Tag Archives: child care

Canada is promoting child care for $10 a day

Originally published in Vox on December 18, 2023.

A massive social policy experiment is unfolding in Canada to provide families throughout the country with child care for an average of $10 a day. The plan, which was introduced in 2021 amid the turmoil of the pandemic, aims to spend up to $30 billion Canadian by 2026 to bring down child care costs for parents and to create 250,000 new slots.

The federally backed effort brings Canada’s safety net closer to that of other Western democracies that have stepped up on child care, including Finland, Sweden, France, Germany, and Australia, and it could prove an inspiration to other countries whose systems still lag, like the United States.

Almost three years in, Canadian families are already seeing a significant drop in price, paying hundreds of dollars less for care each month than they were prior to 2021. Canada is making “solid progress in offering more affordable child care,” concluded a think tank report issued in October. Five of Canada’s 13 provinces and territories have already reached the $10-a-day child care goal ahead of schedule, while others have reduced their fees by over 50 percent. ($10 in Canadian currency is roughly $7.50 in US.)

In addition to reducing costs for parents, the plan has created about 52,000 new child care spots, and in some provinces, like Nova Scotia, federal funding has helped boost the wages of early-childhood educators.

“This is social infrastructure that will drive jobs and growth,” Canada’s deputy prime minister, Chrystia Freeland, said of the policy in a 2021 budget speech. “This is feminist economic policy. This is smart economic policy.”

Canada is a less populous country than the United States (about 40 million people to the US’s 340 million), and while it has never previously had a national child care policy, it has long embraced a more sturdy safety net than the US, providing its citizens with universal health care and annual family allowances to parents. Moreover, Canada provides parents who want to stay home with their infants partial paid leave for up to 18 months.

Still, the two countries aren’t “radically different,” Elliot Haspel, the author of Crawling Behind: America’s Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It, told Vox, “which is one reason [Canada is] an interesting near peer.” Like in the US, Canadian child care advocates had been organizing with minimal success for decades prior to the pandemic — but unlike in the US, they’re finally seeing meaningful progress.

Consequently, US activists and lawmakers are looking to this dramatic shift in Canadian child care policy for inspiration, and leading congressional Democrats even began this year to incorporate the successful “$10 a day” idea into their own political messaging. The Child Care for Every Community Act, introduced in Congress in February, pledges to cap costs for all families and ensure that at least half of families nationwide pay no more than $10 a day.

The policy shift among Democratic lawmakers is backed by research from the progressive polling firm Data for Progress, which found that when it comes to building support for expanding food assistance, voters were more persuaded when presented with a dollar-per-meal framing compared with a dollar-per-month framing. This fact struck the pollsters, who soon realized the same concept held true when messaging on child care.

“It’s really about drilling down to the smallest dollar denominator that you can to get your point across,” Danielle Deiseroth, the executive director of Data for Progress, told Vox. “You want to avoid having to do mental gymnastics to figure out how much things cost or you’ll be spending. And for child care, we found talking about the actual dollars and cents, especially given how top of mind inflation and high prices have been for voters, was particularly effective.”

Local organizing in Canada helped spur national action

Canada’s national child care plan is on a potentially transformative trajectory, but it didn’t come out of nowhere; rather, years of locally driven organizing proved pivotal in finally moving the needle on the federal level.

Beginning in 1997, the province of Quebec invested in a universal and affordable child care system with the goals of raising public revenue, helping more women join the labor force, and improving child development. While rollout of the effort has been uneven over the last 25 years, researchers found it has helped boost female workforce participation and that the public investments more than paid for themselves. Moreover, when child care centers closed throughout Canada during the pandemic, the publicly subsidized centers in Quebec, which are less reliant on charging parents high fees to operate, were more able to stay open and bounce back to full enrollment. This comparative advantage was not lost on federal politicians struggling to lead Canada out of its economic downturn.

“I’ve been defending private markets all my life. I’m not an extreme leftist. But you also have to be pragmatic,” Pierre Fortin, an economist at the University of Quebec at Montreal, told Bloomberg in 2021. “Child care is an area where private markets don’t do a very good job.”

Advocates in another Canadian province, British Columbia, began organizing for child care under the banner of $10 a day and, beginning in 2016, persuaded the provincial branch of Canada’s New Democratic Party (NDP) to embrace the idea too. It became a central and popular legislative plank for the NDP, which identifies as a social democratic party, and helped propel it into government after British Columbia’s 2017 provincial elections.

Carolyn Ferns, the policy coordinator at the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, said advocates in other provinces were wary at first about embracing the $10-a-day mantra pioneered in British Columbia, since for some low-income families, $10 a day is still too high.

“But the simple language made a real difference in getting buy-in from the public and families, especially in terms of retail politics and just being able to explain to people on their doorstep what you’re doing,” Ferns told Vox. “That’s what sold the federal government on it.”

