The working world has a big hole. It’s an empty space where child care should be.

That’s the core message of a new report — “High-Quality Early Child Care: A Critical Piece of the Workforce Infrastructure” — from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

“For the most part, contemporary policies and the modern economy necessitate that all parents work and yet, early child care is not part of the workforce infrastructure,” the report says.

“Current options for licensed early child care exert serious limits on parental work.”

This means parents are “on their own,” combing through a child care system with high costs, limited access, and varying degrees of quality.

“The market is mostly private, where parents bear the costs of paying for child care and providers may need to compromise on quality—as indicated by persistently low child care worker wages—in order to make child care affordable for parents.”

Taking a parent-centered approach, the report explains “why the problems with early child care have persisted in the United States” and justifies fixing them. The report also looks at “improving economic conditions for low- and moderate-income residents of New England…”

A video explaining some of the report’s work is posted here.

The lack of child care comes at a challenging time:

• more than 65 percent of children under age six have working parents

• trends show that as the current workforce ages and young immigrant families join the workforce, more workers will need child care

• “the labor-force participation rate of women in the United States has been surpassed by Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations with more family-supportive policies, such as paid leave, universal child care, and part-time allowances,” and

• estimates are that productivity losses “in the form of absenteeism, and economic burdens attributable to inadequate child care” have cost U.S. employers billions of dollars annually

The report has four ideas for making child care part of the workforce infrastructure:

• “Acknowledge that while much is known about how to deliver high-quality early child care, it is very expensive and thus a financing challenge in a mostly private market.”

• “Identify and highlight the platforms and infrastructures for the delivery and regulation of high-quality early child care that already exist (i.e., Head Start and Early Head Start for children from low-income families).”

• “Develop and share a deep understanding of how early child care impacts the economic and employment advancement of working parents,” and

• “Assess efforts, policies, and practices through a working-parent lens to ensure strong utilization—for example, the highest-quality public preschool options may do little to address inequality concerns if working parents cannot access them because of limited hours/days.”

To be useful, child care should be “available to accommodate parents’ work schedules, their locations, and their children’s ages and needs.”

These challenges are not new. There is a long-standing need for public policy action:

“Aside from a few rarely recalled historical instances, no one has fully taken responsibility to ensure that there is an adequate supply of early child care that, first and foremost, meets the needs of working parents in the United States.”

“Theoretically, market incentives should solve this problem, but given the constraints of the current early child care model—which cannot be both high quality and affordable, let alone widely available because of staffing challenges even in highly populated places—intervention is needed to align the supply with the demand.”

Parent-centered improvements could help families and the economy. As the report concludes:

“A successful long-term outcome for this work would be when all working parents have access to early child care that minimizes trade-offs for them and their children.”