Time to step up for child care

 Politicians in West Virginia talk a lot about the state’s low workforce participation rate and the need to increase it. There’s one easy and proven thing that can make that happen: support for child care for working families. 

The numbers tell the story.

First there’s the issue of unmet need. According to Mountain State Spotlight, there are around 68,000 West Virginia children under age 6 with two working parents, not to mention plenty over that age who still need a safe place to be while parents work. But there are only around 40,000 child care slots.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 12.5% of West Virginia workers missed work in 2021 for reasons related to child care. 

Then there’s the question of availability. More than 60% of West Virginians live in child care “deserts,” where the nearest provider is over 50 miles away.

There’s also the problem of costs. Numbers vary, but according to one recent estimate, the average cost of child care in West Virginia is $845 per month or $10,140 per year. That’s more than twice the cost for full time undergraduate tuition and fees from my alma mater of Marshall University. That contrast is telling because families often have more economic stability as children approach adulthood than when they’re just getting started.

Federal COVID relief funding helped many families cope with child care costs, to the tune of $330 million over the last few years, but that funding is winding down. In November, 7,288 children from 4,596 families with essential workers earning more than 85% of state median income lost this support. No doubt some of these parents will have little choice but to leave the workforce.

The situation is likely to get a lot worse when federal child care stabilization payments to qualified providers dry up at the end of September.

All of these challenges make it hard for quality child care providers stay open. We shouldn’t forget that in addition to helping parents go to work, these centers also provide jobs themselves, although they may not pay enough for their own workers to afford, you guessed it, child care.

Obviously, there are a lot of issues at work here, ranging from changes in the economy and family life to stagnant wages to inadequate investment in early childhood.

However, there is one relatively simple measure that would help to keep child care providers open and families going to work. It involves paying child care providers based on enrollment rather than attendance. In an era of pandemics, new variations on old illnesses, extreme weather events and the general weirdness of our time, attendance at school or child care varies widely.

Anyone with kids in school or child care knows that classrooms can empty out quickly when a new bug makes the rounds. Basing child care reimbursement on who happens to be there on any given day is no way to run this proverbial railroad. It provides no stability of care for parents who need to work and no stability of income for those who make that possible.

Enrollment-based reimbursement will help keep existing providers open, encourage new ones and help retain employees by providing a measure of stability and predictability of funding.

Child care has been called “the industry that supports all other industries,” but it’s more than that. We know from studies of human development that the period from birth to age 5 is the time of the brain’s most rapid development and that positive or adverse experience in early childhood can have lifelong implications.

West Virginia’s children and working parents deserve affordable and high-quality child care and those who provide that care themselves deserve a living wage.

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)