John Hersey
As millennials become parents while baby boomers age, care across generations is needed more than ever. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of the options once in place for family care have been badly disrupted, further exposing cracks in the system.
This has brought tremendous hardships on families at an already difficult time, as they navigate personal financial struggles: parents losing income, families being food-insecure or lacking access to basic needs and health care. Plus, with classes resuming throughout the country in the fall, and most schools beginning with either fully remote learning or a hybrid model, parents need continued child care support in order to return to the workplace, adding additional burdens they didn’t previously have. The act of social distancing, an act of compassion, has isolated families, making them more reliant on care networks that are buckling amid the economic crisis.
Despite these novel conditions, however, the pandemic has reiterated what was already known: The care system is broken, and families need a much stronger safety net.
For years, U.S. care and education systems have been underfunded and undervalued. When the pandemic began, parents, teachers, and child care providers stepped up, devising new ways to help children learn, putting their own lives on the line to care for children, and investing their own resources to keep themselves, their families, their colleagues, and communities safe. While other industries, like airlines, have received a large influx of funds to help them stay afloat, no such rescue package has yet been available for family care or public education—both of which should be essential public assets for society.
The Bipartisan Policy Center’s Early Childhood Initiative reports that over 70 percent of child care providers are closed or operating with limited hours or space. As a result, 44 percent of parents are unable to work without child care. Some providers remained open during the pandemic to care for the children of essential workers, while others closed in keeping with public-health guidelines. Eventually, closures became permanent, as providers became unable to sustain operations. Many others are now looking at reopening, amid concerns about health and safety and lower enrollment, which will decrease revenue at the same time costs for cleaning and health and safety supplies are going up.
The lack of options has been enormously taxing on families. Myra A., an Illinois resident who asked to use a pseudonym due to family dynamics, explains how she has had to change jobs because she could not find child care. Her original job required long hours in the office with little time for child care. She switched over to a project manager role, where she is able to work remotely. While she initially wanted to move into her own place with her husband and two daughters, because of the child care issue coupled with her husband’s aging parents, Myra and her family decided it was not affordable to leave the premises. Instead, she decided to stay with in-laws.
For Safa Khudeira, a resident of Illinois, her grandfather had a caretaker who would come in the morning and leave at the end of the day. “My mother had to send the caretaker home to his family for good and quarantined herself with him for months,” Khudeira tells me. “I couldn’t see my mom for months because she was too scared to see anyone or let anyone anywhere near her.” Khudeira also isolated from her family to protect her father, who is immunocompromised. “It’s obviously difficult for everyone to live through a pandemic like this, but for some people it becomes a question of when will I be able to see my family members up close and personal without endangering them,” she adds.
Khudeira’s grandfather was in a nursing home for rehab before the pandemic, and even then the situation there was bleak. While family would visit her grandfather, others had few visitors, which became the standard after the virus hit and visitation was restricted for the safety of residents. “After COVID-19 hit, it felt so lonely to not see anyone and it made me so sad to think about how their senior citizens in the nursing homes felt. I couldn’t even imagine it,” Khudeira explains.
For others, the dangers to elderly populations have posed additional challenges. A 26-year-old resident who did not wish to be named, from Dover, Massachusetts, works at a hospital school as an essential worker. “Hazard pay ended before the hazard did,” he tells the Prospect. He had to fundamentally change his life to protect those around him, including physically moving away from his elderly grandparents and restructuring his financial obligations to pay rent on a new apartment that would allow him to socially distance. He accepted this financial and social burden in order to continue working at his health care job, because he cared about the children he works with, while also needing to keep his grandparents safe. Help from the hospital school was not forthcoming. “My union representative works night shifts as a nurse, so I cannot contact her for assistance with this situation,” he says. He has resigned himself to the financial cost of keeping his patients and family safe.
The pandemic has reiterated what was already known: The care system is broken, and families need a much stronger safety net.
Dominique Hail, who has been working at a nursing home in the suburbs of Chicago, has seen the stark changes for residents and their families. “There has been a severe toll on patients and their loved ones as they cannot come into the rooms or the facilities. Loved ones are passing away and no one can see them,” Hail explains. “The uncertainty adds to the anxiety,” she adds.
