With dual-earner families increasingly becoming the norm, President Obama trumpeted the importance of "universal child care" in his State of the Union address - a pivot from previous years, when he advocated for universal pre-kindergarten.
Elizabeth Powers is a professor of economics and a faculty member of the Institute of Government and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois. Powers, who studies poverty and inequality, spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the importance of high-quality child care for working families.
How important is high-quality child care - both for children as well as parents? Is it more important for low-wage workers and their children?
A developmentally appropriate, stimulating and safe environment is important for all children. But the question is, how do we provide such an environment? Some research indicates that the learning gains from time spent at home are correlated with family resources. In that sense, then, high-quality day care is more important for children in lower-income households, since they are not getting as much stimulation at home. Put another way, the alternatives to quality day care they face are worse than for children whose parents earn more. This puts children from low-resource households at a big disadvantage by the time they show up for school. They are substantially less ready to learn.
What would the best universal child care policy look like?
There are several issues here. For one, universal pre-kindergarten programs are not necessarily full-day programs. In fact, in Illinois, these programs have all been part-day programs, and for many families that's not a good option because it conflicts with work. So part of this pivot may reflect a desire to place greater emphasis on synchronizing care with earnings opportunities. That type of child care model has potentially more benefits for children because it improves family income as well as early childhood education.
A concern would be with expanding access to child care but missing the opportunity to expand access to quality child care. It is still not clear, in fact, what elements are most essential for a quality program or what features demonstrably improve child outcomes. Just increasing access to the current market, without doing anything to address quality, may not achieve much in the way of learning gains. It would be best to prioritize programs that have been shown to be effective. For example, despite their reputation, Head Start programs, which are targeted to the most vulnerable groups of children, have demonstrated benefits to children's learning.
In the U.S., we have tended to value variety in child care options - family care, center care, programs that are explicitly called "preschool." Illinois has sought to preserve this variety by subsidizing all types of care. This approach is premised on the notion that different families and children have different needs. In light of this philosophy, it's hard to imagine instituting a uniform type of care or program across the country, as has been done elsewhere in the world, at least immediately.
There has been a move to "professionalize" child care - that is, requiring more teacher credentialing - in concert with having the public school structure reach down to earlier ages. For instituting large-scale changes, this is an approach that makes some sense and would certainly eventually lead to a more uniform system.
In Illinois, the child care subsidy fund faces a shortage. What ripple effects are we likely to see if funding isn't restored?
About 100,000 young children in Illinois are in the child care subsidy program, or roughly 10 percent of all children under 6 years old. Research I've done indicates that, on average, a low-earning worker in Illinois would have to spend more than half of their day working just to pay for one day of care for a child under age 2. Clearly, child care just isn't affordable for many parents.
What will parents do when the subsidy budget runs dry? Some may have relatives or friends who could help. But many parents don't have that option, and few "helpers" would be in a position to care for these children largely for free, indefinitely. In the worst-case scenario, you could see some very unsafe care situations arising from desperation to keep some income coming in. Parents would juggle schedules, leading to increased absences at work, but many would soon find themselves unable to work.
Impacts on day care providers also are extremely worrisome. A great deal of subsidized care is provided by women working out of their own homes. They are low-income workers themselves and aren't realistically able to continue caring for children in the absence of the program's cash flow. Centers also serve many children in the subsidy program, and some also may find they can't keep going or have to change their customer base.
Of course, other fields have experienced delayed payments for years. In the developmental disabilities area, providers have experienced terrible delays, but a core group of them have been able to stay afloat. But those providers are corporations, and in addition to taking out loans against their fairly substantial physical capital, they have increased their charitable fundraising and other nongovernmental income sources. Child care providers are less likely to cope with not getting paid punctually, because there are not many good alternative cash flow strategies for them.
If this degenerated into a chronic problem for the state, we would eventually see fewer small providers and limits on how many subsidized children providers were willing to accept. Because child care needs to be located close to either the parent's work or home, a decline in availability would have a very big impact on the parent's ability to work.