Have you heard? Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), the Republican vice presidential nominee, has an idea to fix child care: ask “grandma or grandpa” or “an aunt or uncle” to “help out a little bit more.” In other words, just ask women to take on more care work.
Because, yes, even in 2024, it is still overwhelmingly women who care for children.
This is wrong on so many levels, and it points to the underlying assumptions that created and have perpetuated our broken system: the myths that child care is something only women need and women should provide. Women and their time — whether as moms, grandmas, aunties or as employees — are not valued.
If you’re a mother of an infant or toddler or you know someone who is, you have seen the insanity of the U.S. early care and education system firsthand. One in three parents of children age five and under face rising prices, and one in five struggle to find child care.
Equally nuts is that the women who care for and educate our youngest kids are paid so little that 97 percent of other occupations earn more than they do.
When families can’t find child care, or the care they find is too expensive, or their child is sick, or their child care provider is sick, it is most often the moms who step up. Moms are more likely to quit their jobs, reduce their hours, or take a day off when child care options are limited. The consequences for their lifetime earnings and financial security are disastrous.
And some of those moms are also child care teachers. These women are skilled professionals — many early educators have 16 or more years of experience and hold college degrees. Yet their wages are so low that they face poverty at rates nearly six times higher than elementary and middle school teachers.
Women are America’s social safety net, and it takes a toll.
It doesn’t have to be this way. The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We can fund a public early care and education system for all children from birth to age five — one that provides living wages for all educators, whether they support the learning of five-year-olds or two-year-olds.
The Biden-Harris administration recently released a brief arguing that child care should be considered essential economic infrastructure, something feminist economists have long argued.
If our country valued women, we would be investing differently. We know what the solutions are, but we’re choosing not to invest in them.
The current system pits educators against moms and says there’s not enough money to expand access for families and raise wages for educators — that we have to “choose” one or the other.
Yet historic levels of federal early care and education funding during the pandemic demonstrated an opportunity and solutions. Many state leaders chose to invest in the working conditions of early educators. They can continue to do so in 2025 and beyond.
The need to invest in our early care and education system has never been greater. Federal pandemic relief prevented the collapse of the existing system, but it stopped short of true reform. Now, with federal pandemic relief for child care having expired, programs continue to face high turnover and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff because of poverty-level wages.
Let’s invest in early care and education for all children and stop asking women to sacrifice their bodies, their well-being, and their financial security to prop up the U.S. economy.
Caitlin McLean is director of multi-state and international programs at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, UC-Berkeley. Penelope Whitney is communications director at the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, UC-Berkeley.
