Experts say that without swift federal intervention, the child-care sector may never fully recover from the pandemic, and neither would the people who depend on it for their livelihoods. onesarahjones reports
Photo: Dan Kenyon/Getty Images When children enter Helana Pennywell’s daycare, she scans each small forehead with a thermometer. If they’re free of fever, they’re welcomed inside, where she sanitizes their belongings and makes sure they wash their faces and hands. She’s lucky: Her day care, which she runs out of her California home, is full. “I’ve noticed an increase in demand from essential workers who need care for their children,” she told Intelligencer.
Increased expenses, combined with a sudden and drastic decrease in attendance and a general economic downturn, are putting other child-care providers out of work. “Child care and family child-care homes have been in a free fall since the stay-at-home orders, because they’re primarily driven by supply and demand,” explained Rhian Evans Allvin, who is the CEO of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, or NAEYC. “We don’t have exact numbers.
In the interim, parents and child-care workers are struggling. Their plight highlights an unsettling outcome of pandemic life. The economic crisis the virus has generated dealt a significant blow to women. Just over half of all essential workers are women, the New York Times reported in April. Many still need child care, and they can’t always find it.
As lockdown measures ease, child-care providers may struggle to reopen, and women who can afford it will look elsewhere for care. Without intervention from policy-makers, the pandemic could thus transform child care for the long term. Work could shift from centers, or from family day cares like Pennywell’s, to care provided in the home by nannies — who often lack important labor and workplace protections.
She works for “a really great family” now, she added. They gave her four weeks off, paid, when the pandemic began. Now that she’s back at work, they send a car to pick her up and drop her off. But her experiences demonstrate how sharply a nanny’s conditions can vary, based on the decisions of the family who hires her. If the child-care industry tilts toward in-home care, it will likely plunge workers even more deeply into precarity.
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