Child Care Is A Public Good. Our Government Should Start Treating It That Way - WBUR
By Rebecca Rewald
A historic amount of funding is making its way to child care centers across the country thanks to the American Rescue Plan. It’s time to start thinking about expanding and reforming child care in the long-term.
Even before the pandemic, half of U.S. families were living in child care deserts, and too many families were spending far too much of their income on child care. If we don’t want to reverse course and go back to the ways things were, we need our government to treat child care as a public good that is vital to the wellbeing of our society and our economy. We need child care that is affordable and accessible for everyone.
The efforts of lawmakers and advocates who care about child care over the last year have been focused on saving the child care industry from total collapse during the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan included $39 billion dollars for the child care industry, money that will help keep child care providers open and support them with serving families in their communities.
Now that we’ve pumped money into the child care industry to help prevent its collapse, what comes next?