We subsidize those who raise our crops. Why not those who help raise our children?
Even as parents return to work, the Kansas City region is bleeding child care slots as providers succumb to the pandemic and workers flee the COVID-19 delta variant and scandalously low pay.
Working couples and single parents “are absolutely struggling to find child care,” says Kelly Davydov, executive director of Child Care Aware of Kansas, the lead organization for the state’s child care resource referral network. “There are some places where there are no available slots. It might not be an option to have your kids in child care in the county that you live in. You might have to travel to another county to find a child care spot for your children.
“It’s a Gordian knot. It definitely is.”
As of last year, 16 Kansas counties had no child care openings at all for infants or toddlers — and 38% of the state’s 105 counties had just one slot for every 10 infants or toddlers.
Both Davydov and Paula Neth, president and CEO of Child Care Aware’s partner agency in Kansas City, The Family Conservancy, say the COVID-19 pandemic and delta variant surge have made it even harder to recruit and retain child care workers who, in Kansas City, may earn no more than $10 or $12 an hour.
“We already had some child care deserts across the metropolitan area, and this has just exacerbated that,” Neth says.
Since the start of the pandemic, Neth says the seven-county metropolitan area has lost 207 child care programs. Davydov says the state of Kansas has shed well over 300 child care programs since 2019. Home-based child care businesses have been particularly hard-hit.
What are parents to do? Davydov says besides being a resource for child care providers, Child Care Aware of Kansas offers a free child care resource center and website for parents to get real-time help finding child care openings. Child Care Aware of Missouri does, too. “But,” she adds, “we can provide all of the most wonderful search tools that we want to, but if there isn’t a supply of child care, it’s not helpful in the end.”
As for child care providers, that’s what Neth’s The Family Conservancy specializes in. Last year, she helped form a local Early Care and Education Community Collaborative to help providers navigate these narrow straits.
The child care crisis would be far worse without federal pandemic aid that has poured in to help child care programs keep the lights on and install costly pandemic infrastructure and protocols. But even so, Neth says three Kansas City-area child care programs have had to shut down for 14-day periods because of COVID.
Pandemic made existing problems of staffing, wages worse
Obviously, this is a national and chronic problem that predates the pandemic. The virus has only aggravated the child care industry’s preexisting conditions. Systemic problems with the financial viability of child care programs, the availability of staff — and their ability to earn a living wage — will outlast the pandemic, too, unless something structural changes. And there is no vaccine for that.
“Child care providers, if they’re in this business, they’re in it for kids and they’re in it for families,” says Davydov. “They’re not in it for the income, that’s for sure.”
In its August report, the National Association for the Education of Young Children says 80% of child care centers across the nation are understaffed, and 78% “identified low wages as the main obstacle to recruitment of educators.” As one observer put it, the problem isn’t so much the virus as the staffing. And the problem there is pay.
The NAEYC report says 73% of child care centers in Kansas are experiencing a staffing shortage, which is better than most states — including Missouri, where the figure is 88% — but either figure is still alarming. The report’s summation of the crisis in Kansas says “staffing shortages, low wages, and a broken market mean that substantial, sustainable public investments are needed for this essential sector to recover and rebuild.”
Exactly. There is no way the market alone can fix the child care conundrum — where the options are dwindling, it’s often too expensive for families to afford, and yet child care workers are still vastly underpaid and undervalued.
Moreover, as parents look reluctantly at quitting work and staying home, Neth says, “Some parents are having to make that choice. And that’s really sad. I think we’re really going to see a loss of women in the workforce if this continues.”
A pre-pandemic 2018 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development found that in the 30 richest countries in the world, parents spend an average of 15% of their annual income on child care. In Denmark, for example, couples pay an average of 10.7% of their income on child care, and single parents pay just 2.9%. In the U.S., meanwhile, couples spend an average of just over 25% of their income on child care — and single parents shell out an unsustainable average of 52.7%.
Federal lawmakers are currently considering investing in the nation’s child care infrastructure, as most other countries that can have already done. We subsidize those who raise our crops. Why is it so hard to subsidize those who help raise our children?
You want a return to normal? It won’t happen — not until understaffed, underfunded child care programs that free up parents to work are made a top priority.