Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It

Elliot Haspel is a former elementary school teacher and early childhood policy analyst who writes about early childhood and K-12 education policy. He holds an M.Ed. in Education Policy from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. Elliot’s work has been featured on The Washington Post, The New Republic, Romper, The 74 Million, and other sites. He resides in Richmond, VA with his wife and two young daughters. Elliot’s book, Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It, will be published this week. Order it now from your favorite bookseller.

Elliot can be reached at ehaspel@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter at @ehaspel.

JW: Elliot, what prompted you to write Crawling Behind?

EH: The idea for the book started years ago from a personal place. As my peers and I started having children, I was taken aback by how many conversations were spent bemoaning the stress of finding and affording decent child care. These were nearly all highly-educated, married, two-earner couples in their 30s! Around the same time, I was making a career shift from K-12 education policy to focusing intensively on early childhood policy. It struck me how different the two sectors were, despite both serving children with only an arbitrary age line between them.

In K-12, it’s just assumed that parents don’t have to pay a dollar (beyond taxes) for their kids’ care and education. And while the American K-12 education system has plenty of problems, it’s free, there’s no under supply of spaces, and staff are at least paid a living wage with benefits and unions. In the early childhood sector, though, parents are basically just expected to pick up the tab, leading to all sorts of structural chasms that have created our current child care crisis. I read and read, and found essentially no one was making the case that child care in America should be completely free to families. I decided someone needed to make that case, so that we could shift the conversation away from half-measures like subsidies and scholarships, and to a bigger conversation about whether or not child care should be considered a public good.

JW: We’ve discussed the challenge that “unfettered capitalism” poses to the tasks of caregiving broadly, and our responsibility to care for children, in particular. It is, perhaps, even the underlying issue that animates our current child care crisis. What is the role of children’s advocates in addressing these underlying crises that drive poor outcomes for children and families?

EH: This is such a good point, and I’m always grateful to you for bringing up the more underlying societal issues. There’s a term that some folks have started to use which I think is apt: “workism.” Basically, this idea that when you put work as the be-all, end-all at the center of life, family necessarily suffers. Now, I think it’s important to understand that American workism didn’t happen by accident. While there are some cultural and historical elements, the fact is that we’ve been steadily letting capitalism force more and more family unfriendly – and frankly inhumane – conditions onto workers. You can see this in the rise of nontraditional work hours, the “gig economy,” the constant connectivity to work from our phones, all set against a weakening of unions and a broad stagnation of wages that leaves the vast majority of Americans unable to get ahead.

So now you have a young child, except you’re not around much and when you are, you’re exhausted and stressed out. And a significant portion of your work is going to pay for child care! None of this is good for parents or children. I often think we focus too much on children as the unit of change when we want to improve their outcomes, whether it be health or education or whathaveyou. The fact is that thriving families are what lead to thriving children. There’s nothing better we can do for our children than let their parents be parents. Our hellish late capitalism is nearly diametrically opposed to that goal. I don’t know if we’re ever totally reversing these trends, but I think we can at least start to steer the ship in a different direction.

For children’s advocates, there are a few steps to take. One is that while I’m regularly hectoring folks in other sectors like higher education or business to get fully behind universal child care, I also think child advocates need to get broadly behind worker’s rights. This means pushing just as hard for things like strong unions, paid sick leave and vacations, and laws that restrict no-warning shift changes as we do for quality child care, a child allowance, or paid family leave.

The second step is pushing a cultural change. We need to bring to the fore conversations about re-centering American society around the family, not the workplace. The fact that conservatives are beginning to lift workism up as a problem – they tend to approach it through the lens of declining birth and marriage rates (the Institute for Family Studies in particular has been writing about it recently) – gives me hope we might find a bipartisan way forward towards a family-friendly economic system.

“There’s nothing better we can do for our children than let their parents be parents. Our hellish late capitalism is nearly diametrically opposed to that goal. I don’t know if we’re ever totally reversing these trends, but I think we can at least start to steer the ship in a different direction.”

I should say that beyond conversation, there are also some practical ways this shows up; I went down a rabbit hole a while back about all of the different family-friendly offerings that Finland has, from twice-weekly “family cafes” where kids can be dropped off for free for a few hours with trained caregivers, to “park aunties” where paid municipal staff run free drop-in playgroups. Other countries have their own creative offerings, but America feels pretty bereft, since we see this primarily as a private family burden. Yet these offerings both give parents much needed quality time with one another, and also communicate a society’s sense of appreciation and value towards families with children.

Nothing’s going to change until we start naming the problem and creating forums to reckon with it, which is something I appreciate Capita’s leadership on!

JW: You argue that child care should be treated as a common good, similar to how we treat public schools. And, while every child has a right to go to a public school, they are not assured of an excellent education. First, how do you define “common good” in this context and secondly, how do we ensure that “common good” means more than just “common access”?

EH: I define a common good as a service so socially beneficial that we provide it free of charge to the end user (aside, again, from taxes). Other examples would include fire departments, national defense, roads, sewers, and many parks. The Economics definition of a common good is one that is ‘non-rivalrous’ and ‘non-excludable’, which are fancy ways of saying that you using the good doesn’t stop me from doing so, and that it’s basically impossible for you to stop me from using the good even if you wanted to. Housing is an example of a very important good that is not currently set up to be a common good, because the housing stock is finite and one person can make a better offer, thereby excluding others.

