandemic relief dollars expired,” Boteach said. “Minnesota was among them.”

He a $252 million investment in early learning scholarships to help low-income families pay for child care or early childhood education, as well as $316 million to increase wages for child care providers. A bill he signed in May pre-K seats by 12,360. The state raised the reimbursement rate for providers who accept subsidies, ensuring it was no longer one of the lowest in the country. He also consolidated state agencies so that there will soon be a one-stop-shop for child care. Walz “didn’t just sit back and sign bills into law, but he actually was out there working to get these bills taken care of,” Amanda Schillinger, a child care director in the state. The legislation has “made such huge changes in our industry.”

It’s hard to know exactly what Harris and Walz would do about child care if elected to the White House, but “I do think they see it as the unfinished business,” Boteach said. Harris “was a leader in an administration that , and sees that there’s a lot more to do.”

In her first campaign ad, Harris can be heard saying, “We choose a future where no child lives in poverty.” She followed that statement up in mid-August by a child tax credit expansion that would give families $6,000 per child for the first year of a baby’s life, then $3,600 for children ages one to six and $3,000 for older ones. That goes back to her primary campaign as well. If elected president she to sign an executive order “to end child poverty” and included a number of investments in her children’s agenda, including increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. She was also, of course, part of an administration that helped expand the Child Tax Credit significantly, which cut the child poverty rate nearly in half in 2021. Walz is also a fan of a bigger child tax credit. As governor he a state child tax credit expansion that gives families in the state up to $1,750 per child, the in the country. It’s expected to cut the state’s child poverty rate by a third.

Walz has also his reputation on a bill he signed in 2023, surrounded by a mob of children who swarmed him with hugs, that made Minnesota the fourth state to ensure free breakfast and lunch to all public school students after Congress that ensured them for all students. “I’m honored and I do think this is one piece of that puzzle in reducing both childhood poverty and hunger insecurity,” he at the signing.

Biden, of course, championed care policies and packed many of them into his Build Back Better agenda, only to see them stripped out of what eventually passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But next time might be different. “If you have a team that’s putting a higher premium on care policies, it’s less likely they’re going to fall off the list entirely,” Shabo said. “Maybe a Harris-Walz administration would choose differently.”

“This is at the core of their economic agenda,” Boteach added. Given Harris and Walz’s records, as well as the things they’ve said so far on the campaign trail, care will be “a priority in a Harris-Walz administration.”

And there are costs on top of that associated with missing work to birth or bond with a new baby. America is the only developed country to lack a paid family leave program – so even after a child is born many parents go on unpaid leave to recover. Some who do may put their jobs in jeopardy or delay going back until they can find (and afford) child care. But in the United States, our child care programs are expensive and many families live in places without any access to care — so going back to work may be problematic, adding another cost to the already mounting bills.

All of these anti-family policies — no paid leave, costly health care, and lack of child care — have contributed to the unique stress of being a parent in America. The White House is spot on to want to address this ongoing maternal health crisis, an initiative they unveiled in 2022 which has now seen some positive results.

One of the popular programs involves the provision of Newborn Supply Kits, which delivers a box of baby supplies to new parents. The kits are modeled on successful programs in other countries, such as Finland (though in Finland the kits are delivered as baby boxes and the box can be used as a crib) and the ). And in the United States, we have helping with their promotion, because what new parent doesn’t prefer their diapers to be endorsed by a celebrity?

In addition to diapers, for parents of new babies, such as a thermometer, nasal aspirator, Vitamin D3, diaper rash ointment, diapers, wipes, receiving blankets/swaddle, socks, burp cloth, shampoo and lotion. There’s also a voucher for grocery delivery, and details on how to access the maternal mental health hotline and government services, with a goal of reducing the stigma associated with seeking out such help.

In 2023, 3000 newborn supply kits were distributed and the expectation is that 10,000 more will be delivered in 2024. The program is part of the White House’s larger effort to make life easier during major life transitions — having a child being one of them.�� The initial program was piloted in Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico, and in 2024, it will expand to seven more states (Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, Tennessee and Texas). The goal, according to the White House, is to expand this to a national program supporting all families with the basic items they need in the vulnerable postpartum months.

But running a successful program takes resources, which is why a bipartisan group of four members of Congress (Republican Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana, Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier of Washington, Republican Rep. Marriannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragan of Califiornia) that would appropriate $5 million in funds over five years to create a new national program for the Newborn Supply Kit initiative. Instead of operating as a pilot program in just 10 states, it could operate as a national one.

But can our maternal mental health crisis really be helped by diapers?

The newborn supply kits are one-time gifts — designed as more of a peace offering to families and a way to share what government services might be available to other families, without the stigma typically associated with seeking out such assistance. The idea is that bringing crucial supplies directly to new parents will reduce the time, stress and burden on them.

But the problem with newborn supply kits is that they are just that – supplies. Diapers and wipes may cost time and money, but it’s a fraction of the cost and time associated with the biggest single expense for most families: child care. Within the long list of achievements and initiatives lauded on the White House Blueprint for the Maternal Health Crisis, providing more access to affordable, quality child care is largely absent.

This is not to make light of the White House’s accomplishments on maternal mental health, particularly with respect to extending Medicaid coverage and coming up with better metrics and information reporting surrounding maternal emergency, obstetrics and pregnancy-related deaths. And yes, receiving diapers from a government agency may be the olive branch needed to show that further assistance might be available. But without a targeted look at the , the true costs and stressors of raising a child in the United States continues to climb.

“Kids interrupt a lot,” Joyce says with a laugh. “And they ask the most random questions that have nothing to do with music. Their curiosity isn’t limited to whatever you’re trying to talk about. They somehow found a way to connect dinosaurs with saxophones. Then I would have to try to redirect the conversation from dinosaurs or ‘Bluey’ to music.

“We tried to teach them how the saxophone works—the reed, the mouthpiece, the keys. My favorite part was when they came up to the saxophone and peered down into the bell, reaching their little hands in to see what was down there. But they were more interested in the weird noises we could make.”

Joyce says he had thought the 4- and 5-year-olds might be impressed with his lightning fast runs on the scales. They were universally blasé about that, but when the sax players made multiphonic train horn sounds, or honked like geese, the class was enrapt.

Transforming from Student to Teacher

What Joyce learned about acknowledging the children’s curiosity while moving forward with class material is familiar territory to teachers everywhere, and such awareness was part of Dr. Daniel Abrahams’ motivation for creating the Music Zoo program. Abrahams is associate professor and coordinator of Music Education at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville.

“Our Intro to Music Education course is the first Music Education class the students take,” Abrahams says. “We talk about what it means to be a teacher, what schools are for, why we teach, and I thought this would be a good way for them to work with some kids right off the bat and see if they like it. Nobody wants to spend three or four years in college and realize at the very end, ‘You know, I don’t actually like working with kids.’

“To have this experience at the beginning of their journey really helped solidify their ideas of what it meant to be a teacher. These are all pandemic students whose last two years of high school were pretty much on their computers in lockdown. I had students who had never worked with kids before and had no idea whether they were going to like it. After the experience, they were saying, ‘I love this. I know I’ve made the right choice in what I’ve decided to do with my life.’”

The Jean Tyson Child Development Center is located on the Fayetteville campus, so it wasn’t too much of a schlep for the musicians to take their instruments over, from violins and cellos to the woodwinds—flute, clarinet and saxophone. The percussionists were crowd favorites, possibly because they brought a variety of small hand drums and invited the little ones to play along. The saxophone was also popular (see “train horn and honking geese” above).

Best of all were the tuba and the baritone sax, both of which were taller than many of the preschoolers. Seizing the moment, the teachers turned those demonstrations into a brief foray into math concepts: “Let’s guess if you’ll be bigger than the tuba.”

Because this is the University of Arkansas (Go Razorbacks!) and many of the kids are children of faculty members or staff, they were familiar with the school’s marching band and were jazzed to make the connection between the students demonstrating their flutes, tubas and drums with the uniformed marchers they saw at football games. Instant stardom for the musicians.

On a more serious note, Abrahams said he had been discussing the idea of music aptitude with his students throughout the semester, based on the work of music learning researcher who wrote about music development in infants and young children.

“We talked about what influenced them to become musicians and the idea that you ever know what might influence a student into wanting to be involved in music,” Abrahams says. “Children have a musical aptitude from birth that stabilizes around the age of 9, and any musical experience they have will help them have a richer musical life later. That one morning of sitting and learning about the flute or the clarinet and hearing them played might inspire that student to want to play an instrument when they get a little older.

“The students took the assignment quite seriously,” he says, “because they felt they were influencing the next generation of musicians. The experience was transformational in the ways the students began to see themselves as teachers.”

A Rich Resource

The musicians researched to be au courant with music for the preschool set and came prepared to play the theme songs for Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, YouTube’s Bluey, and the classic Baby Shark (doo-doo-ti-doo). The vocalists sang the 4- and 5-year-olds’ songs they’d learned especially for them and the children reciprocated by teaching the college kids some of their preschool tunes— in 4/4 time.

The greatest number of requests were for the University of Arkansas Fight Song, which Abrahams’ students knew by heart because most are in the marching band. In recognizing the theme songs from a few notes the musicians played, the children didn’t know that they were demonstrating Gordon’s theories, but they were. By recognizing or remembering a tune, they were thinking music, which Gordon called “,” the foundation of musicianship.

The musicians were especially impressed by the questions the preschoolers asked about their instruments, Abrahams says. The little kids were blown away by the tuning pegs on the stringed instruments getting higher the tighter the peg was turned and predicted that they would get lower if the peg was looser (Hello, ).

The success of the initial Music Zoo program has earned it a permanent place in the Intro to Music Education curriculum, Abrahams says, with an additional, unexpected benefit.

“The child development center is starving for people to come in and do learning activities with their children and they’re right here on campus” he says. “This great resource just fell into our laps. It’s a partnership that not only provides a valuable first teaching experience for our students but is also fostering positive interactions with the child care staff and our local community.”

If the first child comes from a home in which there are high levels of anger or hostility and poor communication about feelings, they are likely to view the question as hostile and react accordingly. A child with greater awareness of emotions and an ability to empathize might simply respond with a shrug or a request for next.

Though emotional intelligence is often considered a “soft skill,” it forms the bedrock of learning and can help set up a child for success in school, their relationships, and their future work and earnings. Knowledge of emotions is the ability to recognize, label and understand emotions in yourself and others. It’s a prerequisite for emotional regulation: the foundation for effective communication, the ability to listen, the capacity to change one’s emotional state to meet immediate goals, and even the ability to manage stress.

The child’s ability to regulate their emotions predicts these attributes across socioeconomic strata, and various racial and ethnic groups, but can be especially valuable for children facing the twin stressors of poverty and racism.

Various studies have shown that emotional intelligence in adults and adolescents can be a significant moderator of stress responses, but no published studies to date have examined the association in any demographic for basic emotion knowledge and stress.

A recent study published in the journal examined for the first time the association between emotion knowledge and levels of cortisol, a major marker for stress, in young children. The 307 children in the study attended Head Start preschool; all their families faced economic hardship, and 80% were Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), positioned to experience systemic racism. The children’s median age was 4 years.

“I’ve been studying the physiological toll of poverty-related stress, and stress and trauma related to racism and systemic oppression,” says Dr. Eleanor Brown, professor of psychology at West Chester University and the study’s lead author. “We know that poverty gets under the skin, and when you’re exposed to stress or trauma related to poverty, your whole body responds.

“If you are exposed to a particular stressor, as in an incident of neighborhood violence, your cortisol levels are going to increase, which helps you marshal the physiological resources to respond. But chronic or repeated elevations in cortisol take a toll on physiological functioning in ways that are detrimental to social-emotional, cognitive and physical health. So, I’ve been interested in what might help children facing high levels of poverty-related stress modulate their physiological response, and a student working with me — Sara King — was especially interested in emotion knowledge.” King is co-first author on the current study.

According to the , nearly 40% of children in the U.S. grow up in homes classified as poor ($25,926 for a family of four) or low-income ($51,852 for a family of four). That’s a lot of stress and a lot of cortisol in some very young kids.

Brown’s research focused on the Head Start preschool program because it represents the nation’s largest investment in early childhood education and was designed to support the development of children placed at risk by economic hardship. Head Start enrollment has been associated with improved language and literary skills in preschool children as well as fewer behavioral problems and increased social-emotional competencies. Most Head Start schools have implemented emotions-based prevention programs and curriculum support to increase students’ ability to identify, regulate and constructively use appropriate emotions.

A suggested that having strong emotional regulation skills helped mitigate some of the negative impact from repeated exposure to poverty-related stressors. Brown’s study looks at whether younger children who developed greater understanding of emotions would show fewer stress effects, as measured by their bodies’ cortisol levels.

Implementing renowned theorist Carroll Izard’s coding system that measures children’s ability to recognize and label expressions of emotion, the researchers found a statistically relevant association of greater emotion knowledge with lower amounts of cortisol. The study highlights the importance of addressing emotional competence in early childhood, Brown says.

When children can identify their emotions, they can exercise a level of cognitive control over their emotional arousal, which enables them to react appropriately to the situations and people they encounter. Emotion knowledge is also linked to the emergence of theory of mind between the ages of 3 and 5, when children become aware that other’s beliefs, desires and feelings may be different from one’s own — a foundational mechanism for navigating social interactions.

This age is the birthplace of empathy — also narcissism, the inability to imagine the needs or feelings of another. As children’s ability to understand emotions grows, their ability to negotiate social situations develops, which can set them on a positive course for elementary school and beyond. On the other hand, children who are unable to identify emotions in preschool may face behavioral and social problems as well as internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

Across cultures, humans (and some species) have evolved to recognize certain emotions like anger and fear as important knowledge for survival. Understanding potential causes and appropriate responses to these emotions is not so automatic. Much of the teaching of emotions happens naturally as parents and caregivers talk with children about emotion-provoking events they experience in their day-to-day. However, for households facing economic hardship and systemic racism, the picture may be somewhat different.

“A parent who is stressed about poverty or related hardship may be frustrated, anxious, sad, and exhausted,” Brown says. “Despite good intentions, they may treat the child harshly or withdraw emotionally and be less nurturing, less able to have the conversations with them about labeling shapes, learning the alphabet or asking, ‘How did that make you feel?’ A parent working multiple shifts or juggling too many responsibilities simply may not have the time or emotional energy for those conversations.”

Children growing up in chronic poverty also may have issues properly identifying their emotions simply because their stress levels are such that they don’t have the mental and physical bandwidth to do so.

One unfortunate finding of multiple studies is that parents across all socioeconomic strata are more likely to engage in emotion conversations with girls, more likely to offer space for emotional processing, and to support their taking time to work through emotions, Brown says. Parents are more likely to scaffold girls’ emotional processing with emotion coaching, talking about it, giving their emotions labels and helping them understand. Practically universally in American culture, parents of boys have less tolerance of them showing emotion — especially sadness and fear — and taking space to process it, which possibly explains lower levels of emotion knowledge among boys.

Children during this crucial period of development are not only building their knowledge of emotions, but they are also developing the neurocircuitry that will later support their ability to regulate their emotions, driving home the idea, Brown says, that early intervention with preschoolers may be critical for mitigating the impact of early stress exposure on brain development and functioning.

“This isn’t so much that someone who misses this window can never learn that someone who’s smiling is probably feeling happy,” she says. “They can learn to label emotions earlier or later. But this is a critical period for equipping children with the emotion understanding that will allow them to modulate their responses to meet social and learning goals. It’s also a critical period for the development of a key stress response system — the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis (HPA) — which influences learning and memory as well as emotional and physical well-being.”

Brown adds, “There is a critical period of calibration of that system in early childhood that will influence the child’s development. You can’t necessarily reverse the impact of high stress in childhood, and these findings don’t definitively show that emotion knowledge is lowering the children’s cortisol, but the existence of the link we’ve shown suggests that there’s a good chance that by boosting children’s emotion knowledge, we can help them to regulate at a physiological level.

“This is hopeful because we may be able to use these opportunities with children in early childhood educational contexts to target emotion knowledge and skill development in ways that promote lower levels of stress.”

The child care movement needs a broad base of support in order to win an effective, publicly-funded system. There have been strides in this direction over the past few decades, for instance bringing into the fold respected national security figures and leaders from rural areas facing a depopulation threat. Now, a is opening another door by showing how child care is impacting that most respected of American icons: farmers.

The paper, from professors Florence Becot of Penn State University and Shoshanah Inwood of Ohio State University, uses survey data from 729 farm families. It also draws on a literature review and prior work from the authors, including farm family focus groups. Becot and Inwood start by noting that “In the 1980’s, U.S. farm women identified the need for child care support to further their agricultural careers. Yet, it has taken over forty years for child care to be formally recognized as an issue affecting the trajectory and well-being of both the farm enterprise and the farm family,” with the two largest farm advocacy groups finally adding child care as a policy priority in 2023(!). As a sign of how understudied the issue of child care and farms has been, only two previous studies were conducted prior to this one.

In the popular imagination, children are a boon for farms: they are a ready source of labor and, ideally, take over the family business. This is accurate, yet incomplete. Becot and Inwood explain: “[R]esearchers and policy makers have overlooked the time, energy and resources that the households’ social reproduction require. The caring of children is particularly demanding as children need to be fed, educated and emotionally supported. Care work happens simultaneously and in competition with meeting the farm enterprise production needs. As such care work affects the structure and trajectory of the farm enterprise.”

Becot and Inwood’s study illuminated exactly what kind of changes the arrival of children—and lack of good child care options—causes for farmers. They found “the top three most common changes were decreasing resources allocated to the farm enterprise (i.e. cutting down the hours worked on the farm, scaling back farm production and/or farm employees helping with child care), cutting down on hours and/or stopping working the off-farm job, and hiring new workers to help on the farm and/or with household chores.”

While the mere presence of young children has an understandable impact, the need to decrease resources going to the farm itself was particularly pronounced among families with child care challenges. 46% of those without adequate child care reported making such reallocations, versus 23% of those who had decent child care options. Just 18% of farm families struggling with child care made no changes to their business at all. These moves have a predictable consequence on what the farm produces: “83% of respondents with childcare supply challenges report an impact on their farm productivity compared to 62% for those not reporting that challenge.”

It’s important to note, however, that this is not merely a story of how much corn or broccoli a given farm produces. It’s also a story about family flourishing. Becot and Inwood suggest, aptly, that “In addition to triggering a cycle of changes within the household and the enterprise with the potential to alter short and long-term farm economic productivity, the choices farm parents must make likely have consequences on their mental health and quality of life as farm parents might already feel stretched thin due to role overlap and child care challenges. Indeed, if child care expenses were lower, over half the respondents would prioritize allocating freed-up resources towards the well-being of the household over the enterprise/business.”

To illustrate their point, consider from one of the research participants: “Running a small farm, taking care of kids and managing jobs is really tough. Every week, we have to plan everything: meals, work schedules, kids’ activities, farm tasks and more. On top of that, we need to find babysitters. It’s a lot to handle, and it leaves us feeling tired and worn out.”

So what kind of external child care do farm families utilize when they can? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they rely heavily on caregivers, an option taken by nearly two-thirds of families who use any non-parental care. That said, a solid 42% of those families also reported using some form of paid provider, whether an occasional babysitter or a slot in a family child care program or child care center. Availability and cost continue to be a challenge for many.

All of this goes to show that farm families need a version of what all families need: good, affordable (ideally free) child care options, including direct support for trusted caregivers like FFNs as well as parents themselves. Hopefully, understanding child care’s impact on farmers will help open the eyes of recalcitrant politicians. As Becot said about the study from Penn State, “the implication here is that child care not only impacts farm success for the families, but food availability for all.”

While there is a unique legislative avenue available to help farm families—the Farm Bill, which is ostensibly supposed to be passed this year—getting farmers (and their Congressional representatives) behind a comprehensive approach holds the most promise for a sustainable solution. With such a child care system in place, farm families will be healthier, and the nation will be more prosperous and secure.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who quipped, “Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from a corn field.” I might add, it also looks mighty easy when you’re not the family trying to run a farm in a nation without a decent child care system.

As movements continue to fight for universal, affordable child care and paid family and medical leave, and for workplace reforms through union organizing and forms of activism, prominent politicians like Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance question women’s place in the workplace. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he vowed to represent the in America. In the past he has critiqued the Democratic Party as being run by “childless cat ladies,” and argued that women should be having children rather than working long hours.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay has covered gender and racial inequality in society throughout her career as a writer, editor, organizer and nonprofit leader. In just a few short years she went from executive editor of the now-defunct blog Feministing to executive editor of Teen Vogue, where she oversaw a massive transformation in its coverage, from just fashion-as-usual, to fashion plus all the political, social and identity questions young people were facing. She resigned from that role in 2022.

Her third book, , takes on the problem of women’s burnout from juggling both the unpaid work of family life and the demanding paid work in thankless, profit-driven jobs, and defends women’s right to ambition. The question, she asks, is where should we channel that ambition? Early Learning Nation contributor Haley Swenson sat down with Mukhopadhyay to discuss her journey to understand work and ambition differently in the years since she first “made it.”

Haley Swenson: I’ve read you for such a long time, going back to when I was a college student and you were writing for . And then I remember a few years ago, during the pandemic, everybody was like, wow, look at Teen Vogue. We were seeing articles about socialist feminism and dreamers and DACA and prison and policing and everyone was saying, what’s going on over there? And then I found out you were the executive editor, and I said, aha, that’s part of what’s going on over there. ��

And I remember thinking, “Wow, she’s really made it!” So maybe we could start there. Tell the readers a little bit about that experience, of “making it,” getting that big management job, and how the reality of that led you to this book.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I think I also felt like I had made it. You know, I worked really hard to get to a place where I would even be considered for a position like that. I should have felt this tremendous sense of satisfaction, and I did. I really was proud of the work we were doing, and I was happy to have the job. But there was a deeper part of me saying I worked really hard to get here, and now what? Why am I exhausted? Why do I not have space to take care of myself? And I wasn’t making the kind of money that I felt like I should be making for how much experience I had, and what I was bringing to the table, which kind of made me start to question what all of this was for.

But I didn’t really face that question until the pandemic, when I had this moment that many women had of asking, why do I work all the time? Maybe work isn’t the core organizing value for my life. And there’s a very earnest battle right now to take rights away from women and to say that women should have never been allowed in the workplace. The pandemic forced me to start reporting out what I felt was a reckoning that women were having with their relationship to ambition. I wanted to come in strong with a counter-argument that we weren’t wrong for having ambition, but we were set up to fail.

Swenson: Ambition is a theme that keeps coming back throughout the book. Prior to that pandemic moment, when many of us questioned it all, you talk about how in terms of workplace feminism we had “lean in” and we had “girl bossing,” the idea, as you say, that, “there’s nothing that a little elbow grease and the right shade of lipstick can’t overcome.” What happened in the pandemic that made those ideas of women’s ambition seem so antiquated?

Mukhopadhyay: This was most pointed with mothers. I think that a lot of mothers have been told that you can have it all. You can work and have your family. You just need to organize your time and you’ll be fine. And many of them realized how burned out they were, especially when they lost all of the support they needed to be successful in their careers, like child care, home health workers, housekeepers. When that underbelly of workers that keep many middle class and affluent women afloat dissipated, I think a lot of women had to face that their ambitions were fragile, that they were resting on this care economy and this false idea that you can have it all. And I think that’s the biggest thing that started to unravel.

I also saw this with my single women friends, who I think had been told to put everything into their careers, asking, “Wait, why did I work this hard? Now, none of that matters, because I can’t even go to an office, and I can’t even spend the money I’m earning in a restaurant. My fancy clothes don’t matter. Having a fancy apartment isn’t important anymore, because we’re struggling for our lives out here.”

I think that forced us as a country and a society to ask, what is success? How much do we actually need? A lot of families took a step back from their professional duties to ask these questions. Maybe we got a taste of a balanced life. We got a taste of what it would be like to not just prioritize work at all costs.

Swenson: Sometimes in the child care and paid leave spaces, we say that because the United States doesn’t have robust social policies, you’re really left to the “boss lottery,” where it’s up to your manager whether you can have a balanced life. There’s also this pressure, which you experienced in management positions, of wanting to do right by your employees, the people who report to you, to be that supportive person, to help them develop, but at the same time you have very little power to protect them when push comes to shove. �³󲹳�’s your vision of what management could look like?

Mukhopadhyay: I’m interested in building off of the work of the great feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich, to develop her idea of the professional managerial class as this middle layer of management that could become radicalized and stand with other workers. Something promising that we started to see during the pandemic, was white collar workers, or knowledge workers, coming into consciousness about their own labor conditions.

