The first hint that my 6-month-old may not have been receiving high-quality care came in fall of 2016, when I arrived early to pick him up from his child care program in Manhattan. I saw half-a-dozen infants lounging in bouncers placed around the room, largely ignored while two caregivers sat on the floor cutting out shapes for a bulletin board. It gave me pause, but I told myself that this was probably just a blip.
But day after day, the clues kept coming that maybe he wasn’t as safe and engaged as I‘d hoped.
As a journalist reporting on early childhood, I could practically recite in my sleep the most important aspects of child care quality, like responsive staff-child interactions, as well as adherence to state health and safety regulations. Public records showed the program my child attended had been dinged for various violations, though none that seemed particularly egregious. Yet every day, I saw problems that weren’t captured in city inspection reports: infants left alone in bouncers, drinking from bottles propped next to their heads, blankets draped over cribs to filter out the fluorescent lights above, and caregivers repeatedly left on their own with too many babies.
Still, I felt stuck. My family was stymied by costs and long wait lists for other programs. Then one day my son was brought to me with a fresh, deep cut on his thigh. His providers said they had no idea how it had happened.
I withdrew him from the program immediately. Later, I saw that a city inspector found the program had failed to conduct reference checks on staff, was allowing children to sleep in unsafe environments and was failing to provide “constant and competent supervision by adequate staff for children.”
The experience both shook and confounded me. Here I was, armed with more information than the average parent on what to look for in a quality program, and I had failed my child. Was I that bad at assessing child care quality? Or was quality just that elusive; hard to execute and even harder to find?
Years of reporting since then have assured me that while I did make some mistakes as a new parent, it really is hard to find high-quality care. This is especially true when families have financial and accessibility constraints around their care options, and when the government provides little to no support for the programs or for the teachers educating and caring for our youngest children.
Indeed, experts say providing high-quality care is an arduous feat. “I don’t think that providing high-quality infant toddler care is rocket science … I would say that doing it is actually far more complex than rocket science,” Matthew Melmed, executive director of the nonprofit ZERO TO THREE, told me earlier this year.
My family was extremely lucky: We later found high-quality care in a program we could afford. Over the past year, while reporting on the future of American child care, I spoke to more than a dozen parents to learn about their child care challenges and read hundreds of pages of child care inspection reports. Through this work, I’ve found my experience was not all that unusual. Parents — even those who work in the child care field — face often insurmountable challenges to find safe, affordable child care where their children can thrive.
Here are a few of their stories:
Keʻōpū Reelitz, Hawaii
To Keʻōpū Reelitz, finding child care has felt like a game of “strategy and privilege” reminiscent of “The Hunger Games.” “You have to be able to afford the application fees [and] you have to decide, are you willing to drive 30 to 45 minutes out of your way just to drop your child off someplace safe?” said Reelitz, a mother of three in Hawaii who works in public policy and advocacy. And even after expending all that effort, getting a spot is still far from guaranteed.
Although she put her youngest son’s name on four waitlists — two of them before he was born — he did not get a spot until he was 8 months old. Before she had access to child care, she resorted to taking her infant to work and meetings with her, but found it hard to concentrate fully on her work. When the baby finally got a spot, she cried. “I was just so relieved. I thought we had won the lottery, which is crazy,” Reelitz said. Winning the lottery to pay $1,600 dollars a month is crazy.”
Reelitz said policymakers in Hawaii are focusing on public preschool to the detriment of sustaining child care programs for infants and toddlers. “I want to tell the powers that be that pre-K is great, but what about the littlest ones? What are you doing for them?”
Jacqui Lipson, New York
Jacqui Lipson and her husband had a few requirements when searching for child care for their daughter when they lived in New York City during the first few years of parenthood. They wanted to find “a safe and secure and loving place,” ideally located between their two offices.They put their name on several waitlists and got a spot in a home-based child care program located inside a Brooklyn brownstone, which their daughter started attending when she was 6 months old.
After a few months, Lipson, who works in education communications,started to question whether the providers even liked her child. The infant wasn’t happy at drop-off and only seemed comfortable with one of the teachers. On days when that teacher was absent, Lipson’s heart sank when she handed her daughter off. At times, some of the staff members sent home photos in which her child was sobbing, Lipson said.
Lipson felt stuck. She couldn’t immediately enroll her daughter in another program, given shortages and waitlists. She felt “completely dependent” on her daughter’s child care program so she could work. At the same time, Lipson was wrestling doubts common to new mothers. “I did what women and mothers often do,” she said. “I told myself it was in my head.” Or, she added, she blamed normal, new parent anxiety.
After she finally pulled her daughter out of the program, a former staff member confirmed her worst fears. “She shared that the other caregivers weren’t fond of my daughter, that she cried too much,” Lipson recalled emotionally. “They just told each other to ignore her and not pick her up, she’s too needy.”
Abi Sanny, Kansas
In Kansas, Abi Sanny, a parent of three, started calling around to child care programs that were recommended by friends as soon as she got pregnant. Still, she encountered wait lists that were 18 months long. “It takes nine months to grow a baby,” she said to me wryly. “So that’s not going to work.” The reality of America’s child care system quickly became clear to Sanny, who has worked in education for years. It was so hard to get a spot, she said. “I don’t feel like I had a ton of choice.”
Sanny’s children have each experienced several different child care situations as she tried to find the right fit. While she’s been happy with the care her daughters have received, and she and her partner consider themselves lucky to have had access, the family has taken a financial hit from child care expenses. “We’re not saving for retirement,” Sanny said. “Our savings are pretty minimal at this point because it’s just an extraordinary cost. For six years, we’ve been paying this.”
Over the past few years, as federal pandemic aid has ended, some states have taken it upon themselves to try to fix their child care systems. A handful of states are pouring extra money and resources into operating funds and workers’ compensation, while others are changing regulations to add more spots for children and to make it possible to hire younger, less experienced caregivers.
There are a few resources to help parents search and assess quality as they look for child care. State-run lists of licensed programs and databases of programs that have quality accreditations from organizations like the National Association for the Education of Young Children, NAEYC, and the National Association for Family Child Care. This guide, by The 19th, and this one, from the NAEYC, can help parents as they search for and vet child care options as well.
Do you have a child care story to tell, as a parent or provider? Fill out this form to let me know a bit more. I’ll reach out to chat before publishing any of this information.
Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at (212) 678-3562 or [email protected].
This story about quality child care was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, with support from the Spencer Fellowship at Columbia Journalism School. Sign up for the Early Childhood newsletter.
