Child care has traveled a long way during the pandemic, as this New York Times article headline explains:
“How Child Care Went From ‘Girly’ Economics to Infrastructure.”
The article looks at the work of economist Nancy Folbre, a professor emerita of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1998, Folbre also won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award because, “Her research on the family, on the work roles of family members, and on the relationships among those roles has challenged traditional economic theory.”
Or as the New York Times summarizes her work:
“You can’t measure the productivity of a child-care center the way you would, say, a car factory… The incentives are nothing alike. The profits don’t go only to the center’s owner. Instead, benefits are shared by children and their parents, and society as a whole. The country benefits from a more educated and productive work force.”
Folbre’s research stood in stark contrast to “mainstream economists, mostly men, [who] had argued that child care or other care work was something women did purely out of love, impossible to think about as an economic issue.”
The pandemic changed that.
Suddenly parents, mostly women, had to figure out how to manage work and child care. Millions decided that they had to leave their jobs.
Early education and care programs also struggled. Some weathered the pandemic storm, scrounging for masks and other protective gear as they continued to serve children. Others closed down permanently, unable to manage the pandemic’s demands and the loss of children who stayed home.
Now that vaccines are taming the pandemic’s impact and people are eager to jump start the economy, several questions loom. Who is going to take care of the kids so that parents, especially mothers, can go back to work? And why didn’t the United States have a stronger early education and care system before the pandemic?
“For so long, Dr. Folbre and others sounding the alarm about child care in the United States were shunted to the side of policy conversations,” the Times says. “It was left to parents (typically mothers) to figure out who would look after their children so they could get to work. If the United States treated other elements of infrastructure that are critical to the economy the way it does child care, you could imagine the chaos: Car owners would be left building bridges out of duct tape and scrap iron to get to the office, begging close relatives to come by each morning to hold a traffic light up at the corner.”
President Joe Biden’s policy proposals to invest in child care could change this, but his plans have to make it through Congress.
The need is beyond urgent. Children, families, and the economy are tightly linked. Without high-quality, accessible, affordable early education and care, all three will falter.
To learn more, check out the Times article and share it with your networks.
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