In the US, some advocates hope to chart a similar path by organizing landmark state-level child care policy reforms. Earlier this year, Vermont legislators approved a first-of-its-kind package to pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s child care system, raising wages for child care workers and reducing costs for families. The path to victory in Vermont involved a concerted 10-year advocacy effort backed by philanthropy and grassroots volunteers.

Similarly, in New Mexico, voters approved a historic ballot measure in 2022 to guarantee a constitutional right to early-childhood education, a political effort that came out of more than 10 years of organizing led by early-childhood educators and parents. National child care advocates heralded the victories in both states and studied the campaigns, hoping to replicate them in other parts of the country.

In Canada, though, child care advocates trace their efforts for a universal nationwide program back well beyond more recent grassroots efforts in the provinces, to the release of a federal report in 1970 that recommended steps to enhance equal opportunities for women throughout Canada.

Martha Friendly, who in 1982 founded the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, a small Toronto-based policy institute, has watched the social movement for child care grow in her country over 50 years. “A lot of the social infrastructure in Canada was developed post–World War II, and child care then wasn’t viewed with a feminist lens, it was established before women were really entering the workforce in a large way,” she told Vox. “Child care was long conceived as a welfare program for the deserving poor, but in the 1980s and 1990s a real movement emerged to reframe child care as an important policy issue for women.”

Advocates like Friendly also credit feminist leaders like Freeland, who is also Canada’s first female minister of finance, and former premier of Quebec Pauline Marois, who served as education minister between 1996 and 1998, with moving government-backed child care efforts forward.

Reducing fees is the easiest part

Not everything has been smooth sailing in the implementation of Canada’s child care plan, especially in more densely populated provinces that have struggled to attract enough new workers to meet the demand for care. Most of the money thus far has gone into bringing down costs for families and not to recruiting and retaining more child care workers.

“The goal of offering child care spaces at $10 a day is not the most difficult part. The difficult part is to create new child care spaces because it requires more people working in the sector,” Sophie Mathieu, an appointee on Canada’s national advisory council on early learning and child care, told Vox. “Currently, child care workers are not very well paid, even in Quebec.”

In November, child care advocates across Canada organized a National Day of Action to demand further public investments. In Ontario, the most populous province, activists drew attention to the thousands of families stuck on waiting lists and the meager salaries of child care workers. To address this, activists are calling for a clearer salary scale, beginning at $30 to $40 per hour for registered early childhood educators and $25 per hour for other staff.

A report issued by Toronto’s economic development committee in late November affirmed that in order to meet its 2017 goal of creating 30,000 new child care slots by 2026, the city will need to add funding and raise wages and benefits “to levels comparable to positions in the public sector.”

It’s not a new problem, even for countries that invest more heavily in their social safety nets; Haspel points to Germany, which is dealing with similar workforce issues. In 2013, Germany declared that all families have a legal right to child care, but then failed to invest enough in funding staff to meet demand. “If you can get your kid into Kita [preschool] you are set, but it’s a huge scramble,” Haspel said.

Friendly, of the Childcare Resource and Research Unit, agrees that more investment into raising wages will be needed but said she’s not too worried overall about Canada’s efforts, as other countries have established comprehensive child care systems through iterative progress over time. “I think building any kind of social program like this is push and pull,” she told Vox. “So it’s not that Canada’s effort is not successful, it’s that we’re in the first phase. In every country that is happy with their child care system, it always took a lot of work.”

Canada’s national child care effort, which prioritizes nonprofit and public day cares, does have some critics, like Peter Jon Mitchell, of the conservative think tank Cardus, who would rather see the government just give families more money directly to spend. “The federal government is trying to entrench an expensive but poor-quality program that serves a minority of programs and that only funds some forms of child care that parents use,” he told Vox. “And they really underestimate the cost and complexity of their plan.”

But Ferns, with the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care, rejects this critique and argues it’s been tried before with little success. “We had the conservative approach to child care for over a decade at the federal level under the [Stephen] Harper government, and it didn’t make child care affordable,” she told Vox. “They had universal child care benefits, and child care fees just went up. It didn’t help improve accessibility, affordability, and quality.”

More lessons for the United States

The $10-a-day effort in Canada offers a number of practical lessons that may aid child care reformers in the United States. In addition to the value of working to seed local victories that can potentially be replicated nationally later on, and of simply not giving up, advocates praise Canada’s savvy implementation and straightforward messaging on child care reform.

One feature of the five-year child care implementation plan that Haspel described as “really smart” is the federal government’s commitment to giving voters some immediate benefits as it works toward its larger affordability goal. As an interim step, provinces have already worked to bring average fees down by at least 50 percent. “So you as a politician can say, ‘You were paying $8,000, now you’re paying $4,000,’ and we’re slowly continuing to build these new child care sites online over time,” Haspel said.

