Viewpoint: Child Care Crisis Hurts Workplaces
Lauren Birchfield Kennedy
A focus group of business leaders met recently to discuss an issue not normally associated with the business community: child care and early childhood education. The conversation was motivated not only by a commitment to do right by Massachusetts families but also by an increasing reality in the workplace: employees’ inability to access affordable, high-quality child care is taking a toll on employers too.
Seventy-eight percent of parents with children younger than three years of age are working, yet child care remains in short supply and prohibitively expensive (families in Massachusetts pay an average of $30,000-$35,000 for child care each year). For employers, inadequate access to child care – a crisis not unique to Massachusetts – creates barriers to talent recruitment, retention, and productivity and it undermines efforts to build a strong talent pipeline for the future. A recent report published by Ready Nation, an organization led by business executives, estimates that, nationally, child care challenges cause employers to lose $12.7 billion annually. Given access to child care’s disproportionate impact on women, accessibility issues can also undercut an employer’s commitment to demonstrating gender diversity in executive positions and to pay equity.
The focus group, convened by the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and the Alliance for Business Leadership, found that the most significant impediments to employees’ productivity at work are affordability, finding child care that matches one’s work schedule, and, alarmingly, stress related to child-care issues. What we heard loud and clear from employees is that coordinating care for children is a massive emotional and economic burden for families. Not surprisingly, wealth gaps between higher- and lower-salaried employees contributes greatly to what options a family has when it comes to enrolling their children in child care and early education programs.
These findings were consistent with the report developed by the Early Education and Care Business Advisory Group convened by House Speaker Robert DeLeo in 2017: access to early education and care helps families obtain and maintain employment and achieve economic self-sufficiency. When child care programs are high quality, it further enhances employee productivity. Parents are able to go to work less stressed, knowing that their children are being cared for in a nurturing environment that is setting them up for academic success.
The good news is that employers are responding. They are realizing the role that child care and early education plays in recruiting, retaining, and promoting top talent and in laying the foundation for a long-term workforce pipeline. In addition to offering their employees more generous child care benefits, employers are also invested in advocating for improved access to high-quality, affordable child care and early learning programs.
Encouragingly, the House continues to support increasing rates paid to early childhood educators (an important investment in improving the quality of care provided to children) in its recent budget recommendations for the next fiscal year, and it recognizes the unique opportunity that child care and early learning programs present to support not only children, but their families, as well. For example, the integrated child care model developed by Neighborhood Villages is designed not only to offer child care that meets the needs of today’s workforce but also to demonstrate that a whole-family approach to investing in children during their most formative years will result in improved health, education, and workforce development outcomes - not just for children, but for their caregivers as well.
Massachusetts is not immune to what Ready Nation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and numerous research outlets have defined as a national child care crisis. Federal and state governments, along with business leaders, must commit to addressing it. Massachusetts’ recent investments in the early education workforce and its embrace of innovative child care models is to be commended and should be used to propel further commitment by all of us to meeting the needs of the state’s workforce and its families.
Lauren Birchfield Kennedy is co-founder of Neighborhood Villages. JD Chesloff is executive director of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and a member of the Early Education and Care Business Advisory Group. Both serve on the Department of Early Education and Care’s Workforce Council.