I see an opportunity to think about management less as a climb to the top, and more about people. We should grade managers on that, on how well you build your team and relate to them and support them. And that should be as important as your ability to come up with creative ideas and to execute.

The old model of management isn’t really working right now. Even just for the most basic economic reasons, we really need to start thinking about models that do empower and include larger groups of people to feel purpose-driven.

Swenson: At the end of the book, I was feeling so optimistic. You cite so many examples of workers who aren’t taking it anymore, and are either forming unions or just saying enough is enough and radically changing their lives to be more about community and less about work.

You offer the idea of instead of channeling our hustle energy—our ambition into personal success—trying to channel that into collective change in the workplace. That seems like a starting point for any of the kinds of changes you want to see, so we are no longer set up to fail. Can you explain how you see us replacing the old feminist dream of having it all with the goal of “just having enough”?

Mukhopadhyay: It really has to be a collective reckoning to say that we’ve had enough of how we’re treated in the workplace. We’re not going to do it anymore. The expectation is that if you have it all, you have to do it all, and I’m not going to do it all. And if you want me to do it all, you’re going to pay me equitably for it. And that may mean making some personal sacrifices. It means that maybe you don’t put yourself up for that promotion. Maybe you don’t, and I’m talking directly at the camera to myself right now, take that third freelance gig.

Maybe you have to say, I don’t need to keep pushing and pushing, because the more I push, the harder it is for me to actually enjoy what I have and to not make myself sick and stressed out and depressed in the process.

The easy narrative here is to say, well, this is why women should never work. The whole problem with that is whether you’re working outside the house or inside the house, you’re still working. And most women don’t have the choice to be in the house or outside of the house.

I know many women that would love a little more leisure time, but I do not know any woman that’s not out here hustling. This system was designed to make us miserable, to set us up to fail. But [pushing back] is also something that we need to do collectively. You can “quiet quit” as an individual, but if the person next to you at work is going to pick up the slack, you’re not creating a collective environment where we’re all saying together, “this is what we’re willing to put up with, and this is what we’re not willing to put up with.”

Swenson: Speaking of the moment we’re in right now, politically, has anything changed for you, in terms of your sense of what’s possible, or your optimism about the direction we’re headed in. How is the prospect of a second Trump term affecting your thinking?

Mukhopadhyay: I think that there is such a naked war on women and women’s ambition. J.D. Vance has openly condemned the idea of women in the workplace, women’s independence, . This is part of a working world order and mindset where women are second-class citizens, where their creativity is clamped down on, where their actual human rights are being restricted. And that is very dangerous.

And it’s not that feminists are against ambition. It’s not that we’re lazy and it’s not that we don’t believe that women should be ambitious. What we’re saying is it’s too hard and we can’t do it alone. The solution to that cannot be that we don’t try. What are the conditions for us to successfully try? And that’s why I think this moment is very linked to our fight for democracy and for women’s human rights.

It’s not a coincidence to me that we’re having this profound backlash on women in the workplace, that so many mothers were pushed out of the workforce during the pandemic at the same time we saw the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the rise of the, quote, “trad wife.”

One of J.D. Vance’s quotes is, “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.” And that’s really effective messaging. It isn’t liberating for me to work 90 hours a week, but then neither is forced motherhood.

Swenson: So what is the message you have for women?

Mukhopadhyay: I think a lot of books right now are saying, don’t give up the fight. And I am saying, yes, but pick and choose your battles. You are not alone in what you’re feeling. And I think that one of the problems with neoliberal, lean-in feminism has been that we have put the culpability for women’s progress on the individual woman. You alone cannot change the parental leave policy in your company or in your state. You alone cannot overcome the unequal pay gap. So much ink has been spilled about that moment when you ask for more money, like that’s the core of workplace feminism. “Speak up in meetings and make sure you ask for more money.” And I would never tell someone not to do those things. I just want us to give ourselves a pat on the back. We’ve done enough. But we alone can’t solve these problems. So what does it look like to use our ambition to build a community of support, around the kinds of lives that we want to live, and the kinds of work we want to do?

These proficiencies are nurtured, the committee wrote, when educators design learning opportunities that meet children’s needs, engage responsively with children’s ideas and interests, and when they can hear children’s ideas and see their successes.

The Next Generation Preschool Science team, led by education nonprofits and the and public media foundation, has been working to promote science in preschool by co-designing innovative STEM resources that can be used across home and school. Their work, funded by the involved co-designing resources with teachers and families, to ensure they leveraged children’s interest and families’ funds of knowledge. Through this partnership, researchers, teachers, parents, curriculum developers and media designers created Early Science with Nico & Nor®, a multifaceted program that includes a teacher guide with sample curricular activities, a “family science fun guide” and innovative digital apps to support science investigation in ways that integrate math and engineering.

The program builds on the researchers’ previous findings about technology and young children—not to replace human interaction, but to explore how digital journals and gamified simulations can strengthen and complement young children’s engagement in and understanding of science concepts. A rigorous, randomized control trial study found that children who used the ����������Nico & Nor curriculum supplement in classrooms showed significant improvements in their science learning. Children’s science learning also significantly improved when Early Science with Nico & Nor® was used across school and home environments.

Making Use of Everyday Magic

Though shadows, ramps and floppy tomato plants may not be something most of us pay attention to, they certainly get a 3-year-old’s attention. Children wonder about the world in practical, concrete ways—Why does that ball roll faster on the slide than on the dirt? What makes my shadow look so long? What is a shadow actually … how it is formed? In the program’s three units—Light and Shadow; Force and Motion; and Growth and Transformation— Early Science with Nico & Nor® explores such questions with carefully designed materials that foster the child’s ever-present wonder. Without a whiff of, “OK, class, we’re now going to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics,” that’s exactly what they do.

“The project is built around children’s natural curiosity to understand the world around them,” says Danae Kamdar, an early STEM researcher with Digital Promise. “We asked, ‘How does children’s natural curiosity about the world drive them to ask questions and understand?’ The question was not only how we could support children’s learning and curiosity in preschool classrooms but how we could support learning in communities and families as well.

“As children begin to explore how shadows are made, they notice through these different activities that they need a light source, an object to block the light, and a surface on the opposite side of the light source for the shadow to appear on. Or they’ll observe that the size of a shadow changes when you move the light source closer to or farther from the object. Their observations create a natural way to connect to that science and they begin to use the visual spatial vocabulary in a meaningful way.”

Playing Around

The key to all this learning, both in the digital and hands-on materials, is play. Play not only helps children in their social-emotional learning and ability to collaborate, but it’s also essential for reading proficiency and, as Early Science with Nico & Nor® demonstrates, can be an important tool in learning math and science skills.

Through play, the children learn that bringing the light source closer makes the object bigger, and that the light source must be behind the object. In the unit on force and motion, the preschoolers learn how items on a steep ramp move downhill faster, and that different surfaces on the ramp—grass, dirt—or on the item affect how smoothly or quickly the object moves. Friction slows things down! Whoa.

Although many preschool curricula already include activities in which the children sprout, plant and observe a bean plant, activities in the Growth and Transformation unit enable the children to focus more deeply on the core ideas about plant parts and what they need to live and grow, with some math for good measure: Matt’s plant is seven units tall. Mine’s nine. It’s taller!

The Nico & Nor program didn’t evolve from a group of adults deciding what kids will like and going with that. It’s the result of co-design and iteration, based on design ideas and feedback from educators and families, and observation of how the children themselves engage with the materials. Do they actually play with them?

“When our team is in the co-design phase with preschool teachers and families, we get together to brainstorm seed ideas—initial concepts of what we think would work in the preschool space or be interesting for the children,” says Tiffany Leones, an early STEM researcher for Digital Promise. “From there, the teachers share their feedback about what is engaging for the kids. We then go through the process of iterating and testing it out.”

“For example, in the Shadow Cave app,” Leones says, “the children can actually be in a dark cave. They can manipulate the flashlight, turn it on and off. They can control the conditions in which they’re investigating to understand the core ideas of light and shadows. Within the app, we’ve designed it so there are audio and visual scaffolds to support children since especially in the 3 to 5 range, children can be anywhere on the developmental spectrum. There are differentiated levels within the app, which get developmentally more complex.”

She adds, “Then, to keep play at the forefront, we developed some levels in between where children can create their own fun shadows in the cave, so they can explore that space freely.”

(Full disclosure: this author played all levels of Shadow Cave and Puppy Park and is a bit alarmed to say they weren’t a slam dunk. I thought for sure those triangles would fit together and that bush would shade two puppies …)

Collaboration at All Levels

The Next Generation Preschool Science project is based on building collaborative relationships among researchers, educators, families, curriculum designers and media developers, while putting children and families at the center of the action.

An exceptional dimension of the project is the degree to which the researchers sought feedback and input from the preschool teachers, who brought a rich degree of their own creativity to the activities and freely shared what worked and what didn’t work as well, which often led to modifications to the materials. One realized that before she introduced the bowling activity to her kids, she should show them a video so they could see what bowling was. Another teacher created a “ramp center” in her classroom where children could explore the unit’s materials and variables on their own, in their own time.

Parents were also an important part of the feedback and design loop. Though many initially expressed some doubt about their knowledge of engineering concepts, through their discussions about the materials, they found instances where they and their children engaged in engineering practices. They pushed and pulled boxes (Force and Motion) and when they explored their neighborhood to find ramps, they saw plenty of examples, from playground slides to moving trucks with dollies.

Addressing Inequity

In the same study mentioned in the introduction of this article, “Science and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) decried America’s struggles to support children in historically marginalized communities in engaging in science and engineering. The educational system is often set up to work against children developing and demonstrating proficiencies in science and engineering, the report stated. Teachers may feel underprepared to teach these subject areas and may lack curriculum materials or other resources to support them in doing so. The children themselves may start to lose enthusiasm for sense-making about the natural and designed worlds if they aren’t supported.

The report says that all these negatives can be rectified, and the Next Generation Preschool Science project is a step in that direction. Digital Promise traditionally has worked with educators, researchers, technologies and communities to investigate and scale innovations that support learners who have been historically and systematically excluded, Leones says. Equity is baked into the project and one of the project’s goals was to generate resources that could leverage children’s everyday experiences and families’ funds to promote science in accessible, doable ways. The materials are available in both Spanish and English and are free to everyone with access to an iPad.

Joanne Samuel Goldblum, founder and CEO at the , believes most policymakers are focused on “the big picture” to address poverty but often neglect the material basic needs that help families get through the day. She identifies aisles in the middle of most supermarkets stocked with hygiene products, cleaning supplies and toilet paper, most of which can’t be purchased via assistance programs, but they can be the difference between economic stability and a descent into poverty. Diapers are not typically on the policy agenda, but they should be.

The National Diaper Bank Network defines diaper need as “the lack of a sufficient supply of diapers to keep a baby or toddler clean, dry and healthy.” Findings from the organization’s latest report, , shows that diaper need “remains a serious and pervasive issue that impacts the physical, mental and economic well-being of U.S. children and families.” Shockingly, the survey found that nearly half of families (47 percent) reported experiencing diaper need, a drastic increase from the 1 in 3 families that reported diaper need in 2010.

When they can’t provide diapers, parents resort to makeshift solutions such as using plastic bags, towels and T-shirts as diapers, scouring the internet for instructions on how to make a homemade diaper, and reusing wet or soiled diapers after removing waste. These “diaper-stretching” methods to compensate for diaper need can have serious physical consequences, such as severe diaper rash and urinary tract infections.

Diaper need can also have a profound impact on mental health. A soggy diaper is a physical reminder of a child’s unmet need, and not being able to meet that need is a horrible, unshakable feeling. A found that diaper need was the number one predictor of maternal stress, even outpacing worries about paying for food, electricity or housing.

Diaper need also has economic consequences. Most child care centers require parents to supply a day or even an entire week’s worth of diapers at once, even if the cost of child care is subsidized. If families do not have the required supply of diapers, they must find another child care arrangement, which often means missing work. Twenty-five percent of families with diaper need who were included in the Diaper Check survey reported missing work or school because they did not have enough diapers to place their baby in child care. On average, these parents missed about five workdays per month, which equates to a loss of $296 for those earning the federal minimum wage. That loss of income can keep families in a vicious cycle of poverty. “If you don’t have a diaper and you can’t bring your kid to child care, you can’t go to work, and if you can’t go work, you can’t afford the things you need for your child. That’s true of all sorts of material, basic needs,” said Goldblum.

The National Diaper Bank Network has about 250 member banks in its network, with locations in every state, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. Collectively, the network has distributed over 1 billion diapers since 2011. While some diaper banks distribute diapers to families directly, others operate on a partner model. These diaper banks work with organizations, such as food banks, to ensure families have a one-stop shop to access what they need without traveling to various locations.

Nakeisha Wells founded the in 2019 after discovering that there were no existing diaper banks in Cuyahoga County despite being Ohio’s second most populous county. The organization aims to fill a critical gap in its community and has partnered with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank to distribute essentials to families directly out of a new resource center. The center sees 200 to 250 families daily, and Wells estimates that 8000 diapers are distributed per month just at that location. The Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland surveys families every month. In survey responses shared with Early Learning Nation, every parent reported that the number of diapers they received from the Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland helped them reduce stress and keep their child healthier. Parents also shared that distributions from the diaper bank helped them pay bills, go to work, purchase groceries and buy non-food items like toothpaste or soap.

is a nonprofit that has served the Tulsa community for over 40 years and helps families access essentials like diapers, wipes and formula. Jacky Escobedo, the organization’s director of social services, is proud of the “low barrier process” that allows Emergency Infant Services to make a significant impact. There are no income requirements to get help, and volunteers and staff members rely on conversations with families to assess how they are doing, identify what needs can be met in-house and determine how they can be connected to additional resources. This year alone, Emergency Infant Services has seen close to 29,000 families and has distributed over 1 million diapers.

Diaper banks experienced an unprecedented demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Diaper Bank Network estimates that the need for diapers in communities across the country increased by . Today, much of that demand still lingers, and diaper banks are finding it challenging to keep up. Since February, the number of clients at the Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland’s weekly diaper distribution has tripled. On any given day, 20 to 30 families are lined up before their doors even open. This year, Emergency Infant Services has seen double the number of families they usually help.

Many have theorized about ways to address unprecedented diaper need, but some solutions are misguided. Policymakers have suggested expanding food-based and nutrition programs like SNAP or WIC to cover the cost of diapers, but the National Diaper Bank Network is not in favor of this option.��According to Lacey Gero, director of government affairs at the National Diaper Bank Network, SNAP and WIC are already under constant threat of spending cuts and these programs will not receive an influx of funding to provide additional support. More than a quarter of families with diaper need surveyed in Diaper Check already report skipping meals to afford more diapers. With SNAP or WIC expansion, families would still be forced to make impossible decisions about providing for their basic needs with limited resources: do I provide food for my children this month, or are diapers more important? Families would also continue to rely on community resources, such as food banks, to provide whatever they cannot cover on their own, which strains an already fragile system.

Others have suggested that families who struggle to afford disposable diapers should switch to cloth diapers. According to Goldblum, “The problem with diaper need is not disposable versus cloth,” and it is “simplistic to say that [cloth diapers] are the answer.” She added that more than 90 percent of American families use disposable diapers, and the vast majority of child care centers require them. Cloth diapers also demand washing machines, and heavy-duty washing machines at that, to adequately clean them. However, many Americans who struggle financially do not have their own washing machines, and in most laundromats, cloth diapers are not allowed. While cloth diapers may be a trusted option for some, they are not a feasible solution for many families.

Still, many people shame families experiencing diaper need and reject efforts to address this crisis. Rush Limbaugh, a late conservative talk show host, made a mockery of legislation introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro in 2011 that would have provided federal funding to supply child care centers with diapers to help families who could not afford them. Limbaugh said the proposal .” Others have echoed similar sentiments and often ask, why have children if you cannot afford them? The question itself reflects just how poorly our nation treats those experiencing poverty. Wages have remained stagnant while the cost of living and prices of basic necessities have skyrocketed, an obvious mismatch according to Goldblum. It is no surprise that families are struggling to afford diapers. What else do we expect?

As the Diaper Check revealed, it is not just low-income parents who experience diaper need. This problem cuts across income levels and is present in every community. More than a quarter of families who experience diaper need are classified as middle-income. These families often fall through the cracks because they earn too much to qualify for federal assistance programs but still struggle to afford the cost of basic necessities. Most parents who experience diaper need are employed, many with multiple jobs. Goldblum asserts, “If people are working and they can’t afford to take care of their family, that’s a societal problem and not an individual problem.”

Half of American families cannot afford enough diapers to keep their children clean, dry and healthy. This crisis is too big to be solved by diaper banks and kind-hearted volunteers alone. The millions of families who experience diaper need require policy solutions, not condemnation or empty platitudes.

While I often disagree with his conclusions, Matthew Yglesias is a smart pundit who offers his own useful provocations. He also has a big among influential policymakers and thought leaders, making his opinions something of a public mirror to what many in the halls of power are quietly thinking. In his column, “,” Yglesias argues that the rhetorical reliance on child care’s job-supporting prowess (both in terms of creating jobs within the care sector itself, and job creation more broadly) no longer holds water. He writes, “The main problem is that most of Democrats’ ideas about investing in the care economy were formulated in the shadow of the Great Recession and were framed, in part, as ways of putting people back to work…Today, though, we are clearly back to full employment.”

As an empirical matter, Yglesias is correct. �³󲹳�’s more, the labor force participation rates of mothers of young children—aka the group most acutely impacted by child care challenges—is at historic highs. (I have argued before, and plan to go deeper in a future article, about how this can be a gloss: attachment to employment says little about the to well-being required to work without a stable and satisfactory child care arrangement). But Yglesias takes this starting point and goes in a troublesome direction. He writes, citing pro-care arguments by the Roosevelt Institute’s Suzanne Kahn:

It’s true, that if the economy is deeply depressed, the care sector is a “good investment” in the sense of creating a lot of labor demand per dollar spent. But the economy isn’t deeply depressed, so this is actually a huge logistical problem with the idea of expanding access to care. You could, of course, try to make care work less labor-intensive, but Kahn argues against that, saying “strict staffing ratios should be maintained for those receiving government funds.”

She also wants to ensure that unit labor costs not only stay high but become higher, calling for “strict minimum wages and benefits packages set at family-sustaining levels, as well as protections for workers’ ability to organize.” She wants to discourage private equity investment in the care sector by banning stock buybacks and “demanding that corporate boards receiving significant federal care funds include both recipients of the care and caregivers as representatives.”

…This is an agenda for what my [Libertarian think tank] Niskanen Center friends call “cost-disease socialism,” where you respond to the high cost of something by subsidizing it, but then attach strings that limit the supply and drive costs up further.

There are faulty premises here, almost all of which start from confusion over what and who child care is for. Yglesias seems relatively disinterested in the impact of care investments on the quality of care, other than a brief aside about child-to-adult ratios where he links to a single paper from the deeply pro-free-market Mercatus Center. There is no engagement with the that shows the greatest predictor of quality is the presence of a stable, warm caregiver; that child care educator churn is sky-high and (presumably due to working conditions). There is no engagement with the question of whether those caring for toddlers should rightly be paid akin to dog walkers and parking lot attendants, or why elementary school teachers should receive vastly higher wages and benefits. There is no engagement with what might happen if we let , given the wreckage they have left behind in other human service sectors like nursing homes and autism services.

Most worryingly, though, is that Ygelsias—and he is far from alone in this—fails to see that care that set it apart from other goods. He writes, in a paragraph that simultaneously contains an important truth and a massive misunderstanding:

That doesn’t mean there are no problems in the space of child or care, but I do think it makes a difference to realize that there isn’t necessarily a “crisis.” The reason to address child care costs is that families like to have more money rather than less, so if you can help them out in this regard, they’ll be better off. But parents of young kids buy all kinds of stuff—groceries, car seats, clothing—and as intense as the prime daycare years are, they are only a small fraction of a child’s life and a modest share of the all-in expense of raising a child. Making child care more affordable would help young families, but so would reducing minimum lot size rules to create more single-family homes. So would allowing mid-rise single-staircase apartments to create more cheap three-bedroom floorplans. If you’re focused on the problem (the cost of living for parents of young children) rather than the policy silo (child care), then you have a lot of options that don’t face the particular sticky problems of care-oriented industrial policy.

The important truth is that the family policy space is overly siloed. We weaken our impact by not making common cause with the full sweep of issues that impact a family’s overall life experience. In other words, our tendency to focus more on individual programs than comprehensive policy isn’t great. Housing and healthcare in particular have huge influences on family flourishing, as do items ranging from the to .

The massive misunderstanding is grouping child care with groceries, car seats and children’s clothing, as if it is merely one material need among many, as if the only problem is the monthly bill. Child care is an essential community support. Sociologist Mario Small that child care programs are key sources of friendships and connectivity for new parents; like schools, they act as assets that enhance entire neighborhoods. Child care providers are among the most trusted sources of advice for those parents, as well. Many times, they act as full ‘alloparents’ (non-kin parental figures). In my new book I cite a moment in the documentary where a preschool teacher recalls how important his child care providers were as his family, headed by a single mother, struggled. “My mom was both my parents, and my other parent was my preschool teachers,” the teacher says. “They helped my mom when she needed assistance. They helped me. They helped my family. They, in essence, I feel, saved my life.”

I also think that semantic debates over what constitutes a “crisis” cheapens the human consequences. While it is definitely important that our policy analysis and projections be as careful and correct as possible, and while “crisis” language has mixed success, there is also a risk of going too far in the other direction. When parents are to try to , falling due to a lack of child care or due to child care, I’m not sure what the perfect word is, but it sure seems like a big problem. (I am not an expert on elder care or long-term supportive care, but my understanding is that from many of the same structural problems.)

And yes, that means we need to spend public money to increase supply, affordability and quality. But that’s not “cost disease,” that’s accepting that certain social goods are worth society’s coin. Allow me from none other than William Baumol, the economist for whom “Baumol’s cost disease” is named: “No matter how painful rising medical and educational bills may be, society can afford them, and there is no need to deny them to ourselves or to the less affluent members of our society, or indeed to the world.” (italics his.) The real question is whether care belongs in that list: I say it does.

So, we do need to reboot the care agenda. We do need to recalibrate away from jobs-focused messaging. What we need is to position care as a national value and show how care bolsters child, family and community vibrancy. Then we’ll have a shared foundation upon which to do the difficult work of determining how best to pay for it.

Casey Stockstill, Dartmouth College sociologist and author of , and Halley Potter, senior fellow and director of PK-12 education policy at the Century Foundation, want to change that. They’ve joined forces to identify successful economically integrated early education programs and document what they look like and how they make it work. I was excited to hear about their work. In my reporting, I too have explored those , including a my kids attended. So, I reached out to Stockstill and Potter to learn more about their work. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kendra Hurley: Why do you think segregation in early education remains so under the radar compared to K-12, and what do we lose when we don’t speak about it, or address it?

Halley Potter: Part of the challenge of talking about segregation in early education is that we haven’t fixed the question of access yet. For all of the challenges in our public schools, at least we have a guaranteed right to an education for students once they start kindergarten. But in early ed, because we still need to make sure more children have access to quality early learning, that’s where most of the conversation stays. But we do need to be having the conversation about segregation as we’re having the conversation about access. If we don’t, then we can end up expanding access on the backbone of our highly inequitable and segregated system.

And that’s a big missed opportunity, because in many ways, early learning environments are best set up to take advantage of a lot of the benefits of diverse educational settings. High quality early learning is play-based — it’s about children interacting with each other— so there’s this great opportunity to have children coming in with different experiences and different vocabularies, creating a really rich learning environment.

Also, parents are talking to teachers more, and [it’s] kind of the whole family coming in to the learning environment, so a diverse community in a classroom can lead to benefits for families as well. You [might] have social connections between a parent who’s looking for a job and a parent who’s looking to hire someone, or knows about a job opening.

There’s evidence that parents are the most receptive and excited about diverse learning environments, during children’s early years. I think of that, and I think, “Let’s capitalize on that.” Getting kids in early education programs when they’re young could help families see the value in that early on, and that might influence their education choices and the ways that they show up in different educational spaces as their kids get older, too.

Casey Stockstill: For many parents, child care is their introduction to school.��So, it’s what��they get used to in terms of their child’s classmates, and how to engage with the teacher, and what to expect.

Also, teaching kids can look really different when you have segregated classrooms. In my book, I observe a Head Start classroom where you have six kids experiencing issues at home because of poverty, or they’re new to preschool because their family moves all the time because of poverty.

