Mayor Marty Walsh helps launch the Child Care Entrepreneur Fund Pilot. Photo: John Wilcox. Source: City of Boston Mayor’s Office Flickr page.
What makes child care work?
Mayor Marty Walsh decided to find out by asking the city of Boston.
“In 2019, we added an optional survey to the annual citywide census related to early education and care. We wanted to better understand how families access and experience care for their children ages five and under,” Walsh says in a new report on the results of the survey called, “Making Childcare Work: Results from a Survey on childcare arrangements and challenges.”
“The survey, conducted by the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, found that more than one-quarter of stay-at-home parents, the vast majority of them women, couldn’t work” because they lacked child care, the Boston Globe reports. “Nearly 60 percent of those parents cited cost as the biggest obstacle. Parents of children under 2 had the hardest time finding available slots.”
The report’s other key findings:
• child care costs are “the top concern for families in our sample, regardless of which neighborhood they live in”
• women say child care is “a challenge to entering/re-entering the workforce”
• nearly a third of the parents/guardians who stay home to care for their children said they needed or wanted to work; “91% of those who reported their gender, were female”
• families reported more child care challenges “associated with 0-2 year-olds than 3-5 year-olds, which makes “parents with infant children potentially more vulnerable to being left out of the workforce”
Boston’s next steps, the report says, are to keep listening to families, improve data collection on child care, share this data openly, and take action.
Last week, Mayor Walsh shared the report at an event. He also explained one action that the city will take: launching the Childcare Entrepreneur Fund Pilot.
The Fund offers support to owners of child care businesses in Boston. “Fund recipients attend business training and receive grant funding for their business.”
“One part of the solution is to support the workforce, to help them run stable businesses to increase the supply,” Tania Del Rio, executive director of the Office of Women’s Advancement, tells the Globe.
The Globe goes on to explain that small child care businesses – which are typically run in private homes – are struggling to stay afloat, even though demand for their services is high, because they usually charge less than child care centers. Del Rio also told that the Globe that “high housing costs for these home-based providers are driving many out.”
“Boston has lost more than half of its home-based family child-care businesses since 2010, totaling an estimated 400 closings according to city and state data. Meanwhile, the population of children under 5 has increased steadily.”
That’s why Boston’s goal, as the report says, “is to reverse the trend of family child care closings in order to maintain the supply of available child care seats for families. If the pilot proves successful, the City will expand it in the coming years and look for ways to bring this solution to scale.”
As Walsh says in the report:
“Together, policymakers, early education professionals, parents, families, employers, and academia can call attention to the collective challenge of ensuring Boston’s working parents and our youngest learners thrive. In Boston, we never shy away from a challenge. Let’s face this one head on.”
Eye on Early Education is a blog of Strategies for Children, an organization that works to ensure that Massachusetts invests the resources needed for all children, from birth to age five, to access high-quality early education programs that prepare them for success in school and life. The blogger, 
eyeonearlyeducation.org 
This is a great move toward supporting family child care. I would add though, that while at times family childcare costs less than center based, those providers who charge the prevailing rate make a better living, can stay in the business for longer and continue to grow their skills.
In addition, cost is by far not the only reason that families often prefer family child care. The increased connection between teacher and parent is a significant plus for helping parents with all the small and large challenges of raising a child. Children having access to the same teacher for years is an amazing plus at a time when relationships are extremely important to the developing child. Small groups of mixed ages mimic the ways children have always been raised.
I could go on, but to reduce childcare to economics in this way was a forgivable excuse for the Globe (though barely). For you guys? Come on. You know better than this.
Family child care is as varied in quality as center based care, this we need to tackle across the board. But to ignore the positive benefits while focusing simply on cost, a cost that keeps women (providers) in poverty, is missing way too much of the story.
The amount of money offered is not nearly enough.