Child Care Crisis

The lack of available child care is holding the economy back. 

Donnelly is director of the Grace Preschool, a Des Moines, Iowa, early childhood center that has won international recognition for its high quality. It has struggled during the pandemic, first with plummeting enrollment and, now, with a tight labor market that makes it difficult to hire and retain staff.

The same thing is happening all over America, with far-reaching consequences. Working parents can’t find places to put their kids, businesses can’t get their employees back on the job.

But the three bills that the GOP legislature has taken up so far adopt a very different approach, seeking to deregulate the industry rather than invest in it. One particularly controversial piece of legislation would reduce adult-to-child ratios, so that one care worker could watch over as many as eight 2-year-olds, instead of the six that the state now allows.

The problems predate the pandemic. In 2015, a statewide organization called the Iowa Women’s Foundation convened discussions with leaders from 18 communities, asking them to identify the one issue on which they thought government action could do the most to help girls and women. Child care was the clear choice.

Iowa isn’t unique in this respect. With no comprehensive national child care program, responsibility in the U.S. has fallen heavily on individual families who frequently don’t have much money to pay for care. That has limited revenues for providers, who in turn can’t pay high salaries, leaving them to draw from a limited labor pool.

Advocates have long called for government action to subsidize families and to boost provider wages. That would require some large outlays of money, but advocates say the investment would yield big, quantifiable returns for the rest of society.

Fewer care workers would have to rely on food assistance and other taxpayer-financed benefits, the advocates argue, while the field would attract more experienced and talented workers, improving the quality of care. At the same time, parents would have an easier path back to the workplace if they wanted one.

She worked out an agreement with Collins Aerospace, the large employer that subsidizes child care for its workers at the center, that increased the center’s revenue so that she could raise wages. The difference was dramatic. A dozen openings drew 68 applicants, some with 20 years of experience and degrees in education or child development.

“I keep trying to tell people, you have to invest in the workforce,” Niemi told HuffPost. “If you can offer competitive wages, you’ll be able to get them in.”

That is not the approach that Republicans in the Iowa legislature have taken with their three new bills.

One would allow 16- and 17-year-old employees to watch over school-aged kids without adult supervision ― a prospect that worries advocates and many providers, who question whether teens are ready for that responsibility. Another bill would let providers charge co-pays to families on government assistance, even though those families are by definition struggling to cover basic life expenses.

“We can’t charge families anymore,” Tracy Elhert, an early childhood educator and consultant who is now a Democratic state representative, told HuffPost. “They already can’t afford it. It’s the same as college tuition in a lot of these programs.”