Another possible lesson for the US — which, like Canada, faces a shortage of child care workers — is Canada’s openness to immigration. In addition to raising wages and benefits in the child care sector, enlarging the workforce could help create new child care slots. Mathieu told Vox it’s a “very delicate issue,” but it’s one she and her colleagues on the national advisory council have been discussing. “It’s part of the solution,” she said. “It’s one solution among others.”

Advocates in the US also admit there’s something fundamentally more appealing about Canada’s $10-a-day concept than the more complicated advocacy language often used in the US about capping costs to a percentage of one’s annual income. Democrats still use this more cumbersome messaging — it was included in Senate Democrats’ Child Care for Every Community Act, and the Biden administration’s proposed child care rule back in July.

“I like the simplicity of $10 a day,” said Marica Cox Mitchell, a leader with the Bainum Family Foundation, a Maryland-based philanthropy focused on early childhood. “It’s universal.”

Some, however, argue that implementing a Canada-style child care plan pegged to a $10-a-day pledge isn’t the best way to address family challenges in the US. Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the DC-based Niskanen Center think tank, said he thinks the US would be better off focusing on prioritizing a paid leave policy similar to Canada’s rather than trying to replicate the country’s strategy around child care.

“Canada doesn’t have to worry about supplying nearly as much infant care precisely because the majority of Canadian infants are being cared for at home by their parents for the first year of their life, when center-based care is at its most expensive,” he told Vox. “Another reason to prioritize paid leave over child care is it reduces this problem.”

Many national advocacy groups in the US, including Moms First, Chamber of Mothers, and Moms Rising, reject the idea that politicians must choose one over the other and maintain that, like in Canada, activists in the United States can and should lay the political groundwork so leaders can capitalize on windows of opportunity when they arise.

“Our neighbors to the north have shown it is possible to cut across party lines and invest in a child care system that works for more families,” said Jessica Sager, CEO of All Our Kin, a national group that trains and supports family child care educators. “The vision of a mixed-delivery system, which offers a variety of options to families, is already taking hold in parts of the US. While we can consider Canada’s efforts, we can also find remarkable efforts across our own country.”

A program that saved child care for millions is expiring. What now?

Originally published on September 29, 2023.
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This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.

Some $24 billion worth of child care funding — one of the last remaining Covid-19 emergency relief programs still in effect — is set to expire Saturday. Issued as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the program marked the largest investment in child care in US history and allowed fragile businesses to cover rent and maintenance and raise wages for their notoriously underpaid staff. The Biden administration has reported that the grants helped 80 percent of US licensed child care centers stay afloat.

Frequently referred to as the “child care cliff,” the expiration of the grants is expected to renew strain on the child care sector, which already runs on tight margins, struggles to recruit and retain staff from higher-paying industries, and charges most parents far more than they can comfortably afford.

Many news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, have cited an estimate from the liberal think tank the Century Foundation stating that 70,000 child care programs will likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care.

That figure was derived from an October 2022 survey of 12,000 early childhood educators that found 34 percent of child care programs reported that they would have closed during the pandemic if not for the emergency grants. The grants covered 220,000 programs and 9.6 million kids, so the Century Foundation multiplied those figures by 0.34 to arrive at its estimate.

Experts in child care policy told Vox, however, that the “cliff” may prove far less of a tumble for providers and families than that popular statistic suggests — partly due to poor data on industry supply and demand and partly because most states have made unprecedented investments in their child care systems over the last two years.

The federal grants were authorized to help child care programs during the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, after lawmakers deemed the child care sector “uniquely vulnerable” to the crisis, and less able to access relief loans through methods available to other small businesses. In a US Senate HELP Committee report issued this past spring, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that emergency relief was needed because child care providers began “hemorrhaging money during pandemic shutdowns” as fewer children attended and they faced unexpected costs to comply with reduced group sizes, cleaning materials, and personal protective equipment.

Today, programs are no longer struggling to enroll students nor needing to cover the costs of pandemic safety regulations. “Saying you would have closed during Covid if not for the grants is not the same thing, that you will close after Covid if the grants don’t continue,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of another left-wing think tank, the People’s Policy Project.

One leading child care expert declined to comment on the widely cited Century Foundation estimate (“We didn’t do the number and I don’t want to speak directly to that,” Sarah Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund, told Vox), while another said that they knew no one who expected the loss of programs to reach anywhere near 70,000, but did not want to say so on the record for fear of alienating other leaders in their child care advocacy coalition.

“Will there be some adjustments [when the funds expire]? Yes, obviously, that’s fairly true, but you see estimates that a quarter of American kids will lose their child care spots and I will gladly take any bet that anyone at the Century Foundation wants to place,” said Patrick T. Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “I do not think 25 percent of kids are going to lose their child care. People have a vested interest in using strong frames and narratives to say we have a broken market.”

Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, defended her organization’s analysis but acknowledged that the estimate of program closures is unlikely to come to pass, telling Vox it’s more like a “worst-case scenario.”

