JUDY WOODRUFF: Tonight we begin a special week-long series examining
a problem that's taken on renewed importance for America's working families, child care.
During the pandemic, the federal government spent more than $50 billion to shore up the
child care industry, but advocates say cost and access are still major issues.
Over the past several months, special correspondent Cat Wise and producer Kate
McMahon traveled across the country for our series Raising the Future: America's Child Care Dilemma.
They begin with how we got here and what's at stake.
CAT WISE: America's fragile child care system was thrust into the national spotlight last year.
LARRY SPRUILL, Local 4 News: Day cares across the
state are closing its doors because of the coronavirus.
CAT WISE: Forcing parents to scramble and driving millions of women out of the work force.
Today, as the country emerges from the pandemic, with businesses and
the economy roaring back to life, the same can't be said for the child care industry.
WOMAN: Now many parents who want to go back to work are faced with a new problem:
child care shortage.
CAT WISE: Child care has been one of the biggest struggles for working families for decades.
HEIDI LOHMAN, Mother: We were blown away by the cost of child care.
CAT WISE: Heidi Lohman and her wife, Marenda Chamberlain, live in Portland, Oregon, with
their 2-year-old daughter, Autumn. Heidi is a high school counselor and Marenda is an electrician.
When they began their child care search, they were shocked by what they learned.
HEIDI LOHMAN: She was born in 2018. And some of the places I toured were touring
for the 2021 school year. So, it was even like a year-plus down the road. So it was a scramble.
CAT WISE: Eventually, they found a program that cost nearly as much as their mortgage,
and then COVID hit.
MARENDA CHAMBERLIN, Mother: I had to lay myself off for about four months.
CAT WISE: As essential workers, they later found an opening at a center, but it wasn't a great fit.
HEIDI LOHMAN: It was for four days a week, and we were paying
$1, 650 a month, which was -- that did exceed our mortgage. It's absolutely not sustainable. I don't
think that working families should have to this juggle. And I don't know how some families do it.
CAT WISE: Before the pandemic, nearly 70 percent of children in
the U.S. under the age of 6 lived in households where all parents worked.
During those earliest years, when research shows that children need high-quality care and
education, America's working families have had to cobble together child care solutions in a private
market that is costly, often lacks quality, and fails to pay caregivers a living wage.
LYNETTE FRAGA, Child Care Aware of America: It literally took a pandemic
in order for child care to be a part of everyday conversation.
CAT WISE: Lynette Fraga advocates for affordable, quality child care.
She says it's a critical window of time for development. The science shows that,
during the first few years of life, more than one million neural connections are formed each second.
LYNETTE FRAGA: Why then should we leave that kind of importance not only for the current work force,
but for the future work force, to the market? How about we think about this as a public good?
CAT WISE: Studies have shown investments in child care can pay off, including one that
found a dollar invested in quality child care for economically disadvantaged kids
returns more than $7 in savings. But not everyone wants more government funding for child care.
KATHARINE STEVENS, Early Childhood Researcher: The
focus on non-parental group care for young children is detracting from our focus on
supporting parenting and enabling parents to spend more time with their children, if they want to.
CAT WISE: Katharine Stevens is an early childhood researcher and author. She
says more research is needed to understand the impacts of child care on all children,
and she thinks the federal government should stay focused on helping lower-income families.
KATHARINE STEVENS: Budgets are reflections of values.
If we are directing large sums of money to subsidize parents parenting less,
that's a very significant statement to be making about the importance of parenting in our society.
CAT WISE: But in today's world, many parents do need child care, and demand exceeds supply.
LYNETTE FRAGA: Child care programs are really struggling in finding staff.
CAT WISE: Nationwide, the child care industry has suffered a loss of 20 percent of its work
force since the pandemic. One of the hardest-hit states? Oregon;
24-year-old Olivia Pace of Portland lost her job at a child care center in March of 2020.
OLIVIA PACE, Former Child Care Provider: Most of us got laid off. Most people
didn't go back or have gone back and then left since then.
CAT WISE: She has a degree in child and family studies,
and planned on being in the field a long time, but now she's not sure she will ever go back.
OLIVIA PACE: Even though I love working with children,
the structure of the field is such that, if that's what you want to do, you're going to be
worked to the bone and you're going to be really burnt out. And I don't want to do that anymore.
LEA AUSTIN, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment Director, U.C. Berkeley:
About 97 percent of early educators are women. About 40 percent are women of color. And the
majority of women are Black, brown and immigrant women who are doing this work.
CAT WISE: Lea Austin is director of the center for the study of child
care employment at U.C. Berkeley. She tracks work force issues nationally.
LEA AUSTIN: The median wage right now for early educators in this country is $12.12 an hour.
And we know from research that we have done at the center that about half of this work force
utilizes some form of public safety net program. And...
CAT WISE: That's a huge number.
LEA AUSTIN: It's a huge number.
We have subsidized the system on the back of the workers.
CAT WISE: Austin blames the fragility of the system on the failure of the private market.
LEA AUSTIN: It is a critical part of our infrastructure. But the way it is designed
now is, it's a market-based system. And it is based on what parents
can pay. That's how you access child care, where we're saying go out and see what you can afford.
CAT WISE: But there was a time when child care wasn't so hard to find.
NARRATOR: When married women with small children have to take jobs.
Everything possible will be done to provide day care for the children.
CAT WISE: That time was during World War II.
I am standing on a Navy ship here in Portland that was built largely by women during that era.
The federal government recognized that women were essential to the war effort,
that, in order to build ships like this, they needed child care.
About 75 years ago, just across the water for me, there was a federally funded child care center
that provided high-quality care for about 400 children, while their parents were hard at work.
But when the war ended, the government shuttered the Oregon center and 3,
100 others like it across the country.
The last time the U.S. government seriously considered child care policy was in 1971, but
President Nixon vetoed it, saying that a national child care system would weaken American families.
RICHARD NIXON, Former President of the United States: Child care is --
would have been not only an administrative monstrosity.
ELLIOT HASPEL, Author, "Crawling Behind: America's Child Care Crisis and How to Fix It": That kicked
child care back to the bottom of the policy public policy mountain. And it hasn't recovered since.
CAT WISE: Elliot Haspel wrote a book recently on child care reform.
ELLIOT HASPEL: You can't understand early childhood in America without
understanding a deep history of sexism.
There's a sense that it is the duty and obligation of the mother to take care of the young child.
The problem, of course, is that, especially since the 1960s, women have entered the work
force in very large numbers. But there's been no adjustment on the policy side to that reality.
CAT WISE: Until now. The pandemic has pushed child care back to the top of the political agenda.
JOE BIDEN, President of the United States: This legislation
includes the biggest investment in child care since World War II.
CAT WISE: President Biden has proposed $225 billion in new
child care spending over 10 years. But there is still stiff opposition.
KATHARINE STEVENS: We can't have everything. We cannot advance women's careers
and boost the economy and optimize early childhood development all at
the same time. This is just -- this is just a tough reality.
ELLIOT HASPEL: We need a system that's going to support parents, whatever they want to do.
The American child care dilemma can be summed up
in the fact that we don't have an American child care system.
CAT WISE: While the politics play out,
America's child care dilemma continues for families like Heidi Lohman and Marenda Chamberlin.
HEIDI LOHMAN: Next week, I'm asking for a reduction in hours
because our day care is changing their hours.
CAT WISE: Their long-term plan? Moving away from Portland to raise Autumn near extended family.
For the "PBS NewsHour, " I'm Cat Wise in Oregon.