As restrictions have eased, Hail’s nursing home has allowed for 30-minute outdoor visits. That has provided huge relief, since families are able to exchange food and see each other while still observing social-distancing protocols. But it’s no substitute for full connections, and it puts strain on care workers dealing with lonely and stressed individuals.
Unfortunately, care has been disrupted not only for grandparents but also uncles and aunts—especially if they are elderly. Saira Yousef, a baker who runs Tootie’s Treats, from Illinois, has family members who have been unable to see her two elementary school–aged children for several months now. Her husband has a cab business that completely shut down since the pandemic. Together they are trying their best to make ends meet. As independent business owners, they have had access to no paid leave or other types of benefits to help offset costs. “It’s really sad and the pandemic has taken a toll on us mentally and emotionally,” Yousef says.
Emijah Smith from Seattle invests her time working toward racial justice and eliminating forms of oppression, as the community engagement manager at a prominent nonprofit. When speaking to her about intergenerational care, she mentioned how mainstream institutions define family from white-centered cultural norms. “Our institutional policies are steeped in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. To be equitable, we must value the dynamics of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and People of Color] families when determining public policy,” she urges.
When it comes to care, the definition of family needs an upgrade, Smith says. She applauds organizations that implement family leave policies that define “family” by blood relationship as well as affinity, as defined by the individual. She explained how cruel and evil acts of U.S. enslavement stripped Black/African American families apart involuntarily, separating children from parents, siblings from siblings, and husbands from wives as a standard practice. Determined to survive, Black people took care of one another and created family, whether blood-related or not. “In an effort to determine a family connection, it is very common today for Black/African American people at first introduction to ask, “Who are your people?” Smith says. “My first cousins are like sisters and brothers to me. If anything happened, I would need to be there for them, their children, and their parents.”
Leave policies have different definitions at the federal level and depending on the state, and cousins, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews often do not qualify. The pandemic has expanded this gap, limiting who can take time off to help give a family member the care they need. “Our institutions and systems continue to produce public policies that deny access and opportunity to families who do not fit white-centered cultural norms,” Smith says. “Unfortunately, our federal and state paid leave policy follows suit. We must do better. No excuses.”
The many cracks in our system of care have left the economy reeling, and exacerbated racial, gender, and economic inequality.
Others find themselves sandwiched between providing care for both the young and old. As lifespans increase and wages stagnate, this burden has grown for families that have few resources to get outside help. Nadia Hussain, a campaign director at MomsRising, an advocacy organization for mothers and families, has one child in kindergarten and a five-month-old. During the crisis, she asked her older parents to move in, to protect them from COVID-19. Her father suffered a mild stroke recently and requires assistance. Her mother can help with the youngest child, but doesn’t have the technological savvy to ensure the kindergartener stays online. So Hussain must simultaneously assist with her young child’s remote learning, take care of and breastfeed her baby, and provide care for her father, all while working full time.
“I am very lucky to be able to be at a job where I was already 100 percent remote and with great paid leave benefits,” Hussain says. “Even with the benefits in terms of a supportive remote job and economic stability, I struggle with trying to handle everything. I can’t fathom what workers without access to paid leave are doing.”
Hussain worries about the future, with fewer child care options due to closures and bankruptcies, and with parents unable to take work due to child care, or losing income due to a lack of paid leave. “This isn’t just about the economy; it is a life-and-death situation,” she says. “We must support paid leave for all workers. Not doing so would literally destroy lives, it would torpedo our economy, the job market, and the livelihoods of so many families.”
The many cracks in our system of care have left the economy reeling, and exacerbated racial, gender, and economic inequality. Whether Americans stay home with children, work in a school with teenagers, run a family child care home with infants, strive to both work and parent, or provide care at a center with the young and old, they must sort through an impossible set of options to care for children and parents, with next to no government support. While the country faces incredible uncertainty in almost every aspect of life, one thing we are certain about is that Congress has the ability to make this time substantially safer and less burdensome by providing significant additional federal relief funding for care.
