Cliff Notes: Pandemic Relief Funding Teaches Lessons About the Need for Sustained Child Care Investments
By Shengwei Sun, Karen Schulman, Rachel Wilensky, and Melissa Boteach
Child care allows parents to enter or stay in the labor force, improves the well-being of families and communities, yields long-term positive outcomes for future generations, and buttresses economic growth. Yet in the United States, child care is perceived and funded as a private responsibility that is made possible by women’s unpaid or underpaid labor. The private provision of child care is “a textbook example of a broken market,” with families paying unaffordable fees and early educators—predominantly women who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic compared to the overall workforce—subsidizing the system with their poverty wages. While the value of child care extends to the entire society and far into the future, what individual families can afford to pay cannot match the true value of care work. The United States’ failure to invest in this crucial sector has created a fragile and patchwork system unable to meet the demand for child care.
Even before the pandemic, rising child care costs were far outpacing the rate of overall inflation. A long history of racism and sexism has contributed to early educators, especially women of color and immigrant women, remaining some of the most underpaid workers in the country. In 2019, the median annual pay for child care workers ($24,230) was less than half that of kindergarten teachers ($56,850), and Black early educators were paid on average $0.78 less per hour than their white peers. A long history of racist and xenophobic biases toward Black, Latinx, and immigrant families has also created significant gaps in child care assistance policies and funding, with only one in six children who qualify for federally funded child care assistance actually receiving it.
The pandemic pushed the already precarious child care sector to the brink of collapse. In response, the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act (CRRSAA) included initial relief funding to the child care sector, followed by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which included an even larger investment to better stabilize the sector and support families with children. The ARPA legislation provided $24 billion in stabilization funds to the child care industry and a $15 billion increase in the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), the major federal child care program that provides funding to states to help families afford child care and invest in the quality and supply of child care. The ARPA relief dollars were the largest federal investment in the child care sector since World War II, but with the expiration of child care stabilization dollars in September 2023 and the upcoming expiration of the CCDBG supplemental funding, the sector will be left with a funding cliff that will only exacerbate its fragility.
What lessons have we learned from this short-term investment? While the pandemic child care relief dollars have provided critical support for families and early educators as they navigate the crisis, these one-time relief funds are not nearly enough to remedy the failures in the existing child care market. Moreover, not all impacts of the expiration will be immediate. The negative effects of this expiration will be long term and deeply damaging. Only sustained and robust public investment can address the long-term structural flaws and build a child care system where all families can find and afford care and where all early educators are valued and paid robust wages and benefits.