Child care is our most glaring post-pandemic learned lesson - Boston Business Journal
By Saskia Epstein & Lizzi Weyant
As employers and workers who have been operating with remote structures since the pandemic return to in-person or hybrid work, we cannot miss this critical moment to address what the pandemic has laid bare: The early education and child care field is broken, and working parents — women in particular — are bearing the brunt of the consequences.
For the sake of the well-being of working parents, children and our economy, it is essential that we act to provide flexibility for working parents in the short term as affordable and accessible early education and child care remains challenging in the coming months and years.
At the same time, we must also make significant changes — including bolstering the financial stability of providers, raising wages for early-education professionals and reducing per-child costs for families — to begin the urgently needed work of overhauling our child-care system for the long term. Long closures, increased costs for cleaning, and reduced capacity upon reopening from the pandemic created a shortage of child-care seats and long wait lists for families, with some providers choosing not to reopen at all. Yet the sector has long strained under a tenuous financial model, with low wages for early education professionals, astronomical per-child costs for families, and individual child-care businesses facing constant financial instability and risk of operating at a loss…
Luckily, momentum is building at the municipal, state and federal levels for transformational change to this system…Groups like the Common Start Coalition and the Massachusetts Business Coalition for Early Childhood Education are building a movement of parents, early educators, organizations, and business leaders for lasting change.