Cultural connections make children and their families feel like they fully belong to a community, which is why SAELI aims to empower families and increase access to resources. Parent centers and advocacy efforts are among the strategies that enable the collaborative to involve families in the community.

Sandwiched between San Diego and Los Angeles, Santa Ana is the in the U.S., among cities with more than 300,000 residents. , according to data from the 2020 Orange County Census Atlas. Rigo Rodriguez, founder of SAELI, these statistics stem from global immigration trends, as well as the heavy reliance on low-wage immigrant labor in the service and construction sectors in Orange County.

鈥淏ecause of this density and reliance on immigrant labor as essential workers, Santa Ana became the epicenter of the COVID pandemic here in Orange County,鈥� says Rodriguez, who also serves as Chair of the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

SAELI takes a comprehensive approach to working with first-generation immigrant families and low-income families with young children. Rodriguez, who is on the board of Santa Ana Unified School District, helps to maintain close ties between the district, the organization and the community.听

In 2016, when SAELI was launched through a grant from , a public agency dedicated to the healthy development of young children, the school district only had 313 preschool slots in 8 of its 33 elementary schools, and most of the parent centers were located in the secondary schools. Today, the district has 1,560 preschool slots across 31 schools, covering nearly 70% of incoming kindergartners. Moreover, every elementary school has a wellness center open to the entire community with a full-time family and community engagement liaison connecting parents to resources and opportunities. SAELI also uses the (EDI), a tool developed in Canada in the 1990s and administered by UCLA, to track progress in kindergarten readiness across five domains: language and cognitive development; communication skills and general knowledge; emotional maturity; social competence; and physical health.

鈥淭his comprehensive approach,鈥� Rodriguez explains, 鈥渞equires an active alliance between city government, over 20 nonprofit agencies, the school district and over 250 active parents hailing from 24 elementary schools.鈥澨�

As a grassroots coalition, the collaborative has exceptionally strong community ties, says Andres Bustamante, an associate professor at University of California, Irvine School of Education, who collaborated with SAELI on the design and implementation of , a project that brings together science of learning and urban design, through a grant from the National Science Foundation. The project has implemented a number of solutions to promote everyday opportunities for learning and development among young children and their caregivers. For example, they鈥檝e installed signs inside local supermarkets to spark conversation while food shopping. And a giant abacus at a local bus stop was co-designed by SAELI caregivers to inspire caregivers and children to count together while they wait for the bus.听

鈥淚鈥檝e seen groups beg for participation without getting much of a response,鈥� he explains, 鈥渨hereas our biggest problem with SAELI is, when we say we want 10 families, they get back to us and say, 鈥極kay, we have 40 families.鈥欌�澨�

These families aren鈥檛 afraid to express their opinions. Bustamante describes unveiling the mockup of a mural depicting people walking around Santa Ana. One of the moms raised her hand and said, 鈥淪omething doesn鈥檛 feel right here. All these people are all facing different directions, but that鈥檚 not how we walk. We don鈥檛 walk alone. We walk together as a family.鈥� Bustamante and his team set about revising the mural.听

Wendy G. Gomez, the director of SAELI, embodies the collaborative鈥檚 commitment to parent leadership. She started as a parent volunteer with the initiative when the younger of her two sons was in first grade. Although she studied education in college, her career had gone in another direction, and she was working in the finance department of an insurance company. By her second SAELI meeting, she was hooked, and took advantage of the various ways families could get involved, from conducting job interviews to serving on committees. Soon she applied to be a promotora 鈥� a community health worker who helps SAELI with outreach in Spanish-speaking areas 鈥� a position she held for a year before becoming project coordinator.听

In addition to trusting her own instincts as a leader, Gomez has gained confidence in valuing the voices of Santa Ana residents. 鈥淚 had assumed that when a funder said, 鈥榡ump,鈥� my response would be, 鈥榟ow high?鈥欌�� she says. 鈥淏ut that鈥檚 not how we do things. We go back to the families and say, 鈥楬ey, this is an opportunity that we have. What do you think?鈥欌��

Gomez says that community members organize resource fairs, neighborhood workshops and often raise issues that, while not directly connected to academics, relate to children鈥檚 ability to thrive. Housing stability, accessible park space, food security and freedom from immigration harassment, for example, are priorities among Santa Ana families. In 2021, for example, SAELI joined forces with to pass an ordinance for rent control requiring 鈥渏ust cause鈥� for evictions. Families have also led the charge to turn vacant lots into green spaces, through a partnership with and . Many parents remain involved even after their children enter high school and beyond.

