MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Parents and caregivers of young children, you already know. For most, it's one big, hot, stinking mess.
JOSEPH SPIER: You know, this whole thing just has really put a lot of strain on us, like, financially, emotionally.
MARTIN: Joseph Spier (ph) is a dad with two kids in Washington, D.C. He and his wife both work. And in December, they paid a thousand dollars on backup child care after their son's daycare closed for a quarantine. And then in January, they needed backup again. And it's not just the financial strain. Spier says the hardest part is seeing the impact on his two kids.
SPIER: I mean, it's the changing routine. We've had to constantly, you know, just force them into new day every day, totally different, on a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old.
MARTIN: And the people who provide that care, they're struggling too. Deidre Anderson is CEO of Early Start, a nonprofit early childhood education program with three locations in Kansas City, Mo.
DEIDRE ANDERSON: I have classrooms that are closed due to quarantines, but also classrooms that are closed because we cannot hire the teachers to fill those classrooms while I have families that are stressed to the max, as are our staff. And it, quite frankly, is very overwhelming.
MARTIN: There's still no COVID vaccine widely available for children under 5. And with all of the uncertainty and disruption, it's no surprise that for families and caregivers, the situation can feel like a nightmare.
CORI BERG: I had somebody tell me to [expletive] off last week.
MARTIN: Cori Berg directs the Hope Day School, a church-affiliated preschool program in Dallas, Texas. That four-letter word was from a parent who was angry that her children lost their spots in the program. The parent later apologized. The pandemic certainly highlighted problems in the child care system, but the problems and the frustrations of both parents and care providers are not new.
LINDA SMITH: The first thing that people have to understand that child care is a business. It's a failed business model because we have a product that costs more to produce than most of the customers who need it can afford to pay.
MARTIN: Linda Smith directs the Early Childhood Development Initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center. She told NPR's Here and Now she thinks the United States has to do better.
SMITH: We have got to rethink the model of child care in this country. Do we really think it's a public good, a shared responsibility? And then what do we do about that?
MARTIN: CONSIDER THIS - America's child care system is in crisis. It's a business where just about everybody is stretched. Parents can't afford it. And yet daycare providers of some of the lowest-paid workers in the country. Experts say fixing child care isn't just important for people with kids. It's important for the American economy. That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michel Martin. It's Saturday, February 26.
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MARTIN: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. Brenda Hawkins has cared for a lot of children. She's operated a small, home-based daycare in Upper Marlboro, Md., for the last 24 years.
BRENDA HAWKINS: I'm actually working on the second generation in some families. I'm taking care of my babies' babies.
MARTIN: She's dealt with a lot over many years in the business, but the pandemic brought a totally new set of uncertainties.
HAWKINS: And so didn't know exactly what was going to happen. Because, you know, this is our livelihood. If we don't work, we don't make money.
MARTIN: Brenda Hawkins was able to keep her daycare open for essential workers, and as quarantine orders were lifted, she remained open - until January of last year.
HAWKINS: Half of my little people were - actually came down with a case of COVID.
MARTIN: She had to close down for two weeks.
HAWKINS: It was the hardest phone call that I ever had to make to these parents to let them know that their child was - that they had come in contact with a child who had COVID. So we made it through. But, you know, there are people who, once that happens, they don't want to come back to your daycare.
MARTIN: Brenda Hawkins says caring for children isn't just work, it's her calling. So in 24 years, she says she's never thought about leaving the profession. But she understands from firsthand experience why so many others are leaving.
HAWKINS: Since the pandemic, there's a lot more work involved, and they're still making the same pay.
MARTIN: Let's talk about that pay. People who care for children are some of the lowest-paid workers in the country for a job that carries tremendous responsibilities, not to mention long hours.
HAWKINS: We work an average of 40 to 60 hours per week. A lot of us work more along the lines of the 60 hours per week. And when you're talking about spending $200 for child care, that actually breaks down to an hourly rate of $3.33.