The question of quality is so important. I mention in my book that no one starting a new nation would look at the American K-12 education system and think, “copy-paste!” One benefit we have in early childhood is that we essentially get to build a system from scratch, as opposed to trying to reform a system with almost 200 years of classist, racist baggage baked in from the start.

One advantage of leveraging public money is that you can require recipients to adhere to certain regulations. So while I think we should essentially hand parents a large credit (directly, not as a tax credit) to acquire the care they need, no provider should be able to accept the credit without meeting certain quality benchmarks. Those benchmarks, in my opinion, need to include several key factors: at bare minimum, registration and participation in their state’s Quality Rating & Improvement System (which tend to include things like adoption of a vetted curriculum and objective external observations); providing staff with a solidly middle-class wage and benefits floor; and data sharing agreements with local public school systems to ensure productive feedback loops. We have to explicitly design these policies to backstop against inequities.

I should say, though, that even if all we did was provide a moderate-quality early care and education experience for all children – though I think we can and should set our sights higher! – we would expect to see tremendous improvements in child and family outcomes solely on the basis of improving families’ financial situation. There is quite a bit of research proving that just putting more money in the pockets of families (which is, in effect, what zeroing out the cost of child care and compensating stay-at-home parents would do) has major, direct positive impact on family and child outcomes due primarily to stress reduction and increased parental time and attentiveness.

JW: In Foundations for Flourishing Futures, we’ve identified “caregiving in flux” as one of the most exciting and challenging areas of change related to young children and families in the next decade. A lot of the dynamism around caregiving is driven by changes in work (e.g. the gig economy, unpredictable scheduling, stagnant wages, etc.). How does the child care sector need to change to better meet the needs of the working family of the future?

“The other way that the sector might change is by emphasizing relational supports and what Dr. David Willis calls “early relational health.” All of these changes in work and the economy are putting tons of strain on modern families. Early childhood providers are a wonderful and trusted touchpoint for linking in parenting support groups, counseling, home visitation, etc. Some programs that we currently have, perhaps most notably Early Head Start, already integrate a family support specialist with their early care offerings. With adequate public funding, this could become the rule rather than the exception.”

EH: A big part of this comes in honoring parental preference and needs. While my entire book is a case for 100% public funding of quality child care, I have concerns with making the birth-to-five years functionally mirror the K-12 years. A system that is entirely government-led necessarily has more-or-less uniform hours and uniform delivery (for instance, a post office in New York City and a post office in rural Wyoming are broadly similar). That’s not a great fit for the early childhood years.

In addition to the changes in work that you’ve noted, there are two important facts to remember. The first is that in early childhood, quality matters vastly more than setting – a child can thrive equally well when cared for by a knowledgeable relative or in a NAEYC-accredited center. The second is that parental preferences are extremely dynamic in the early years. In surveys, parents report wildly different desires. Some want to stay home full-time, some want to work outside the home full-time, some want to work outside the home part-time… and this shifts by the age of the child, family circumstances, etc.. These preferences are only going to get more varied as we move into the future.

So I think the sector needs to shift in a couple of different ways (in addition to pressing for policy changes I mentioned above which will better buttress family life). The first is to be sure that we’re offering a lot of different quality options. There should be (zero-cost) providers that specialize in overnight care, in providing transportation to and from the site, in working with children who have experienced trauma, in caring for mildly ill children, and so on. Right now these are far and few between, and quality is a giant question mark. We also need to find ways to really engage informal types of caregivers – for instance, friends, family & neighbors – to make sure they have the knowledge and skills needed to provide a positive experience. As you put it in the Foundations document, we want a sector where “due to recognition that strong relationships can be built in a variety of settings, flexibility around what counts as an early learning environment has increased, as have funding and professional supports.”

The other way that the sector might change is by emphasizing relational supports and what Dr. David Willis calls “early relational health.” All of these changes in work and the economy are putting tons of strain on modern families. Early childhood providers are a wonderful and trusted touchpoint for linking in parenting support groups, counseling, home visitation, etc. Some programs that we currently have, perhaps most notably Early Head Start, already integrate a family support specialist with their early care offerings. With adequate public funding, this could become the rule rather than the exception.

JW: What’s a project you’ve dreamed about, but haven’t started yet?

EH: The issue that I am most passionate about aside from early childhood is climate change, though of course they’re intensely related. I’d love to build out ideas I explored in a New Republic article a few months ago about how Millennial parents need to be leading the charge for combating the climate crisis. Climate change is going to hammer our children and grandchildren, and it’s frighteningly clear that’s not a hypothetical. Yet I don’t see much in the way of an organized movement of young(ish) parents that can rise above partisan politics and reground the conversation to focus on the interests of our children. I think the potential power here is massive -- Millennials are now the largest eligible voting bloc in America, by sheer numbers -- but I haven’t had the space or time yet to think deeply about how to operationally help bring forth such a movement.

Hilary RikardNovember 11, 2019