Worrisome Signs During The National Week of the Young Child

Child care is expensive, and for many families, economic hard times have made quality child care unaffordable. Stories are emerging about how parents are being forced to pull their children out of care, find alternative arrangements, or even quit work because the cost of child care has exceeded what their paychecks provide. Other stories describe how emptier classrooms impact providers, how infants are particularly affected (because caring for infants requires more staff and is therefore more expensive), or how fewer children in well-supervised care has led to an increase in cases of child abuse or neglect. ABC News produced a video about how this is impacting middle class families who can’t pay for care but still make too much to qualify for child care subsidies or Head Start. Earlier this week New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote about fewer children being able to gain access to necessary health services.

These stories add urgency to this year’s National Week of the Young Child, a week sponsored by the National Association for the Education of Young Children and traditionally marked with celebrations advocating more support for children’s services. In addition to the concerns about child care affordability and children’s general mental and physical health, we would like to point out another angle to this story: the impact a sagging economy could have on children’s ability to do well in school. Given how much we know about the benefits of high-quality early education, think about how much children will be losing if they are pulled out of relatively high-quality centers or preschools. Replacing existing child care arrangements with ad hoc care, or enrolling them in cheaper child care centers that are likely to be of lower quality threatens to disrupt a child’s chances for gaining an education that can help him escape poverty or other challenging environments. This is all the more reason to have robust publicly funded pre-kindergarten and child care subsidy programs and to protect existing programs from budget cuts.

Widespread availability of child care is important in helping parents go to work and revive today’s economy. Having stable, high-quality care and education in early childhood is important to ensuring the academic success and economic productivity of future generations.