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National crises often generate policy breakthroughs, and the history of child care in the United States offers a prime example. During World War II, out of desperation to find workers to “man” its defense plants, the federal government reluctantly began to recruit women and soon realized that in order for mothers to take these jobs, they would need child care. With the help of federal funding, states and localities created a nationwide network of 3,000 public child care centers serving some 130,000 children of Riveting Rosies. Even this supply was inadequate, but the parents fortunate enough to secure slots found that their children flourished. Yet public child care failed to become a permanent fixture of American social policy.
Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic has again revealed that child care is crucial to a successful response to national crisis, and that the current supply is inadequate. Members of Congress understand that “essential workers” who are parents cannot show up for duty without assurance that their children have proper supervision, and for this reason included funding to “stabilize the child care market” in the CARES Act. Will this burst of pandemic-induced child care funding go the way of the World War II aid and disappear once the crisis has passed, or will Congress finally acknowledge that universal child care is an essential component of the American safety net (as it is for most of our peer countries)?
Will Congress finally acknowledge that universal child care is an essential component of the American safety net?
Though wartime child care was always presented as being “for the duration only,” little about it was jury-rigged. Several of the centers were purpose-built and architecturally ingenious, and many modeled the best practices that early-childhood educators had to offer. One even offered weary mothers coming off the assembly line cooked food to take home when they came to pick up their kids. Mothers who used the services found that they could face the unaccustomed stresses of industrial work without having to worry about the welfare of their children. Nevertheless, federal funding ended right after VJ Day, causing most of the centers to shut down. This was especially unfortunate because, contrary to myth, the postwar baby boom did not permanently transform wage-earning mothers back into full-time housewives. After an initial wave of layoffs, millions returned to the labor force—though not in the lucrative industrial jobs they had held during the war—and they needed child care more than ever.
At the time the pandemic became a national emergency in mid-March, child care was already inadequate. The coronavirus has further reduced the availability of services and raised their cost by multiplying the precautions providers must take to prevent the disease from spreading among staff as well as children. While closing down many centers in the interest of curbing the spread of infection, most governors have concentrated on keeping open at least a few services for essential workers, in some cases even providing them care for free. (Notably, child care providers are among the workers considered “essential.”) On April 10, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that the state was allocating $100 million of the federal aid it received to create 20,000 additional slots. “Many of California’s workers on the front lines of this pandemic are parents, and as a father, I know the importance of making sure our children are kept healthy and safe,” Newsom told his constituents.
But what about the future? Child care will be crucial for the nation’s post-pandemic economic recovery, but the current chunk of federal funding is only a temporary measure to prevent the complete collapse of services. It is unfortunate that it has taken a lethal pandemic to draw attention to the deplorable state of child care in the United States. The number of slots has long fallen far short of demand, and high fees put quality services out of reach for many. In 2018, according to the Center for American Progress (CAP), over half of U.S. families with preschool-age children lived in “child care deserts,” areas where there were three or more children needing care for every licensed slot.
The pre-pandemic demand for services stemmed from the growing prevalence of what politicians like to call “working families,” those in which all parents present have paid jobs. This is a relatively recent phenomenon. Under the “male breadwinner” regime that became widespread with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, fathers relied on mothers to care for children at home while they went out and worked for wages. Experts’ admonitions about the dangers of weakening the “mother-child bond” reinforced this pattern, stigmatizing mothers who did go out to work unless there was dire need. With this understanding, 19th-century philanthropists established day nurseries for the children of the poor so their mothers could take jobs to support themselves, but they established strict criteria for eligibility. Mothers would be served only if their children were “legitimate” and they lacked a male breadwinner because their husbands had fallen into one of four categories: drunk, disabled, deserted, or dead. If the men sobered up, recovered from their injuries, returned home, or rose from the dead—or the women remarried—their children were no longer eligible for care.
In 2018, over half of U.S. families with preschool-age children lived in “child care deserts,” areas where there were three or more children needing care for every licensed slot.
The twin ideologies of the male breadwinner and nurturing full-time mother persisted for decades. Even during World War II, psychologists and social workers insisted on interviewing mothers planning to enter the factories so they could be warned of the potential risks of spending so much time away from their children. But that division of labor and the ideologies undergirding it began to crumble under feminist challenges, starting in the 1960s. From the get-go, the women’s movement demanded high-quality, publicly funded child care. With it, children would continue to thrive; without it, activists declared, women could not compete equally with men in the labor force.