鈥淔amilies are now training [other] families in order to pass the baton,鈥� Gomez says. 鈥淏y building these strong networks, new parents and new arrivals have something to plug into, and their children benefit from the resources we have lined up for them.鈥�

One of her big lessons has been learning how to give up power. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 hard,鈥� she admits, 鈥渂ecause we are all kind of in one way or another part of a system.鈥澨�

Reflecting on her own parenting style, she now realizes she 鈥渄idn鈥檛 always look at the whole child, and how that includes the extended family.鈥� When parents work, grandmothers and other relatives might be providing care during the day. Big siblings might be picking younger ones up from child care. A survey conducted in partnership with , a nonprofit devoted to parent organizing, found that half of Santa Ana鈥檚 young children are in the care of someone other than parents.

While Rodriguez recognizes the ongoing challenges resulting from decades of rapid expansion of Santa Ana鈥檚 population of children as well as underinvestment in education, he sees progress toward SAELI鈥檚 ambitious goals. 鈥淲e believe,鈥� he says, 鈥渢hat if children are doing well in math and reading and are socially [and] emotionally resilient by the third grade, it’s hard to stop them afterwards.鈥�

The issues that most directly affect children and their parents appear to be at the heart of the Democrats鈥� current campaign for the White House. 鈥淩ight out the gate she mentioned child care, paid leave,鈥� noted Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women鈥檚 Law Center Action Fund. And then she chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who signed a number of policies aimed at families into law, as her running mate. 鈥淪he is positioning herself and positioning care as the issue that will in part define her candidacy.鈥�

Both Harris and Walz not only have extensive track records on these issues, but have frequently gone outside the political consensus to push for bold policies. Their past stances, and the way they talk about the issues now, illustrate not just that they are likely to prioritize them, but what kind of policies they might champion if given the power.

As a candidate in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary, Harris had to find a way to distinguish herself. One important way she did that was with her children鈥檚 agenda, and one of the boldest planks it included was a paid family leave proposal that went far beyond what others in the primary were backing. She to guarantee six months of leave, offer 100 percent wage replacement for people who made less than $75,000, and cover leave taking to take care not just of a new baby or oneself but also an expansive list of family members, including siblings, grandparents and 鈥渃hosen family,鈥� all with job protection built in. Her policy would have covered all Americans, including independent contractors and part-time workers. It was 鈥渢he strongest, most inclusive, longest proposal for paid family and medical leave of any of the candidates in that race,鈥� recalled Vicki Shabo, senior fellow for gender equity, paid leave & care policy and strategy at New America.

Harris has also backed other family leave proposals. As soon as she arrived in the Senate in 2017 she signed on as a of the FAMILY Act, Democrats鈥� longstanding paid family leave bill that would guarantee 12 weeks of leave with partial wage replacement, and she continued to cosponsor it until she left the Senate to become vice president. Endorsing legislation so quickly, instead of waiting, is 鈥渘ot necessarily something a freshman senator would do,鈥� Shabo noted.

Walz has his own strong track record on the issue, too. When he was in Congress he also the FAMILY Act. Then in 2023 he into law Minnesota鈥檚 first paid family leave law, and it鈥檚 a compared to other state laws. It guarantees 12 weeks of medical leave, including for pregnancy and childbirth, and 12 weeks for other needs, including caregiving as well as safety from domestic violence and sexual abuse; workers can take up to 20 weeks a year for both categories in a year. Workers can take leave to care for family members including siblings, grandparents and grandchildren, and people who also have a relationship that isn鈥檛 codified by living together. Their jobs are protected when they take leave, which is not always the case in other state laws, forcing many people to risk losing their jobs while away from work if they don鈥檛 qualify for the Family and Medical Leave Act. Wage replacement is progressive, starting at 90 percent of the lowest weekly wages and tapering for higher ones. The benefits are also portable from job to job, which means that if someone switches work the leave they earned from their previous job still counts.

鈥淚t builds on lessons from the other states,鈥� Shabo noted. In California, for example, low-wage workers to take advantage of the program because it only offers them some of their wages. Research has also found that workers need to be assured that they will be paid of their normal incomes for low-income workers and fathers to take it.

Walz also signed paid sick days into law, guaranteeing that employees who put in 80 hours a year can accrue if they fall ill or need to care for a sick loved one. The leave can also be used for medical appointments, absences due to domestic abuse or sexual assault, and if inclement weather closes children鈥檚 schools.

