Given all of the economic worries, it would be tempting to stop paying your daycare provider, many of which are asking for partial tuition during the shutdown. If you can afford it, it’s a good idea to keep paying them, as you will want a daycare facility to return to once it is safe again.
As many working parents will attest to, access to high-quality, affordable child care is the single most pressing issue for being able to balance career and family. Child care is one of those items that’s barely affordable for most families, ranging anywhere from 9 to 36 percent of a family’s income, while also operating on incredibly slim margins, with daycare teachers being paid, on average, $10.82 an hour.
Daycare facilities operate on slim margins
Daycare facilities are in an incredibly precarious situation, with 30 percent of facilities reporting they would have to close permanently if they had to shut down for two or more weeks. Meanwhile, as the shutdowns started, daycare centers reported losing 70% of their daily attendance in a single week.
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According to a recent analysis, we could permanently lose up to 4.5 million child care slots if this crisis continues without any sort of intervention. The CARES Act offered a little bit of relief, in the form of $3.5 billion for child care facilities, but it is estimated that the actual need is closer to $50 billion.
How do I work if no one takes care of my kids?Although we can hope that Congress will intervene, the fact remains that a majority of our elected officials are men who have most likely never worried about finding or paying for high quality child care. Preserving our already strained child care infrastructure probably isn’t an issue that hits home with them, and won’t be high on their list of priorities.
Daycare closures have already impacted parents
This issue recently hit home for many parents who work in Houston’s Texas Medical Center—which includes a large number of healthcare workers and biomedical researchers—when the University of Texas Health Childhood Development Center permanently closed, suddenly and without much warning.
For Kai Li Tan, a researcher whose work focuses on understanding the intestinal nervous system, this closure means she will have to find another daycare for her two children.
“How do I work if no one takes care of my kids?” said Tan in an email. “We cannot afford a long-term personal babysitter.” For Tan, whose husband is an essential worker, this daycare closure will make returning to work that much more complicated, especially given how tight child care slots are, and how expensive alternative options, such as a full-time nanny, are.
So when you are weighing your many different priorities, it’s important to remember just how important high quality daycare is, and to think about what actions you can take, in order to make sure your daycare facility will still be there once it is safe to open up again.
