Imagine families having reliable, stable child care options that met their needs—affordable, convenient, with no wait list—and ensured their children were safe, happy, healthy, and learning. Picture early educators being paid well to stay in the profession they love, allowing them to grow and prosper as they supported the next generation to do the same. Affordable, convenient, and available child care would mean that parents would have less financial strain and would have more time with their children, as well as the peace of mind that all parents need. With families and educators working in partnership, children’s development and wellbeing would be supported. At the same time, mothers would have the freedom to maximize their options—a freedom that fathers often already have, due to social norms that dictate that unpaid (and underpaid) care work is to be performed by women.
That vision must be the focal point for any strong child care policy proposal. It is a stark contrast to the vision being pitched by some on the right who instead imagine the ideal for child care is that it is to be provided by so-called traditional wives (tradwives). In their vision, women are expected to focus on having babies and spending their days raising them without agency or autonomy to build their own financial stability or careers. According to right-wing writer Scott Yener, “They appreciate a husband’s loving provision for what it makes possible or honor how he forges businesses, makes cultural institutions, or engages in politics… [while the women prioritize] building a home.” If they work, work is a “side hustle,” and caring for family and home are to be the main focus of their lives. (It is worth noting here that they likely only mean white women, as historically the right has made the racist case that Black women should work, regardless of their parental status.)
Staying home to raise children should absolutely be a choice for parents, regardless of gender or race, but right now, only the wealthiest can afford that choice. Building a robust child care infrastructure is key to giving all parents real choices for a strong and happy family life. The reality is that today most families need all available parents employed to have economic security. Having affordable, high-quality child care options gives parents the freedom to choose how they structure their time and their work and how to make financial decisions. Women have faced historic discrimination that limited their labor force participation, requiring policies that support women’s freedom to work going forward. Without robust investments in child care, that freedom is limited.
That’s why the Child Care for Working Families Act (CCWFA) is so important as part of the national conversation on the contrasting visions for women and families. Led by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA), the bill would make child care and early education affordable so that any parent—no matter where they live or what they look like—would have great care options for their children.
Currently, high-quality child care and early education programs can cost families tens of thousands of dollars a year—more than rent, mortgage, or public college tuition. For many families, this is simply unaffordable. Some parents—most often mothers—are forced to quit their jobs or reduce their hours when they can’t find or afford child care. When women are forced to stay home or reduce work hours, that has major consequences for family economic wellbeing, child development, and women’s ability to save for emergencies and retirement. The Child Care for Working Families Act would bring down costs for families, while also giving them more choices.
Core Principles of the Child Care for Working Families Act
First introduced in 2017, the Child Care for Working Families Act has evolved over time to reflect the lessons learned from the collapse of the child care sector during the pandemic, the success of investments in child care through legislation such as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), and the national debates over implementing President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Core to CCWFA are five key principles that have been in the legislation since the beginning. It would:
- Guarantee child care assistance to every eligible family, including middle-class families, reaching millions of children.
- Lower child care costs for millions of families. The bill would lower costs by establishing a sliding scale that ensures no family pays more than 7 percent of household income for child care, and by guaranteeing free child care for millions of the most under-resourced families.
- Give every family the freedom to choose the care and early education for their children that works best for them, including during nontraditional work hours. The bill would make investments to build the supply of high-quality child care and pre-K options in diverse settings, including centers, family child care, faith-based programs, Head Start and Early Head Start programs, and pre-K programs in schools.
- Invest in the child care workforce by providing higher compensation and training opportunities. Such investments are key to addressing the child care staffing shortages that threaten to further dismantle the child care sector. Providers will be paid in a way that supports lower costs for families and the ability to pay higher wages and invest in other quality measures.
- Ensure all children have access to high-quality care that allows them to thrive and fosters their health, well-being, and learning during the earliest years of foundational brain development.