Walz was, of course, not the only state lawmaker responsible for getting these laws passed, and advocacy campaigns had been waged for years before they did. But he was a vocal champion of them. 鈥淗e enthusiastically was part of this effort,鈥� Shabo said. Paid leave was part of his platform when he ran for office, and he鈥檚 tweeted about it . When what legislation Democrats should pass first if they hold the White House, Senate, and House in 2025, Walz responded, 鈥淚 think paid family and medical leave.鈥� He continued, 鈥淚t is so foundational to just basic decency and financial well-being. And I think that would start to change both finances, attitude鈥攕trengthen the family.鈥�

鈥淚鈥檓 feeling bullish about their commitment,鈥� Shabo said, 鈥渂ecause of how prominent it鈥檚 been.鈥� That could mean a lot, especially if Democrats control Congress next year. In the face of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin鈥檚 opposition, paid family leave was the first thing to be winnowed out of Biden鈥檚 Build Back Better legislative package before it ultimately failed, but he鈥檚 leaving the Senate, and Harris and Walz may not be so willing to trade the issue away next time around. 鈥淭here鈥檚 real power in having the president and the vice president so committed to something,鈥� Shabo said. She thinks 鈥渢his issue would stay at a higher priority level.鈥�

The two politicians have also been champions of child care and early childhood education. The children鈥檚 agenda Harris released when running for president in 2020 included the passage of Democrats鈥� Child Care for Working Families Act, which would cap many families鈥� child care costs at 7 percent of their income, improve compensation for providers, and work toward universal, high-quality preschool for three- and four-year-olds. Harris was also a co-sponsor of the legislation when she was in the Senate. Her children鈥檚 agenda called for more funding for Head Start and Early Head Start.

As vice president, she was the one to issued by the administration that caps copayments for families receiving federal child care subsidies, encourages states to waive copayments for low-income families, and offers more financial stability for providers who accept federal vouchers. She has talked about child care as 鈥渒itchen table economics that families are grappling with day to day,鈥� Boteach said. As a senator, she the very first federal Domestic Workers Bill of Rights.

Walz has also championed the issue. He a $6 million grant program to expand child care access, which his administration estimated would expand capacity by 2,200 spots. 鈥淥nly a few states put in their own money after the pandemic relief dollars expired,鈥� Boteach said. 鈥淢innesota was among them.鈥�

He a $252 million investment in early learning scholarships to help low-income families pay for child care or early childhood education, as well as $316 million to increase wages for child care providers. A bill he signed in May pre-K seats by 12,360. The state raised the reimbursement rate for providers who accept subsidies, ensuring it was no longer one of the lowest in the country. He also consolidated state agencies so that there will soon be a one-stop-shop for child care. Walz 鈥渄idn鈥檛 just sit back and sign bills into law, but he actually was out there working to get these bills taken care of,鈥� Amanda Schillinger, a child care director in the state. The legislation has 鈥渕ade such huge changes in our industry.鈥�

It’s hard to know exactly what Harris and Walz would do about child care if elected to the White House, but 鈥淚 do think they see it as the unfinished business,鈥� Boteach said. Harris 鈥渨as a leader in an administration that , and sees that there鈥檚 a lot more to do.鈥�

In her first campaign ad, Harris can be heard saying, 鈥淲e choose a future where no child lives in poverty.鈥� She followed that statement up in mid-August by a child tax credit expansion that would give families $6,000 per child for the first year of a baby鈥檚 life, then $3,600 for children ages one to six and $3,000 for older ones. That goes back to her primary campaign as well. If elected president she to sign an executive order 鈥渢o end child poverty鈥� and included a number of investments in her children鈥檚 agenda, including increasing the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit. She was also, of course, part of an administration that helped expand the Child Tax Credit significantly, which cut the child poverty rate nearly in half in 2021. Walz is also a fan of a bigger child tax credit. As governor he a state child tax credit expansion that gives families in the state up to $1,750 per child, the in the country. It鈥檚 expected to cut the state鈥檚 child poverty rate by a third.

Walz has also his reputation on a bill he signed in 2023, surrounded by a mob of children who swarmed him with hugs, that made Minnesota the fourth state to ensure free breakfast and lunch to all public school students after Congress that ensured them for all students. 鈥淚鈥檓 honored and I do think this is one piece of that puzzle in reducing both childhood poverty and hunger insecurity,鈥� he at the signing.