MARTIN: And many jobs in child care lack basic benefits. Brenda Hawkins says she's lucky because she has health insurance through her husband's job.
HAWKINS: And so that's one problem that we have in child care. Another is that, you know, there's - when it comes to retirement, there's a lot of providers that find themselves working well into their 60s and 70s because they simply can't afford to retire.
MARTIN: The problem of low pay for providers and high cost for families didn't just happen in the pandemic. It's been around for a while. And for many right now, it feels like the whole system for taking care of kids in America is at a breaking point. Coming up, we'll hear from a policy expert on what can be done to fix it.
Elliot Haspel (ph) is an authority on child and family policy. He says America has a child care crisis.
ELLIOT HASPEL: The child care system in America manages to work for no one involved.
MARTIN: First, finding child care can be difficult.
HASPEL: Significant portions of the country or what are known as child care deserts, which just means there simply aren't enough slots for all the parents who want them. And so you end up with long waiting lists. You end up not being able to find a provider that serves their particular needs.
MARTIN: And as we noted, the costs just don't work for parents or providers.
HASPEL: And that's because providing child care is very, very expensive 'cause you have to have very low adult-to-child ratios. So, you know, you're one caregiver for, you know, four infants or for six toddlers. And you can imagine the personnel expenses add up. And so even though those parents are paying $10,000 a year, that providers actually taking a loss because they need to be charging at $20,000 a year. And then the pandemic, this came crashing down on this incredibly fragile equilibrium, you know, like the proverbial bull in a China shop.
MARTIN: So the problem is an old one, but there's new energy in the debate over solutions, in part because of the proposed funding for child care outlined President Biden's signature "Build Back Better" legislation, which is facing roadblocks, but also because of the pandemic.
HASPEL: While in the beginning parts of the pandemic, you know, child care programs are experiencing closures that alongside the school closures in many cases. What's going on now is this huge staffing shortage that actually isn't simply related to the pandemic. So remember, you know, child care work worker's making $12 an hour. Well, what did other low-wage industries do over the past, you know, 12, 18 months? They've raised their compensation? You know, Amazon and Target are at a $15 starting wage. McDonald's, Chipotle, right? Like, all across the board, these industries have in retail and fast food are raising their wages which health care programs can't do that. They can't keep pace because they don't have anywhere else to turn. And there's very little public money in the system.
And so we're seeing this exodus of child care workers. So while overall in the economy, you know, we've recovered to within 2% or 3% of our pre-pandemic employment levels. The child care industry is still 11% or 12% percent below its pre-pandemic employment levels. And when you don't have enough workers and child care programs, unlike a restaurant that might have to reduce its hours or, you know, maybe close one day a week, what happens because of those legally mandated adult-to-child ratios, which are really important for safety and quality, is programs have to shut entire classrooms. In some cases, they have to shut entire programs. And so you're seeing the capacity be reduced even more, and that's before you even get into the quarantines that you're talking about.
MARTIN: So this is one of those things that just makes people crazy who are engaging with this. On the one hand, the cost of child care can be absolutely crushing. And yet you're seeing that in the current environment, child care workers can walk across the street to a fast food restaurant and make more money, so they're going to do that. How is this possible? I mean, because, you know, there are subsidies and grants available to some families for child care. Some states and even cities make free pre-K available. Why is it that this isn't working?
HASPEL: Yeah. So the child care industry is in what the U.S. Treasury Department calls a market failure. And what that means, basically, we're treating what should be a social good - right? - akin to a library or a public school or a fire department, we've turned it into this private market going to where families are basically on the road. You're right that that there are mild subsidies. But even before the pandemic, those subsidies were so poorly funded they were only reaching 1 in 6 eligible families. And these families were, you know, those at the lower end of the income spectrum.
