Child Care and the Workforce
I am writing today to bring your attention to an important matter. Wanting the best for your child’s safety, care, and wellbeing is the number one priority in any parent’s mind. Unfortunately, “The United States is among the lowest in the developed world in the early childhood care we provide” (Friedman, 2014). Parents need comfort and consolation that their children will be well taken care of when going to their jobs. Parents should be able to trust that their country’s expectation and standards for childcare, regardless of the city and/or state, are more than satisfactory. To many parents’ dismay, the childcare system in the United States is below subpar.
Though Americans spend more on childcare than in other developed countries (and those countries actually provide excellent childcare), “the majority of American day care providers ranked fair or poor and only 10% were deemed of high quality” and “the cost of care has doubled since the 1980s, according to the Census Bureau” (Friedman, 2014). Many parents have been stopped or greatly restricted in their careers due to their need to parent their children because of the great lack of decent childcare. A recent study published in March 2019, examined a group of about 2,000 Amazon employees with younger children and “argues that a lack of affordable childcare has prevented talented women from progressing in their careers” and “these mothers are ‘tired of seeing colleagues quit because they can’t find childcare’” (Schochet, 2019). Amazon is typical of American workplaces. Parents nationwide have struggled with this for too long.
Our lack of good childcare forces many parents to leave their jobs due to needing to take care of their children. There’s also an increase in one parent working and the other staying home to be a full-time caregiver and not even working with the degrees that they’ve earned to fulfill life-long dream careers. To make matters worse, good quality childcare is expensive, especially when having multiple children. Fortunately, all hope is not lost for these parents.
The two largest federal programs that provide free or subsidized childcare are The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) and Head Start (HS). These federal programs are made for low-income families and parents who are still trying to pursue their careers with younger children. The CCDBG is the biggest monetary source of federal funding for childcare assistance. It funds childcare subsidies provided by states for low-income families. The other federal program, Head Start, helps to ensure that children get high quality early education in addition to health and social services (Schochet, 2019).
These programs need more funding. They need to be able to help more families. They’ve made such an impact and helped so many families, but more families need such assistance. Approximately one million low-income children and their families are helped annually, but in 2018 over four million persons lived in poor families with related children under age six (Semega et al., 2019, Table B-2). Though these programs have helped many families through “promoting maternal labor force participation” and have been having “positive child outcomes” (Schochet, 2019), they need to include more families in their served population, and need the funding to be able to do so. Many more families and parents need this assistance. Sadly, “only a small portion of families who need assistance paying for childcare receive it...about one-third of eligible 3- to 5-year-olds, while Early Head Start serves seven percent of eligible children under age 3” (Schochet, 2019).
In conclusion, a very select amount of families receive assistance with childcare and so many more need it. Please help support and help these families that are in need. Parents are struggling and unable to fully fulfill their responsibilities and duties, and children are suffering in poor quality childcare facilities and not receiving the appropriate attention and care they deserve. Recently, in the FY 2020 budget, the Federal government appropriated $7.7 billion for the CCDBG and $11.6 billion for Head Start (Joughin, 2019). It seems to me a more appropriate level of funding would be $20 billion for CCDBG and $35 billion for Head Start.
References
Friedman, S. D. (2014, August 7). 7 Policy Changes America Needs So People Can Work and Have Kids. https://hbr.org/2013/11/7-policy-changes-america-needs-so-people-can-work-and-have-kids
Joughin, C. (2019). Here’s the latest on federal funding for early learning and care for FY2020. First Five Years Fund. https://www.ffyf.org/heres-the-latest-on-federal-funding-for-early-learning-and-care-for-fy20201/
Schochet, L. (2019, March 28). The Child Care Crisis Is Keeping Women Out of the Workforce. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/early-childhood/reports/2019/03/28/467488/child-care-crisis-keeping-women-workforce/
Semega, J., Kollar, M. Creamer, J., & Mohanty, A. (2019). Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018. U.S. Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.pdf
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