Teachers are dealing with those issues, and that can take away time from things like sitting down and reading a book calmly with a child. We add a list of demands to teachers when we give them a classroom of students who are all in poverty. And when you think about majority white preschools, where there’s one or two kids of color with a white teacher, sometimes that doesn’t communicate that it’s welcoming to kids of color. So, I wonder how segregation is making it harder for preschools to do this work of closing equity gaps. I don’t think separate is equal here either.

Hurley: There are so many barriers to integration in early education, parent choice being one of them. How did you choose to focus on programs that are tackling it with funding solutions?

Potter: We have this fractured early education system. We have private programs that charge tuition that is typically unaffordable to lower income families. And then we have many public programs like Head Start which are only open to low-income families, or to children who have met certain other criteria for risk factors. So, we’re set up for segregation.

The real solution is big public investments in early education that make it possible for everyone to access this together. But until we get there, we have to work with the fractured, flawed system we have, and one of the ways to do that is to create more programs that are accepting multiple types of funding streams. And then we can have multiple types of families enrolled.

Stockstill: Bringing different funding streams together (called blending and braiding funding) is the first step to increased accessibility for Black, Latino and Indigenous families. That’s because we have racial gaps in income and wealth. So, if you have a private program that is expensive and inaccessible to middle-income or lower-income families, that program is going to shut out a disproportionate share of Black, Latino and Indigenous families. There’s a hope that programs that do the blending and braiding will also consider racial equity and inclusion, and make their programs welcoming to children and families of color.

Hurley: Tell me about the project you’re working on to that end.

Potter: We’re building a list of early childhood programs that are doing different types of blending and braiding of funding, and are using that as a way to enroll children from diverse backgrounds, diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but also diverse racial backgrounds, and in some cases linguistic diversity and diversity of ability. And part of that will be in-depth profiles of some programs. We’re hoping that showing examples of where a funding strategy has been leveraged to create diversity will help increase the appetite to do that, answer some questions about strategies that work, and also serve as an advocacy tool.

In most cases, blending and braiding really feels like pushing against the tide. If you are a Head Start provider and you want to enroll families who pay tuition, there aren’t a lot of supports to make that happen. If you’re at a private preschool and you’re interested in taking children with child care subsidies, again, it’s usually up to you to figure it out.

Stockstill: I hear quite a bit from directors who say, “We accept the subsidy, but we don’t have any families using it.” And if a family goes through an income loss or can’t make a payment, there are programs that want to be able to continue supporting them. And what I tell them is, “Having a [mixed] funding structure is the answer.” So, there’s this appetite for inclusion, but there are these missing links.

And there are parents who would like a diverse early learning environment. You just usually can’t find one, because we know two-thirds of these programs are segregated. I see it as being helpful to certain programs to offer an integrated program, and to kind of sell that as a plus to affluent parents who basically have more choice.

Hurley: What about the big chain child care programs like Kindercare, Bright Horizons and Primrose? Few of their centers take subsidies or vouchers and their tuition is often quite high, making them inaccessible to many families. Yet they’re capturing a bigger and bigger share of the child care market. Are you planning to look at what they might do to diversity their funding and families?

Stockstill: This category of child care that are chains that do franchising charge the highest tuition, and they do not pay teachers more. For them, it’s profit-seeking. And the administrative cost of blending and braiding funding streams, and also accepting the subsidy rate does not lend well to profit.

There’s always a gap between the subsidy rate — which is what the government offers you to provide care to a kid on the subsidy program — and what programs actually need to serve that kid well. And a lot of the successfully diverse programs like or All Five in Menlo Park, California, make up that difference, through fundraising, or they’ll charge affluent families even more and let them subsidize the diversity. But all of that takes a commitment and an administrative savviness that I don’t see the chains being interested in.

Hurley: Casey, you’re working on program profiles for this project. What have you seen on visits to diverse child care programs that makes you hopeful?����

Stockstill: My favorite thing is hearing the stories of continuity of learning and care for the children. The Auraria Early Learning Center at the Auraria Higher Education Center in Colorado, serves student parents who are eligible for Head Start alongside faculty who pay full tuition. When the students graduate, they suddenly earn a higher income.

So they’re now past eligibility requirements for Head Start, but they can’t afford the $1,200 a month for care. If a family went to a pure Head Start program, they would have to move centers because they’re no longer eligible for Head Start. But because the program has mixed funding, their children can stay as they increase their income or the reverse, like if someone loses the job. It’s like, “you still get to be in this school; you still deserve to come here; it’s not about how much money your family makes.” I love that.

Are you a teacher or parent in a diverse child care program? Reach out to Halley Potter and Casey Stockstill by writing to potter@tcf.org.��

The sector in discussion is child care, and the discussion focuses on what can happen if private equity firms take over a larger share of the child care market. Slaughter was speaking on a panel at a day-long event in Washington D.C. to mark the by the National Women’s Law Center and Open Markets Institute: “Children Before Profits: Constraining Private Equity Profiteering to Advance Child Care as a Public Good.”��

The concerns about private equity’s influence are well founded. by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers result in significant job losses. These firms reduce wages, benefits and staffing at firms they acquire – with devastating consequences to thousands of workers, their families and their entire communities. Private equity funds also should their tactics to maximize profits fail. And for a business like child care, primed to receive a possible influx of federal and state investment, private equity’s interest in the sector is likely to increase.

“The report isn’t anti-private equity, it’s pro-child care,” said Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women’s Law Center and one of the authors of the report. Boteach and her co-author, Audrey Stienon from Open Markets Institute, advocate that child care should be understood as a public good that’s in need of sustained government investment. The report lays out a vision of how a robust child care system would provide universal access to high quality child care with appropriately compensated providers. The goal, says Boteach, is that if private equity firms, or other outside investors, are going to enter the child-care market, they should do so in a way that upholds this vision.

The timing of this report coincides with several states — including , and — instituting record levels of government investment in child care. from the First Five Years Fund also shows strong bipartisan voter support for more child care funding, with 93 percent of voters believing it’s important for working parents of young children to have access to affordable quality child care programs.

Private equity has a history of chasing after industries that receive sustained sources of federal funding. Eileen Applebaum, co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an , who also served as a panelist at the event, detailed the way in which private equity firms began investing in a substantial share of hospice care services. Much of hospice care is funded by Medicare, which pays a fixed amount to the hospice agency for each day an eligible Medicare beneficiary is enrolled, regardless of whether the patient receives actual services on a particular day.

Other tactics from the private equity “playbook” as Applebaum discussed, include myriad anti-competitive behaviors, including consolidation, creating higher debt burdens, cutting labor costs and staff benefits, and enacting policies that maximize short-term profits to the private equity fund while passing on the liabilities and burdens to the individual companies they’d invested in. Applebaum points to the wide discrepancies in profits and patient care for hospice services: profit margins for a nonprofit hospice provider were around 4-5%, and for those owned by private equity firms, it was 19 percent. Nonprofits are more likely to use funds to invest in staffing and the business, debt-financed acquisitions to restructure these companies to maximize their profit margins, and try to sell them to the highest bidder within three to five years.

In the case of hospice, Applebaum that private equity hospice providers have higher rates of neglect, low staffing and are more likely to pass on the higher costs to patients and families.

Child care is in a unique position of being primarily a small business industry, with low profit margins yet with high demand because it is a necessity for many Americans to go to work and for the economy to function. “A textbook example of a broken market” is how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin in the United States. Yet if a child care center is forced to declare bankruptcy, the private equity company may still see a high return on the investment, even though the individual businesses may have shuttered, and the communities that rely on such child care centers may no longer have a viable option.

Boteach emphasized that the presence of private equity and the private sector itself is not problematic – and that the existence of more child care options with high quality care can be a profitable industry if sufficient government funding is provided. Often the individual child care centers are owned by women, many of them Black and brown, with strong ties to the communities they serve. Making such industries profitable so that they can pay their employees a living wage is a noble goal, she said. “The problem,” Boteach explains, “is that private equity firms have a traditional playbook, whereby the firms collect the profits and pass the risk and liabilities back to the companies they’ve taken over. And with the influx of possible public funding, external investors should have guardrails in place to protect the child care industry and the families they serve.”

The report is coming out at a moment in which private equity is poised to enter the child care market, but it is “not yet entrenched,” said Audrey Stienon of Open Markets Institute, and the report’s co-author. “It is possible to get ahead of the problem and change patterns.”

Experts encouraged action to counter the threats of private equity takeover. This can be done at both the state and federal level, though guardrails surrounding government funding.��Examples cited included to create standards and restrict profit for for-profit preschools that receive state funding. In Massachusetts, efforts are underway to limit the amount of state funding any larger company can receive. And for an industry like child care, which many families rely on for their own work, there is potential for real momentum in organizing parents to insist on such accountability measures for the involvement of outside investment groups like private equity. And as Rebecca Slaughter told the group, they need to bring such examples of poor conduct to the attention of the FTC. “I can’t solve a problem if I don’t know about it,” she said.

Child care may have a constituency that is primed to be vocal proponents. “Parents of children are a really good group of people to organize,” said Eileen Applebaum.�� “You have to let them know that they are not alone.”

It’s been a years-long search for the right care provider, starting from the earliest days of my pregnancy. We talked to neighbors and friends about their child care experiences. There have been never-ending online searches, writing down the names of centers we see driving around town so we can look up reviews about them later, noting the names and numbers of providers that parents we meet at the library or the splash pad have liked to find out if they have openings.

I expected “sticker shock.” What I didn’t expect is needing to go on a virtual scavenger hunt to find even basic pricing information from the providers of interest.

Where my family lives in Southern Utah, there are just four child care providers listed on Winnie, a free database for parents to search for care providers in their area, with pages providers can claim and update with details about their offerings at no cost (providers can pay to upgrade their pages to contain more features and to show up higher in search results). Not one of the providers in my town lists the cost of care on their Winnie page. In St. George, the larger city next to us, 26 providers appear in a search, with just 2 listing their prices. One provider’s Winnie page lists its price as a huge range, between $450-$750 a month, which at least helped me to get some ballpark sense of cost. Unfortunately, in lieu of a price or a price range, most providers’ pages say simply, “Contact this provider to inquire about prices and availability.” My wife and I have emailed providers and left voicemails. Usually, we don’t hear back at all. It’s hard to make an educated decision when you don’t have all the information in front of you.

Until you’ve been in a child care search, you may not fully appreciate just how frustrating it is to not readily find price tags for what will be one of your family’s greatest expenses and most important decisions. One way to test Treasury Secretary is to ask how you would react if something common in the child care sector were to take place in another equally vital industry, say in the search for a new vehicle.

Imagine walking around a car lot, looking for your family’s next sedan. Buying a car is critical to your ability to get to work, to earn a living, to your family’s livelihood. You need a car. You spot a couple options that look like the right size and style for your family. But instead of seeing a price painted on the windshield, you see the phrase: “Inquire for pricing.” You go online to the automakers’ website and read a full sales pitch about the make and model of the cars of interest. They’re perfect. But can you afford it? Who knows? Finally, you contact the car dealership. A few days pass before you hear back from a sales person who says they’ll walk you through the price of the cars when you come for a tour and test drive. After all this effort and taking time out of your schedule to visit the dealership, you finally see the price tag, only to realize you cannot afford the car you liked so much. This is often the experience of families searching for child care in America, where public funding is scant.

One of the many problems with child care as a private market is that providers, especially the largest ones with the most funding behind them, have far more power than the families they’re serving. Demand for high quality early care and education far exceeds supply, which means families are competing for much-coveted openings. For many families, child care is a necessity, critical to their ability to earn a living; and good, reliable child care is such a rarity that most families will feel forced to pay whatever the cost. But some families simply cannot, and there are increasingly stark divides between higher income families who can access paid child care services, and lower income families who cannot. found that “among parents with younger children, those with higher income were about twice as likely as those with lower or middle income to use 20 or more hours of paid child care per week.” The lack of price transparency in the sector is a sign of a much larger problem with a profit-driven child care system and the way it ends up treating parents and caregivers alike.

Winnie’s CEO Sara Mauskopf says it’s unfortunate that many providers they encourage to update their pages are reluctant to list their prices directly, worrying that the “sticker shock” a parent feels when they see the cost initially will stop them from considering the provider. Mauskopf says the theory is that if you can get a parent in the door of the center and give them the opportunity to “fall in love” with what they see, they’ll be more likely to enroll their child, even if the price is high.

But Mauskopf says that’s a myth. “When it comes to child care,” said Mauskopf, “You know what you can afford and you can’t really stretch much beyond your range. If some place costs twice as much as your range, there’s not really anything you can do to afford it. So, I think that is just the wrong philosophy.”

In fact, internal data analyzed by Winnie suggests that providers who list their price on their Winnie page than those who do not, likely because people are more likely to pursue the provider once they know they can afford it. Mauskopf also says this hide-and-seek pricing model could only ever make sense for big providers, those with staff members who can give tours to prospective parents during the day, and field phone calls from people just inquiring about prices.

KinderCare, for instance, is the in the United States. Its is bright, inviting and laden with information on their approach to safety, care and education. But nowhere on the website are specific numbers about costs. Even on the individual web pages for specific KinderCare locations, like , which includes a button that says, “Tuition and Openings,” no actual tuition information appears.

I reached out to both KinderCare and another large provider, Bright Horizons, to ask why they don’t include pricing information on their websites, but they did not respond.

Mauskopf said not all providers approach pricing this way. Home-based providers or small center-based providers are less inclined to see the lack of price transparency as a strategic, marketing decision. They already have staff wearing multiple hats, acting both as teachers and as administrators. Needing to also act as tour guides and sales people to families who may not even have the budget to cover tuition is wasted time they can’t afford. For them, the bigger problem with listing their prices may be the burden of updating a website with their costs or even having a web presence to begin with. For most child care providers, whose labor and infrastructure costs alone are incredibly high, margins are too tight to afford a robust marketing team, or even a team that can stay in contact with the host of child care databases like Winnie about their prices and openings.

Dana Levin-Robinson started her company UpFront in 2020 to tackle this problem, as well as a host of problems with transparency in child care. She says private databases like Winnie are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting up-to-date pricing information from providers, simply because it’s hard to get their time and attention when they have so much else going on. She says individual consumers and private companies are both unlikely to have the leverage they need to get providers to share their data and to update it regularly.

Unlike private websites, resource and referral agencies have leverage. Government-operated resource and referral networks contract with UpFront to create user-friendly databases with search filters parents can use to find child care that truly works for them. They not only play a role in licensing providers, but they also connect providers in their networks with publicly funded resources and support. Additionally, Levin-Robinson has found, reaching out with clear, simple asks to providers makes the work of updating information much easier. Instead of emailing a contact with a list of required data fields, Levin-Robinson says, they’ve had more success by being very specific and very simple, asking something like, “You previously listed your price for infant care as $300 a week. Is that the same or has it changed?”

One of UpFront’s clients, the , has pricing data for 4,567 out of 6,256 providers they work with, an astonishing 72 percent of providers. Families looking for child care can search for providers in their area using dozens of different search fields and filters, to almost learn instantly who would and would not work for their family and their budget.

Ultimately, Levin-Robinson suggests, these resource and referral agencies would have even more leverage if transparency about pricing and regular updates a requirement for state licensing and renewal were, something state legislatures could consider enacting. I’d be relieved if my state had information as robust as Maryland’s available with the click of my computer mouse. But ultimately, price transparency is the tip of the iceberg in the ways the child care market has failed American families.

Last week, I sent a desperate, terse website inquiry to a center ten minutes from my house that didn’t list their price online but did offer me the chance to fill out an application that asked me to agree to a particular pay schedule before I even knew if I could afford it. “I’m wondering the price of care for a 15-month-old to see if it’s in my budget. Could you send your cost information?” I wrote. To my surprise Karen, the center’s director, emailed me back within 24 hours. She answered my question directly — $80 a day or $260 a week — and said they had an opening three days a week for a one-year-old. If the price worked for my family — it was steep but no worse than we’d been anticipating — she said she’d be happy to give us a tour and answer any other questions we had.

A few days later, we went for our tour and fell in love with the child care center, something I’d begun to think would never happen. It was the facilities, the teachers, the way even the director and assistant director knew the names of every kid in their care, the way they spoke to us and took our questions seriously, and the environment of play and learning we saw as we poked our heads into each classroom.

I realized that what frustrates me most about our child care search isn’t just the lack of numbers. It was the way this whole experience seemed to disregard the humanity of everyone involved. We’ve been forced to play a shell game in a process that is ultimately about the care and education of our baby, a subject about which we could not feel more tender and vulnerable. Meanwhile, caregivers are attempting to give their time and attention to our children, while also being asked to manage websites, tight budgets, grants and licensing, facilities maintenance and marketing strategies.

If a country truly invested in the care and education of young children — rather than leaving it to the private market and overstretched, overworked parents — child care pricing would not only be transparent, but simple and affordable. It would be abundant and easy to access in every neighborhood. Perhaps I could have saved myself the dozens and dozens of hours I have spent looking for child care since before my son was even born. With publicly funded child care, we could invest what amounts to a huge portion of our income we currently spend on child care in our son’s future. Maybe my stress levels would be lower and my health and happiness higher if figuring all this out and making it work weren’t constantly on my mind.

Maybe the teachers and caregivers who have dedicated their lives to this work would be paid what they deserve for caring for our communities’ youngest human beings and the parents who have entrusted them with their lives and development. Maybe we could all focus, first and foremost, on people.

While Helen Russell’s clever, well-researched exploration of the parenting culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries might not fully map onto the experience of most families in the U.S. or U.K. (Russell’s original home), it offers refreshing insights that can help parents relax a bit, give themselves heaps of grace and have much more fun raising their family. For societies like ours that are confronting crises in practically any arena that concerns our children, Russell’s deep dive into the “Viking way” offers practical, doable approaches that entire nations have proven can work in creating healthy, happy families.

Russell had been in London, “living the city dream” as an editor for MarieClaire’s U.K. online edition when her husband was offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. Both were feeling overworked, overwhelmed, burned out and ripe for a change. Denmark had just been voted the happiest country in the world (not for the first time) and she was intrigued. The couple emigrated and soon found themselves parents of “the redhead and the IVF twins,” which placed them in the thick of Nordic childrearing culture.

After 10 years in her new homeland, Russell still maintains sufficient outsider status to offer observations that are helpful, thought-provoking and sometimes hilarious. Her culture shock winds through anecdotes such as the reminder from her son’s Scout group that, “On Wednesday, we build bonfires! Bring daggers,” or the fact even in big cities, you’ll see rows of “under threes” bundled up in huge Mary Poppins-style prams no matter the weather while mom or dad runs inside for a latte or a sandwich. (It’s considered crucial for babies to be able to lie flat rather than be curled over in a buggy or car seat.)

The Nordic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — share the Viking heritage, descendants of the seafaring folks who roamed (and yes, often marauded) across northern Europe from 800 to 1066 CE. Their hardiness is genetically baked in from those beginnings in a harsh environment, and culturally is encouraged today through common practices such as encouraging babies as young as two weeks to take in plenty of fresh air “to help the lungs develop.” Viking children live outside, Russell says, rain or shine. Given the local climate, this often means rain or worse. If the Nordic countries have a shared motto, it’s “There is no bad weather, there are just the wrong clothes.”

Those of us who prefer the warmth of the hearth to unrelenting cold drizzle easily recognize Russell’s shock at the realization that not only will her children be splashing around in the cold and drear, she, too, will be expected to join in and actually play in all that mess. Viking parents volunteer. They go along. They get out there. Danish children are not issued the appropriate wardrobe at birth, she writes, but they might as well be. In some places, posters are put up reminding parents exactly what children need for each season, from the all-in-one snowsuit and Gore-Tex boots for winter, to the balaclava “elephant hat” that all children wear much of the year in varying thicknesses. Wind-resistant, waterproof and thermal clothing come in the smallest of sizes and are simply a fact of life. Luckily, she writes, the thriving hand-me-down culture means no one has to buy all that kit from scratch. Just look around—and pass along whatever your kids grow out of.

In chapters running the gamut from Viking health and safety to school time, to singing and the social brain, Russell touches on many elements that create the unique Nordic approach to children’s lives — encouraging the risk-taking that fosters resilience and self-confidence; the idea that it’s great to cut loose, go wild and get dirty; the view that play is a sign of well-being; the necessity of developing grit, the freedom to mess up and learn from one’s mistakes — all go into creating happy, well-adjusted children.

It is a given in Nordic parenting that children will figure things out, learn to use their bodies and manage their surroundings. They are raised to trust themselves and others from the very beginning. Samfundssind, or community mindset, is the bedrock of Nordic society and from infancy, children are raised to consider the ethos of “the greater good,” even when it means a bit of discomfort for themselves. In Nordic society, fathers are parents and are expected to be involved in all aspects of their children’s upbringing. Real Viking dads change diapers and wouldn’t respect a father who didn’t, she writes.

In each chapter, Russell offers observations that even the most urban, most non-Nordic parent can incorporate to create opportunities for greater freedom and self-reliance for their children, even at very young ages. Her tone is chatty, self-deprecating and sometimes veers a bit cute, but especially for new parents, “How to Raise a Viking” is a delightful, liberating handbook that encourages loosening our grip a bit, trusting our children and each other a lot, and helping our children grow into their richest, most authentic selves.

However, none of Russell’s great examples or clever observations would be sufficient for someone living in a non-Nordic country to raise a child gloriously expressing all the best Viking values. No matter how hard you might try to go it alone, you need a society that supports those values. A quick answer to “How do you raise a Viking?” would be, live in a society that values children in real, practical, unwavering ways, not as entities deserving of lip service prior to elections, but as the bedrock of a society that intends to have a future. This is where policymakers might want to look at “How to Raise a Viking” and check out the lengthy citations in each chapter. It’s no secret that American society must make fundamental changes in how we support parents and children if we are to move forward in a functional, even sensible way. In “How to Raise a Viking,” resources abound that might help move that needle.

Reading Russell’s chapters on government-subsidized child care, parental leave, free healthcare, free education and free dental treatment and a work week that generally clocks in at 33 hours can make the reader wistful for why we can’t have nice things. Yes, taxes are high, but it’s hard to argue with the societal payoffs. (See “happiest country in the world,” above.)

Nordic society isn’t perfect. Some U.S. educators would no doubt take issue with how reading and academic achievement don’t really receive much emphasis until a child is 8 or so, though as Russell points out, children in Nordic countries play for longer, learn later, but still do better in the long run than children in the U.S. and U.K. — and are happier. There are clouds on the horizon, as children in Nordic countries are now getting smartphones and devices at earlier ages, which is causing as much headache and consternation there as it does over here.

In her Epilogue, Russell writes that she knows the idea of the Viking spirit isn’t a package of ideas that can be shipped and adopted wholesale; they are elements to strive toward. By 2050, she writes, economists predict that 40 percent of current jobs will be lost to automation. Right now, we simply don’t know what our jobs our children will be doing in their adulthood. But they will need resilience, adaptability, grit and the ability to think for themselves.

That’s the Viking spirit.

I about the strange schism between early child care and school-aged child care, and I don’t want to belabor the point other than to say parents of school-aged children represent a shockingly untapped care constituency. Instead, I want to talk about summer care, and summer camp specifically. I recently had the chance to do a podcast recording with the American Camp Association (ACA), alongside the outstanding economist Kathryn Anne Edwards. I also don’t want to get out ahead of the podcast, so I’ll just say one part of the conversation that stood out to me was thinking about summer care needs as a door to movement-building. [UPDATE 6/7/24: The podcast is now live and available .]

After all, one of the major mindset barriers that holds back child care policy is the idea that child care needs are entirely individual family obligations, and thus the state has little-to-no role. I frequently quote a : “the conceptual shift away from thinking about one’s situation as an individual problem or as a problem caused by fate or nature, to thinking about it as a social or public problem, is widely understood to be a necessary, if insufficient, condition for political action.”

Summer care seems to offer many of the factors necessary for that conceptual shift. For one, it’s easy to see the absurdity of providing free public schools (and its child care) for seven hours a day, nine months out of the year, and then suddenly leaving a multi-month gap. While the discussion over how we got here is interesting, and has , the fact is summer’s a for millions and millions of families. This is also a distinctly American headache: journalist Katherine Goldstein recently in which she reported:

I was not able to find any other Western country that has the combination of long summer breaks, no mandated paid vacation time, minimal subsidized options and a dominant cultural belief that kids need constant supervision, especially in public places. Clearly articulating all of these factors really helps me understand how we find ourselves in Hunger Games-like registration battles and spending thousands per kid per summer, just so parents can continue their jobs (emphasis hers).