“A number of states have put forward their own state funding and our analysis did not account for that,” she said. “We don’t have numbers yet of how much will be mitigated by state investments, but from Alaska to Maine to Illinois, they have put their own funding in, and that will make a decent difference in reducing the losses.”

Why Congress isn’t extending the Covid-19 child care grants

The federal pandemic grants were objectively successful in helping to stabilize the child care sector over the last three years, leaving many people baffled that Congress would choose not to renew the funding now. The Department of Labor recently reported that the price of child care rose 6 percent in July over the previous year, nearly double the rate of inflation.

From Republicans’ perspective, the child care grants, like other Covid-19 safety net programs, were passed as an emergency relief measure, and now that the emergency is over, the pandemic level of spending should not become the new federal baseline. A strong current among conservatives supports “going back to normal” and reining in spending more broadly to address inflation and the deficit.

Democrats and progressives argue that funding for child care was woefully low before the pandemic, and returning to the status quo now, amid a tighter labor market and fierce hiring competition from other industries, would be untenable. Reduced federal funding could mean pay cuts or hiring freezes, or hikes in costs that families can’t afford, leading to fewer children served and, ultimately, closure of some programs.

In response to the impending deadline, congressional Democrats earlier this month proposed a bill to give $16 billion to child care providers each year for the next five years. It has no Republican co-sponsors and even its own authors concede that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. The Biden administration has declined to lobby for additional child care funding in the fraught ongoing budget negotiations, arguing that it needs to bargain with Republicans only over emergency priorities to stave off a government shutdown.

One recurring challenge for Democrats is that because they have so many areas they want to see new big investments in, and because they work within broad advocacy coalitions, leaders often struggle to home in on a few specific priorities, instead championing lots of big social investments at once.

This dynamic was on display during the failed Build Back Better negotiations and amid Inflation Reduction Act talks. Child care investments were in competition with new spending on preschool, affordable housing, paid medical and family leave, and the expanded child tax credit. In the end, virtually none won out.

Child care programs face tougher staff recruitment. Parents face higher costs.

Over the last two years many states passed new legislation to support child care access, affordability, and quality, including red states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Montana and North Dakota, as well as blue and purple states like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, Alaska and Vermont. Most states were in strong fiscal positions and built on the political momentum for child care investments that coalesced during the pandemic.

Linda Smith, who heads early childhood research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Vox that the impact of the expiring pandemic funds will vary by state, but she expects that broadly, retaining child care workers will become harder. In 2019, the median child care worker earned $11.65 per hour. Today their pay averages $14.22, but without public subsidy, programs may have to raise rates for families to continue paying workers those higher wages. The survey released last October and cited by the Century Foundation found that 43 percent of child care centers and 37 percent of home-based providers expected that they’d have to raise rates when federal relief dollars dry up.

“In lower-income working families, passing those costs on to parents is not going to be an option,” said Smith. These increased costs will also overlap with the resumption of student loan payments in October after a three-year pause, and higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans.

Some states are already starting to see the effects of diminished funding. In June, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin started reducing its federal stabilization grants from $20 million a month to $10 million, and the remaining funds are expected to end completely in January. Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told CBS that nearly 90 percent of day care centers are raising tuition in response. Some programs have closed.

Whitney Evans, the California director for ParentChild+, said she expects the decline in federal funding will affect low-income parents who are least able to work remotely. “For middle-income families, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass but they’ll figure out a way,” she told Vox. “But for children with the least access to resources, who won’t be able to pay more for slots if rates go up, there will be even less space available.”

Could this affect female workforce participation?

A big question looming over the expiring child care funds is whether a major disruption to the child care ecosystem would force parents — and mothers in particular — out of their jobs. Child care advocates have been saying for years that a failure to invest more in the nation’s child care system will result in that outcome; this was a key argument during the fight for the Build Back Better Act.

However, despite the failure of Congress to pass those new child care investments, workforce participation among moms, and even moms of very young children, has continued to rise. The latest data showed 66.6 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were working in 2022, up from 66.5 percent in 2021, and 61.6 percent in 2010. And more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under five were working this past summer — more than even before the pandemic. The expansion of remote work, which makes it easier for parents to juggle their jobs and child care responsibilities, is likely one major contributing factor.

Kashen, of the Century Foundation, credits the American Rescue Plan investments for staving off female workforce fallout, and said that the “reality is most parents have to work,” so even if moms are employed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t making hard trade-offs behind the scenes, including working later hours, facing declining mental and physical health, or spending less time with family.

Is there any chance child care funding will return?

The politics are challenging right now. Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a fierce battle over cutting federal spending and have expressed little appetite for new social investments.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Among parents, the child care issue is far less polarized. A recent poll of Kentucky voters and parents found strong support for investing more taxpayer money into child care programs, and a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund this summer found that 74 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Republican voters, back increased federal spending for child care.