Since the 1960s, this demand has been only partially met, and not always in the way feminists anticipated or desired. Between 1970 and 1995, the proportion of American mothers with children under six who had paid jobs more than doubled, from 29 percent to 65 percent, but the supply of formal child care did not keep pace. Thousands of voluntary organizations and colleges and universities were already offering preschool or nursery school places to millions of toddlers, but these facilities were normally open for only part of the day, and none of them took infants. A few expanded their hours to accommodate the needs of mothers with full-time jobs, but most refused to do so, claiming that their mission was to provide education, not “custodial” care.
Lucky parents might have found a spot at one of the handful of dedicated nonprofit, professionally run child care centers operating in cities around the country, some of them holdovers from those charitable 19th-century day nurseries. But these were few and far between, leaving the majority of wage-earning parents to rely on unpaid care from friends and family or place their children in fee-charging family day care homes, many of them unregulated and varying widely in quality.
Into the breach stepped Perry Mendel, an enterprising Oregon real estate developer, who correctly predicted that the number of mothers in the labor force was only going to increase, and they would all need care for their children. In 1969, he established the first Kinder-Care Nursery School, in Portland, and two years later added care for infants. By 2017, the company was operating 1,600 centers in 39 states, accommodating some 200,000 children. It also offered 600 before-and-after-school programs and managed 100 facilities for private employers.
Running child care centers for profit presents a challenge, as they are highly labor-intensive and there is a limit on how much parents are willing or able to pay. As it is, child care employees are among the lowest-paid personal-service professionals. With annual salaries ranging today from $16,000 to $36,000 and few or no benefits, they are, in effect, subsidizing parent fees and ensuring owners profits by accepting low wages. But KinderCare (as its name became) thrived, going public in 1972, adding more centers every year, and by 1987 reporting revenues of $900 million. Soon after, however, its fortunes began to decline, first as a result of that year’s stock market crash and then because of overeager diversification and mismanagement by several executives, forcing the company to declare bankruptcy in 1992. Yet KinderCare survived and in 2005 was acquired by the Knowledge Learning Corporation, an even larger outfit. By this time, several other companies had entered the field, including Bright Horizons and La Petite Academy, bringing the number of commercial slots to about 440,000—still only a small fraction of all the child care that was needed.
Since the start of the pandemic, KinderCare has been forced to shutter some 1,100 of its 1,600 centers. Given their solid corporate base, this and the other large child care companies are likely to survive the crisis and most of their centers will reopen. Not so, however, for the thousands of small, independent child care centers, both nonprofit and for-profit, as well as family day care homes, that do not have that kind of financial resilience. As Lauren Birchfield Kennedy and Katie Mayshak pointed out in The New York Times in late May, “Child care providers operate on razor-thin margins with very little cash reserves, and the partial or complete loss of revenue these small businesses have experienced has pushed most to the brink of insolvency.” Many have been ordered to shut down by local or state authorities unless, as we have seen, they serve parents deemed “essential employees.” Others have remained open but suffer from declining enrollment and dwindling fee streams as parents lose their jobs or try to work at home and simultaneously care for their children rather than risk exposing them to potential infection. Such losses have, in turn, forced both commercial and nonprofit centers to lay off their own employees, many of whom may end up abandoning the profession altogether.
Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
Teachers wear masks as they work with children at the Frederickson KinderCare center, in Tacoma, Washington, in May.
Congress responded to these difficulties with money in the CARES Act, a $3.5 billion supplemental appropriation to the existing Child Care and Development Block Grant, which goes directly to the states. They have the “flexibility” to use the funds to enable child care centers that have lost enrollment to remain open and continue to pay their staffs. State appropriations range from about $6 million (to Vermont) to over $330 million (California), according to population—not to the number of centers needing life support. The Bipartisan Policy Center has found that while states have stretched the funds as far as possible, “it is clear this alone is not a durable solution.” The House-passed HEROES Act contained funds to give child care providers and other “frontline” workers “pandemic premium pay”—an additional $13 per hour—which would no doubt be most welcome to those workers, some of whom currently earn only the federal minimum wage, $7.25 an hour. But even if this additional support were to pass in the Senate, it will again be only a temporary fix, and do nothing to help those who are laid off.
Child care advocates often decry the “patchwork” of child care services that has emerged in the United States, one that is uneven in quality, inefficient, and too costly for many parents. Instead, looking at what other wealthy countries do, they call for a system of high-quality, well-regulated universal public provisions supported by a generous permanent federal funding stream. Enacting such a system will, however, not be easy because of the framework of policy established by Congress in the past.