Moreover, summer camp has the advantage of nostalgia. Early child care is still fighting for its reputation, and there are plenty of Americans—as many as half, —who think young children have little business being cared for outside the home. Not so with summer camps. According to the ACA, more than 26 million kids attend a form of summer camp every year. that they look back on fondly decades after the fact; I know I do. It is what marketers might call an ‘easy sell.’

Finally, it’s worth noting that the falls heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class families. Lower-income families are from camp participation altogether due to things like cost, transportation and not being available to sit at a computer at 8 a.m. repeatedly hitting refresh as if trying to acquire a Taylor Swift concert ticket. Thus, there is a major opportunity for cross-class solidarity in improving summer care options. (Reducing the length of summer break is unlikely to be a viable lever: despite the summer scramble, year-round school by parents.)

It is not uncommon for less popular policy ideas to ride along with more popular ones. To use the example of a different ACA, the Affordable Care Act’s restriction on insurance companies discriminating due to preexisting conditions was one of the keys to its passage in the face of opposition. Child care has its own history here: as Sally Cohen details in on federal child care policymaking, the Child Care and Development Block Grant passed in 1990 largely as a “sidekick” to the more-popular Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet as far as I’m aware, there is currently no major national proposal around summer child care.

I don’t want to overstate the case. Creating a comprehensive birth-to-13 child care system is going to be expensive and complex, and no one is going to be hoodwinked by including a robust mechanism for increasing the supply and affordability of summer camps. We still need to argue for early care and education on its own merits, and we should not pretend that early care needs and school-aged needs are identical. I wonder, though, if summer care shouldn’t be closer to the tip of the spear, rather than a forgotten cousin.

There’s a reason why women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them and that if they don’t hold everything together Macgyver-like with pluck, grit, duct tape and dental floss, their worlds could fall apart.

The reason is because it’s true. Maybe not the part about the duct tape, but the reason so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving is that the United States doesn’t have a robust social safety net the way many other industrialized countries do. We have no federal child care infrastructure and no federal paid family leave plan. We’ve skipped over the safety net chapter on how to run a country and instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack.

Calarco, who works as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, made headlines in November 2020 when her quote: “Other countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women” went viral. It resonated while still getting to the heart of what makes being a caregiver in this country so incredibly frustrating: it’s hard, it’s time-consuming and women are expected to do it while being given no support, financial or otherwise. It also served as the basis for Calarco’s new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco spoke with Early Learning Nation about everything from the outdated Supermom myth to the role humor plays in perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes.

A lightly edited and condensed Q+A is below.

Rebecca Gale: Your book talks about the United States’ insistence on maintaining the illusion of a DIY society — that each of us should make our own decisions and take care of our problems without help from anyone else. But given that people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives, why do you think this illusion has endured for such a long time?��

Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don’t need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems – child care, health care – they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations, which is threatening to people as it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us: exploitation. They have an interest in maintaining the illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.

RG: Really?

JC: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s, then was imported to the U.S. for manufacturers to use to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the U.S. and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.

RG: So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care and why women are expected to make up the difference?��

JC: Part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don’t have a social safety net like universal child care and universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it’s not ever going to work within our profit-based economic system, without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.

We have pushed the labor-intensive work disproportionately onto women. You can see that in industries like child care, home health care, services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable: women, prisoners and immigrants. We have an interest in this DIY model: the more we create conditions where people are forced to take the job reinforces the perception that this job must be less valuable.

Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as the moral or emotional benefit that must make up for what is not paid. So, you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.

RG: One framework you discuss in the book is that low-income women are unable to say no as they need the work, especially those in caregiving roles, so they say yes, even to situations that may be untenable to them.��

JC: Yes, we see this especially for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, who have nowhere to turn for support. It is a two-way trap. I give the example of a woman named Patricia in the book. She’s a low-income Black mother who has a number of young children, also working a full-time job. She is carrying the burden on that front. She decides to cut back to working four days instead of five. Once her extended family finds out she has the day off, she winds up driving folks to the grocery store and doctors’ appointments. She wants to find a way to say no, but says “I’m their only hope.”

We have decimated communities so they have so few resources to go around. They know the people they love have nowhere else to turn. Patricia worries, ‘what if I need help one day?’ She ended up divorcing her partner, had five young kids at home, including newborn twins, and when she was home recovering from a c-section, she ended up needing that support from her network. She was glad she had not pushed them away at that moment and opted instead to help the other people around her as well.

RG: You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of “Good Choices Won’t Save Us.” I know that ties into the neoliberalism you mentioned earlier, but let’s unpack that further. Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they’d never have a need for a social safety net?

JC: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don’t have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. This has been fully debunked – a social safety net does protect people.

People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It’s not that choices don’t matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.

RG: What about childbirth? That’s a pretty binary viewpoint. Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes.��

JC: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can’t manage. Whether it’s childbirth or environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can’t manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people. They should be able to figure out what the choices are and how to protect themselves from risk.

We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it’s your fault if you didn’t figure it out and make it.

RG: Let’s talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you’ve posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?

JC: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives, they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.

I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They’re told: ‘Stop being a nag. Can’t you lighten up?’

Sexist humor seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society they’re part of.

RG: Can you give an example?

JC: Andrew Tate is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter turned YouTuber who is banned from a number of different public platforms for his misognystic messaging, like ‘Women should be men’s property in marriage.’ One of the problems with that is that if he is able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying ‘at least I don’t believe the extreme version of it.’

RG: My favorite chapter in your book is the one that concentrates on the Supermom Myth. Why do you think this myth persists, even as so much research and general wisdom seems to contradict that idea that women should be doing it all?

JC: We tell women in our society that they are the best protectors for children. If all else fails, it is their responsibility to make sure children are safe. In a society with a lot of risk, there’s a lot to protect them from.

This kind of messaging—where women are supposed to view motherhood as the top protector from the threats of the world—is that it primes them for fearmongering. It can persuade women that they need to go above and beyond. Some are cloaked in religious messaging like Critical Race Theory, or transgender kids and public schooling, or similar fear mongering along those lines.

It can take more secular forms too, like the fear of downward mobility; the idea that if��you don’t get into the right college your life will be a disaster, or if you don’t have that investment banking job, your life will be ruined.

These fears can lead mothers to sacrifice themselves. Even if they have the resources for full-time child care, these fears can lead them to decide to stay home full time, believing that is the way to protect the child.

RG: But why are mothers the ones to shoulder this burden?

JC: We have these twisted ideas about biology because women have historically done that work, as opposed to recognizing the socialization influences. For example, girls are trained to be mothers from the time they can hold a baby doll. All the evidence suggests that young girls are pushed into these responsibilities at a young level.

With early socialization, these roles get more ingrained and it becomes easier for women to do that work. In the Supermom Myth, if moms have the most experience managing the responsibility, it can feel threatening if dad isn’t doing it as well. One of the saddest things we found about the pandemic research was the way angry dads were exacerbating the situations at home.

We did a big national survey in September 2020, and asked how often are you yelling at your kids? For college-educated white fathers, the numbers were off the chart. Those are the dads that were able to work remotely during the pandemic. In couples where both parents could work remotely part of the time, dads didn’t have the experience of working for pay while caring for children, which led to high levels of frustration. In one example from the book, on the days a dad was home he was angry, yelling at the kids. He didn’t have that kind of experience to navigate the challenges, so the mom was deeply worried and took on all the child care herself.

RG: When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what’s your takeaway?

JC: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us that the system works, which makes it incredibly hard to create the safety net that we need and deserve.

People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others.��We need to be up front about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives – even as it reduces some of the inequalities between us.

My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help people see where this DIY model comes from and how it’s hurting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.

And that’s a good thing, says Dr. Susan B. Neuman, professor of childhood and early literacy at New York University, even if a parent or caregiver feels as though they might crack if they read their toddler “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?“��one more time. Repetition is one of the elements that help connect children not only with words but with the world those words create.

Neuman has researched and written extensively on literacy learning for young children. Her paper for the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, “,” examines an intervention designed to improve low-income children’s vocabulary and knowledge in science.

In choosing books for the study, Neuman says, one of the criteria was the book’s “repeatability.”

“We wanted short reads,” Neuman says, “ones where the child could say, ‘Oh, that was so much fun. Read it to me again!’ And that’s when you say to yourself, ‘All right. I’ve made it.’ ”

The year-long study involved pre-K through first grade classrooms in 12 elementary schools with from 71% to 100% free-and-reduced lunches (a community poverty measurement) in a large metropolitan area. Classrooms were randomly selected to participate in a supplemental program in which the children were read aloud to about science topics. The control classrooms simply offered the usual curriculum; the study’s total sample included 24 intervention classrooms and 21 control classrooms. Before classes began, pre-K and kindergarten teachers for the intervention classrooms participated in a day of training to review the texts to be used and examine how the topics built on one another to establish big ideas in science. Teachers in each school were assigned a coach responsible for supporting the intervention throughout the year.

The results were noteworthy: Children in the read-aloud group learned significantly more words and science concepts than those in the control groups, with growth for English language learners (ELL) exceeding that of native speakers.

More than Words

has long been a passion for Neuman, who helped bring public attention to the fact that exist in the U.S. in which there are virtually no books for children living in poverty. Indeed, poverty is one of the most powerful determinants of whether a child is ready to learn to read at the “starting gate” of preschool and kindergarten. In the late 1990s, acknowledging the “word gap” experienced by children in poverty helped spur interest in foundational skills such as print concepts (for instance, that we read from left to right in English), word recognition and phonics, Neuman says. But even recognizing and addressing the word gap fails to tell the whole story. Before they reach kindergarten, the average cognitive score of children in the nation’s highest socioeconomic group is 60% above the score of children in the lowest-income group—an even deeper problem for children who are non-native English speakers, who now represent nearly one in five U.S. students.

Learning to read and acquire knowledge is a cumulative process. As children begin to grow their vocabulary and gain conceptually rich knowledge, they’re then able to learn at a faster rate, a snowball effect that enables them to keep deepening their understanding of the world. So, while the focus on teaching children fundamentals and phonics was important, Neuman said she and her team were concerned by how little interest there seemed to be in vocabulary-building and seeing to it that children developed the background knowledge so central for comprehension.

“(For a long time) there was the notion that children should just learn words without them being connected to knowledge,” she says. “Even when I went to school, we would have this list of words to learn, and we’d have to look up their definition in a dictionary. But we never knew exactly why we were doing this.

“Why should a child learn to read? Why would they want to do this?”

One very good answer to that question? Science!

“Our study focused on science for a number of reasons,” Neuman says. “Children are fascinated with their world. They’re interested in their environment; they’re fascinated with such common things as the weather. Worms are interesting. Animals are interesting. Everything is new.

“Math is important, but to a young child, it isn’t as intriguing as science. Also, science is very structured as a domain, so you can use it to develop concepts. When you develop concepts, you begin to cluster ideas together and children begin to make inferences,” Neuman explains.

She adds, “For example, a child might learn that insects have six legs and three body parts. Is a moth an insect, then? Yes. Well, what about a spider? Well, no, because spiders have eight legs. The child begins to understand similarities and differences, which form concepts that provide them with the rich knowledge base that allows them to fill in those semantic gaps where the meaning may not be crystal clear, but you fill in the blanks. That’s how children begin comprehending.”

From concepts like, “Bugs have six legs,” the conversation expands to domains, such as “Bugs are living things; lions are living things. What do living things need?” That discussion leads to big ideas that crosscut the concepts, such as all living things needing food, water and air. And from there, it isn’t long until you’re talking with a bunch of kindergartners about habitats.

“What you see them doing is building a schema, or a knowledge network that allows them to remember those concepts and recall them when they’re needed,” she says. “When they learn about survival, for instance, and they read in different genres, they have that knowledge of vocabulary that becomes deeper and deeper over time.”

Reading Aloud

The researchers set up the study as a read-aloud program because studies have shown that this is one of the most important vehicles for developing rich vocabularies and content knowledge. Before the children can read on their own, a teacher or parent reading to them introduces the idea that those squiggles on the page are words, those images are connected to the squiggles, and they can learn to read those squiggles, too.

“Nothing else is quite as powerful as the read-aloud experience,” Neuman says. “What we know is that very often when parents read to a child, they’re not just reading the book, they’re talking about things related to the book — how they’re living, what they’ve done. For instance, a parent might say, ‘Do you remember when we did this?’ The book will recall events and histories between the parent and child, which becomes so powerful for them.

“And when a child is looking at a book and asking questions, the parent responds, and the questions keep coming. So, parents need to be responsive to children’s queries.”

Those questions and answers create our old friend, , the back-and-forth mechanism that adults use to extend children’s language.

It’s also important, Neuman says, to call it quits when the book isn’t working for the child. Nobody wants bedtime book-reading to be like soldiering through a bad book-club selection.

The Right Book

The researchers used specific criteria to select books for the program, Neuman says.

1. The books had simple text, with beautiful, simple pictures that represented the diversity of the children they were working with.
2. The books were “predictable,” meaning they had repeated lines that would encourage the children to chime in and would encourage the reader to solicit the child’s response, “What do you see?”
3. The illustrations were clear. Neuman says even many pre-K books that may have only a few main words often have confusing illustrations. Clear illustrations with bold colors are best because children love bold colors and will pay attention to them.
4. Keep it simple and short. “A lot of times, parents make a mistake by selecting something a bit too complicated for children,” she says. “They’ll look and see that it’s a picture book. But you need to look inside and if there’s too much detail or too many words, maybe pass on that one. I’d rather read, repeat and read the story again than have a too-complicated book that loses the child’s interest.”

Nonfiction for the Win

Though some adults may think children need storybooks with cute animals and characters to pique their interest, Neuman says the research shows that they’re equally interested in informational, nonfiction or narrative nonfiction texts.

“We just did an eye-tracking study where we were looking at children’s attention as they’re being read to,” she says. “It’s very clear from our study that they like informational text just as much as storybooks and their attention was high with both genres. Yet, they remembered more, and the learning was stronger from the informational text. So, I encourage parents and teachers to think about that.”

The bottom line, Neuman says, is that children need both word and world (content knowledge) to learn to read and understand complex texts in later grades. Starting early is crucial, and children learn to understand words when they hear them frequently over time and in multiple domains.

So go ahead; start from the top. And again.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see …

These are magic words for Alvin Irby, a former teacher and the founder and executive director of Created in 2013, Barbershop Books is a nonprofit organization that distributes books to barbershops across the country, provides literacy training to barbers and inspires Black boys to read for fun.

A chance encounter with a student was the inspiration behind Barbershop Books. While Irby was getting a haircut, he noticed one of his first-grade students looking bored and antsy in the chair sitting next to him. “All I kept thinking the whole time was he should be practicing his reading right now. I wished I had a children’s book to give him, but I didn’t,” said Irby. As a Black man and an educator, Irby recognized that a barbershop setting presents a unique opportunity for educational support and enrichment.

Barbershops are not simply places where Black boys get a haircut a few times each month, but rather, places where they bond with and learn from Black men. According to the Pew Research Center, of public school teachers are Black men. Irby believes that an absence of Black reading role models at school and at home can contribute to decreased reading motivation and poor reading performance, but barbers can help close the gap by encouraging young boys to read.

Instead of rifling through old magazines, boys at participating barbershops can choose from a wide range of stimulating, funny books geared toward children. The bookshelves are intentionally kid-sized, and the material is chosen based on the recommendations of young Black boys. Barbershop Books has distributed over 50,000 books and partnered with over 250 barbershops in over 50 cities. “Every inch in a barbershop is valuable real estate, so if a barbershop owner lets you keep something in their shop, it is generally because it adds value. So the fact that we have all these barbershops that continue to remain program partners year after year is a testament to the efficacy and the value of the program,” said Irby.

This year, to sponsor Barbershop Books programming in 10 new participating barbershops in Las Vegas. During Super Bowl week, the NFL Commissioner and 20 former NFL players helped them give away free haircuts and more than 1,000 children’s books. Although the program is intentionally non-rostered and its drop-in nature makes it challenging to quantify the number of boys Barbershop Books impacts, the organization estimates it reaches 15,000 boys annually. One of those boys, , is a ten-year-old from Harlem and a former New York State Youth Poet Laureate who is often found reading at his local barbershop.

Watch:

Although Irby is the leader of an organization dedicated to inspiring kids to read for fun, he admits that he did not enjoy reading as a child. His mother was an elementary school teacher who practiced reading lessons with him and expected him and his siblings to read proficiently, but he never saw her curl up and enjoy a good book. Irby now recognizes that there is an important distinction between reading identity and reading proficiency. When people hear about Barbershop Books, they typically think that the program helps kids develop a love of reading. Irby believes children can fall in and out of love with interests, just like adults, but when kids identify as readers it becomes a part of who they are and their regular practices and habits. The organization’s work, therefore, “is not just to help kids develop a love for reading, but to create the type of conditions and curate the type of content that cultivates Black boys’ reading identity.”

Susan B. Neuman, professor of Childhood and Literacy Education at New York University and specialist in early literacy development, conducted a two-year evaluation of the Barbershop Books program in Philadelphia. In a new report exclusively shared with Early Learning Nation, Neuman found that the presence of books at participating barbershops and barbers’ support for reading positively affected self-image and Black boys were more likely to identify as readers. The study divided barbershops into control and treatment sites and worked with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) students to observe children’s behavior and reading patterns. The treatment sites were given a bookcase filled with books geared toward children, and barbers received literacy training.

Neuman says, “Students appeared to benefit from the program in their views of reading as fun and cool, and scored statistically higher in identifying themselves as readers compared to the control group.” That finding is particularly meaningful for Irby. Barbershop Books has been cultivating the reading identity of Black boys for the past decade, but this is the first time that independent research has shown how their programming impacts reading behavior. To Irby’s knowledge, this is the first time an organization has demonstrated that an intervention has significantly impacted the reading identity development of children.

Books at participating barbershops are all “boy-approved,” meaning selections are made based on what children in Barbershop Books’ target demographic are most interested in reading. The vast majority of boys express that they enjoy reading funny books. Survey results from Scholastic’s echo this trend. Scholastic found that and that humor is the top criteria that kids consider when selecting their reading material.

Funny, silly books can make reading a fun and positive experience for children and encourage them to read more often. It seems like a simple formula: understand what kids like and make that content more readily available to boost reading engagement. However, Irby believes that “many adults have opinions about what children should be reading, and far too often those opinions are not informed by the actual interests or preferences of children.” That’s one of the reasons he created Reading So Lit, a reading identity exploration and assessment platform that helps children better understand and articulate their reading preferences. The tool asks children about their interests and invites them to reflect on things like their favorite genre or their favorite reading spot in an effort to capture their reading attitudes and behaviors. The platform collects data that helps educators develop curriculum that is more relevant and engaging for students and can accelerate their reading achievement. Last year, Reading So Lit and was recognized as a catalyst in the field.

Barbershop Books recently launched “Reading So Lit Summer.” This virtual 2-week reading identity exploration program inspires boys to read for fun, and trains high school students of color to lead interactive literacy lessons. In turn, the program can inspire more Black teens to become educators and give young boys relatable literacy role models. The program has already made a profound impact. Teacher and caregiver surveys from the pilot program found that “Reading So Lit Summer” increased student vocabulary and world knowledge, increased reading self-efficacy and confidence, improved reading engagement and motivation, and supported positive reading identity development.

Our nation is in the midst of a literacy crisis that requires innovative solutions. of Black fourth-grade boys in the United States are not proficient in reading, and reading scores have fallen to their lowest levels in decades. It is time to think beyond phonics and boosting proficiency scores and to understand what kids are actually interested in reading, the conditions in which they like to read, and how to make reading a natural part of children’s routines.

“If as soon as the school day ends kids don’t want to touch a book, and as soon as the school year ends and they are not reading anything at all, then a lot of those gains in proficiency are lost,” said Irby. That is precisely why Barbershop Books is “unapologetically” and “doggedly” focused on reading identity development. The organization is part of an emerging field that emphasizes the non-academic elements of reading success such as reading identity, confidence and motivation that have not traditionally been the focus of literacy assessments. These elements are essential for sustaining reading progress and encouraging kids to read for fun and for themselves. Irby believes that cultivating reading identity is especially important in this time of budget cuts, library closures and book bans so that children are motivated to read outside of school hours and are passionate about reading regardless of external factors.

Barbershop Books has taken a unique, innovative approach that helps kids develop a lifelong relationship with reading and empowers them to say words that unlock a world of possibilities, “I’m a reader!”

These moments of connection are sweet, emotional encounters, but researchers know they are much more. Research scientists at the University of Washington’s (I-LABS) recognize this “social ensemble” as the nascent that lay down the pathway to language — the gateway to connection, education and the world of ideas. Given that these distinctive interactions appear to be universal and uniquely human, I-LABS researchers wondered what their developmental purpose could be. What they found was not only that the babies’ brains “lit up” during these interactions, but that the degree to which individual babies responded to social interactions predicted the child’s language growth beyond 2-½ years of age.

“What we were trying to see is whether that social ensemble — the parentese, the warm smiles, the touches, and the back and forth that says you’re paying attention — has a (developmental) goal in addition to the emotion that’s connecting these two people,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS’ co-director, and holder of the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, who led a groundbreaking longitudinal study linking infants’ individual brain responses to social interactions and their future language development.

Using a magnetoencephalography () brain-imaging device — a safe, silent, noninvasive technique I-LABS has tailored for studying infants — the researchers monitored the brains of a group of 5-month-old infants during social and nonsocial interactions with an adult. The researchers then followed up with the children at 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 months. Their findings were published in the April issue of and represent the first such study to track the relationship between infants’ social responses and their language acquisition.

Arriving Ready for Language

Even before they produce their first words, infants are learning phonetic sound patterns. They come into the world able to pick out the human sounds that make up words in any language. Previous independent studies have shown that there is a “sensitive period” for phonetic learning between 6 months and one year when these initial universal phonetic capacities narrow down and become specific to their native languages.

“Testing the babies at 5 months was important because we were trying to establish that this social connection that lights up the baby’s brain and gets them ready to learn comes first and sets them up for when this sensitive period begins,” says Kuhl, the study’s lead author. “The social interaction is of cognitive importance and gets the baby ready for what’s coming around six months. The exaggerated face and silly-sounding speech (the ‘ensemble’) come intuitively and are the original ‘hook’ that pulls them and primes them for the learning to come.”

For the study, Kuhl says, researchers set the infants up in the MEG device and an adult female researcher engaged with the baby, speaking in parentese and reacting warmly back and forth using the tried-and-true adult-baby call and response. For the experiment’s nonsocial control, the researcher would then turn and speak to another adult seated just out of the infant’s view. The intention was to capture typical social interactions that babies experience regularly in their home environments.

The researchers’ findings showed that at 5 months, face-to-face social verbal interaction between an infant and an adult who’s sensitive to the baby’s cues significantly increases the child’s brain activity in regions involved with attention, compared with a nonsocial control. Even more exciting to those interested in babies’ language learning, the scientists found that babies’ individual levels of brain activity during the social interactions showed a strong positive association with their subsequent language skills.

“Not all children’s brains lit up to the same degree to the social ensemble,” Kuhl says. “Their social attention is different. The ones with more social attention learned language faster.”

The Joy of Face-to-Face

Kuhl says the researchers knew from previous studies that social interaction — rather than, say, watching a video or app — is essential for language learning. The current study shows that parents’ natural use of parentese, coupled with smiles, touch and their warm volley and return captures infants’ attention at an early age and makes them ready to latch onto language when that sensitive window opens around 6 months.

The researchers didn’t use the children’s parents in this study because they were concerned their history of interaction might color the babies’ responses, nor did they have the researcher turn from the baby to use a smartphone or device because they have seen in other research how upsetting that is to the babies. The researcher interacting with the babies had not met them before the experiment began but started the kind of natural interaction with them that might occur in the grocery store or when other adults drop over for a visit. She cooed back and forth with the baby, then, on cue, looked away to interact with another researcher “offstage” for a moment. On another cue, she turned back to the baby and began the social interaction again.

The babies’ little brains loved all that attention and weren’t happy (as observed by MEG’s neural light show) when they were being ignored. Some babies’ brains really sparked at the social interaction and those were the babies who, by 2-½ years, showed the greater vocabularies and more sophisticated use of language.

This doesn’t mean that babies have to be attended to at all times or they’re going to lose out on language skills, Kuhl is clear to state. No helicopter parenting here!