Child Care Bill Is a Model for States
The core principles of the Child Care for Working Families Act have been a model and impetus for state progress. For example, thanks to advocates and state leadership, the Connecticut legislature recently approved Governor Lamont’s proposal to create an Early Childhood Endowment that will help lower prices by making it free for families with incomes below $100,000 and cap costs at 7 percent of income for families with higher incomes. It will address staffing shortages, support quality, and increase families’ options by raising wages for early educators, providing a health care subsidy, and creating an additional 20,000 subsidized pre-K and infant/toddler spaces. Texas also recently approved an additional $100 million in new funding for child care scholarships to lower child care costs for more families. In 2023, Vermont, passed a historic annual investment of $125 million for child care through a new law called Act 76. Not only did Act 76 include one-time child care stabilization funds, but it also sets the stage for minimum pay standards for early childhood educators, moving toward a future in which no educator will earn less than a set amount. Similar advances have been made in Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and other states.
Child Care Investments Work
One of the key lessons of the past few years of federal and state investments is that the child care crisis is a solvable problem. The federal pandemic-relief funding demonstrated that when public resources support child care programs and the families that rely on them, providers are more stable, families pay lower prices, and children have more reliable care. In addition, states that invested in child care with their own dollars or by repurposing federal dollars now have child care sectors faring better than those in states that did not. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) found in the eleven states and Washington, D.C. where significant additional state investments were made, the share of women respondents who reported they wanted to work for pay but couldn’t because they were caring for a child decreased by 13 percentage points between fall 2023 and spring 2024. This finding is unsurprising, given the extensive research that demonstrates the positive impact of child care on maternal employment. For example, the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that the ARPA child care stabilization grants, which provided 220,000 child care providers operational grants to help keep their doors open coming out of the COVID pandemic, increased mothers’ labor force participation by two to three percentage points.
Keeping Forward Motion
The reintroduction of the Child Care for Working Families Act comes at a crucial time. It embodies a transformational change for American families, allowing them the freedom to raise children without the economic burden and uncertainty that currently comes with our country’s current costly and unstable child care. To recognize and support child care as the public good that it truly is requires political will, and a belief that people should have equal opportunities to engage in the workforce regardless of gender and parental status. The Child Care for Working Families Act builds on the excellent foundation of its previous iterations, incorporates lessons from the pandemic, ARPA, and the experience of nearly achieving historic child care and early learning policy during the Build Back Better debate. Children, families, and America’s economic growth cannot wait.
Thanks to Ruth Friedman for her valuable input on this commentary.
Tags: working families, Child Care for Working Families Act, childcare
Raising a Family Is Increasingly Expensive. The Child Care for Working Families Act Would Help.
Imagine families having reliable, stable child care options that met their needs—affordable, convenient, with no wait list—and ensured their children were safe, happy, healthy, and learning. Picture early educators being paid well to stay in the profession they love, allowing them to grow and prosper as they supported the next generation to do the same. Affordable, convenient, and available child care would mean that parents would have less financial strain and would have more time with their children, as well as the peace of mind that all parents need. With families and educators working in partnership, children’s development and wellbeing would be supported. At the same time, mothers would have the freedom to maximize their options—a freedom that fathers often already have, due to social norms that dictate that unpaid (and underpaid) care work is to be performed by women.
That vision must be the focal point for any strong child care policy proposal. It is a stark contrast to the vision being pitched by some on the right who instead imagine the ideal for child care is that it is to be provided by so-called traditional wives (tradwives). In their vision, women are expected to focus on having babies and spending their days raising them without agency or autonomy to build their own financial stability or careers. According to right-wing writer Scott Yener, “They appreciate a husband’s loving provision for what it makes possible or honor how he forges businesses, makes cultural institutions, or engages in politics… [while the women prioritize] building a home.” If they work, work is a “side hustle,” and caring for family and home are to be the main focus of their lives. (It is worth noting here that they likely only mean white women, as historically the right has made the racist case that Black women should work, regardless of their parental status.)
