From Moms Rising (https://www.momsrising.org/):
Quarantining during this pandemic brought out a myriad of hobbies for many of us, such as binging on streaming tv shows, trying your hand at whipped coffee, TikTok dance sessions, impersonating your favorite work of art, and bread baking. Oh there was so much bread baking.
Though pandemic baking was awesome (and tasty), the sad truth is that many of our actual breadwinners haven’t been able to bring home the dough for their families. According to the Census Bureau, just past January some 1.6 million fewer mothers living with school-age children were actively working compared with a year before.[1] That’s a lot of breadwinners pushed out of much-needed jobs.
The Child Care for Working Families Act (HR 1364) is a recipe to ensure moms aren’t pushed out of the workforce. Tell Congress to Act now at https://action.momsrising.org/sign/CCFWA2021!
Women, particularly women and moms of color, have borne the brunt of this pandemic, with millions of women having been forced to leave the workforce (and much-needed jobs) often to take on caretaking roles. The White House itself has noted that 2.3 million women have been forced out of the labor force. [2]
This is unacceptable. While some were waiting for pandemic bread to rise, the labor force of moms and caregivers fell. Unfortunately, this is NOT a new problem. Decades of underinvestment made this pandemic disastrous for moms and families. And it’s costly not only for women, moms, and disproportionately women of color and their families, but costly for our economy overall. For example, “the risk of mothers leaving the labor force and reducing work hours in order to assume caretaking responsibilities amounts to $64.5 billion per year in lost wages and economic activity.” [3]
The lack of support for caretakers may have been crumb-y, but thankfully, there is a solution that would help address this ongoing childcare crisis! Today, Congress will be re-introducing the Child Care for Working Families Act, which establishes a child care and early learning infrastructure that ensures working families can find and afford the child care they need to succeed in the workforce and children can get the early education they need to thrive. It would jumpstart our economy by creating roughly 700,000 new child care jobs, help 1.6 million parents—primarily mothers—go back to work, and lift one million families out of poverty.
The Child Care for Working Families Act:
- Makes child care more affordable for working families, by creating a federal-state partnership to provide financial assistance for working families with children ages 0-13
- Expands access to preschool programs for 3- and 4-year olds, by providing funding to states to establish and expand a mixed-delivery system of high-quality preschool programs
- Improves the quality and supply of child care for all children
- Increases wages for child care workers, by ensuring that all child care workers are paid at least a living wage and earn parity with elementary school teachers with similar credentials and experience
- Better supports for Head Start programs, by providing the funding necessary to offer full-day, full-year programming
One in three women of childbearing age cited child care as the reason for being pushed out of their jobs.[4] And research has also shown that about one-third of essential workers have a child at home.[5] Moms, families, early educators, and caregivers need a long term investment in a care infrastructure. Too often politicians think of childcare as a “personal issue” – as in our own personal problem to solve. But the pandemic has laid the truth we already knew bare. The crisis working families are facing is not due to personal failings, but is a larger problem that needs larger solutions. Prioritizing child care can improve the well-being of our children, our own peace of mind and productivity at work, the care workforce, and our communities!
Like yeast to bread, supporting child care will help our economy rise, especially as we move forward towards recovery. Right now, the U.S. loses $57 billion each year in economic productivity and revenue losses due to child care—roughly the cost of legislation pending in Congress that would result in major funding and reforms to our current child care system. [6] We must create a child care system that meets the needs of children, families, communities and child care providers.
High quality, affordable child care benefits everyone. We as a country want to ensure that all children, families, and communities can thrive—and we have the ability to do that by coming together to invest in a bright future for all of us.
*The more of us who raise our voices on this issue, the more noise we’ll make and the more powerful we’ll be! After you take action, send this link to your friends and family so they can sign on too: https://action.momsrising.org/sign/CCFWA2021
If you’re like most parents and caregivers, you’ve spent over a year providing childcare for the children in your home. As we move into pandemic recovery, we must ensure that child care is prioritized as the true infrastructure investment is for our nation and its families.
Together, we can make a difference. Let’s bake our bread and eat it too by raising our voices for childcare!
References:
[1] Tracking Job Losses for Mothers of School-Age Children During a Health Crisis[2] The Employment Situation in February
[3] How COVID-19 Sent Women’s Workforce Progress Backward
[4] Working Moms Bear Brunt of Home Schooling While Working During COVID-19
[5] A Basic Demographic Profile of Workers in Frontline Industries
[6] Want to Grow the Economy? Fix the Child Care Crisis.
[7] Garcia, Heckman, Leaf, and Prados: The Lifecycle Benefits of an Influential Early Childhood Program, 2016
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Now more than ever, lawmakers must support child care providers, working families, and young children by ensuring high-quality child care is affordable and early educators and care providers are respected for their important work.