Seattle City Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda made history last month when she had a baby. Mosqueda is the first sitting member of the Seattle City Council to become a mother while in office; her colleague Lorena González is due to join the same exclusive club in January. Their experiences with parenthood while in office matter. More diverse political leadership means more diverse issues are addressed at the government level. Studies show, for instance, that women legislators are more likely to champion issues that impact women and families most, like health, education, housing, and civil rights. Perhaps, then, Seattle can expect its council to pay more attention to the child care crisis the city is facing.
Just weeks before she gave birth, Mosqueda was reportedly still on at least one child care wait list she had signed up for a year earlier. Hers is not an uncommon story. While 2,300 child care spots were added in King County between 2012 and 2017, the number of children 4 and under grew by about 7,280 in that time, and the number of licensed facilities actually decreased, according to data reported by The Seattle Times.
Meanwhile, working motherhood in the country has become commonplace. Seven in 10 mothers with children 18 and under worked outside the home in 2015, up from 47 percent of moms in 1975, according to Pew Research Center. Both parents work full-time in nearly half of two-parent households, up from less than one-third of households in 1975.
In other words, our child care needs as a country have shifted in recent decades. Today, the majority of parents need some kind of child care to keep working.
That cultural shift plus the rapid growth in Western cities means that we may only be approaching a child care crisis point. According to the Center for American Progress, more than 75 percent of neighborhoods in Utah are considered “child care deserts” where there are more than three young children for every licensed child care slot. Of the 11 states with the highest rates of residents living in child care deserts, seven are in the West.
Chris Herbst, an assistant professor at Arizona State University, said that the term “child care desert” can be slightly misleading, since many families use friends, family, nannies, or other unlicensed caregivers. “I mean, look at Care.com. That’s a thriving, massive, informal child care market,” he said. However, he added, the quality of care you might find on a site like this or with a family or friend is “of variable quality, and sometimes on the low end of quality.”
And that, Herbst said, is where he sees the beginnings of a problem. “While it’s very easy to find a caregiver in that kind of market, high-end programs are beginning to require higher training and education requirements. We may be on the cusp of a shortage problem there,” he said. “When you need a bachelor’s or an associate’s for employment, early childhood educators may not want to work for those wages.”
So parents must find the care, afford the care, and feel secure in its quality, while child care workers also need to make a living wage. The multi-pronged nature of the problem has everyone from the private sector to city councils to Congress trying to figure out an answer. Solving it just might need them all.
There are economic consequences at play. “Women are now 50 percent of the workforce,” Herbst said. “Even if you care nothing about gender equity, and all you care about is economic growth, you still ought to care about child care policy. You cannot make it more difficult for half the workforce to do its thing.”
That very issue is playing out in Missoula, Montana. Last December, the Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce surveyed workers about how child care was affecting their professional lives. More than 47 percent of the 550-plus respondents said they had abandoned their career (or planned to) or scaled back on work because of problems finding acceptable child care.
“The thing that we kept hearing was people are leaving work and not coming back when they have kids. They can’t find child care, they can’t afford child care, or the child care that they can afford wasn’t something they were willing to put their kids in,” Clint Burson, director of government affairs and communication with the Chamber, told NBC Montana at the time.
One Montana company is addressing the issue from a startup mentality. Bozeman-based MyVillage offers child care providers who want to operate out of their own homes a “business in a box solution,” according to Erica Mackey, the company’s co-founder and CEO. The company provides on-the-job support to its affiliates as well as licensing, insurance, legal, and tax help, all for a 10 percent cut of their revenue.
MyVillage currently operates 80 in-home daycares, all in Montana or Colorado, but it has lofty goals. “We plan to have 1 million kids in care within our first 10 years,” Mackey wrote in an email to Bitterroot. “We wanted to start the company in the Mountain West because we needed to make sure we created a solution to the child care crisis that was truly scalable in any area of the country: rural, suburban, or urban. We have programs everywhere from Denver to Missoula to teeny-tiny towns like Troy and Superior, Montana.”
MyVillage and similar companies such as Silicon Valley darling Wonderschool and Los Angeles-based WeeCare are real “innovations in the market,” according to Herbst — so long as they can assure quality of care. MyVillage does require its providers to become licensed and cites a high customer satisfaction rate thus far, but maintaining a quality workforce will likely be a challenge the company faces as it expands.
While many families do prefer in-home daycare options, providers notoriously work long hours for low wages and rarely for benefits. A law passed in California this year took aim at one part of the issue by allowing providers working with low-income families on state subsidies to unionize and collectively bargain with the state.
Those providing in-home care for low-income families are often those who struggle the most to get by, and they’re also more likely to be women of color. In California, these providers make a median wage of $12 an hour; 58 percent of them rely on government assistance to support their own families, according to Child Care Providers United California, the newly formed union.
Charlotte Neal of Sacramento has been running her own in-home daycare for 18 years. She provides 24-hour services because some of the families she serves work overnight shifts or odd hours. Even though she cares for 14 children, ranging in age from 3 weeks to 11 years, she’s barely scraping by.
“Thank god my husband has health care and I get it through him,” she said. “It all goes back to the juggling, because that’s what we do. We juggle just to make it, to survive another day.”
Neal took the kids she cares for to the state Capitol while the legislature considered the collective bargaining bill. “I took my daycare kids down to the Capitol so [lawmakers] could see that they have a voice and face as well. To show them that these are the people affected,” she said. “It’s easy to ignore the problem when you don’t see them or hear them, but if you see them, then you can see these are the ones being left behind. These are who is impacted the most.”
Negotiating with the state could get Neal and her employees a much-needed raise, which she said would allow for the best care and education for the children.
And that’s the heart of the issue. The youngest generation’s care and education are at stake — but so are the livelihoods of women like Neal and the working parents who depend on them while they earn their own paychecks. If fast-growing Western cities want to maintain their meteoric economic climbs, the issue of child care will need to be reckoned with — and soon.
Mosqueda, for her part, sees the role this multidimensional issue will play in the future of her city. “While Seattle is a growing city attracting new people every day, not everyone in Seattle makes the Area Median Income of $93,000, let alone a living wage with benefits,” she said in a statement to Bitterroot. “Working families are financially pinched on all sides, from housing costs to quality of life issues such as commute times and access to affordable child care.”
In the meantime, she and González have paved the way for more child care centers in the city by allowing developers to build larger buildings if they include space for them. They’ve even taken a look at their own workplace, and are spearheading an initiative to open a daycare inside City Hall.
Herbst said government involvement is necessary. “My view is that the price of child care should be heavily, heavily, heavily subsidized,” he said. “If we pay [child care workers] more and allow them to organize, heavily regulate the market, and require [them] to get degrees, that will all drive up the price of care — and that has to be offset for parents.”