Moreover, during the second Republican presidential debate earlier this week, the moderators pressed candidates on how they would expand access to care — even citing the expiring pandemic-era funds. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott blasted the Biden administration for allowing day care costs to exceed $15,000 per child, and Doug Burgum, the GOP governor of North Dakota, stressed that “child care is workforce infrastructure.”

That bipartisan support for affordable child care is likely why Republicans, after rebuffing Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, agreed to a 30 percent increase last year of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. And this past summer, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) announced the launch of a new Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in Congress, and Reps. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill to improve federal child care tax credits, legislation endorsed by advocacy groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Some Republican lawmakers remain ideologically against government involvement in child-rearing and oppose efforts such as increased spending on non-religious day care centers. This is partly why some Republicans are more open to expanding the federal child tax credit, which gives money directly to families to spend how they see fit. Expanding the tax credit is also a priority for Democrats, though it might be tough for lawmakers to secure new investments for child care and the child tax credit at the same time.

Progressives, for their part, are hopeful that they’ll have another opportunity to push new child care investments during the end-of-the-year omnibus tax package negotiations. Last year advocates secured new funding in this period for a maternal and child health home visiting program, doubling the amount of federal spending and reauthorizing the program for five years.

“The pandemic gave us all a better sense of what it means to have more money in the child care system,” said Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund. “We know that money needs to be sustained beyond Covid, and we’ll be looking at every possible way we can to make that happen.”

One state just became a national leader on child care. Here’s how they did it.

Originally published in Vox on May 22, 2023.
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Action in Congress to support child care has been stalled for years. But in Vermont, lawmakers have just approved an ambitious plan that would pour tens of millions of new dollars into the state’s starved child care system.

The bill authorizing $125 million in annual investment comes after nearly a decade of organizing. As in many states, thousands of Vermont kids lack access to any child care program, and among families that have been able to land competitive slots, average costs exceed $26,000 a year, more than 30 percent of many families’ household income.

Meanwhile, child care workers are some of the lowest paid employees in the state, earning about $15 per hour, and typically with no benefits. Given that their workers could make more money doing just about anything else, programs struggle to hire and retain staff — adding additional stress to parents who can’t rely on their child care programs to stay open.

The newly approved child care bill would expand state subsidies for families earning up to 575 percent of the federal poverty level (or $172,000 for a family of four) and families earning up to 175 percent of the poverty line (or $52,000 for a family of four) would now pay nothing out of pocket.

The new payments will mean an infusion of funds for child care, allowing providers to be reimbursed at a 35 percent higher rate than they currently are. The legislation also tasks lawmakers with studying how to create an affordable full-day pre-K system.

The investments would be paid for in part by a new payroll tax, of which employers would cover at least 75 percent. It’s not law yet — it’s headed to Republican Gov. Phil Scott’s desk, who has previously said he would reject any new taxes. His office did not return request for comment, but Democrats have a supermajority in the Vermont legislature and have made clear they would override any veto in June.

Vermont’s legislative victory comes nearly a year after the Inflation Reduction Act passed the US Senate without any child care provisions, a gutting blow after the House had approved a $390 billion investment in November 2021. The Vermont victory also comes as federal pandemic child care subsidies are expiring, and President Joe Biden looks to make child care a top priority heading into his reelection campaign. Last month, Biden signed new executive orders to boost child care programs and their workers.

The path to victory in Vermont offers a roadmap for activists in other states who want to see increased public investment into their child care systems, and insight into the policy trade-offs leaders had to make for their measure to get through the legislative process.

“Vermont showed that you can have a bold vision, cultivate a broad base of support, persevere though budget battles and pandemics, and make the state a better place for those who don’t have a voice in politics,” said Helene Stebbins, the executive director of the Alliance for Early Success, a national nonprofit that supports early childhood advocacy. “The hard part is not the policy — it’s the strategy, and the patience.”

How Vermont built its winning coalition

The origins of Vermont’s child care campaign trace back to 2000, when a Burlington real estate developer named Rick Davis and his friend in private equity, Carl Ferenbach, launched a foundation dedicated to supporting Vermont children.

For its first decade, the foundation focused on a range of initiatives, including youth centers, programs for kids with incarcerated parents, and supporting new community pre-K programs. This work helped prompt Vermont legislators to pass a bill in 2014 requiring all school districts to offer at least 10 hours per week of publicly funded pre-K.

Yet huge gaps remained, and the philanthropists grew more interested in the emerging research demonstrating the cognitive importance of a child’s earliest years. Teaming up and pooling money with other foundations interested in children’s issues, the two men launched Let’s Grow Kids in 2014 to boost child care access, an area they thought would carry the most bang for their charitable buck. They pointed to economic studies that found every dollar spent on high-quality early childhood programs yielded a return of $4-$9.

“Everybody knows we should invest early to save money down the road,” explained Davis, who often framed his work in terms of economic development. “We’ve got to find ways to get young families to come to Vermont and stay.”

