Child Care Isn’t Working. For Anyone.
Access to child care is foundational. It’s an important driver of employment opportunity, financial security, and economic mobility. It’s critical to preventing the achievement gap, and core to gender and racial equity. But child care has long been undervalued in our country. As a result, it’s not working for anyone - families, providers, or educators. And until we start building a true child care system, we shouldn’t expect any different.
Until we treat child care as a public good, we’ll see the same outcome: a system that fails everyone.
Despite being an industry essential to family financial security, child development, and a healthy economy, our country’s child care sector receives no meaningful public investment. Rather than making a societal commitment to provide child care solutions for all families, we’ve forced parents to bear its full cost. The result? Families struggle to find the care solutions they need to work and children are denied equal access to education.
In states like Massachusetts, child care tuition fees exceed the cost of in-state college. Yet, even with high tuition rates, child care providers struggle to pay their staff more than minimum wage and to keep their businesses afloat. Educators can’t afford to stay in the field because their pay is so low.
No one can afford child care delivery the way it works right now - not parents, not providers, not educators. This is a fundamentally broken sector. It’s failing everyone.