When I count the things I'm thankful for, high on the list is my daughter's child care center, a place so respectful of children that everything about it feels supportive of the goal of safe, enriching child development. I, and most parents who have searched for child care, understand what a necessity such care is for a working family.
The search entails finding something that not only meets working parents' needs—for peace of mind, affordability, hours of operation, and proximity to home—but the child's, as well. Since children explore and learn best under the supervision of reliable, engaged adults, they need consistent teachers, with skill and resources to work effectively with children, just to feel safe and regulate their emotions, so they can make developmental progress and grow. In other words, child care environments where turnover is high and staff poorly prepared can actually put a child behind. And child care that does all the right things often isn't cheap.
A new report, just released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, finds that the cost of raising a child has climbed; CBS Money Watch's Stacey Bradford notes that, adjusted for inflation, it is 22% more costly to raise a child today than in 1960, with most of the increase caused by just two spending categories: health care and child care. Low-income families, in particular, struggle to pay for child care. Working full-time in Houston for less than $15 per hour, as most hourly workers do, leaves families with one wage-earner unable to cover the basic cost of child care, a 2008 report from the National Center for Children in Poverty found.
If we want to get Texans off to the right start, we ought to recognize child care as the basic necessity families, kids, and research know it to be. Decades of cognitive and social science have demonstrated the importance of the early years. We now know that much of humans' lifetime brain development occurs during the first years of life and that early habits and environments can impact outcomes for years to come. Yet, even with the indisputable evidence of the early environments' importance—and with the vast majority of parents working and, thus, relying on child care to provide those environments at least part of the time—we have been surprisingly hands-off about something that, when mishandled, exacts a heavy cost for us all.
If good child care becomes mostly a function of who can afford it, it falls not in the category of items that we approach as something which affects everyone (think education or clean air), but in a category of discretionary purchases, where we allow some to have it and others not. The result? Horrific news reports, such as one earlier this year from the Texas Tribune, showing safety violations and outright abuse of children occurs in poorly regulated day care settings all over Texas, many of them serving families with the least financial means. Texas also has some of the lowest child care standards nationwide (they are currently under review), so that, although many home- and center-based day cares do operate in ways that align with best practices in child health and development, others can easily cut costs by going without training and personnel that early childhood experts believe essential to children's safety and wellbeing.
A Texas Observer article last month examined another aspect of this problem, with the case of Texas 4-year-old Melanie Delvecchio, who was repeatedly left alone when her mother had no child care option at all because the family earned too much to qualify for the small pool of public subsidies available and too little to afford private day care. Melanie's otherwise-attentive mother admits the choice to leave her child home alone was inexcusable. She is being prosecuted, but at an expense to the state that the article suggests would more sensibly have been applied to getting young Melanie consistent, quality care she needed:
Research has consistently shown that children with access to high quality pre-K are less likely to need special education, repeat grades, drop out of high school, or end up in the criminal justice system. A 2006 cost-benefit analysis by the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M found that for every $1 invested in pre-K, the state could expect a return of $3.50.
Unfortunately, few politicians seem to understand the economics of child care, for family and state budgets alike. One promising development is the U.S. Commerce Department's decision that will allow the Census to adopt a Supplemental Poverty Measure next year, which will include assessing more of the basic expenses families face, including child care. The existing federal poverty guidelines will remain in place and the standard for determining eligibility for programs, including child care subsidies. Still, the supplemental measure's data could very well provide an entry point for talking about the real costs of leaving child care to the marketplace—and start telling a story that today, too often, goes untold.