In 2015, Bob and Christine Stiller, the founders of Vermont-based Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, gave Let’s Grow Kids a massive $20 million gift, and the group pledged to achieve their mission by 2025. This so-called venture philanthropy idea was to essentially use foundations as a catalyst for legislative change.

Let’s Grow Kids assembled a powerful team of lobbyists and organizers to lead the campaign. In 2015, Davis recruited Aly Richards, a top aide to Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, to serve as CEO. While working for Shumlin, Richards led the push to establish Vermont’s universal pre-K program. Other Let’s Grow Kids leaders included a former lobbyist for victims’ rights and a campaigner for legalizing same-sex marriage.

The philanthropic investments helped support statewide organizing, ultimately bringing more than 35,000 Vermonters into the campaign. Volunteers wrote op-eds, signed petitions and pledges, turned out for rallies, and testified before state lawmakers. Let’s Grow Kids also funded television ads and digital marketing, and organized 1:1 meetings with politicians. They helped mobilize child care workers to share their stories, and during the 2016 election, they asked all state candidates how they would address Vermont’s child care problem, and posted their responses online.

Let’s Grow Kids conceived of their strategy from scratch but studied lessons from other winning campaigns like Freedom to Marry. “We’re very small, very nimble, and we had an opportunity and responsibility to be a pioneer,” Richards said.

In 2021, with just four years left until their organization planned to shut down, Let’s Grow Kids established a sister 501(c)4 organization to exert more power in the 2022 midterms. Their goal was to support candidates who not only committed to prioritizing child care, but who also would commit to increasing public investment. Let’s Grow Kids ultimately endorsed 130 candidates last cycle, of which 117 won in November. This led to the first-ever coalition of self-described child care champions headed to Montpelier.

The political compromises lawmakers had to make

Partly spurred by the Let’s Grow Kids campaign, Vermont lawmakers passed a law in 2021 setting goals to expand child care slots, to limit family child care spending to no more than 10 percent of their annual income, and to pay early childhood educators comparable wages as kindergarten teachers in public schools.

Policymakers then commissioned a study to figure out how much that would all cost. To meet all those objectives, state officials would need to raise between $179 million and $279 million in new public funding, according to a report led by the Rand Corporation published this past January. The consultants suggested instituting a new payroll tax, a new sales tax, or a new services tax to get it done.

Even coming in this year with a Democratic supermajority, new committed legislative champions, and a well-funded lobbying effort, the last few months in Montpelier demonstrated the tough political compromises inherent to passing any new program.

Lawmakers said they weren’t ready to commit to spending as much as the Rand report recommended. When the legislative session began, Vermont Senate lawmakers proposed instead expanding child care subsidies for families earning up to 600 percent of the federal poverty level, (or $180,000 for a family of four), paid for by a new payroll tax funded primarily by employers. They thought this was fair, as child care largely provides a benefit to employers. To help fund those new subsidies, Senate lawmakers also proposed repealing a $1,000-per-child tax credit Vermont authorized last year.

In the House, lawmakers favored keeping the child tax credit in place and instead wanted to fund child care investments via a new progressive corporate and personal income tax. In this scenario, wealthier individuals and businesses would finance the bulk of the new revenue, but all taxpayers would still help contribute to a social program that benefits the greater good. The chair of the Senate finance committee said she didn’t like taxing people who might not ultimately need child care services.

Lawmakers were gridlocked for weeks, and it was not clear the two chambers would be able to compromise. In the end, House lawmakers agreed to the payroll tax, but funding families only up to 575 percent of the poverty level, not 600 percent, so that the child credit would stay in place.

The final legislation garnered approval from Democrats, progressives, independents, even some Republicans and a Libertarian. “It is not easy to ask Vermonters — any Vermonter — to pay just a little more, which seems to be a theme of this session,” said Republican Rep. Ashley Bartley of Fairfax. “However, the price of inaction is far greater.”

While Let’s Grow Kids didn’t achieve their goal of capping child care costs at 10 percent for all families, advocates have hailed this as a “quantum leap” forward and note they still have two more years left to push for additional investment, as well as to formalize a compensation scale for workers. Higher-income families that won’t receive direct financial assistance will still benefit from new subsidies flowing into the system, which can stabilize the workforce and boost program quality.

Vermont’s child care political blueprint

Not every state has the kind of philanthropic infrastructure Vermont enjoys. Experts say, though, their political roadmap could be replicated elsewhere, including the assemblage of a diverse coalition of parents, grandparents, business leaders, and child care workers.

“I really think that no matter the demographics of a state, no matter the political landscape, there is something that cuts through anything and that’s grassroots mobilization,” Richards told Vox.

The only other state to take comparable leadership in state child care investments is New Mexico, which successfully organized a ballot measure this past fall that authorizes new money from a state sovereign wealth fund to provide dedicated funding for universal preschool and child care. Like Vermont, the victory came after a decade-long organizing campaign, where early childhood educators helped lead the fight.