Biden, of course, championed care policies and packed many of them into his Build Back Better agenda, only to see them stripped out of what eventually passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. But next time might be different. 鈥淚f you have a team that鈥檚 putting a higher premium on care policies, it鈥檚 less likely they鈥檙e going to fall off the list entirely,鈥� Shabo said. 鈥淢aybe a Harris-Walz administration would choose differently.鈥�

鈥淭his is at the core of their economic agenda,鈥� Boteach added. Given Harris and Walz鈥檚 records, as well as the things they鈥檝e said so far on the campaign trail, care will be 鈥渁 priority in a Harris-Walz administration.鈥�

And there are costs on top of that associated with missing work to birth or bond with a new baby. America is the only developed country to lack a paid family leave program – so even after a child is born many parents go on unpaid leave to recover. Some who do may put their jobs in jeopardy or delay going back until they can find (and afford) child care. But in the United States, our child care programs are expensive and many families live in places without any access to care 鈥� so going back to work may be problematic, adding another cost to the already mounting bills.

All of these anti-family policies 鈥� no paid leave, costly health care, and lack of child care 鈥� have contributed to the unique stress of being a parent in America. The White House is spot on to want to address this ongoing maternal health crisis, an initiative they unveiled in 2022 which has now seen some positive results.

One of the popular programs involves the provision of Newborn Supply Kits, which delivers a box of baby supplies to new parents. The kits are modeled on successful programs in other countries, such as Finland (though in Finland the kits are delivered as baby boxes and the box can be used as a crib) and the ). And in the United States, we have helping with their promotion, because what new parent doesn鈥檛 prefer their diapers to be endorsed by a celebrity?

In addition to diapers, for parents of new babies, such as a thermometer, nasal aspirator, Vitamin D3, diaper rash ointment, diapers, wipes, receiving blankets/swaddle, socks, burp cloth, shampoo and lotion. There鈥檚 also a voucher for grocery delivery, and details on how to access the maternal mental health hotline and government services, with a goal of reducing the stigma associated with seeking out such help.

In 2023, 3000 newborn supply kits were distributed and the expectation is that 10,000 more will be delivered in 2024. The program is part of the White House鈥檚 larger effort to make life easier during major life transitions 鈥� having a child being one of them.听 The initial program was piloted in Arkansas, Louisiana and New Mexico, and in 2024, it will expand to seven more states (Alabama, California, Georgia, Mississippi, New York, Tennessee and Texas). The goal, according to the White House, is to expand this to a national program supporting all families with the basic items they need in the vulnerable postpartum months.

But running a successful program takes resources, which is why a bipartisan group of four members of Congress (Republican Rep. Julia Letlow of Louisiana, Democratic Rep. Kim Schrier of Washington, Republican Rep. Marriannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa and Democratic Rep. Nanette Barragan of Califiornia) that would appropriate $5 million in funds over five years to create a new national program for the Newborn Supply Kit initiative. Instead of operating as a pilot program in just 10 states, it could operate as a national one.

But can our maternal mental health crisis really be helped by diapers?

The newborn supply kits are one-time gifts 鈥� designed as more of a peace offering to families and a way to share what government services might be available to other families, without the stigma typically associated with seeking out such assistance. The idea is that bringing crucial supplies directly to new parents will reduce the time, stress and burden on them.

But the problem with newborn supply kits is that they are just that – supplies. Diapers and wipes may cost time and money, but it鈥檚 a fraction of the cost and time associated with the biggest single expense for most families: child care. Within the long list of achievements and initiatives lauded on the White House Blueprint for the Maternal Health Crisis, providing more access to affordable, quality child care is largely absent.

This is not to make light of the White House鈥檚 accomplishments on maternal mental health, particularly with respect to extending Medicaid coverage and coming up with better metrics and information reporting surrounding maternal emergency, obstetrics and pregnancy-related deaths. And yes, receiving diapers from a government agency may be the olive branch needed to show that further assistance might be available. But without a targeted look at the , the true costs and stressors of raising a child in the United States continues to climb.

鈥淜ids interrupt a lot,鈥� Joyce says with a laugh. 鈥淎nd they ask the most random questions that have nothing to do with music. Their curiosity isn鈥檛 limited to whatever you鈥檙e trying to talk about. They somehow found a way to connect dinosaurs with saxophones. Then I would have to try to redirect the conversation from dinosaurs or 鈥楤luey鈥� to music.

鈥淲e tried to teach them how the saxophone works鈥攖he reed, the mouthpiece, the keys. My favorite part was when they came up to the saxophone and peered down into the bell, reaching their little hands in to see what was down there. But they were more interested in the weird noises we could make.鈥�

Joyce says he had thought the 4- and 5-year-olds might be impressed with his lightning fast runs on the scales. They were universally blas茅 about that, but when the sax players made multiphonic train horn sounds, or honked like geese, the class was enrapt.