“That would be the wrong message to take from this research,” she says. “Part of these interactions’ special nature is that they only come occasionally. The interaction is there, then it goes away, and next time it comes, it’s like Christmas — something to be anticipated and excited about. So, parents shouldn’t stress and think, ‘Oh my gosh, here’s one more thing I have to think to do.’ Its magic is that it’s unexpected and babies are overjoyed by that.”

More Questions, More Studies

As good studies do, this one has prompted almost as many questions as it’s answered. For one thing, researchers want to know about what’s happening with the brains of babies whose mothers are dealing with clinical depression.

“In mothers who have clinical depression, you don’t see the smiles, the parentese and the warm interactions,” Kuhl says. “There are all kinds of issues with these children, one of which is a depressed affect and a slow growth of language.”

The current study also points to a greater understanding of autism and draws attention to other research, such as that of Dr. Karen Pierce of t he University of California San Diego, et al, showing that babies’ reduced attention to parentese can both contribute to downstream language and social challenges, and help diagnose toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

“When (Pierce) tests young children who are at risk for autism (because they have a sibling with autism) with a social versus nonsocial stimulus — such as people interacting versus cars or just sound — the children with autism tend not to like social, people-oriented stuff,” Kuhl says. “And the more they tend not to, the more severe their clinical symptoms for autism are.”

Another fascinating study in the I-LABS pipeline is the differences between mothers and fathers in their deployment of parentese. Preliminary research indicates that men are talking to their babies only 25 percent of the time, compared with mothers. They do use the social ensemble to interact with babies, but ongoing research is looking at whether fathers stop using parentese earlier in the child’s development, and if they do, why that may be the case.

�³󲹳�’s that about? We’ll have to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we can go ahead and indulge our impulse to engage in that silly social way with babies and know that we aren’t just forming emotional connections; we’re helping open their pathway to life with other humans.

“I suppose if you were on an island by yourself and had all the survival skills you needed to discover food, water and shelter, you might be able to survive as an isolate,” Kuhl says. “But everything we know about human beings is that we inherently crave connection with each other. And language is the gateway to any communicative connection we have. It’s our social-emotional glue.”

Elliot Haspel: First off, tell me: Why did you decide to write this book?

Elissa Strauss: So, it really came from two almost contradictory places that came together in the end. On one hand, I reported for years all about why we don’t have paid leave, why don’t we have universal and affordable child care or eldercare, why is there still so much maternal discrimination in the workplace, why are too many moms still dying during labor? So, all this stuff that moms, and caregivers more broadly, had stacked up against them in society. And part of me felt like I got to a place where I couldn’t write one more paid leave article—I’m absolutely, very glad other people are still beating that drum!—I wanted to dig deeper. And I thought, you know what, there’s something else that I could be focusing on: the cultural roots of the care crisis.

Track two was that when I became a mom in 2012—and I think this is still alive and well—there was very much a sense that it was not cool to like motherhood. You had Rachel Cusks’ being passed around a Brooklyn playgrounds like ‘I’m handing you the truth,’ and that’s a book that really presents motherhood and selfhood as a zero-sum game. And look, I don’t wanna come down against the burden narrative of motherhood, because I think it’s important to also talk about the stresses, especially in the United States. But it felt like there was so much of it.

It took me a beat to realize actually these things are connected. I was writing about why our society doesn’t value caregiving, but I myself in my life didn’t really value caregiving. I wanted to have kids. I love my son, but I thought I had to partition it off from everything else in my life, in order to be legit.

Haspel: That’s one reason I really appreciate this book. It does come at a different angle than a lot of the books, even the books that I write, which are much more on the policy side of things. You had this fascinating chapter on when women’s movements embraced care, talking about this lesser-known feminist history of women who saw care as something really to be valued. Could you talk a little bit about what you found when looking into that?

Strauss:��Yeah, that was some of the most exciting research in the book, that and the whole world of care ethics.

Haspel: Oh, we’re going to get into that, don’t worry!

Strauss: They were the two like, ‘Oh, my gosh, why was this never taught to me?’ parts. So you know, many of the feminisms I cycled through—all important, all which fed me and nourished me, and made a world that I like living in, whether a career feminism or sex-positive feminism or reproductive rights feminism—either they ignored care or they didn’t necessarily have terribly nice things to say about care.

And then when I went digging, I found right there were lots of other feminisms, and they don’t say women should be home, you know. I feel like we’ve been set up by Phyllis Schlafly stuff, we’ve been set up as you’re either pro-women staying home and valuing care, or you’re pro-women leaving the house and seeing care as something that holds women back.

And it turns out there is a third way—and not just one we’re imagining now, but that women imagined a hundred-plus years ago. So, the first time I saw this, historically speaking, was with the fight to get women the vote, and how women actually relied on their authority as mothers and caregivers to make the argument that their voice mattered in the populace, that they needed to contribute to selecting our leaders because they had special insights on account of being active caregivers.

They were called ‘social housekeepers’ or ‘municipal housekeepers,’ and it was a very powerful movement. One named Rheta Childe Dorr wrote that a woman’s place is home, but home is everywhere. Even that feels like such an inversion of all categories we use to think about women’s participation in public life. And you know, these social housekeepers make great gains, in addition to helping successfully get women the vote. They also made sure that there were public playgrounds, children weren’t working, there was clean drinking water.

And, of course there’s a tension: this may not have been palatable if these women didn’t wear the motherhood cloak. But I think to fully take away that care was its own powerful lens to look at, that is demeaning care. To be overly cynical about it and say, ‘well, of course they had to do that because men wouldn’t have wanted their voices if they were trying to be truly equal to men.’ That’s true! Yet, I personally refuse to accept the idea that a bunch of moms or caregivers don’t have interesting things to say.

You know, there were a number of Black feminist leaders that thought like this, especially as welfare became a dirty word because Black women needed it. So, we have Johnnie Tillmon, one of the great welfare activists, and her vision of feminism is one that really makes room for being able to care: when the household needs you and the family needs you, you should be able to do that. It should be a right, not to mention a privilege and a joy.

Haspel: So, I want to jump to the last two chapters and the conclusion, because that’s some of the stuff that honestly stopped me in my tracks a little bit. We’re so used to talking about care in instrumental terms, right? Like what it can do for your ability to work. We lose sight of the bigger questions. Can we start with the fact there is this field of philosophy known as care ethics that is, I think, pretty under-acknowledged and under-appreciated. What is that, and what can we learn from scholars of care ethics?

Strauss: To start very broad, we have these ideas of what it means to be a good person and what it is to do the right thing, and how we figure that out. One of the big ideas is a rules-based way to think about it: We follow, maybe, the Ten Commandments or the classroom rule. So we don’t cheat or steal because ‘thou shall not cheat or steal.’ Or maybe we have a more virtue-based approach to ethics, and we think ‘I have these core traits that are good traits,’ like I am honest. Therefore, I don’t cheat or steal. And then there’s something that’s very fashionable here in Northern California which is a more utilitarian approach, that if you can just data-ify everything you could somehow come up with a formula—not to dismiss any of these, even though some people take it too far—that you could figure out what’s the right thing to do by figuring out what would create maximum good in the world.

So, care ethics comes in, and it introduces something to the world of philosophy that was left out for a long time — and that is relationships. That sometimes the right thing to do is actually rooted in that one and only person before you, and that one and only moment that you’re in. An example I use in the book is around when you have to think about cheating or being dishonest. If your kid had a horrible day of bullying at school, and they had a book report, and it’s ten o’clock at night, maybe you help them more than you usually would, and you think it’s not the best and most right thing, but that is actually the best thing for that relationship. Care ethicists are hardly saying, ‘Oh, relationships should be everything,’ but they want them included in our conception of what it means to do right by others.

Adding to that, once you’re in relationships, it is an area where there are deep ethical and moral epiphanies possible. Through these relationships we learn so much about ourselves, we learn so much about human nature. We can actually cultivate the goodness inside of us.

One of my favorites, Nel Noddings, talks about how the ‘memory of care’ is the foundation of morality for many of us. You know, care was just so left out of conversation for so long. And care is not always this beautiful, harmonious, frictionless place of love and ease. When you have someone you care for, and they’re dependent on you, you do have to privilege them versus other people; it’s just the nature of the game. So how do you balance that? When is that right or wrong? For us, we made the decision to send our kids to private school. We still feel really bad about that, even though we also know why we did it. That’s something that is actually at the heart of care ethics, too: how do our care relationships interact with our other relationships?

Haspel: What really struck me was how deep the implications of a care lens take you. You talk about the founding documents of the United States — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You have this quote that “care is as fundamental to the good life as justice, but it’s rarely presented in fundamental terms.” It suggests a broader social contract. And that to me is a very interesting mindset shift. So I’m curious: what would be different if we did start to talk about care and more fundamental terms?

Strauss: I’ll go straight to a very concrete thing: we would care for the caregivers. So, justice is seen as ultimately about equality, right? It’s two independent people having a relationship that’s fair. Once you mix in dependency—which was there all along but ignored—,it just doesn’t relate. Like, there’s no justice with me and my children. It’s never gonna happen! So when we really incorporate care, it opens our eyes: there’s something else going on that we’re trying to achieve. That is, making sure all people that are dependent on others have the ability to survive or thrive, or be treated with dignity at the end of their life, which I think is a universal value now. We just forget that dignity happens through a one-on-one relationship; the core element of dignity is care.

So, if care is a core value of our society, we have to care for the caregivers. Dependency is a chain. It’s a natural part of what it is to be human. And when someone depends on you, you’re not independent anymore. So not only is that person dependent, you yourself become dependent. You yourself can’t fully inhabit the world as an independent person anymore. It’s just not how it works, but right now caregivers are expected to live with dependency while living in a world where there’s a total blind spot for dependency. And no one’s made it easier for them, from the smallest things of, if you bring your elderly parent with dementia who moves very slowly to a certain restaurant, people might just get annoyed with you, there won’t be easy access. If you bring children in the public arena in this day and age you often get a stink eye. So caring for the caregivers is about making space for dependency in the public sphere, and also providing that critical support that caregivers need and don’t get — and it’s tragic.

In mid-April, nurses in Wichita, Kansas, ratified their first-ever union contracts with two Ascension health system hospitals. The victory followed a similar win in March in Austin, Texas, when nurses at Ascension Seton Medical Center voted to ratify their first union contract with Ascension. Neither success came easily or quickly, say members of (NNU), the country’s largest union and professional association of registered nurses.

“I don’t think [Ascension] calculated on our determination and resolve to get the results we wanted, and our patients needed,” says Marvin Ruckle, NNU member and a veteran nurse who has worked at Ascension St. Joseph in Wichita since 1989, with 24 of those years in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. “Our community has been so supportive, coming out to our strikes, bringing us food and water. Workers from all the other unions around the Wichita area — steel workers, UPS, Spirit (airplane factory) — joined us. Most of these people have either been a patient or had family in one of our facilities and they know there needs to be change.

“This (contract) is an incredible step forward for nurses, so we can work with the hospital to make patient care better for our community,” Ruckle says. “But it shouldn’t have taken this long. We were determined, we kept pushing, and all Ascension did was drag out the process.”

One of the nurses’ most significant wins was safe staffing ratios enforceable through a nurse-led Professional Practice Committee. In Austin, hundreds of nurses spent more than a year in contract negotiations and organizing efforts, participating in two strikes to focus attention on their demands including guaranteed lower nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. At all three facilities, Ascension management responded to the nearly 2,000 nurses’ historic one-day joint strike on June 27 with a three-day lockout.

Mission-Driven Ascension

Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Ascension is one of the largest health systems in the U.S., boasting 140 hospitals and 40 senior living facilities in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Becker’s Hospital Review listed Ascension as No. 2 in its 2019 list of 100 of the largest hospitals and health systems in the U.S. and the largest nonprofit health system by hospital count. The nonprofit Catholic health system’s stated mission is to deliver “compassionate, personalized care to all, with special attention to persons living in poverty, and those most vulnerable.”

A deeply researched analysis from the National Nurses Organizing Committee and NNU, “,” questions how closely Ascension hews to that mission, particularly in communities with high poverty rates and a disproportionate number of Black and Latino residents. Ascension, the report states, is one of the nation’s worst offenders in closing obstetrics units and obstetrics services. Over the past decade, Ascension has eliminated obstetrics services at 16 hospitals and slashed more than a quarter of the labor and delivery departments that it had been providing in 2012, a rate three times higher than the national average of 6 percent.

Since 2022 alone, Ascension has closed five maternity wards, all health care markets where Ascension maintains a monopoly or near-monopoly on health services. Half of the hospitals where Ascension closed labor and delivery units are in counties with a higher proportion of low-income residents and people of color, and higher rates of infant mortality than the national average (also known as “persons living in poverty, and those most vulnerable” — see Mission Statement above).

Profits over Patients?

By now, the statistics are familiar to anyone paying attention: the U.S. has the highest rate of death among pregnant women and infants of any wealthy country; maternal mortality is more than 10 times and infant mortality almost double the average among comparably wealthy nations. It is no longer even a nasty secret that Black women are nearly three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women.

As “Dangerous Descent” points out, for the first time in two decades, infant mortality has risen in the U.S., largely due to pregnancy-related complications, which experts attribute to limited access to specialists who deal with complicated pregnancies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable — and healthcare leaders have a major role to play in improving these outcomes. Tragically, many systems focus their eye most keenly on the fiscal bottom line rather than the fundamental health of their patients.

Hospital consolidation has been on the march over the last two decades, with more than 67 percent of U.S. hospitals now belonging to a larger system, compared to 45 percent in 2000. NNU’s report cites numerous studies that have shown that such highly consolidated markets can lead to price increases and diminished patient outcomes. Hospital corporations say such consolidation creates “efficiencies” that enable them to cut costs. What they don’t say as loudly is that steps such as eliminating and obstetrics services — both major casualties of hospital cost-cutting — also improves their profits. In practice, consolidating labor and delivery limits access to care for many patients in low-income areas who may not have vehicles or good access to public transportation. Increased distance to medical care can result in missed prenatal appointments or an inability of patients to get to the hospital in time to deliver their babies safely.

According to the , more than 400 maternity services closed in the U.S. between 2006 and 2020. Between March and June 2022, 11 health systems announced they were closing their obstetrics services. When birthing units close, obstetricians and nurse-midwives are more likely to go elsewhere, exacerbating the epidemic of maternity care deserts in the world’s largest and most robust economy.

“What was really striking to us,” says Elana Kessler, author of NNU’s “Dangerous Descent” report, “is that this is a mission-driven hospital system under the Catholic church that is to care for the poor and to create a more just society. Their actions are not in line with that mission statement. By closing labor and delivery units in Medicaid-heavy areas with higher proportions of Black and Latino patients, they’re hiding behind their mission while they’re increasing their profits.”

Health reporting news site stated in a 2021 investigation that Ascension, “a wealthy, religious, tax-exempt health system,” had migrated toward behaving like a Wall Street firm, using its wealth to create a sophisticated investment strategy that includes a partnership with the private equity firm, TowerBrook Capital Partners. Ascension stands out from other nonprofit hospitals that have dabbled in private equity investing in the sophistication and expansiveness of its $1 billion partnership with TowerBrook, the STAT investigation found.

On its 2021 federal tax return, Ascension reported that CEO Joseph R. Impicciche received a salary of $13 million. In 2022, the reported that Ascension had spent years reducing its staffing levels to improve profitability even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion in cash reserves. At that time, its charity care accounted for 1.9 percent of operating expenses (against a national average of 2.6 percent).

Even with the additional revenue from its investments, Ascension pursued cuts to safety-net hospitals in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, abruptly closing its Labor and Delivery unit in December 2022, leaving Milwaukee’s south side, home to a large immigrant community, completely without a hospital to deliver babies. The move prompted a scorching letter from Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who demanded answers from Ascension on its questionable priorities that funnel cash to its investment funds and executives, putting providers and patients at risk. In her letter, Sen. Baldwin called on Ascension to reinvest its cash reserves in hospitals that serve vulnerable communities and to increase pay and improve working conditions for its “burned out and overextended health care workforce.”

In an April 19 email response to Early Learning Nation magazine, Sen. Baldwin stated that Ascension had replied to her letter. ��“While I’m encouraged that Ascension appears to be taking the communities’ concerns seriously and working to rebuild relationships,” she wrote, “I remain concerned that their business practices appear more like a private equity firm than a nonprofit hospital whose stated mission is to serve the public.”

Understaffed NICUs and Obstetrics Units

“It’s been like working in a MASH unit,” Ruckle said, describing his experience in Ascension St. Joseph’s NICU. Mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH) units, which were phased out in the early 2000s, were known for their primitive conditions, grueling work schedules and frustrating lack of resources. As reported in “Dangerous Descent,” nurses at multiple Ascension hospitals have noted the perpetual crisis caused by staffing cuts and equipment shortages.

“It’s heart-wrenching to go home and wonder if you were able to help that critically ill baby as best you could and worry that they aren’t going to have the best outcome,” he said.

The result for nurses can be not only stress and frustration but, according to Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, one of NNU’s presidents, moral harm.

“As nurses, we have an obligation to advocate for our patients, to do what’s best for our patients,” she says. “But the situation we’re being put in, especially Ascension nurses, is that we know we have to do the right thing and are being prevented from doing so because of the situation in our hospitals. Then we suffer from moral injury. Our hearts are breaking because we want to do what’s best, but our employers are not providing what we need to do so.

“We start asking, ‘Is this really worth my health?’” says Triunfo-Cortez, who has been a registered nurse for 44 years. “The majority of our nurses will be out there fighting for our patients and fighting for what’s right, but it does make us question.”

Recommendations from NNU

Pointing out that Ascension enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks thanks to its nonprofit status yet continues its abandonment of low-income mothers, parents and newborns, NNU and the National Nurses Organizing Committee recommend systemic changes that would align Ascension with its mission:

• Come to the table and listen to nurses; staff every unit to ensure the best care for patients.
• Commit to reopening closed labor and delivery wards.
• Provide obstetric services at all new hospitals Ascension opens or acquires.

Ascension has the opportunity and resources to become an industry leader, says Kessler, the report’s author. “As nurses advocating not only for nurses but for the patients they serve, we know that safe staffing and readily accessible care are completely entwined in the work nurses do — they’re one and the same.

“Ascension will say, ‘Consolidation is part of our business strategy. It’s better for the patient,’ but at the end of the day,” she says, “it doesn’t happen that way. It creates barriers for patients to face — transportation, child care — and when there is not ready access to obstetrics services, pregnant patients are less likely to get prenatal care, which then has a cascade of harmful effects.”

��������Բ����Dz�’s 1 in 50 Report

In late April, Ascension released a in which it reported that one in 50 U.S. babies is now born at an Ascension hospital, no doubt in part to what The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cited as the corporation’s role as the “most active dealmaker” in its hospitals’ expanding into wealthy areas while shunning poorer ones. Nonprofit hospitals now account for half the $1 trillion U.S. hospital sector. Across the sector, the �³���’s investigation found, though they receive local, state and federal tax breaks in exchange for providing charity and benefiting communities, nonprofits are less generous in providing aid than their nonprofit rivals.

Though the Ascension report states that its commitment is “rooted in the loving ministry of Jesus as healer” and the 32-page report details positive health outcomes throughout the system, NNU’s Kessler says the report doesn’t tell the full story of how those numbers arrived.

“Outcomes for patients no longer served by Ascension wouldn’t be included in the hospital’s data, so the report is incomplete,” she says, “failing to consider the impact on communities where Ascension has shuttered obstetrics services under the corporate strategy of ‘consolidation.’

“Ascension asserts that one in 50 babies are born in their care, which only underscores the importance of Ascension keeping obstetrics services open for the thousands of expectant mothers they serve each year.��Furthermore, a snapshot of data from one year, in one health system, doesn’t tell the whole story of the impact of ��������Բ����Dz�’s decision to close services. It should also be noted t��could weigh the data in favor of showing better than average outcomes.”

Today, children across all racial identities are increasingly likely to live with a grandparent. The share of children living with their grandparents has doubled since the 1970s (from 3.2 percent to 8.4 percent), and more children are being raised by their grandparents today than ever before in U.S. history. The majority of these kids live in multigenerational households, where they receive care from at least one biological parent in addition to a grandparent. A growing minority of those kids live in “skipped-generation” households, that is, where their parents are not present and grandparents, especially grandmothers, are taking on the chief responsibility for their grandchildren’s care and well-being.

In – A Twenty-First-Century Story of Love, Coercion and Survival, University of Washington Professor of Sociology LaShawnDa Pittman dives into the emotional, financial, medical and legal struggles of their daily lives. Pittman conducted extensive interviews with 74 Black grandmothers heading skipped-generation households in the Chicago area. Pittman argues that they represent the growing number of families made up of our country’s two most vulnerable populations — children and the elderly — and that they have very few legal rights, while facing public policies not designed for families like them, as well as a host of intersecting inequalities and barriers.

Early Learning Nation magazine contributor Haley Swenson interviewed Pittman about the book and about what child care advocates and providers should know about the rise of grandparent-headed households.

Haley Swenson: Why did you feel it was important to focus on kids in skipped-generation households in particular with this book?

LaShawnDa Pittman: When I started this research, I was interested in Black grandmas raising kids. I had not gotten as nuanced as multi-generational or skipped-generation arrangements. It took just a few interviews for me to realize that these were very different experiences. I was primarily interested in a story of resilience and coping, and I felt like these women in skipped-generation households were having to cope in very different kinds of ways from other grandmas.

One thing that became really, really clear was that child-rearing institutions, like educational and health care systems, are not set up for [these skipped-generation families]. I was having conversations with them about just how difficult it was to navigate those institutions. That’s mainly because of grandmothers’ legal marginalization, relative to parents and to the state. Grandparents have no inherent rights to their grandchildren. That illuminated a piece of the puzzle for me, and I thought that was a really important story to tell.

We know that the bulk of grandparent caregiving happens informally, but even inside of that informal bucket, we include both no legal relationship at all and legal guardianship of various sorts, and depending on which state you’re in, that’s called different things. Sometimes it’s temporary. Sometimes it’s not. The decision to become a legal guardian was often driven by the need to navigate the childrearing institutions, to get healthcare or child care for the kids, or the need to protect children from their parents.

And then we’ve got formal arrangements, which include some relationship to the child welfare system. The child welfare system has increasingly relied on relatives to provide care, and in many states they get less support for that care than non-family foster care providers. It really became apparent that the relationship with the child welfare system is something that is shaping contemporary grandparent caregiving in a way that prior generations just did not have to deal with.

Swenson: In one of the final sentences of the book you say Black grandmas are like “canaries in the coal mine, warning us of the dangers of transmitting social injustices from one generation to the next.” I think one of the ways the book shows that happening is with messy, almost impossible-to-navigate social and family policies.

Because of their legal marginalization, grandmothers describe immense red tape to get access to basic care and financial support for their grandkids. What are some of the things that these grandparents have to go through and negotiate in order to get by, whether that’s by keeping their jobs, or accessing benefits their grandchildren should be entitled to receive?

Pittman: When it comes to resources, it’s like, well, if I don’t get these resources, my grandkid could be taken, but if I do get these resources, then perhaps it exposes me to a whole set of issues that I wasn’t anticipating, and my grandkids could be taken.

​​Even with their best efforts, their best efforts have no match for the sort of structural issues that they face or that they were already facing [before taking in their grandkids]. They’re largely Black women, or indigenous women, who were already economically marginalized. And there are two kinds of issues they face when they raise their grandchildren: How do I hold on to what I already had, and then how do I secure the additional resources they need?

On housing, here is a kid that’s now living in my home that I did not expect to be here. For some folks, it might mean not having enough room, for others, a safe enough community or home. For others it was the child welfare system requiring they have so much space and so on and so forth. So, they have to deal with these housing issues. Some grandmothers in my study have housing assistance, and so then [the change in their household] becomes an issue. How do I hold on to something that’s incredibly difficult to get in this country? There was a freeze on Section 8 housing in Chicago for well over a decade. We all know subsidized housing is becoming a thing of the past. There’s less and less of it.

One of the things I found that was really, really hard to hear about were the ways they were given misinformation about what was required in order to both utilize or hold onto their housing assistance. So, there are federal protections for grandparents raising grandchildren, in terms of not requiring legal guardianship of the kids that they care for, in order to have that assistance. And yet they were often told by street-level bureaucrats, the housing authority or landlords that they needed legal guardianship to have them in their houses. And there are all kinds of reasons why they don’t want legal guardianship. They might hope they don’t have to do this for long, or they don’t want to hurt their children, the children’s parents, who might be relying on some of the benefits they get to raise other kids.