While Vermont’s win is yet another example of the child care movement gaining momentum, Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change Action, said the “real lesson” from states like Vermont and New Mexico is that the system is broken, and federal investment is needed to fund the true cost of child care, to pay early educators what they deserve, and to make care affordable for families.

Miriam Calderon, the chief policy officer with Zero To Three, a national advocacy group focused on infants and toddlers, agreed with Wells that states can’t fix this problem alone.

“In the short term this looks like not letting tens of billions of dollars in federal child care funding expire in September and protecting child care funds from deep cuts proposed as part of the default debates,” she said. “Long term, we need to pass the Child Care for Working Families Act, which ensures a strong federal and state partnership in funding the early care and education our babies and toddlers and families deserve.”

Fixing the child care crisis starts with understanding it

Originally published in Vox on April 17, 2023.
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Nearly every day a new story is published about “the child care crisis” in America. (I’ve written stories referencing it myself.) President Joe Biden has referred to the “acute, immediate child care crisis”; on April 18, he signed new orders to boost child care programs and their workers.

But what exactly is that crisis? A closer look at the various articles, think tank reports, advocacy campaigns, and political speeches reveals that not everyone is talking about the same thing.

Is the crisis the inability of families to afford child care? The struggle to land spots in licensed centers, or find care close to home or work? Is it a lack of support for parents who want to stay home with their kids, or the failure to provide support to other informal caregivers? Is it the inability to attract child care workers in the competitive labor market? Is it inequitable enrichment opportunities for children, or the challenges parents, particularly mothers, face when trying to work? Is it all of the above, or only some?

Crises are often multifaceted, and disagreement over what should be prioritized to address them is not unusual. But the “child care crisis” rhetoric, by combining several problems into one, often muddles the picture, and implies there’s more consensus on said crisis than actually exists. This matters because not all proposed child care solutions would address the respective concerns, and some interventions could even make aspects worse.

The first step to solving a crisis is understanding it. And policymakers know less about the child care landscape than one might expect. For instance, despite many anecdotal stories reporting a shortage of child care staff, researchers admit they do not actually have a good idea of what the supply and demand mismatch for child care actually is — what kind of care do parents actually want for their kids, and would they use center-based care if it was available? Private and informal arrangements — be it through grandparents or nannies from sites like Sittercity and Care.com — remain vastly understudied.

The concept of a “child care desert,” which has been popularized by advocates in recent years, refers to communities that have more than three kids for every licensed slot, and presumes parents would want those official slots if they were available. Experts admit they don’t know this is the case.

“The data is horrible, it’s very, very limited, we’re all trying to stitch things together from multiple incomplete sources,” said Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist who has studied the sector. “And I don’t love the ‘child care desert’ metaphor — it’s a great communications tool, everyone understands immediately that putting children in a desert is dangerous — but as a research tool, it’s fairly arbitrary, and doesn’t take into account who really wants care and under what circumstances.”

Some groups, like the Bipartisan Policy Center, have been trying to gather more precise estimates, and concluded recently that across 35 states, a gap between supply of available care and potential need for it exists for 3.5 million children, or 31.2 percent of kids. But researchers involved acknowledge their data does little to clarify parental demand for care. Those 3.5 million kids might need slots in child care, but they might not.

Separate surveys the Bipartisan Policy Center has led in partnership with the polling firm Morning Consult found that while two-thirds of parents prefer “formal care” — meaning a child care center, a home-based child care business, pre-K, or Head Start — one-third of parents prefer “informal” care — meaning care from relatives, parents, friends, neighbors, and nannies. Indeed most parents currently using informal care told pollsters they’d prefer it, even if a free and convenient formal option were available to them.

This suggests “there’s not one solution for child care needs,” said Morning Consult pollster Claire Taylor.

Leaders should say which problem they are trying to fix

Journalists often report on parents struggling to find child care, or child care businesses struggling to hire and retain staff. But not knowing what the demand really looks like complicates crafting a solution.

Should policymakers look to boost the number of licensed child care businesses run out of homes, or primarily centers? Since 2005, home-based child care businesses — which tend to be cheaper for parents — have declined by almost 50 percent, in part due to increased competition and rising regulatory burdens. Should child care be targeted to traditional working hours, or do parents need more flexible options? How has remote work affected demand?

The number of child care providers backed by private equity has also increased significantly over the last few decades, while the number of children participating in nonprofit child care, like a church-based program, has declined. Patrick Brown, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, has argued policy should be designed to better support nonprofit options, which could help address affordability concerns and better align with parent preferences.

Is the key crisis of child care the cost families are paying? One fundamental challenge is that an individual’s peak earning potential — in their 40s — doesn’t align with when most families have young children.

Many experts argue the government should increase spending on early childhood — partly to bring expenditures more in line with public spending on older children. But there’s debate over whether the government should subsidize the cost for more affluent households. In late 2022, Arizona State University professor Chris Herbst found that families spent 8.7 percent of their annual income on child care costs in 2019, up from 6.6 percent in 2005. This increase in cost burden, Herbst found, was similar for families regardless of income level and marital status.

