Kids Count Report shines spotlight on America’s faltering child care system

A version of this column originally appeared in Michigan Advance.

The burdens that families have been carrying on their shoulders as a result of costly and hard-to-find child care in our country keep getting heavier, causing too many households to struggle to make ends meet, while also driving people out of the workforce and having a direct impact on child well-being at a critical time in their development.

Our faltering child care system has also cost the economy billions of dollars annually and failed our critical child care workforce by not paying living wages.

These were my key takeaways from the recent release of the national 2023 KIDS COUNT Data Book from the Annie E. Casey Foundation — a 50-state report of recent household data analyzing how children and families are faring.

This year’s report presents an important opportunity for us to lift up the child care issues impacting every state in our country, including Michigan, and advocate for ways that government leaders can improve our child care system through new solutions and investments.

While America’s child care system has long been on shaky ground, things have only become worse as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. As it stands today, many families in our country and state are facing overwhelming affordability issues when it comes to securing care for their children, resulting in tremendous stress and impossible choices.

Here in Michigan, the average cost of center-based child care for a toddler in 2021 was $11,309 — 11% of a married couple’s median income and an astounding 37% of a single mother’s median income in the state.

Moreover, we also know that families are facing access challenges, including hard-to-find child care, long waitlists to get into child care programs and issues with securing care that is compatible with work schedules and commutes.

Affordability and access challenges have made working while raising children difficult, if not impossible, for too many American families, including Michigan families. In fact, according to this year’s report, 14% of Michigan children 5 and under lived in families in which someone quit, changed or refused a job because of problems with child care in 2020-21, which is slightly more than the national average of 13%.

Women are disproportionately impacted as they are five to eight times more likely than men to experience negative employment consequences related to caregiving.

Furthermore, by not paying a living wage to child care workers, our current child care system is worsening disparities for women, especially women of color, who are disproportionately represented in the child care workforce. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, child care workers are paid worse than 98% of other professions, with the median national pay for child care workers in 2022 being $28,520 per year or $13.71 an hour.

This is substantially low — lower than the pay for retail and customer service workers in 2022 — and has certainly contributed to child care workforce shortages that have exacerbated access challenges for families seeking care.

To help ease the burdens that families and child care workers have been shouldering for far too long, the League joins the Annie E. Casey Foundation in advocating for stronger child care investments and the strengthening of existing federal programs that provide support, including the Child Care and Development Block Grant program, Head Start and the Access Means Parents in School program.

Here in Michigan, state leaders have prioritized child care in recent investments, including through start-up grants for new child care businesses and regional child care planning grants, efforts that will make child care accessible and affordable to more families. To build on that momentum, we at the League support maximizing remaining pandemic recovery act dollars to fund needed child care services and capacity. We also support the Think Babies Michigan collaborative policy agenda, which focuses on increasing access and affordability of child care, ensuring child care subsidies are fully utilized by families and providers and growing the critical workforce needed by thousands of Michigan families by making child care an in-demand career path.

Additionally, we support improving the infrastructure for home-based child care, beginning with lowering the barriers to entry for potential providers by increasing access to start-up and expansion capital. Improving home-based child care infrastructure will not only support this critical segment of the child care workforce, but also support families, as home-based child care is more affordable than center-based child care in almost every state, including Michigan.

It is crucial that we do more to support our families with young children and child care workers. They are critical to our economy and, more importantly, they are essential to the well-being and early learning opportunities for young children growing up in our country today.