The majority of these caregivers are still working. So, they might ask: How do I maintain my work and take care of this kid, and if that kid is under five, how do I get child care? We know in some places, child care is more expensive than rent. And child care subsidies are not set up for these families. To get these subsidies, a grandma might need to get custody taken from their parents, or her income might hurt her eligibility or her health might be too poor to work the required hours to qualify. And, we know as it is. So, who do they go to when they need to drop them off, when they are the person everybody else comes to?

I saw women who were already marginalized and fragile, vulnerable, having to decrease their work and income. Then I saw women who had to increase work, who didn’t have the health at times to do that, or were retired and had to go back into work. I saw women do more informal work, selling dinners, selling cigarettes, things like that just to get income coming in.

Swenson: There’s a strong belief among many early educators in “whole-family solutions,” not just providing care and education to the kids but giving some wraparound services, job training for parents, healthy food, to the whole family. I’m struck by what you say in the book about how few of these families are even accessing that formal care and education for young children. It’s heartbreaking to think of this whole field of educated, compassionate people who want to be doing this work for these families, and that they’re unable to access the families who really need it, that you describe in your book.

What would it look like if our child rearing systems were remade, to meet families as they are, and to really work for grandmother-led families. What would be different? What kinds of changes would you like to see?

Pittman: If we were actually creating policies that made it less difficult to get the resources that these families need in terms of housing, in terms of child care, when it comes to resources, the outcome would be improved mental and physical health. We talked about the burden of securing these resources, and remember that’s on top of experiencing multiple systems of oppression, from racism to sexism to classism and to ageism. The stress of that, the impact on their mental and physical health, is real.

I imagine that if we addressed that, instead of blaming individuals or the parents for what they aren’t doing, these grandmas would be around longer, and they’d be around with better health, mentally and physically. And that means the kids would be having a better parenting experience. Imagine kids who are getting their needs met, because our child rearing institutions are thinking about the whole family. Without that mental load, they’d all be able to breathe and to get the respite that they need.

Introduction

In January 2024, the Yale New Haven Hospital system (YNHH) announced a change at the two child care centers they run for employees and community members. , YNHH would no longer operate the centers themselves but were instead entering into a “partnership with Bright Horizons,” the second-largest U.S. corporate chain and the only one traded on the stock market. The Daily News reports that, “Without advance warning, day care educators were told to reapply for their current positions. In response, many employees have since left, leaving the center short-staffed and at risk of state closure.” A parent who attended a call with YNHH leadership reported the leaders “told them that the hospital was losing money on the day care and had been looking for ways to cut costs. As a result … the hospital had zeroed in on no longer managing the day care.”

The question of how allowing Bright Horizons to take over the centers would cut costs — while still making Bright Horizons a profit — is becoming apparent: the company has moved to alter employee benefits and increase classroom group sizes. In addition to requiring long-tenured educators to reapply for their jobs, the Daily News reports leadership told staff that “during the rehiring process … the staff members would lose their YNHH benefits and paid time off.” Moreover, “center leaders gave parents flyers informing them that some of the day care’s infant rooms would be combined. [Parent Jon West] told the News that each classroom previously had three teachers for every six to seven kids. Now, there are two to three teachers for every eight kids. Parents also described how the facility’s receptionist and the day care supervisors were also taking on educator roles to meet the state educator-to-student threshold.”

Cast in America as a pay-to-play system with limited public funding, child care has long struggled with like difficult budgetary math, low educator pay and highly variable quality. Some argue that the presence of investor-backed chains offers economies of scale, business know-how and an injection of capital into a starved sector. The reality appears to be much more problematic. An unprecedented — especially from private equity firms, which now by capacity (a ninth, Bright Horizons, was previously private equity-owned), as well as several smaller chains — is creating a cascade of risks for the sector. These risks threaten the path toward an inclusive child care system which works well for all children, parents and early educators.

This piece draws on interviews with current and former chain employees and child care experts, reviews of scholarly research, and analysis of financial records and legal filings. The picture it paints is one of a sector increasingly captured by excessive profit-seeking behavior and systemic vulnerabilities that can come at a human cost to one of the most vulnerable populations imaginable: young children who often have, literally, no ability to speak up for themselves.

Ultimately, says Melissa Boteach, vice president for Income Security and Child Care/Early Learning at the National Women’s Law Center, the issue is whether investor-backed chains can ever overcome an inherent conflict of interest. “The bottom line for private equity, and investor-backed chains more broadly, is profit for [investors]. The bottom line for child care should be early learning and care for children. And it’s not that you can’t ever reconcile those two things,” she explained, but, “when you implement standards, whether it’s living wages for early educators, low child-to-adult ratios, or other measures that affect the quality of that care, investor-backed chains will face external pressures to comply with these standards in the cheapest way possible, which in turn has implications for either lowering the quality of the care or raising the fees charged to parents.”

Boteach added that such reactions are “not necessarily because they’re bad people, but because they have an obligation of profit for their investors. And I think we should talk about it like that. It’s not a dirty thing to want to make money if you’re in business. The question is whether an investor-backed business model — and in the case of private equity, a heavily financialized model focused on short-term profit — is the appropriate model for something that is a public good.”

Boteach’s comments nod to a discontinuity between how America treats early care and education versus K-12 education. Elizabeth Leiwant is director of Government Relations at Neighborhood Villages, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit that focuses on improving the state’s child care system. She mused in an interview, “how would you feel if I told you that, say, Morgan Stanley owned your child’s elementary school?” Leiwant continued, “It would just seem ludicrous to anyone that these companies and investment firms are making decisions about how your child is educated. And yet people either don’t know that’s going on in early care and education, or they somehow feel comfortable about it, because they don’t associate early education with education in the same way that they do with K-12.”

This article is split into six sections: First, how private equity firms and shareholders manage to make money in a sector that is well-known to struggle financially; Second, the systemic risks from debt-driven growth and consolidation; Third, the political risks to universal child care efforts posed by rising investor influence; Fourth, what clientele investor-backed chains seek to serve and how they treat their employees; Fifth, the implications of profit maximization for program quality, health and safety; and Sixth, what actions policymakers have or might take to put up guardrails against excessive profiteering — particularly as more public funding becomes available. One way or the other, what decisions those policymakers make in the coming years will indelibly shape the future of American child care.

Profit from an unprofitable industry: “Profit from an unprofitable industry”

The Changing Nature of For-Profit Chains

The concept of for-profit chain child care is nothing new. Two of the largest chains, Learning Care Group (which now operates several brands including TutorTime and La Petite Academy) and KinderCare, were founded respectively in 1967 and 1969. Their growth rapidly accelerated as middle-class mothers flocked into the workforce but the government failed to provide public funding for a child care system. That failure was most dramatically marked by President Richard Nixon’s 1971 of the bipartisan Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have invested billions into the beginnings of a nationally-funded, locally-run network of child care programs.

In 1977, the New York Times ran a profile of KinderCare entitled “.” The piece offers that, “its promoters confidently promise that KinderCare will be to the preschool child what McDonald’s was to fast food and Holiday Inn to the salesman’s one‐night stand.” KinderCare has since grown to be the nation’s largest provider of private child care services, with over 1,500 centers serving around 200,000 children —far more than the total number of licensed child care programs in many U.S. states. (KinderCare has a complicated corporate history that includes periods of being privately owned, publicly traded, in bankruptcy, and, from 1996 to 2005, owned by a .)

What has changed in the past 20 years is widespread involvement from outside investors, specifically a bevy of private equity firms. Private equity ownership from both simple privately-held companies and traditional investment or venture funds. As Brendan Ballou, former special counsel for private equity at the U.S. Department of Justice, explained in his book, “,” the private equity business model rests on three pillars to return high profits to investors: buying businesses for the short term (typically three to seven years), loading the companies with debt while drawing out fees, and protecting the private equity firm from legal consequences of any negative outcomes. Many private equity firms also have a history of getting involved in politics to protect their investments, actions which are not always aligned with the public interest: as Ballou writes, “quite simply, Congress works for few constituencies harder than it works for private equity.”

In the 2020s, the chains have been at a rapid clip, largely — though not exclusively — through mergers and acquisitions as opposed to opening entirely new programs. Currently, (depending on the measure used) between 10 and 12% of the licensed child care market. And as industry analysts the New York Times in late 2022, these companies may return profit margins of 15 to 20%.

One can even see the private equity profit motive baked into how some chain executives are compensated. For instance, in 2022, to the U.S. Securities and Exchanges Commission (SEC), KinderCare CEO Tom Wyatt made nearly $2 million in salary and bonuses. KinderCare also uses what they term “equity-based compensation,” whereby most of the company executives’ stock options accrue depending on how much money the company returns to their private equity owners, Switzerland-based Partners Group. The incentive structure includes a segment of stock that vests when Partners Group makes back twice its investment, and another segment that vests when Partners Group makes back three times its investment.

At a time when most mom-and-pop and nonprofit child care programs are , and as parents struggle to or any open slots, the question lingers: how are these companies making so much money?

Maximized Enrollment, Minimized Overhead

The private equity playbook is well-established. Audrey Stienon of the Open Markets Institute has researched how private equity operates in many human service sectors, including child care. Stienon has explained that private equity is good at “making profit from unprofitable industries.” She notes their heavy involvement — often with negative consequences — in areas like and that have challenges similar to child care operations: high costs from staffing needs combined with limited public funding. When it comes to child care, Stienon said in an interview, “they don’t need to serve the whole market, they only need to serve the profitable parts of the market,” adding the chains do this, among other strategies, by “targeting the higher income families, raising the fees.” She went on to emphasize that, in general, “if you’re a private equity investor, you’re there for the short term. Your goal is not necessarily to make a sustainable child care business, your goal is to extract as much as you can during the time that you own the business.”

Interviews with current and former staff of investor-backed chains make it clear a top priority, reinforced by pressure from corporate management, is steady revenue via maximized enrollment and minimized operational costs. Emma Biggs worked as a teacher at three chain sites in North Carolina and was the director at one; she is now the director at an independent center. Biggs said that there was constant pressure around enrollment via management emails and visits, while staffing was kept intentionally lean, leading to strain on staff and “constant high turnover.” Cost-cutting occurred in multiple areas: Biggs recalls being told to limit children to “one sheet of paper per day” for arts and crafts. (She went out and bought more using her own money.)

Additionally, corporate management pushed Biggs to serve only portions of food that were . Verna Esposito, who worked as a teacher, assistant director, and director at chain sites and now owns an independent center, confirmed in an email that such measures were common in her experience. Esposito noted that teachers in programs at which she worked tended to disregard the pressure and give children more food if hungry. Another former director, who worked for a chain both before and after it was bought by a private equity firm, said that after its acquisition, the chain became “really strict” about overhead. That included restrictions on buying items like new toys, while shifting daily cleaning responsibilities from a cleaning service to classroom teachers.

Biggs’ experience is also concordant with that of a former KinderCare director in the Pacific Northwest who wished to remain anonymous for fear of professional consequences. The director shared that one of the metrics she was consistently evaluated on was the number of “FTEs,” an acronym for full time enrollments. She said that in conversations, corporate management was clear the enrollment push was more about profits and growth than childrens’ or families’ experiences. “They’re like, well, if everybody has full enrollment, then we can continue to open centers. And so that was your goal — bonuses would be [partially] contingent on whether you had full enrollment.” The director added that in her view, “the end user is a dollar sign, it’s not a child.”

A Captive Customer Base

Even when parent concerns do arise, chain programs tend to do well because child care has another hallmark Brendan Ballou cites as making an industry attractive to private equity: captive customers. The child care sector in general is extremely supply-constrained: because personnel costs are so high and public funding so meager, high demand has not resulted in high supply. The U.S. Treasury Department has stated child care is a sector in “,” and some experts child care is fundamentally miscast as a market good. With many programs sporting that can take months or years to get off, parents have little recourse if they have quality or cost concerns: there is often no alternative care provider to turn to.

This reality came up in 2023 when a small chain in Vermont was acquired by regional chain Little Sprouts, which is owned by the largest for-profit child care chain in France, itself owned by a French private equity firm. Shortly after the Vermont acquisition, Little Sprouts it was raising rates between 30% and 40%. On a call with the Little Sprouts CEO, the news site VTDigger reports, one parent called out the lack of other options, saying that “You know none of us can leave, so you’re manipulating and taking advantage of that situation.” (Amid heavy criticism, Little Sprouts adjusted the plan to spread out the rate increases over two years.)

The Primacy of Enrollment

At times, the inexorable enrollment push can lead to risky situations. A former Bright Horizons director in California, who also requested anonymity for fear of career consequences, shared a story of a classroom at her center where several children had behavioral challenges and the teachers were not, in her professional opinion, well-enough qualified or trained to handle the classroom. “I made the decision to shut the classroom down and got a lot of pushback” from corporate management, she said. “They were like ‘you have to get it open right away. You can’t do this. And I was like, ‘well, they’re not safe.’” The director went on to add, “Safety versus the bottom line: I hit that wall several times, and I know peers that did as well.”

Legal filings also suggest how chains may at times react to teachers’ allegedly extreme behavior. In 2021, three sisters working at a KinderCare site in Burlington, New Jersey, filed against the company alleging they were subject to racist epithets, and that little-to-no corrective action was taken. The lawsuit alleges that a white teacher at the site referred to the sisters, who are Black, as “the colored people,” and a separate white teacher called them “ghetto.” The filing alleges that the latter incident occurred “in front of the assistant director of KinderCare, who failed to do anything to reprimand” the teacher. After one of the sisters called the district manager to lodge a complaint, the lawsuit alleges, the same teacher called her the n-word. According to the lawsuit, the district manager decided not to discipline the teacher for using the n-word because “no children were hurt.” In the end, the lawsuit alleges, “none of the employees that racially harassed the Plaintiffs were ever disciplined in any way.” (The lawsuit would later be settled out of court with undisclosed terms. KinderCare did not respond to a request for comment about the case.)

Beyond Tuition: Institutional Contracts, Real Estate, and Franchise Fees

Parent fees from enrollment are not the only way investors make money in child care. Several chains, most prominently KinderCare and Bright Horizons, work heavily with corporate clients, as well as public institutions like universities and government agencies, to offer on- or near-site child care options for employees — as with Bright Horizons and Yale New Haven Hospital System. Since these large clients have far more funding available than even an affluent parent, such engagements can be incredibly lucrative. For instance, in 2023 Arizona’s Maricopa County (which contains Phoenix and surrounds) a $13 million contract with KinderCare to operate a center that will serve county employees.

Increasingly, governments are to offer child care benefits to their employees. That includes tens of millions of dollars in state tax credits and grants being offered in both Republican- and Democratic-led states. The federal government, in addition to , made having a plan for child care assistance a requirement for semiconductor manufacturers seeking to access funding from the CHIPS Act.

The contracts resulting from these incentives are likely to flow mostly to investor-backed chains. Child care analyst Annie Dade a note of caution that large chain providers “are really primed to win these contracts” and in doing so may disadvantage community-based providers. Both Bright Horizons and KinderCare have divisions dedicated to corporate clients, and KinderCare has an entire “Government Funding” . Bright Horizons CEO Stephen Kramer has that the CHIPS Act requirements were “wonderful gratification of many, many years of really pushing the idea that employers have a vested interest [in child care].”

Julie Kashen and Lea Woods of The Century Foundation, a think tank, when it comes to the CHIPS Act, “Companies that choose simply to partner exclusively with corporate child care providers … risk failing to meet families’ diverse needs. They could actually be undermining efforts to build a robust workforce by inadvertently skipping over a sector of the child care services that cater to nontraditional hours and multi-age child groups, such as family care providers, as well as crowding out the women- and minority-owned businesses and nonprofit organizations that provide the majority of child care today. In doing so, they may also provide an opening for private equity to use the child care sector to extract wealth at the expense of children’s safety and early educators’ wages.”

Stienon of the Open Markets Institute explained that private equity firms also commonly utilize a strategy known as “leasebacks” (sometimes called “sale-leasebacks”), whereby the owned business is required to sell its real estate — with the profit going to the private equity firm as opposed to the business — and then rent it back from the new owners. This results in businesses offloading one of their major assets and adding a new budget drain from the same property. Ballou writes that frequently, because private equity firms only put in a small amount of their own money when buying companies (the rest coming from investors, both private ones and, increasingly, ), real estate sale proceeds alone can cover the firm’s outlay.

Sale-leasebacks in child care appear to be on the rise. A 2022 trade noted that “in an environment of rising interest rates, net lease assets occupied by early childhood education centers are growing in popularity.” The article quoted Jim Ceresnak, a director at the brokerage firm B+E who specializes in sale-leasebacks, as explaining that “more and more investors and lenders have become familiar with the growing players in this market, which has helped their growth in popularity.”

An additional way corporate chains turn a profit is by piling fees onto individual sites. This tactic is used in chains that operate on a franchise model as opposed to corporate-run centers. Chains that rely on franchises include major ones like Primrose, Goddard and The Learning Experience, all of which are owned by private equity firms. A review of those three chains’ Franchise Disclosure Documents (a legal document presented to potential buyers) reveals that in addition to basic royalties — commonly 7% of a program’s gross revenue, which is a mid-range rate — franchises are often forced to pay to utilize company assets.

These fees can include usage of proprietary curricula and technology. For example, in 2021, mandated that each center is “required to have a minimum of one interactive, wall-mounted ‘whiteboard’” which runs proprietary curricula on prescribed software. As of 2021, the franchise must pay up to a $8,000 one-time setup fee per whiteboard, as well as a $149 monthly “service fee” and a $3.75 to $5.00 per child monthly fee. Franchise Disclosure Documents reveal that in 2019, The Learning Experience made over $25 million on royalties and fees from 242 franchises.

There is one other major way that investor-backed chains fuel their ongoing growth: debt.

When Chains Fail: When Chains Fail

The Cautionary Tales of ABC Learning and Estro Group

Investor involvement and corporate consolidation raises the prospect of widespread system failures. A common feature of private equity engagement is extracting profit while saddling companies with debt that can leave them on shaky ground. Brendan Ballou notes in “,” that “while private equity doesn’t doom a company to failure, the chance of failure dramatically increases. Roughly one in five large companies acquired through [private equity deals] go bankrupt in a decade. This is vastly more than the roughly 2% of comparable companies not acquired by public equity firms that do.” As large child care chains both consolidate and gain market share, then, the systemic risk rises.

Corporate child care chains can and do fail. Arguably the most infamous example was Australia’s ABC Learning. In the mid 2000s, ABC Learning was the world’s largest child care provider, owning over 2,200 centers by 2008. It accomplished this feat by acquiring programs at a meteoric pace —ABC owned only 43 centers in 2001 when it was first listed on the Australian stock exchange — including buying Learning Care Group (then the third-largest chain in the U.S.) and Busy Bees (then the sixth-largest chain in the U.K.). ABC was at one point valued at over $2.5 billion and its founder, Eddy Groves, became a minor celebrity in Australia; among other things, he bought the Brisbane Bullets basketball team.

However, belied a tremendous amount of debt — not profit — that was fueling ABC’s aggressive expansion. The bubble burst once ABC was no longer able to, as a group of accounting researchers , “mask its declining profitability.” It turned out that, in fact, at least 40% of ABC’s sites were losing money.

Amid the global financial crisis, debts were called in and ABC Learning could not meet its obligations. In August 2008, the company collapsed, trading on its stock was suspended, and the Australian government had to step in with a bailout of over AUS$50 million to prevent tens of thousands of families from abruptly losing their child care. (The impact was blunted in the U.S. because, ironically, ABC had sold a majority stake of Learning Care Group to the private equity arm of Morgan Stanley in April 2008 to help reduce ABC’s debt obligations). The fallout included government receivership, parliamentary hearings, and the criminal conviction of the company’s former CFO. Eventually, the remains of ABC were acquired by an Australian nonprofit consortium. The researchers concluded that “ABC Learning presented a classic clash of private interests and public need.”

Similarly, in 2014 the largest Dutch child care chain, Estro Group, which owned 380 child care programs across the Netherlands, declared bankruptcy. This came after years of financial problems following its 2010 acquisition by U.S.-based private equity firm Providence Equity Partners. Per a , the acquisition was marred by “mismanagement,” including the fact that the child care company was saddled with the very debt used to finance its acquisition. This debt —30 million Euros a year onto an already debt-burdened balance sheet — was a contributing factor in Estro’s collapse, as were changing economic and political conditions that led to a pullback in previously generous public child care subsidies.

Estro’s experience also shows how even when things go south, private equity firms can insulate themselves from the consequences. The company’s bankruptcy was carefully planned, and another investment firm immediately snapped up and rebranded more than 200 of Estro’s sites at a bargain basement price. In doing so, , a finance professor at the University of Amsterdam, the new owner “was also able to shed more than one third of employees and locations, especially the less profitable ones in the periphery of the Netherlands, without having to fulfill its legal social obligation to more than 1,000 workers being laid off.” (This that fired employees eventually won.) Engelen concludes that “the parents, children and workers in the over one hundred former Estro-locations that were closed down [permanently] in the aftermath of the bankruptcy were, without doubt, the biggest losers from this sorry story of serial plunder.” The private equity firms involved in the debacle, though, mostly avoided losses — and many actually made money.

The Current Threat Level

Could an ABC Learning or Estro Group fiasco occur in America? It is difficult to assess the risk among U.S. chains because, with the exceptions of KinderCare and Bright Horizons, the companies do not generally provide a detailed public picture of their finances. (KinderCare submitted SEC documents in advance of a potential Initial Public Offering; the company has since plans and Partners Group is instead reportedly to other private equity firms.)

In considering risk, there is a relevant question about the extent to which private equity firms dictate significant business decisions. It is notable that firms regularly take positions of influence with their owned companies. (All private equity firms that own the large chains declined to comment or did not respond to a request for comment.) For instance, two of KinderCare’s seven are executives at their Swiss-based private equity owners Partners Group. Similarly, two of the three Directors of The Learning Experience are executives of their private equity owners, Golden Gate Capital. (Note: the author has an immediate family member employed by Golden Gate Capital.) In the case of Child Development Schools — the seventh-largest U.S. chain by capacity — the Chairman and CEO, David Evans, is also the Chairman and CEO of Glencoe Capital, the private equity firm Evans founded which in 2006 acquired Child Development Schools.

Even Bright Horizons, which is publicly traded, retains a relationship of sorts with its previous private equity owner, Bain Capital. Bain is a significant shareholder, and two former or current Bain executives are on Bright Horizons’ . Bright Horizons’ SEC filings that Bain has special privileges with regards to Bright Horizons’ business dealings: their “certificate of incorporation … imposes some restrictions on mergers and other business combinations between us and any holder of 15% or more of our outstanding common stock other than Bain Capital Partners LLC.”

Research from the U.K. is both informative and relevant as to the current threat level, as Bright Horizons is the second-largest U.K. chain. A team of researchers led by Antonia Simon, a professor at University College London (UCL), in 2022 entitled “Acquisitions, Mergers, and Debt: The New Language of Child Care.” The authors highlight the high debt many chains carry, which increases the risk of collapse:

“(W)e found that private-for-profit companies in the [U.K. early care and education] sector are heavily indebted, and they have very complex financial structures involving foreign investors and shareholders … We also identified that a considerable amount of money is being extracted for debt repayment. For example, two of the largest private-for-profit chains we examined were heavy borrowers, with leverage ratios of debt to total assets of between 51 per cent and 101 per cent.”

They go on to note the example of one U.K. chain, Just Childcare, that was making a profit and paying taxes as of its 2015 takeover by private equity firm Phoenix Equity Partners, and thereafter was “in debt and pays no tax, although it continues to expand.” Overall, Simon’s team writes, “What we have observed leads us to conclude that the high levels of borrowing led to lower profits (or even losses) and reduced or negligible payment of taxes due to the tax relief obtainable on loan interest payments. In our analysis of some publicly submitted financial accounts, we found increasing executive remuneration and rewards for the private equity holding company at the same time that the subsidiaries are making losses.”

The following year, the UCL team’s fears were realized. On December 29th, 2023, the U.K. chain Alpha Nurseries the immediate closure of its 22 centers across the nation. The reason, the company stated in a letter, was “due to its financial position.” Simon said in an interview for this article that while it was impossible to conclusively say profit-seeking behavior led to Alpha Nurseries’ downfall, “it seems highly probable.” Simon added that “if it can happen here, it can happen there.”

As the largest U.S. chain, KinderCare currently appears to be in a moderately, if not entirely, stable financial position (the company for five months between 1992 and 1993). In March 2024, Fitch Ratings — one of the three leading ratings agencies — the company a “B+” default rating alongside a “stable rating outlook.” Single B ratings are as investments that are “highly speculative,” in that they “indicate that material default risk is present, but a limited margin of safety remains. Financial commitments are currently being met; however, capacity for continued payment is vulnerable to deterioration in the business and economic environment.”