For several decades after funding for the wartime centers dried up, the only form of federal support available for child care was an income tax deduction passed by Congress in 1954, which did little to restore, much less increase, the supply of services, as the amount was limited and eligibility narrow. With rates of maternal employment beginning to rise in the 1960s, several members of Congress and even a president (John F. Kennedy) sought congressional approval for federal funding, regulation, and logistical assistance for universal child care, but their repeated efforts fell short. An excellent bill, the Comprehensive Child Development Act of 1971, made it through both the House and the Senate, only to be vetoed by President Nixon on the grounds that it would weaken the American family and expand the size of government. In 1976, Congress did manage to convert the child care deduction to a Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, but this too has been of limited use, as it has always been capped well below the real cost of care. Today, at $3,000 per child, it covers only a small percentage of annual fees, which run on average about $10,000 for full-time slots.
When more substantial federal aid finally arrived, it linked child care provisions not with feminist demands for economic equality but with the goal of moving poor and low-income single mothers off the welfare rolls and into the labor force. Since the New Deal, this group of mothers had received at least minimal financial assistance from a mixed federal-state program, known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which, in keeping with the reigning ideology, allowed mothers in poverty to stay home and care for their children. But in the late 1980s, as rates of maternal employment in general were climbing, lawmakers began to think that low-income mothers should also join the labor force—a shift that would have the added benefit of lowering welfare expenditures (this was, after all, in the midst of the Reagan era, with its infamous “welfare queens”). Starting in 1988, Congress enacted several federally funded child care programs for welfare recipients that were designed to encourage them to either find jobs or pursue training or education. One, the child care block grant, provided states with federal funding to help cover child care costs for low-income families and also improve the quality of services being offered. All of these schemes required states to come up with matching funds, but participation varied widely, from 24 cents per child in Idaho to $152 per child in Massachusetts.
However well intended, these voluntary programs did little to lower the number of single-mother families receiving public assistance, prompting candidate Bill Clinton to pledge that he would “end welfare as we know it.” Once elected, Clinton kept his word, and under the terms of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which he signed into law in 1996, “encouragement” to find paid employment became “compulsion.” The law mandated recipients of cash assistance to search for jobs, and to enable them to do so, allocated additional federal funding for child care. Notably, Clinton vetoed the first two versions of the bill passed by the Republican Congress because they would have rolled back the food stamp and Medicaid programs and did not include adequate funding for child care. In the final bill, funding for the child care block grant was merged with cash assistance into the Child Care and Development Fund, which remained more or less stagnant until Congress renewed the Child Care and Development Block Grant in 2014.
In tethering child care subsidies to mandatory employment, lawmakers transformed what feminists had initially envisioned as an entitlement for all mothers into a lever for punitive policy toward poor and low-income mothers.
In tethering child care subsidies to mandatory employment, lawmakers transformed what feminists had initially envisioned as an entitlement for all mothers—indeed, for all wage-earning parents—into a lever for punitive policy toward poor and low-income mothers. The policy was especially discriminatory toward those with low vocational skills, as child care, even with public subsidies, would take a huge chunk out of their paychecks. Perhaps most cruelly, the welfare reform legislation eliminated the previous regulation that had allowed recipients to rely on public assistance while pursuing training or education and thus improve their occupational prospects. Now, individual states had the option of prohibiting that use under the rubric of “Work First”—and many did.
As the major piece of postwar legislation concerning child care, the 1996 welfare law established the principle that federal support would be forthcoming only for the most disadvantaged mothers—and not to support employment as an option but as a condition of receiving public assistance. Along with Medicaid, the food stamp program (now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP), the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Section 8 housing (vouchers for low-income housing aid), federal aid to the states for cash assistance and child care makes up what scholars call a “residual welfare state,” one that offers public support only as a last resort, when applicants implicitly concede that they are incapable of supporting themselves. A residual welfare state contrasts with a proactive or affirmative state that regards public provisions such as child care as a form of collective social good designed to achieve a consensual goal. But even in the context of a residual welfare state, the 1996 law, with its new work requirement for cash assistance, seems especially harsh.
Without a universal national policy, the supply of child care for the general public has mostly limped along since the 1990s. Costs remain high, and quality uneven. Scarcest and most expensive is infant care, which can range from about $1,800 to over $2,500 a month in a center, somewhat less in a family day care home. Paid maternity or parental leave would be the most cost-effective and, for many parents, a preferable alternative to out-of-home infant care, but the United States remains the only country among the world’s rich democracies that still lacks such a policy. Five states—California, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Washington, plus the District of Columbia—currently do provide paid leave; the federal 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act offers job protection but only unpaid leave for new parents.