Staying home to raise children should absolutely be a choice for parents, regardless of gender or race, but right now, only the wealthiest can afford that choice. Building a robust child care infrastructure is key to giving all parents real choices for a strong and happy family life. The reality is that today most families need all available parents employed to have economic security. Having affordable, high-quality child care options gives parents the freedom to choose how they structure their time and their work and how to make financial decisions. Women have faced historic discrimination that limited their labor force participation, requiring policies that support women’s freedom to work going forward. Without robust investments in child care, that freedom is limited.
That’s why the Child Care for Working Families Act (CCWFA) is so important as part of the national conversation on the contrasting visions for women and families. Led by Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) and Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA), the bill would make child care and early education affordable so that any parent—no matter where they live or what they look like—would have great care options for their children.
Currently, high-quality child care and early education programs can cost families tens of thousands of dollars a year—more than rent, mortgage, or public college tuition. For many families, this is simply unaffordable. Some parents—most often mothers—are forced to quit their jobs or reduce their hours when they can’t find or afford child care. When women are forced to stay home or reduce work hours, that has major consequences for family economic wellbeing, child development, and women’s ability to save for emergencies and retirement. The Child Care for Working Families Act would bring down costs for families, while also giving them more choices.
Core Principles of the Child Care for Working Families Act
First introduced in 2017, the Child Care for Working Families Act has evolved over time to reflect the lessons learned from the collapse of the child care sector during the pandemic, the success of investments in child care through legislation such as the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), and the national debates over implementing President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Core to CCWFA are five key principles that have been in the legislation since the beginning. It would:
Child Care Bill Is a Model for States
The core principles of the Child Care for Working Families Act have been a model and impetus for state progress. For example, thanks to advocates and state leadership, the Connecticut legislature recently approved Governor Lamont’s proposal to create an Early Childhood Endowment that will help lower prices by making it free for families with incomes below $100,000 and cap costs at 7 percent of income for families with higher incomes. It will address staffing shortages, support quality, and increase families’ options by raising wages for early educators, providing a health care subsidy, and creating an additional 20,000 subsidized pre-K and infant/toddler spaces. Texas also recently approved an additional $100 million in new funding for child care scholarships to lower child care costs for more families. In 2023, Vermont, passed a historic annual investment of $125 million for child care through a new law called Act 76. Not only did Act 76 include one-time child care stabilization funds, but it also sets the stage for minimum pay standards for early childhood educators, moving toward a future in which no educator will earn less than a set amount. Similar advances have been made in Illinois, New Mexico, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and other states.
Child Care Investments Work
One of the key lessons of the past few years of federal and state investments is that the child care crisis is a solvable problem. The federal pandemic-relief funding demonstrated that when public resources support child care programs and the families that rely on them, providers are more stable, families pay lower prices, and children have more reliable care. In addition, states that invested in child care with their own dollars or by repurposing federal dollars now have child care sectors faring better than those in states that did not. The National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) found in the eleven states and Washington, D.C. where significant additional state investments were made, the share of women respondents who reported they wanted to work for pay but couldn’t because they were caring for a child decreased by 13 percentage points between fall 2023 and spring 2024. This finding is unsurprising, given the extensive research that demonstrates the positive impact of child care on maternal employment. For example, the White House Council of Economic Advisers found that the ARPA child care stabilization grants, which provided 220,000 child care providers operational grants to help keep their doors open coming out of the COVID pandemic, increased mothers’ labor force participation by two to three percentage points.
Keeping Forward Motion
The reintroduction of the Child Care for Working Families Act comes at a crucial time. It embodies a transformational change for American families, allowing them the freedom to raise children without the economic burden and uncertainty that currently comes with our country’s current costly and unstable child care. To recognize and support child care as the public good that it truly is requires political will, and a belief that people should have equal opportunities to engage in the workforce regardless of gender and parental status. The Child Care for Working Families Act builds on the excellent foundation of its previous iterations, incorporates lessons from the pandemic, ARPA, and the experience of nearly achieving historic child care and early learning policy during the Build Back Better debate. Children, families, and America’s economic growth cannot wait.
Thanks to Ruth Friedman for her valuable input on this commentary.
Tags: working families, Child Care for Working Families Act, childcare