Fitch’s report notes that KinderCare projects an EBITDAR (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, and rent) leverage between 5.8 and 6.4, meaning the company’s debt is around 6 times as high as its EBITDAR. Financial analysts generally consider this leverage fairly high but not disastrous, particularly in sectors like child care with stable and predictable cash flows. Fitch goes on to project KinderCare’s “total revenues to grow modestly … mainly driven by an expansion in center count and an increase in tuition rate supported by offering high-quality service.”

Alongside the economic outlook lies another important factor shaping the future of American child care: as KinderCare and the other U.S. chains continue to gain market share, so too does their political influence grow.

Economic Power Equals Political Power: Economic Power Equals Political Power

Investor-Backed Chains’ Political Inclinations

Private equity firms wield immense political power. And few things, it seems, get private equity firms to pick up the phone like legislation that threatens the profitability of their portfolios. For instance, Brendan Ballou notes that private equity companies spent $54 million in 2019 to successfully that would have curbed surprise medical bills, as they owned many of the largest companies collecting the money.

Audrey Stienon believes this dynamic is at play in child care, saying that “the more market share, the more economic power, that translates into political power. And so if [investor-backed chains] become a growing share of the child care market, they come to define what that means to be a child care provider. They have more money at their disposal to start lobbying and build relationships with policymakers and enforcers and regulators at all levels of government.” In doing so, she adds, the chains can define what the sector “needs from the government.”

When it comes to child care, investor-backed chains have already shown their political inclinations. The Build Back Better Act of 2021 contained $400 billion worth of investments in early care and education. It also carried caps on parent fees, and requirements that child care programs receiving public money adopt at least a living wage for its employees, as well as move towards pay parity between early educators and K-12 educators who shared similar credentials and experience. These provisions posed a significant threat to chains’ business models. As by the New York Times’ Dana Goldstein, the (ECEC) — an advocacy and lobbying group that represents many of the largest chains, including KinderCare, Bright Horizons, Learning Care Group, Big Blue Marble Academy, Goddard, and The Learning Experience — allegedly went to work behind the scenes opposing the bill.

Goldstein reports that despite a public statement of support, “according to three Democratic Senate staffers who worked on Build Back Better … the consortium in meetings reacted skeptically to the idea of subsidizing tuition for upper-middle-class families and preferred a plan that could pass with Republican support.” After Sen. Joe Manchin effectively killed Build Back Better, Goldstein’s reporting continues, executives from chains including KinderCare, Bright Horizons, and Primrose “made donations [the following month] to Mr. Manchin’s campaign fund and his political action committee, Country Roads.”

Similarly, ECEC quietly and unsuccessfully tried to get provisions struck from a Massachusetts child care reform bill that restricts chains’ access to a publicly-funded grant program. The bill, , was passed in March 2024 by the Massachusetts Senate (as of this writing, the legislation has not been voted on by the Massachusetts House) and contains arguably the most robust guardrails against excessive profit-seeking in child care yet seen in America.

The what large for-profit chains must do to access a generous pandemic-era program run by the state — centers receive an average of nearly $150,000 a year to help them maintain staffing and quality — which the legislation makes permanent. If a chain has more than 10 sites in the state, they must agree to accept a reasonable number of children receiving subsidy aid, dedicate a percentage of the grant to educator compensation and follow a career ladder with minimum salary requirements the state would establish, and provide detailed financial information about how the grant money is used. The legislation also caps the amount that any single chain can receive at 1% of the total program money (which as of 2024 is $475 million) and requires that the state prioritize programs serving large numbers of children from high-needs backgrounds.

The bill language was made public on March 7. On March 11, ECEC’s Director of State Government Relations, Elsa Jacobsen, drafted to the Chair and Vice Chair of the relevant committee, a copy of which was obtained. The letter requests “critical amendments” which would eliminate most of the sections with conditions that specifically apply to large for-profit chains.

The ECEC letter variously argues that, as written, the bill “unnecessarily singles out a specific population of providers and severely restricts their access to operational grant funds”; that “it is unreasonable to ask providers to demonstrate a willingness to accept more children receiving child care assistance directly in proportion to that provider’s size” (emphasis theirs) given a lack of full funding for the state’s subsidy assistance program; and that “it is not reasonable to require providers to dedicate a certain percentage” of operational funds to increasing early educator compensation based on a career ladder “unless sufficient funding is provided to meet the high requirements of the career ladder.” (ECEC declined an interview request for this piece but provided the following statement: “Members of ECEC share a commitment with the entire early education community to supporting families with high-quality early education and care, while also elevating our teachers who have chosen a career in education. More than 100,000 children are without child care in Massachusetts. We can only close that gap by working together. Providers, all of whom are still recovering from the impacts of the pandemic, should be treated equally, with a focus on quality and community impact.”)

In the end, no legislator offered the requested amendments before the Massachusetts Senate passed the bill unanimously.

What Chains Want

By contrast, ECEC has been of increasing child care funding that comes with no strings around parent fees or educator wages, such as proposals to increase the Child Care and Development Block Grant, which provides states with federal funding to administer the existing subsidy system. Goldstein reports that at a dinner with Manchin shortly after making their donations, “the executives expressed their wish for federal child care funding to be included in the bill that became the Inflation Reduction Act but said it should be targeted toward lower-income families.”

This orientation is, again, not hidden. In its 2023 annual report to the SEC, Bright Horizons :

“National, state or local child care benefit programs comprised primarily of subsidies in the form of tax credits or other direct government financial aid to parents provide us opportunities for expansion in additional markets. However, a broad-based benefit with governmentally mandated or funded child care or preschool, could reduce the demand for early care services at our existing early education and child care centers due to the availability of lower cost care alternatives, or could place downward pressure on the tuition and fees we charge, which could adversely affect our revenues and results of operations.”

The chains’ political activity at times goes beyond direct child care policy. Harper’s Magazine that in 2009, when Bright Horizons was still owned by Bain Capital, “the company paid the union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis L.L.P. $10,000 to lobby Congress on the Employee Free Choice Act.”

In general, several chains have shown hostility toward unionization efforts. Both Bright Horizons and KinderCare cite unionization as a profit risk factor in their SEC filings, and in 2016 KinderCare notified the University of Southern California they would be an affiliated site on USC’s campus, one month after workers there voted to unionize amid alleged “deplorable working conditions.” KinderCare claimed the decision to shutter the site was unrelated. Similarly, in 2024 Guidepost Montessori chain — a chain with over 100 sites that is owned by Higher Ground Education, in turn by several venture capital firms — abruptly in the Portland, Oregon area for multiple months. This action allegedly came on the heels of staff members at both sites voting to unionize, and the staff members have with the National Labor Relations Board.

If investor-backed chains are steadily gaining political power and helping shape the contours of child care policy, questions around what they see as an ideal system become paramount. In particular, who are the chains wanting to serve, and what does their continued growth imply for efforts to create a system that meets the needs of all families and the educators who care for young children?

Who is Child Care For?: Who is Child Care For?

The Desirable Clientele

In 2018, the Justice Department reached settlements with both and over alleged violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As a result of an investigation, the Department asserted that Learning Care Group staff “refused to provide assistance with insulin administration (by pen or syringe) to children with Type I diabetes based on a corporate-wide policy requiring such refusal.” The KinderCare settlement, which came out of the U.S. Attorney’s office in Connecticut, also focused on allegations related to accommodations for children with diabetes.

Similarly, in 2019 the Justice Department entered a over an alleged ADA violation with a child care chain owned by Spring Education Group (in turn owned by China-based private equity firm Primavera Capital Group). The complaint concerned a child with Down’s Syndrome, Maggie, who the center allegedly expelled when she was unable to meet toileting requirements, a consequence of the chain “refus[ing] to make reasonable modifications to its toileting policy for children with disabilities.” As part of the settlement, Spring agreed to announce a policy of reasonable accommodations for children with disabilities and pay a $30,000 civil penalty (via the settlement, Spring admitted no wrongdoing).

Such lawsuits fit a pattern of chains seemingly trying to cultivate a clientele that can pay their high prices with a minimum of hassle. They also implicate challenges around teacher turnover and training. Lauren Halpin, a former Bright Horizons director, recounted that some of the teachers in her center did not, in her professional opinion, have an adequate understanding of supporting children with special needs. These teachers preferred that children struggling with behavioral challenges be removed from the classroom. Halpin said she was limited in her ability to help because of the other corporate demands on her time.

Halpin’s experience is echoed by a current Primrose teacher. The teacher wrote in an email that, “I’ve asked for resources for students with emotional issues and because corporate doesn’t have set things for it, my requests have been pushed aside, dismissed, or forgotten about.” She added, “I had a student with some pretty severe behaviors — self-injurious and also injuring staff and students, mainly staff as we would keep that student away from others during moments of agitation. I called for help multiple times a day and would ask repeatedly for more assistance. I asked for anything and everything I could think of but the only assistance I was offered until I tried to quit was that they’d help me rearrange the room furniture.”

Beyond whether students have need of extra support, most of the large investor-backed chains — with one notable exception — , showing little interest in serving lower- and moderate-income families. This strategy is not subtle: for example, The Learning Experience states plainly in its Franchise Disclosure Document that “our target market for each location is dual income, middle-class families or single parents who seek a quality child care facility…” The company (according to U.S. Census data, roughly half of American households make less than $75,000 a year).�� Similarly, as The New York Times :

The percentage of Bright Horizons students who qualify for government assistance is a “single digit,” according to Stephen Kramer, the chief executive. At Lightbridge Academy, about one-third of its 66 sites accept subsidized students, said Gigi Schweikert, the chief executive. And at those sites, subsidized students make up 20% or less of the center’s total population.

(Ross Brendel, co-founder of Westerly Group, one of two private equity firms which partnered to acquire Lightbridge in 2021, said that “we wanted to be on the premium end of the spectrum. It’s just very much more healthy unit economics, a lot more tailwinds, and a lot more insulation from come-what-may from the government.”)

Research on the five largest U.S. chains conducted by the think tank Capita (note: the author, though writing in an individual capacity, also holds a title as senior fellow at Capita and helped coordinate the cited research) that across seven analyzed states, the median household income in census tracts surrounding Bright Horizons, Goddard, and Primrose sites exceeded $100,000. In all analyzed states, the median income surrounding chain sites substantially exceeded the state median income.

The major exception is KinderCare. While KinderCare also caters to an affluent clientele — one former director said that full-pay parents were seen as “gods” — the surrounding median income in the seven analyzed states was around $75,000, and the company also of “subsidy coordinators” whose goal is to help eligible lower-income families acquire government subsidies. While government reimbursement rates tend to be than full sticker price, these subsidies provide a steady source of revenue at scale, and many states have in recent years been increasing their reimbursement rates. As seen with the Build Back Better episode, more generous public funding for lower-income families could therefore change chains’ calculations.

The other side of the budgetary equation, of course, is not about how much parents can pay, but how much staff are to be paid.

Educator Churn

Beyond basic health and safety, quality in child care settings is heavily determined by educator stability. Young children thrive on what researchers call “” relationships. When there is high teacher turnover or teachers are experiencing acute stress, they are less able to provide the warm relationships children need. While the child care sector writ large struggles with high turnover, for-profit programs appear to put added stress and demands on their workforce.

A study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services , using 2019 data, franchise and chain programs showed the most “high turnover” (defined as more than 20% of the staff who work with children leaving over a 12-month period), with 47% of analyzed sites having high turnover. 45% of independent for-profit programs also had high turnover, while nonprofit and government programs were at 30% or below.

Working conditions seem to be part of the explanation. For instance, in 2023 the state of Massachusetts fined KinderCare over $540,000 for violating labor laws. A from the Massachusetts’ Attorney General’s office said their investigation:

“(R)evealed that employees at KinderCare’s Massachusetts locations were often unable to take meal breaks due to understaffing. Under Massachusetts law, employers must allow employees who are working a shift of more than 6 hours to take a 30-minute, uninterrupted meal break. Similarly, KinderCare was found to have violated wage laws by deducting breaks that were 20 minutes or less from employees’ paychecks. These short breaks are considered compensable time and therefore must be paid.”

In addition, individual center directors were found to have violated the Massachusetts Earned Sick Time law by restricting employees’ ability to take paid sick leave or imposing extra barriers like doctor’s notes.

(In response to the fine, KinderCare released largely blaming state regulation, writing in part that “staffing in the state has unique challenges because it requires that we have a certified teacher in the classroom at all times.” The statement also suggested that teachers can opt out of their meal breaks, although it goes on to note, “we had difficulty proving that teachers had voluntarily missed their meal breaks.”)

Rebecca Gwilt, a mother in the Richmond, Virginia area, sent her son to a local KinderCare. She shared in an interview that one day when she went to pick up her son, one of his teachers pulled her aside. As Gwilt recalled, “She said, ‘listen, we’re treated really terribly here. They treat us awfully, and I can’t take it anymore, and I’m quitting. And I want you to know I care a lot about your child, but I can’t be here anymore.’”

Beyond working conditions, the chains’ high fees and profitability do not seem to translate into substantially higher wages for employees (despite, as noted, the multi-million dollar packages for some chain executives). While large chains commonly offer health insurance and other fringe benefits many independent and nonprofit programs are unable to offer, their starting wages are not meaningfully different. For instance, as of 2024 in Colorado — where companies must post salaries on job descriptions by law — KinderCare teachers in cities like Colorado Springs start at $14.70, with lead (mentor) teachers at $17-$20 per hour. The state that average early educator pay in that area, inclusive of all teacher roles, is $17.41. Similarly, starting wage ranges for Primrose and Goddard teachers in Colorado are in line with surrounding county averages.

This mismatch between profit and pay has at times led to labor conflict. In 2023, staff at a Cadence Academy center (the company is owned by U.K.-based private equity firm Apax Partners) went on strike to protest low wages. The Olympian Cadence educator Rose Bayer, who “said she earns $16 per hour, just 26 cents per hour more than Washington state’s minimum wage of $15.74 per hour. When she was hired, she claims she was told the school raises tuition every six months so that those increases can be passed on to staff in the form of higher wages, but that hasn’t happened.” The staff also demanded adequate funding for classroom materials, which they said they had to pay for out of their own pockets.

Inconsistent Outcomes: Inconsistent Outcomes

What Research Says

It is difficult to draw broad conclusions about investor-backed chains without distinguishing what characteristics are more common to these chains versus independent or nonprofit programs. Any such conclusions are necessarily generalized: there is variation within all types of child care settings, just as experts like Brendan Ballou are clear there are better and worse actors among private equity firms.

Few research studies have been conducted in the U.S. around for-profit child care. What research exists does not make a distinction between investor-backed for-profit chains and those not backed by investors — although that distinction may be less relevant as the vast majority of large chains are now owned by private equity firms. That said, international evidence is suggestive. Drawing on research from Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., the Netherlands, and the U.S., a team of researchers that the totality of child care evidence “suggests quality is lower in for-profit services.” (This evidence is not, however, ironclad: one in the Netherlands concluded that while parent fees were higher in Dutch private equity-backed child care programs compared to non-profit programs, quality levels were more or less equivalent and focus groups found “the experiences of parents and staff differ little between the two types of ownership.”)

The most significant was published in 2007 by researchers at Yale University, who analyzed data from a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development study. The team concluded that “significant group differences were consistently in the direction of higher quality care provided by nonprofit centers compared with for-profit centers.” In all but one age group, wages were higher in nonprofit programs, and for toddler classrooms in particular, both child-to-adult ratios and teacher turnover were lower. Compared to not only non-profit programs, but also independent for-profit programs, for-profit chains came out worse on nearly every metric studied. The researchers conclude “the findings suggest that … for-profit chains were often lower in quality and never highest in quality (though occasionally were the same).”

That said, all U.S. chain programs — private equity-owned and otherwise — are licensed by the states in which they are located, some are accredited by national organizations, and many receive decent-to-high marks in their state quality rating systems. For instance, of the KinderCare sites listed in Illinois’ “ExceleRate,” rating , 26 are “gold circle of quality,” 9 are rated “silver circle of quality,” and 63 are in the “licensed circle of quality,” meaning they meet Illinois’ licensing requirements but most staff have not taken state-approved trainings on additional quality improvement measures.

That variation nods to a feature of many investor-backed chains: their scale can be both a boon and a risk.

The Benefits of Scale

There are certain advantages to the size, scale, and business savvy investor-backed chains can bring to bear. Interviewees regularly praised the professional development that was made available. Nicole Allen has been in early care and education for nearly 25 years, including stints as a Primrose teacher and a KinderCare site director. Allen said her experience with Kindercare “was top notch,” adding that, “I can’t say enough about the professional development that I got from KinderCare.”

In particular, Allen explained, KinderCare helped her learn how to sustainably operate a program in a financially difficult industry. She received training on “how to manage your ratios versus your enrollment, how to manage your food program money that comes in and the other additional dollars that you get from subscribing to whatever scholarship program or subsidy program that you receive in your center. They really do teach you how to see those line items and how to turn a profit.”

Allen added that the training went beyond business practices, crediting “the professional development that you get on child development, curriculum implementation, really understanding teacher-child interactions.”

Denise Hilbert concurs. Hilbert worked with Goddard Systems from 2007 until 2020, helping lead and perform quality assurance as well as helping to open new Goddard schools. She said that her experience was largely positive, as she had a chance to help sites with licensing and onboard new teachers before a new site opened, “showing them the Goddard ways, safe ways.” That said, Hilbert added that when Goddard got a new CEO in 2019, the corporate culture began to shift. “Toward when I first started, it was all about the education. Toward when I was getting ready to leave, it was all about the money.” For instance, Hilbert said there was an organizational restructuring that saw the vice president in charge of education have his influence diminished in favor of those more focused on the business bottom line.

What Hilbert lifts up appears to be a common tension between the pedagogical side and business side of corporate chains. In a 2024 , Rachel Robertson, Bright Horizons’ Chief Academic Officer, offered thoughts that many child development experts would agree with: “Early education is not, in fact, simply a preparatory stop on the way to real school, it is real learning. It is a time when the most brain development is happening, when the foundational architecture for all that comes next is forming and strengthening. It’s the place where children discover who they are, how the world works, and what is possible. It should be full of joy and wonder and exuberant play; not desks in rows, worksheets, and cookie cutter crafts that squelch curiosity and imagination when they are at their very peaks … We must insist on developmentally appropriate practices and ensure developmentally fundamental experiences” (emphasis hers).

The former Bright Horizons director in California, who also did trainings across network sites, affirmed that, “there were some big advantages to corporate: having training resources available, having libraries of tools and things for teachers to refer to, funding for teachers to go do professional development or be part of national groups.” The director noted, however, that the extent to which those assets were actually utilized was highly variable depending on the individual managers who were interfacing with sites. In some cases, she said, managers would work with sites on quality measures, while in other cases, managers would focus on budget savings. The director added that, “there are people [at the corporate office], and I’ve met them, and they’re lovely, and they’re very smart, who have a really good sense of quality. The way that that trickles down through the management structure, it gets completely lost.”

Quality Failures

An assertion commonly made about corporate child care is that their standardization provides at least a floor of quality — the first aspect of which is health and safety. It is useful to look closely at KinderCare in this regard given their dominant size and history in the American child care sector. The argument goes back decades: the 1977 New York Times article about KinderCare noted that the company “aims to be safe and predictable — a common denominator that’s appreciably higher than the lowest but not so high as to interfere with its own expansion.” A KinderCare from 2022 states plainly, “We hold sacred our responsibility to protect and nurture the children in our care.” Nearly all chain companies have prominent statements about safety on their websites.

Yet in addition to the research findings that suggest quality in for-profit programs often tends to be lower, these promises have questionable empirical backing. An analysis of licensing violations reveals, as with quality ratings, enormous variation within a chains’ sites. For example, in California, 86 KinderCare sites have had zero “complaint” visits from state inspectors since 2018 (visits responding to a lodged complaint about the program, which can range from being out of compliance with ratio requirements to safety concerns). During the same period, 81 sites have had four or more complaint visits, and 16 of those have had eight or more, with one site in Solano alone receiving 17 complaint visits.

Moreover, while instances of child abuse and neglect can and do occur in every type of child care setting — and the simple math of corporate chains having many sites increases the probability — there have been many examples of terrible outcomes and quality failures in chain programs that should ostensibly prevent them.

For instance, in January 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families began the process of revoking the license of a KinderCare program in Schofield, Wisconsin. The local news station, WSAW-7, :

“(T)here have been dozens of violations and fines committed by KinderCare staff over the past few years, including three dozen in the span of a few months. Overall, the violations included a lack of attention given to kids, more kids to teachers than allowed by state requirements, unchecked behaviors from kids that could cause harm, unsanitary and hazardous conditions, and some staff who did not have background checks or who were not qualified to teach.”

A former staff member who spoke with 7 Investigates but who did not want to be named to protect her children due to them being mentioned in some of the violations, said she would report issues to center leadership, but those issues would not be addressed. She said she began talking with the state the first week she started working there.

She said she was caring for the kids by herself with as many as 13 kids above the age of 2, beyond the state’s ratio requirement of at most eight kids per one teacher.

“With the amount of behaviors some of these children have, I’m not able to give myself to the other children who also need my attention,” she said. “I felt like I was lying to the parents (in reference to providing quality care).”

(In a letter to families, the KinderCare director and its district leader stated that they will appeal the revocation and that, in part, “we believe this decision places unnecessary stress on our families … We work closely with state officials to investigate concerns as they arise. In the past few years we’ve trained our teachers and staff on a variety of teaching skills, best practices, and their responsibilities as caregivers.”)

Reports like these are not, however, limited to KinderCare. For example, in 2022, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood of a Primrose franchise. State inspectors documented that staff members “restrained children by placing their legs over them at nap time,” that “twice, staff members were sleeping when they were supposed to be supervising children,” and that the director did not report allegations of abuse and neglect to the proper authorities. (Primrose said in a statement at the time, in part, “The health, safety and well-being of the children entrusted to our care is at the very core of our brand promise at Primrose Schools … Upon learning of the situation, we immediately launched an internal investigation and terminated the franchise agreement. We are deeply saddened by the stress this closure is causing the children and families who attended the school.”)

Even some smaller chains have such experiences. Big Blue Marble Academy (BBMA) operates 67 programs primarily in the Southeast. It had been owned by private equity firm Avathon Capital since 2018 and was sold in early 2024 to another private equity company, Leeds Capital. In 2023, dozens of parents at a BBMA site in Daphne, Alabama alleging widespread abuse and neglect.

Among other allegations, the lawsuit claims BBMA staff members “improperly punished plaintiffs and other children, including but not limited to: unauthorized use of corporal punishment; withholding food; locking children in [sic] unattended in rooms including the bathroom as punishment; refusing nap time as punishment; physical abuse; verbal abuse; shaking; pinching; and pushing.” (BBMA denies the allegations, saying in a statement at the time that “State licensing has concluded its investigation into each of the claims, which were ultimately dismissed as unfounded. Additionally, Big Blue Marble Academy in Daphne has had a series of satisfactory licensing visits and is not currently under investigation for any licensing violations.”) Also in 2023, the former director of a BBMA site in South Carolina for allegedly forging the results of legally-mandated employee background checks while running the program.

At times, these quality failures can result in the worst case scenario. In February 2024, Cadence Education for $16 million nearly three years after a five-month-old, Cash, died at a South Carolina site. Per , the death allegedly occurred after Cash was placed down to sleep in an unsafe position and then left unattended for 30 minutes. (In a statement to the Rock Hill Herald following the settlement, Cadence stated in part: “The health, safety and well being of all of the children in our care is our highest priority,” and, “In June 2021, an infant at our school had an isolated, emergency health situation. Our teachers and staff reacted immediately, performing CPR and calling emergency services. Our hearts remain with the parents and loved ones of the infant, and everyone who was impacted by this tragedy.”)

The Policy Response: The Policy Response

With all of these facets in view, several possible futures emerge as the United States and peer nations wrestle with the growing influence of investor-backed child care chains. One such future involves the chains’ unchecked growth as more public money becomes available: a situation where, as former adviser to the U.K. Department for Education Sam Freedman said , “We’re putting a lot of state money into the sector and they’re taking a lot of money out.” Verna Esposito, the former chain employee and current owner of Little Friends, an independent center in Connecticut, worries about what such a future means for the children whose families will be left out of such a system. “If this is allowed to happen — if private equity becomes the national model — we’re in big trouble,” she said. “Children are going to be in unlicensed care. Children are going to be isolated. Children are going to be missing out on the many, many benefits of high-quality early care and education.”

