America Needs to Change the Way It Views Child Care

The United States Department of Education released a report this month titled “High-Quality Early Learning Settings Depend on a High-Quality Workforce.” The authors decried the low earnings of child-care workers in contrast to the important role they play in society.

The report, along with the journalists who picked up the story, were clear in their analysis: Child-care workers are extremely important to a child’s development, and the government should make sure they’re paid enough to encourage high-quality workers.

But there is another way to look at the problem.

Marcy Whitebook, director of the Center for the Study of Child-Care Employment at the University of California–Berkeley, has been studying early childhood for four decades. On May 6, she wrote, “[T]he lived experiences of early educators and the families they serve underscore the case for a national solution that fundamentally shifts the way we think about early childhood jobs and how we prioritize working with young children.” Whitebook said it is ironic that child-care workers “often cannot afford child care for their own children.”

A number of topics continue to underpin the child-care discussion.

First, the earliest years of a child’s life are crucial to his or her later development. As one journalist noted, “[T]he belief that good early-childhood education can help prevent later gaps in test scores and graduation rates from emerging between poor and well-off children is widely shared.”

Second, child-care work is not something to be viewed as rudimentary. “People tend to think of this as unskilled work,” Whitebook said, “when in fact the work of facilitating the education and development of babies is every bit as complex as working with kindergartners.” Not many parents are likely to tell you their job is easy.

Third, small teacher-to-student ratios are beneficial for overall academic achievement, language development and thought processes. The greatest benefits come from those ratios in the early years of schooling.

These benefits could be maximized if children were taught by a parent in their own home. The child could be educated from the youngest age, given the attention from someone whose primary goal is the child’s best interest, and offered the smallest teacher-to-student ratio possible: one to one. Yet the government-planned incentives are not about having the fewest possible children involved in child care, but having the greatest amount of adults.

In 2014, President Barack Obama set the goal of enrolling 6 million children in “high-quality preschool.” He then laid out the agenda in his 2015 State of the Union Address:

In today’s economy, when having both parents in the workforce is an economic necessity for many families, we need affordable, high-quality child care more than ever. It’s not a nice-to-have—it’s a must-have. It’s time we stop treating child care as a side issue, or a women’s issue, and treat it like the national economic priority that it is for all of us.

Besides the misnomer of an economic “necessity” (rather than an economic “want”), President Obama is right. America, and all countries, need high-quality child care. The real question is whether that care comes from the child’s parents or someone else. Single parents often have very little choice but to put their young children into a child-care institution. As of 2015, 58 percent of mothers with infants under age 1 were in the workforce. But for those families who have some leeway to choose, shouldn’t we incentivize parental child care rather than institutional care?

The question for Americans, especially during the crucial early years of their child’s development is whether strengthening the family or the workforce is more important. In this, it seems Washington has cast its vote.

As one editor at the Atlantic explained:

One factor that helps explain why the country doesn’t have enough quality programs is, as this new report suggests, its failure to effectively cultivate or compensate a cadre of early-childhood educators who are prepared to offer quality instruction.

That is true on more than one level. With the prevalence of single-motherhood, working toward improving the quality of institutional child care is a worthy goal. But we cannot forget the more important role highlighted by Trumpet executive editor Stephen Flurry in “Wanted: Good Mothers.”