the heartbreaking Reality of Child Care today
- Nanci Bradley
- May 10
- 3 min read
Child care and early childhood education are officially in crisis. It's like a huge slap in the face to parents and early childhood professionals alike. Or maybe it's more like a slow boil. Either way, we need a change.
As the parent of a young child under the age of 5, you face a 90% chance that your child will be in mediocre to poor child care should you choose to work. That can be true even if you pay a large portion of your salary for care.
As an early childhood professional, even with a higher education, you face average hourly salaries lower than dog groomers.
Most early childhood teachers cannot afford to live on their own because they don't make a living wage. Many don't have benefits or health care. On top of it all, it's not an easy job to do.
The following is an excerpt from the Hechinger Report, a publication that focuses on education.
“This is a really sensitive time to get it right for kids. They need safe, stable, nurturing environments and responsive caregiving,” said Rahil Briggs, a clinical professor of pediatrics and psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the national director of Healthy Steps, a pediatric health care program.
Right now, child care providers in the United States are struggling to meet these needs. While there are plenty of loving caregivers who engage children in thoughtful interactions in safe settings, studies show that, overall, child care quality is low in the United States. A seminal 2006 study funded by the federal government estimated that only 10 percent of child care programs provide kids with “very high quality” care. More recent research suggests that quality not only remains a problem but is also wildly uneven, especially when it comes to children from low-income families."
Why aren't things better? We're limping along in a failed system at the expense of:
The parents who use child care
The teachers who depend on child care to live
The administrators who have to make do with what they have
and, most importantly, the children they care for
It's time for change.
Here's an excerpt from an article by the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).
Research has shown that children who attend high-quality preschool are better prepared to be successful in school and in their future careers. The economic and community benefits of high-quality early learning and development experiences for all young children cannot be understated and include, increased graduation rates, increased economic well-being for all
communities, and the long-term development of a high-quality professional workforce.
What can we do?
We need to build a new system from the bottom up. Our best chance is to unite our parents, teachers, and administrators to demand better educational experiences for our youngest. It only makes sense.
Here's a quote from the National Research Council Institute of Medicine.
It is no surprise that the early childhood years are portrayed a formative. The supporting structures of virtually every system of the human organism from the tiniest cell to the capacity for intimate relationships are constructed during this age period.
Imagine what would happen if the public schools were suddenly defunded and had to rely on parent tuition to pay for all buildings, furnishings, staff, maintenance, teachers, benefits, books, equipment, and special education.
This has been the economic reality of child care since the end of the Second World War.
Why can't we seem to move forward?
We need to demand a better system. One that doesn't regulate early childhood professionals and parents to the bottom of the barrel, making it almost impossible to support the children they care for. Or to support each other.
There's so much stress involved in having a child in care.
There's so much stress involved in working in child care.
We need to work together to get some support from our government and from employers. Science says that helping children early on saves our government money in the future on special education, behavioral intervention, courts and prisons.
If you live anywhere in the US, I'd encourage you to contact one of the following organizations to find out more about how you can support our re-building efforts. The future depends on it.
Nanci J Bradley is an early childhood and family educator, author, teacher, family aerobics instructor, and an all-around fun-loving person. She believes in the power of sleep, healthy eating, lifelong learning, and most of all, PLAY! She studied early childhood ed at Triton College and received her BS in education in 1986 from NIU. She received her MA in human dev from Pacific Oaks College in 2011. She lives and teaches in Madison WI and is the founder of early childhood rocks, a non-profit org dedicated to creating change through early childhood education.
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