According to a 2016 report by Child Trends, only about 3 percent of the total number of available child care slots are based in centers, with home-based providers, either paid or unpaid, providing the bulk of services. Many parents prefer home-based settings, especially for very young children, but finances also limit their choices. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says that child care is “affordable” when it takes up no more than 7 percent of a family’s annual income. CAP’s Rasheed Malik has found that, on average, working families with children under five pay at least 10 percent of their income for care, and for the nearly one-third of those families deemed low-income, the proportion may run as high as 35 percent, even counting public subsidies. Nor does paying more of their income mean that low-income families are securing higher-quality care for their children. According to CAP, the services they can afford tend to be lower in quality and less safe than those used by higher-income families, who are willing to spend more overall to get the best care they can, regardless of cost.
Policymakers and analysts now realize that child care is needed not just to fight the pandemic, but also to ensure that an adequate labor force will be available to rebuild the economy once it has subsided.
The pandemic has revealed not just that affordable care for infants and toddlers is in short supply, but also that K-12 education has long served as a form of supervision for older children while their parents work. Closing down schools now deprives wage-earning parents of a key child care resource, forcing many to put older siblings in charge of younger ones, rely on occasional check-ins by friends and neighbors, or simply leave children to their own devices. Parents fortunate enough to be able to work at home must balance paid duties with the challenges of supervising their kids’ online instruction. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren recently put it in a New York Times op-ed, “Even parents who can work from home are expected to feed the baby and help their children learn while participating in Zoom calls.”
Public educators are not always eager to acknowledge that their schools serve this second function or make any needed adaptations for schools to work as child care. When San Diego parents protested the announcement that all K-12 instruction in their city would go online in the fall, Cindy Marten, the district’s superintendent, retorted, “Schools are not child care.” In contrast, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio seems to have tacitly accepted public schools’ dual function but relieved them of responsibility for devising ways to compensate for the loss of their child care capability. He recently announced that his administration, not the schools, was developing a plan to accommodate some 100,000 K-8th grade students with wage-earning parents in the fall, when they are expected to learn remotely two days a week under the city’s hybrid attendance scheme.
Policymakers and analysts now realize that child care is needed not just to fight the pandemic, but also to ensure that an adequate labor force will be available to rebuild the economy once it has subsided. At the national level, many Democrats want to do this by shattering the mold of traditional child care policy. In his just-released plan for a “caregiving economy,” Joe Biden addresses issues facing families who are caring for both children and elderly relatives. For families making up to $125,000 per year, he proposes that child care tax credits be increased from the present $3,000 per child to $8,000, much closer to the actual cost of services. For lower-income families—those making up to 1.5 times their state’s median income—the plan provides subsidies to keep outlays for child care to no more than 7 percent of income. Biden also proposes raising salaries and benefits for child care workers and offers incentives to businesses to include space for child care centers when constructing or renovating their facilities.
To turn these proposals into legislation, Congress will probably need to replace the child care block grant, which, though very helpful in the past and given a second life in pandemic relief, is still framed as support for low-income families rather than as a universal program. Universal child care has value for both young families and the wider society. As CAP’s Rasheed Malik puts it, “A public investment in child care can effectively act as wage increases for millions of middle-class and low-income families, who are often in their lowest earning years as young parents.” Once launched into the labor force, those parents will start climbing an occupational ladder that, for most, will take them to better jobs with higher incomes as time goes on and their children no longer need care. The same applies to women who, without affordable care, might otherwise stay out of the labor force or delay entry until their children are at least of school age, limiting their prospects for advancement. And, of course, when individuals prosper in the job market, so does the U.S. Treasury.
Congress was reluctant to appropriate funds for child care when the United States entered World War II, but eventually it stepped up and a model child care system was the result, if only short-lived. During the current pandemic, Congress acted relatively quickly to give states the means to save at least some existing child care facilities. Once again, however, federal aid for child care is widely understood to be temporary, in this case to prevent small child care businesses from going under. But policymakers and analysts now ought to realize, if they didn’t already, that child care is always needed to ensure that workers can get to work and children can thrive. Biden and his team seem poised to break through the residual paradigm that has limited child care policy in the past and develop a set of universal provisions that come closer to what feminists envisioned more than half a century ago. Let us hope that this time, federal support for child care will not turn out to be “for the duration only.”
