Longer work hours compound the difficulties workers confront in trying to work and care for their children. Cost and quality also are obstacles to finding satisfactory child care arrangements. Full-time child care costs between $4,000 and $10,000 a year and one-quarter of families with young children make less than $25,000, according to a study by the Children's Defense Fund. More than 7 million children are left home alone regularly, according to a Census Bureau report.
Most families that have left the welfare system are working but are not receiving child care subsidies. In June 2000, 13.8 percent of all civilian workers had access to child care resource and referral services, which help in locating child care but do not provide financial support to pay for it. Nearly half of working families with children younger than age 13 have child care expenses and these costs range from an average of 9 percent of earnings for two-parent families to 16 percent for single-parent families.
Early childhood education and the quality of care have a profound impact on children's social and cognitive development. Children who attend quality programs have better language and math skills as well as better classroom social and thinking skills from the preschool years into elementary school. Yet high-quality programs are in short supply, in part because state requirements are limited and monitoring is lax.
Child care quality is affected by the training, skill and experience of providers as well as the continuity of children's care—a particularly serious problem.
The turnover rate among child care workers is more than one-third annually, much higher than the turnover rate for public school teachers, even though the demand for child care workers is great and will increase significantly in the future. Jobs in the child care industry are projected to grown as fast as 10 percent to 20 percent between 2002 and 2012.
Low pay is the main cause of high turnover among child care providers. These workers struggle to provide the best care possible, but with wages hovering near the poverty level, many simply cannot afford to stay in the field. Others find it financially impossible to invest in improving their skills and training. Providing a living wage for child care workers is critical to retaining and improving the child care workforce and improving the quality of early childhood education. But it's mainly parents who finance child care programs. With budgets stretched thin already, working parents simply cannot solve the dilemma of low pay for child care workers on their own.
Solving America's child care problems will require greater public and private investments—to help working parents care for their children and to help caregivers earn decent wages and benefits so they can remain in the work they love. The unions of the AFL-CIO work to bring the advantage of a union voice at work to more child care workers, to bargain with employers for child care assistance and flexible work schedules and to increase public investments in child care to meet working family needs.
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