Elizbaeth Leiwant, of Neighborhood Villages, agrees. She said that, “as we talk about the future of early care and education, we really need to be thinking about what does a quality and sustainable sector look like, and what are we allowing to happen in early education that we wouldn’t stand for in K-12?”

Ownership Transitions

Issues of ownership transition loom large when considering potential future scenarios. Chains frequently grow via acquisitions of existing programs, although there are some exceptions (The Learning Experience, for instance, relies heavily on newly built sites). As the owners of independent programs look to sell, either because they are reaching retirement age or otherwise wish to move on, they face few viable options beside selling to a chain. There are, generally speaking, no public options for acquiring programs, and very few U.S. programs go through the process of converting to a worker- or parent-owned co-op model.

Chains know this. For instance, the private equity-backed company Premier Early Childhood Education Partners has sent unsolicited letters to Wisconsin centers offering to start a conversation about acquisition. One such letter, provided by a program owner, comes from Premier’s chief development officer. It starts with “Have you ever considered how you might transition your business to a new owner?” and goes on to offer, “My best advice to all owners of businesses is to consider what their transition could look like well before actually wanting to wrap things up as the process will take time.”

Similarly, in February 2024, Bright Horizons CEO Stephen Kramer nodded to the idea that the could lead to more acquisition opportunities due to the fragmented nature of the sector. “Competitors, specifically in our industry, tend to be individual owner-operators. They are very vocationally minded and they ultimately will focus on families. They’ll focus on their teachers and may do things that are uneconomic for some period of time,” Kramer said, adding that such programs may now be struggling as finances tighten. He went on to note, “There are isolated examples where owner-operators are turning in the keys or deciding to be acquired. But I think at this point, it’s still very early in that process, and we expect the effects to unfold over the next 12 to 18 months.”

In practice, acquisitions can look like what happened with AppleTree & Gilden Woods, an independent Michigan-based child care chain with 24 sites across the state. In 2022, AppleTree & Gilden Woods was sold to Learning Care Group. In explaining the decision to sell, owner and president Bridgett VanDerHoff , “To be able to do this acquisition, it was about finding somebody that had the wherewithal.” VanDerHoff went on to say she was confident that Learning Care Group would keep her chain growing and profitable. Although terms of the sale were not made public, an attorney for AppleTree & Gilden Woods said, “it was a very meaningful transaction for its owners.”

Erecting Guardrails

Ownership transitions aside, governments have a menu of potential policy responses at their disposal. In 2021, as Build Back Better seemed poised to uncork major public funding for child care, a group of organizations, including the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), entitled “Action to Preempt the Financialization of the Early Childhood Sector.” The brief suggested several principles: prioritizing public child care funding toward public, nonprofit, and/or small business entities; requiring state agencies to boost the infrastructure supporting such programs; and attaching conditions to the funding “that promote equity, transparency, and accountability.”

Such conditions, the brief contends, might include limits on executive compensation, prohibiting the use of public funds for dividends or other financial maneuvers that enrich investors, requiring public reporting of how taxpayer funds are being used, establishing living wage floors for employees, reducing fees for parents, and so on. The brief notes conditions like those have precedent, for instance around restrictions for airlines receiving pandemic-era CARES Act funding.

There are domestic and international examples of what guardrails can look like in practice. As previously mentioned, Massachusetts currently has the against excessive profit-seeking. Additionally, in 2023, Vermont passed , a significant piece of child care legislation that included more than $120 million a year in permanent funding fueled largely by a small payroll tax. Working amid media coverage around Little Sprouts — the French private equity-owned chain — hiking their fees, Vermont legislators added a requirement that programs receiving public money publicly disclose their tuition and all of their owners and affiliates.

More consequentially, the law states programs may not increase their tuition by more than 1.5 times the national average increase in child care wages. Functionally, that means that for the first year of the law’s implementation, at a 7.2% fee increase. (Leaders from Vermont’s Department for Children and Families many providers of all types have raised concerns about the fee caps because of the timing in which they take effect compared to when the new state money starts flowing, suggesting the importance of how policy guardrails are designed on a technical level.)

Similarly, New Jersey allows for-profit centers to be part of its state-funded preschool system, but . To participate, for example, programs must adhere to educator compensation standards in line with school district salary bands. They may not do a sale-leaseback deal that results in the program owing more in rent than they previously spent when owning the property. Profit is restricted to no more than 2.5% of the total allowable program costs paid by the state. Likely as a result, the major corporate chains have chosen not to participate in New Jersey’s preschool system.

Other nations are also beginning to act. Canadian provinces are taking various steps to curb undue profit-seeking as the country rolls out their child care system. Martha Friendly, executive director of Canada’s Childcare Resource and Research Unit, explained in an interview that per the Canadian federal government’s budget which outlayed billions of dollars for child care expansion and fee reductions, expansion was to be led by “primarily public and nonprofit” providers.

Provinces have interpreted this guideline differently. requires that funding prioritize nonprofit, public, and Indigenous programs as well as family child care businesses. Alberta, a more conservative-leaning province, is more permissive of for-profit programs but has prohibitions on using public money to pay dividends back to investors, and has adopted a “.” Perhaps most importantly, Friendly said, are provinces that are using public funds to adopt fixed parent fees while working toward implementing wage grids for child care educators. Doing so moves the system “away from the market, essentially, and then the possibility of making profits starts to shrink.”

There are also guardrail options that go beyond the child care sector itself. Recommendations which Brendan Ballou makes that could impact the child care sector include having the Department of Justice aid efforts to end liability shields that protect private equity firms from the consequences of their owned companies’ actions; having the Securities and Exchange Commission bulk up mandatory financial disclosures; and having the Treasury Department designate the largest private equity firms as “systemically important,” which adds new reporting requirements and oversight. Ballou contends Congressional action should also be on the table, such as the , which would substantially reform multiple dimensions of private equity.

Whatever action policymakers do — or do not — take, investor-backed child care chains will be a defining influence in the coming years. Reckoning with that influence will have enormous implications for children, parents, educators, government, and the child care sector writ large. These issues go to the heart of how child care is positioned in society, and to an overarching question: how comfortable is America with having, as one former KinderCare director put it, “commodified children.”

Note: The following organizations either declined to comment/be interviewed or did not respond to multiple requests for comment/interviews: Partners Group, Apax Partners, Sycamore Partners, PSP Investments, American Securities, Providence Equity Partners, Golden Gate Capital, Primavera Capital Group, Roark Capital, Glencoe Capital, KinderCare, Learning Care Group, Bright Horizons, Primrose, Goddard Systems, Cadence Education, Child Development Schools, The Learning Experience.

]]> /zero2eight/gas-groceries-homeownership-opportunities-and-kids-extracurriculars/ Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:00:08 +0000 https://the74million.org/?p=9365 Briyana Holloway remembers the shock when she saw her new paycheck. It was January 2024, and the had given child care educators like her a raise in their paychecks through their employer. Her twice-a-month take-home pay had been $1,800, and now it had leapt to over $2,500 — nearly a 50% increase. For Holloway, who has a bachelor’s degree from Delaware State University and works as a lead teacher in a child care center in northwest D.C., this was the most amount of money she’d ever made.

The extra money changed her life. She enrolled in the to begin the process of purchasing her own home in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, where she lives now in an apartment with her partner and three boys. She can now pay her rent and her bills on time. One of her children has an autism diagnosis, and she has been able to purchase therapy aids for him, such as noise-canceling headphones and a weighted blanket, and she enrolled him in swim classes. She can afford gas for her car without any stress – which matters since she travels an hour each way for work.

Ashley Ross also saw a drastic pay bump. She has worked in child care for over 15 years and has seen a number of small salary bumps, including a several thousand increase after she received her associate degree through a specialized program, which allowed her to work and go to school simultaneously. But even after a decade of teaching and the extra credentials, Ross made a salary of $51,000, which made it hard for her to support herself and three children. When the D.C. Pay Equity Fund bumped up her salary, she made $63,000 a year, with her bimonthly take-home pay moving from $1,500 to more than $2,000 per pay period.

“Once this started, everything changed for me,” Ross said. She can easily pay her water bill and electricity bill, and she no longer receives threatening notices to have either turned off. She can pay the internet bill, so her 10-year-old can do homework. She no longer has to rely on her fiancée to pay an extra portion of the bills. She has more money for groceries, and can buy fresh food, such as whole grain pasta and organic yogurt instead of the cheapest options, like white noodles and mac and cheese. The healthier food is especially important for her 4-year-old daughter who has been diagnosed as pre-diabetic.�� When Ross’s daughter wants to go to a bounce house or out for ice cream, she has enough discretionary income to say yes. “I don’t have to tell her to wait until next week when Mommy gets paid.”

For child care workers all over the District of Columbia, the D.C. Pay Equity Fund, the $75 million program that allows early-child care educators to be paid similar salaries to their D.C. public school counterparts, has been “life-changing” and “shocking” and “gave me room to breathe” as described by educators when explaining what the salary difference did for themselves and their families.

At the time of its inception, the D.C. Pay Equity program was and supporting in this role, . Washington, D.C. was in the child care landscape, investing tens of millions of dollars into a child care system, including direct payments to providers and child care centers so that staff could be paid a livable wage. But Mayor Muriel Bowser’s would zero-out the Pay Equity Fund. (Washington, D.C. is one of the rare jurisdictions in the country to offer pre-K3 and pre-K4, ). If the budget goes through with those existing cuts in place, teachers who received a pay bump through the D.C. Pay Equity Fund will now see a drastic pay cut in its place.

Note:

Noah Hichenberg runs the Gan HaYeled Preschool at Adas Israel Congregation, where Briyana Holloway and Ashley Ross work.��The D.C. Pay Equity funds have been “a total game changer” for his staff, allowing the school to recruit and retain teachers and show a level of respect for the profession and difficulty of the job, which has long been seen as separate from traditional public school teachers. Hichenberg says that 90-95% of the tuition revenue he gets from families goes to paying his staff, and even though the Gan doesn’t pay rent or mortgage for the building space they use in the Adas Israel Synagogue, they still cannot afford to pay their teachers the higher wages without the D.C. Pay Equity funds.

For child care workers all over the District of Columbia, the D.C. Pay Equity Fund, the $75 million program that allows early-child care educators to be paid similar salaries to their D.C. public school counterparts, has been “life-changing” and “shocking” and “gave me room to breathe” as described by educators when explaining what the salary difference did for themselves and their families.

Without the funds, Hichenberg would have offered a new employee applying for a job a starting salary in the high 30,000s or low 40,000s. “It really diminishes anyone wanting to apply for these jobs,” he said. But the D.C. Pay Equity Fund came with mandatory levels of which to pay early childhood educators, aligning with their education level and role as a lead or assistant teacher. The fund was able to lift salaries for both new hires and existing employees, and Hinchenberg said many of his teachers were motivated to receive additional accreditation to reach that higher salary level.

For an employee like Holloway, with a bachelor’s degree and as a lead teacher, she now makes over $75,000. “Everyone has been in awe of this program,” Hichenberg said, referring to the other preschool directors and members of the early education field who have been aware of the innovative and transformative nature of the D.C. Pay Equity Fund program. “No one else pays their teachers $75,000.” Hichenberg says he has the most stable workforce he’s ever had this past school year, along with happier teachers since they have less financial stress at home.

But if the Fund goes away, as the budget is slated to zero out? Hichenberg doesn’t know how he can afford to keep the teachers, or how he can expect them to weather such a pay cut.

“To take this away now is cruel and callous,” said Hichenberg. “It’s far worse than not having attempted it in the first place.”

***

The D.C. Pay Equity Fund came out of the D.C. Early Childhood Educator Equitable Compensation Task Force, which was in 2021 during the pandemic with the goal of finding ways to disburse funds from the District’s . This was one of many programs that state and local governments to the stress on child care providers that the pandemic had exacerbated. Hichenberg explained that when D.C.’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education first unveiled the program to educators, they reiterated multiple times to educators that “there is no sunset on this legislation” and it would exist in perpetuity. But it’s a piece of legislation, so politicians can still kill it, he explained. The goal had been to make early childhood educators’ compensation more equitable with people who worked in D.C. public school early childhood — including DCPS pre-K3 and pre-K4 teachers — the same job that Ross has, though she works at a private child care center. But the DCPS contracts are union-negotiated, so not eligible for cuts in the Mayor’s budget.

Neidia Ramsay-Swann has been working at the Gan for 8 years, and the salary bump under the D.C. Pay Equity Fund meant she no longer had to take on a second job to pay her bills. Under her previous salary, Ramsay-Swan picked up jobs over the weekends babysitting or caring for the elderly. When the synagogue needed weekend or holiday coverage, she volunteered to work to make the extra money. “But that took time away from my own family just to fill in that gap,” she said.

Ramsay-Swan had enrolled in the same associate degree program that Ashley Ross attended, and got a small bump to $47,000 per year after earning her degree. But after the D.C. Pay Equity raises, her income jumped to $63,000. For the first time that she can remember, she had money to put in her savings account. She could cover her own expenses without relying on her husband. “Now I can do it by myself. Which is like freedom. Who needs a man?” she asks, laughing.

The extra money meant Ramsay-Swan could help her daughter, who was pregnant and out of a job, pay her rent. And she’s saved enough to take a trip of her own this July, to Jamaica to visit her mother.�� Her face brightens when she explains that she hasn’t been to Jamaica in 30 years, and hasn’t seen her mother since 2007. “It’s been a really long time,” she said.

But if the program is cut, “It’s going to be sad,” she says. “You hear in life that you aren’t supposed to go backwards, only forwards. If the money stops, it’s going to be a lot of going backwards, a lot of planning, things you shouldn’t have to worry about again.”

LaVonda Butler-Means has worked at the Gan for six years, and the D.C. Pay Equity salary bump took her from $43,000 per year to the $50,000s. She no longer chooses between groceries and gas to get to work — though Butler-Means says it was never a real choice, gas won because “of course I am going to come to work.” The extra money has allowed her to breathe, she explains, and enroll her two kids in extracurricular activities — gymnastics and swimming for her daughter and football and basketball for her son – though she is looking into soccer options for him as well.

The extra money allowed her to get caught up on her bills. “I had to play catch up from a long time ago, but I’m caught up,” she said. She can pay for school activities, for the book fair, for the small things her kids need and ask for. This year, when the Gan is closed for its spring break, Butler-Means and her family are going to Williamsburg, Virginia, for their first vacation in over a year. But her kids have gotten used to their activities, and Butler-Means recognizes she may have to pull them if the funds get cut. “I don’t like to tell them no, but if I don’t have it, I don’t have it,” she said.

Hichenberg says there is no winning path for his child care center if the D.C. Pay Equity funds go away. “I don’t have a waiting list of potential employees,” he says. “[These teachers] are going to walk away from the job because they can’t afford their lifestyles, and they aren’t flashy.” He doesn’t know if he can find someone to teach who can make $38,000 a year, and without the adequate number of staff, they can’t serve the families unless they raise tuition further. Yet D.C. has some of the in the country, and the Gan charges families $34,000 a year for full day, year-round child care, with a discount to $30,000 for members of the synagogue. “I don’t see how the whole operation sustains itself through this,” he said.

For the teachers, the uncertainty itself is harrowing. LaVonda Butler-Means tries to keep her kids from worrying about it. “Your kids are not supposed to know that you are actually struggling,” she said. But if the funds go away, “it will be a downward spiral for us.” Briyana Holloway is worried that she may no longer qualify for the home ownership program.��She has the documentation now to prove she can provide the monthly mortgage payment, “but I can only prove this up until the program is taken away. I don’t know where I stand after that, honestly,” she said. Neidia Ramsay-Swan feels she’s already gotten “two strokes of good luck” – the associate degree program and then the pay bump. “But now it’s about to change,” she said.

Ashley Ross knows she may need to consider other options if the D.C. Pay Equity Funds cuts happen, but she doesn’t want to. She has worked in early childhood education her entire adult life. She loves the work but feels the role is chronically under-appreciated, especially when programs like the D.C. Pay Equity Fund cuts threaten to take away the financial cushion her family has been given. “We don’t give teachers enough credit,” Ross said. “Parents love us of course. They need us to be able to work, and they trust that their children are safe with us. But we work really, really hard and we should be paid,” she said. “We are due for more shine.”

]]> /zero2eight/finding-a-home-for-family-child-care-in-publicly-funded-preschool/ Thu, 18 Apr 2024 11:00:27 +0000 https://the74million.org/?p=9358 Home-based child care is a fact of life in the U.S. On any given day, millions of children spend their days — sometimes their nights — in family child care settings. The decision for a child to attend a family child care home is influenced by multiple factors, but despite their popularity among parents, such homes rarely find their place among state-funded pre-K programs.

Given the number of states that now realize the urgency of expanding their preschool offerings, and the challenge they uniformly face in meeting demand, why have cities and states been slow on the uptake of this valuable option and what it would take to remedy the situation? ��What would it look like for family child care homes to be part of states’ publicly funded high-quality pre-K system? And what might that cost?

Such policy questions concerning 3- and 4-year-olds are precisely up the alley of the (NIEER), whose annual has been a rich resource for tracking state-funded preschool efforts for two decades.

“We consider family child care homes one of the options in a mixed delivery system, and we know the numbers are probably small,” says GG Weisenfeld, NIEER’s associate director of technical assistance. “Originally, we didn’t know exactly how many states are including them and what that looked like. So, we developed a survey and sent it to the states we knew allowed family child care homes to receive state dollars, either directly or indirectly. We followed up with conversations with state leaders and a review of policy manuals and from that, we wrote a paper.”

That paper became a yearslong suite of papers that together comprise a sort of “Everything You Wanted to Know About Family Child Care in Publicly Funded Pre-K But Didn’t Have the Resources to Ask.”

The initiative couldn’t be timelier. In late February, the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human services issued a joint letter encouraging state school and early childhood leaders to collaborate on a mixed delivery approach to preschool and to leverage federal funding to improve access to high-quality preschool. “Mixed delivery” refers to an approach that provides programs in child care centers, Head Start programs, public schools and family child care homes. Every state except Hawaii operates mixed-delivery systems.

The Department of Education has also released guidance to support public schools that use Title I funds for early childhood programming, aimed at closing educational achievement gaps for children of families with low incomes. To implement those programs, policymakers and community leaders will need a much clearer picture of the country’s early care and education mosaic — and the powerful case for family child care as vital to that effort.

Given all the variables, attempting to present the Big Picture of FCC across the U.S. must be a bit like trying to wrangle an octopus into a mayonnaise jar. Nevertheless, NIEER researchers’ first paper, written in partnership with , a national collaborative of funders supporting home-based child care, presented a comprehensive look at the role FCCs play in publicly funded pre-K systems in the U.S.

NIEER’s Lowdown on Family Child Care in Publicly Funded Pre-K Systems

• ��
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• Coming next: NIEER will publish another paper later this spring on 75 of the largest U.S. cities’ inclusion of FCC homes in their pre-K programs

The paper, “” and its more recent reveal the complexity of families’ choices for their preschoolers — needs as varied and multifaceted as the child care options themselves. Research shows that families with low incomes or from marginalized communities such as immigrant communities, those in rural settings or communities of color are more likely to use home-based care, frequently drawn by lower costs, proximity to home, or the caregiver’s language and cultural compatibility with the family. Embracing FCC as part of states’ mixed delivery systems therefore presents a ready-made opportunity for the equitable delivery of high-quality preschool.

An important consideration for many of these families is that family child care homes often operate during non-traditional hours — significant for parents working in service industries, medical environments or other sectors that require flexible or non-standard working hours. This necessity puts many FCC homes at odds with being part of state- or city-funded programs, which typically require facilities to offer part- or full-school days over a 180-day school year. For FCC homes to participate in state-funded pre-K, policymakers need to address how preschool programs can be delivered within these flexible hours outside public-school schedules, and how educators will be paid for hours of care beyond traditional pre-K days. This is just one example of the questions facing policymakers seeking to integrate FCC into their public programs.

Lessons from States

States face major challenges in expanding their preschool systems thanks to the “mix” in mixed delivery. The variety of settings and different types of providers, from faith-based centers and charter schools to Head Start agencies and family child care homes, leave administrators and policymakers with the Herculean job of distributing funding and maintaining quality across a profoundly complicated landscape.

NIEER researchers, with support from the , took an in-depth look at how policymakers in Alabama, Michigan, New Jersey, New York and West Virginia have addressed the challenge. As “” shows, each of the five states featured has taken a different approach but has built high-quality systems that serve at least one-third of their state’s 4-year-olds. The paper concludes with recommendations for state policy, based on the authors’ analysis of what worked in all the states’ efforts to support a strong mixed delivery system across settings.

“Many states have not quite figured out how to seamlessly incorporate family child care within a mixed delivery system,” says Karin Garver, an early childhood education policy specialist at NIEER and one of the paper’s coauthors. “Center-based care in a child care center doesn’t look much different from center-based care in a school district setting but are different compared to a family child care setting. In these papers, we’re trying to outline how to make it doable, to see what it looks like to intentionally incorporate family child care into state-funded pre-K programs.

“It’s important to have foundational policies in place when you set up a program before you start adding massive numbers of children to your rolls,” Garver says. “We see states do the opposite and end up with a lot of trouble. They expand enrollment to a whole bunch of kids and then they try to increase quality. It’s very challenging to course-correct like that once the program is established.”

�³󲹳�’s Needed

As the researchers noted in their state analysis, even those that have built high-quality preschool systems struggle to reach all of their 3- and 4-year-olds. Nationally, just 14% of 3-year-olds and 39% of 4-year-olds were enrolled in publicly funded programs in the 2020-2021 school year. One means of ensuring that more children have access to high-quality preschool is to expand to settings beyond school- and center-based classrooms, such as FCC homes.�� NIEER’s “,” spells out what it will take to do so.

“Researching and writing ‘Conditions for Success’ was a lengthy process,” says Erin Harmeyer, assistant research professor at NIEER. “We started with a literature review to look at things such as curriculum usage, environmental recommendations and we put together some drafts. Then we had a lot of expert conversations with other researchers and a couple of other institutes. Through these conversations, we edited, refined and revised the conditions for success. Then we got further feedback from FCC educators themselves and from a few other experts in the field, and revised some more until we came up with a final draft.”

Given that degree of vetting, research, feedback and revision, any policymaker or community leader wanting to see that FCC is included in publicly funded pre-K can use “Conditions for Success” as a GPS-accurate roadmap to undertake the journey.

But What About the Cost?

The roadmap laid out in “Conditions for Success” will require sufficient fuel to reach the destination. Recommendations include professional development for providers, including on-site coaching, training, peer-to-peer networks and mentoring, as well as developing a system that provides funding and opportunities for FCC educators to obtain a bachelor’s degree and specialized training for home-based settings.

“NIEER considers the FCC educator having a bachelor’s degree a baseline for quality,” Weisenfeld says. “This is based on the current research that says pre-K teachers need a BA degree and ECE specialization to get the positive outcomes we know they can achieve, but only through a high-quality program.

“Early childhood is when children’s brains are developing and the most significant part of their growth and development is happening. Why not have the people with the highest degrees and the most qualifications educating that population? The FCC educators want to have those degrees and they want to be compensated accordingly. We feel that if we can support this population of educators who want degrees, want to make a difference and want to operate a high-quality program, why not support this?”

For the paper, “,” NIEER used a previously developed tool called the Cost of Preschool Quality and Revenue. The tool is intended to help policymakers, advocates and state administrators understand the true cost of implementing a state funded preschool program. The tool enables users to consider various scenarios and see the impact of adding or not adding certain quality standards.

“We looked at how much states are spending now, what we think they should be spending and how much it would cost to achieve that,” says Garver. “Then we looked at the difference and asked, ‘How many are within striking difference of what it would cost to serve children in FCC settings, assuming that they pay comparable salaries to teachers in K-12 settings, use a network system to provide supports for providers and so on.’

“It’s interesting that it’s just not that much more expensive. When we started this project, we had some concern that our work would show that the cost of serving children in family child care settings was too high for states to take it up. That’s just not the case, depending on how the state sets up the system.”

The bottom line, the researchers agree, is that states aren’t spending enough on the programs they have. Given their stated commitment to providing high-quality pre-K to all their preschoolers, they need to be spending more on all programs.

“If they’re spending what they should be on those programs,” says Weisenfeld, “they’re not that far away from where they need to be in order to incorporate family child care more systematically into their state funded pre-K program.”

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