Even though not all parents want formal child care, researchers do feel confident in saying the current prices deny many families, particularly low-income families, a real choice between formal options and informal ones.

Or is the child care crisis around unequal learning opportunities for children? Some researchers argue that boosting “quality” of programs, even if that makes them more costly to run, is essential. Others argue the trade-offs required to boost quality metrics are unnecessary and unduly expensive, and only serve to impede access to care.

Or is the lack of affordable child care a crisis due to its impact on workforce participation? When costs get too high for care, many parents — and usually moms — decide it makes more sense to reduce their hours or quit altogether.

Or is it the low wages paid to child care workers — which can fuel high turnover and disrupt parents’ work schedules? “The wages are undeniably empirically low,” said Herbst, who found that the median hourly wage ranked 16th lowest out of 753 occupations on a federal labor survey — in between cashiers and sports bookers. To raise staff wages without public subsidy would likely mean raising parent fees. In practice, this would mean fewer families able to afford formal child care at all.

The trade-offs of contemporary child care proposals

This won’t be an exhaustive list, but to illustrate some of the ideas above, it’s perhaps easier to look at concrete ideas people are already talking about.

One idea is increasing investments in the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a longstanding federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. There’s already bipartisan support for this, as right now only a tiny fraction of those families eligible actually receive assistance.

Additional CCDBG funding could help more low-income mothers work in the labor market, and find affordable child care. But many progressive child care advocates argue policymakers should increase public subsidies to all or most families, not just low-income households, and warn increased funding to CCDBG alone would do little to incentivize quality improvements, or address low wages in the sector.

Another idea is increasing immigration. Expanding immigration could bring down the cost of child care for families by increasing the supply of workers and help more moms work in the labor market. Past research has shown that when US communities increase their supply of low-skilled immigrants, the employment of high-skilled women goes up because they can hire more nannies and cleaners. Other research found that tougher US immigration policy decreased the number of immigrants working in child care, and led to reduced employment of college-educated women.

Whether an increasing supply of immigrants would help with wages is unclear. One study found metro areas with increased low-skilled immigration between 1980 and 2000 saw “larger decreases in the median wages of childcare workers” but another found reducing immigrants led to lower wages for immigrant and native child care workers alike. Past research found that the arrival of low-wage immigrants has little to no negative effect on native-born workers’ wages or employment. Matthew Yglesias, author of the pro-immigration book One Billion Americans, noted that expanding the supply of Spanish-speaking child care workers could, for example, create new positions for bilingual child care workers to work as supervisors.

Yet many child care advocates express ambivalence about immigration as a solution — warning that the workers could be exploited and that it could detract from their broader goal of boosting the status of child care work in the US. “The history of child care in America is that it’s been done by Black women, immigrant women, and unpaid labor of moms, so there are artificially depressed wages based on discrimination,” said Julie Kashen, the director for women’s economic justice at the left-leaning Century Foundation. “The idea is to fight against the discrimination, not just to play into those kinds of ideas.”

An idea Kashen and many other advocates support instead is increasing public subsidies for licensed “high-quality” child care, as Democrats proposed doing in their failed Build Back Better package in 2021, and which Democrats plan to introduce again soon.

This new public spending would boost child care wages and likely induce new workers to the field, though would offer little help to those parents uninterested in formal care, and could raise prices sharply for higher-income families.

Another basic idea is simply to give parents money with the discretion to spend it as they see fit. This could help more parents afford child care if they want, and potentially allow child care businesses to raise their prices and increase wages. A child allowance, however, wouldn’t necessarily boost the supply of workers, the quality of programs, or maternal labor market participation.

These trade-offs are playing out in real-time right now in Vermont, where Democrats are advancing a proposal to increase subsidies to early childhood programs, paid for in part by repealing a child credit Vermont authorized last year. Vermont’s robust child subsidy was based in part on the success of the federal government’s expanded child tax credit during Covid-19, which helped families buy household essentials and reduced the child poverty rate by 30 percent.

Vermont’s proposed reshuffling of funds would likely raise the wages of child care workers, though take money away from informal caregivers. Josh McCabe, director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, called this a “breathtakingly bad idea” and noted progressives rejected work requirements in the federal child tax credit but are now “pushing for the expansion of subsidies only accessible to households where all parents are in paid employment.”

The bottom line is you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who says they don’t want to support children, families, and child care workers — and if “tackling the child care crisis” simply means that, then yes, everyone agrees. But figuring out exactly how to do that is where things get tricky, and where the political rubber meets the road. It also helps explain why so little has gotten done, despite seeming consensus on the crisis rhetoric.

Better data would help, particularly more research on parent preferences and informal care arrangements. But so too would speaking in plainer language about what measures we’re fighting for, and which ideas to support parents, kids, and workers we’re not.