So for middle-class families, there's no help basically available. So the problem is, again, the true cost of care in child care program, you know, a program needs to make to be able to keep the lights on and pay its teachers well is more than what parents can bear. And so the way that we solve this in most other parts of our society is we say, OK, public funding is going to come in, right? We're going to pay for our public schools. We're going to pay for our libraries, for our fire departments. U.S. puts in the third-lowest percentage of our GDP to early care and education of any developed nation. We put in almost nothing to fill that gap. And so as a result, we're at this, again, this untenable situation which hurts parents, which hurts the economy, which hurts child care providers and, ultimately, which hurts children.
MARTIN: So President Biden's "Build Back Better" Act proposed free universal preschool and a program that would allow states to expand subsidized care to about an additional 20 million younger children. The act itself is currently stalled in Congress. Now, you know, the president has said that he'd be open to breaking it in pieces if that's more palatable to people. If that's the case, what piece would you recommend that he break off first?
HASPEL: Yeah, that's a good question. So I think - so child care and pre-K largely move together. You can't do one really without the other. But in terms of breaking it apart - right? when you talk about all of the other things are in there, I am personally huge supporter of the expended child tax credit. I'm personally a huge supporter of paid family leave. But if those things do not have a political path forward, child care has been shown to have bipartisan support.
You mentioned pre-K. You know, the first states to adopt universal pre-K systems were Oklahoma and Georgia. The state with the currently highest rated system is Alabama. You know, we've had - President Trump hosted a White House summit on child care in December 2019. You know, it's not very long ago where he was talking about, you know, how backbreaking the costs could be for families.
So this actually shouldn't be as controversial as it is. Child care, it really powers most of the rest of the economy. It largely pays for itself because of the increased maternal labor force participation. It makes businesses more productive. You know, it really, truly is this infrastructure that powers all the other sectors. So if they do have to break apart the "Build Back Better" Bill, you know, a bill centered around child care, it would be a big win for American families.
MARTIN: Before we let you go, you're calling on businesses to step up their efforts to help provide affordable child care. You've called businesses freeloaders for not paying into the child care system. And you're in support of efforts by some in Congress to tax business to pay for child care. Could you explain, what's your rationale for that and how would that work?
HASPEL: Yeah, absolutely. So I feel strongly about this. Businesses benefit from child care in the same way that they benefit from there being public schools. They benefit from it because the current generation of their workers need somewhere for their kids to go so that they can be productive. And that matters for the future generation because those kids are eventually going to become the next generation of workers.
And we let businesses get away with not paying into the child care system. So they pay into the public schools via primarily business property taxes. You know, which, if you kind of aggregate them up, it's about $300 billion a year. They pay zero dollars in any dedicated funding for early care and education. And so we do. We let them be freeloaders. They all benefit from it. There isn't a business in America that doesn't have a workforce today or in the future that is going to rely on some level on child care.
So yes, I do think we need to talk very seriously about other ways to get businesses to step up because this is a social good. We don't want child care to be a job-linked benefit like the way that health insurance is. You absolutely don't want it to be you only get child care because your, you know, in the business you work for, happens to provide some child care benefit because that means when you lose your job, you lose your child care. And that's terrible for you. It's also terrible for child development. Children need consistency and reliability.
But we need businesses paying into a child care system so that any American anywhere who has a young child has access to that care so that they can thrive. Again, this is, to me, it very much goes back to our core American values. We talk about self-determination. We talk about choices by when we don't have a functional child care system. What we're really doing is limiting the choices and limiting the freedoms of many, many, many families who are constrained for no other reason than we have decided that providing care for children is a completely individual responsibility and that society doesn't need to step up. And I just fundamentally think that's a misreading of what families need and who America is.
MARTIN: That was Elliot Haspel. He is a former teacher and a child and family policy expert, and he's author of the book "Crawling Behind: America's Child Care Crisis And How To Fix It." Additional reporting in this episode came from NPR's Anya Kamenetz. It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Michel Martin.
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