Transforming from Student to Teacher

What Joyce learned about acknowledging the children鈥檚 curiosity while moving forward with class material is familiar territory to teachers everywhere, and such awareness was part of Dr. Daniel Abrahams鈥� motivation for creating the Music Zoo program. Abrahams is associate professor and coordinator of Music Education at the University of Arkansas/Fayetteville.

鈥淥ur Intro to Music Education course is the first Music Education class the students take,鈥� Abrahams says. 鈥淲e talk about what it means to be a teacher, what schools are for, why we teach, and I thought this would be a good way for them to work with some kids right off the bat and see if they like it. Nobody wants to spend three or four years in college and realize at the very end, 鈥榊ou know, I don鈥檛 actually like working with kids.鈥�

鈥淭o have this experience at the beginning of their journey really helped solidify their ideas of what it meant to be a teacher. These are all pandemic students whose last two years of high school were pretty much on their computers in lockdown. I had students who had never worked with kids before and had no idea whether they were going to like it. After the experience, they were saying, 鈥業 love this. I know I鈥檝e made the right choice in what I鈥檝e decided to do with my life.鈥欌��

The Jean Tyson Child Development Center is located on the Fayetteville campus, so it wasn鈥檛 too much of a schlep for the musicians to take their instruments over, from violins and cellos to the woodwinds鈥攆lute, clarinet and saxophone. The percussionists were crowd favorites, possibly because they brought a variety of small hand drums and invited the little ones to play along. The saxophone was also popular (see 鈥渢rain horn and honking geese鈥� above).

Best of all were the tuba and the baritone sax, both of which were taller than many of the preschoolers. Seizing the moment, the teachers turned those demonstrations into a brief foray into math concepts: 鈥淟et鈥檚 guess if you鈥檒l be bigger than the tuba.鈥�

Because this is the University of Arkansas (Go Razorbacks!) and many of the kids are children of faculty members or staff, they were familiar with the school鈥檚 marching band and were jazzed to make the connection between the students demonstrating their flutes, tubas and drums with the uniformed marchers they saw at football games. Instant stardom for the musicians.

On a more serious note, Abrahams said he had been discussing the idea of music aptitude with his students throughout the semester, based on the work of music learning researcher who wrote about music development in infants and young children.

鈥淲e talked about what influenced them to become musicians and the idea that you ever know what might influence a student into wanting to be involved in music,鈥� Abrahams says. 鈥淐hildren have a musical aptitude from birth that stabilizes around the age of 9, and any musical experience they have will help them have a richer musical life later. That one morning of sitting and learning about the flute or the clarinet and hearing them played might inspire that student to want to play an instrument when they get a little older.

鈥淭he students took the assignment quite seriously,鈥� he says, 鈥渂ecause they felt they were influencing the next generation of musicians. The experience was transformational in the ways the students began to see themselves as teachers.鈥�

A Rich Resource

The musicians researched to be au courant with music for the preschool set and came prepared to play the theme songs for Nickelodeon鈥檚 Blue鈥檚 Clues, YouTube鈥檚 Bluey, and the classic Baby Shark (doo-doo-ti-doo). The vocalists sang the 4- and 5-year-olds鈥� songs they鈥檇 learned especially for them and the children reciprocated by teaching the college kids some of their preschool tunes鈥� in 4/4 time.

The greatest number of requests were for the University of Arkansas Fight Song, which Abrahams鈥� students knew by heart because most are in the marching band. In recognizing the theme songs from a few notes the musicians played, the children didn鈥檛 know that they were demonstrating Gordon鈥檚 theories, but they were. By recognizing or remembering a tune, they were thinking music, which Gordon called 鈥�,鈥� the foundation of musicianship.

The musicians were especially impressed by the questions the preschoolers asked about their instruments, Abrahams says. The little kids were blown away by the tuning pegs on the stringed instruments getting higher the tighter the peg was turned and predicted that they would get lower if the peg was looser (Hello, ).

The success of the initial Music Zoo program has earned it a permanent place in the Intro to Music Education curriculum, Abrahams says, with an additional, unexpected benefit.

鈥淭he child development center is starving for people to come in and do learning activities with their children and they鈥檙e right here on campus鈥� he says. 鈥淭his great resource just fell into our laps. It鈥檚 a partnership that not only provides a valuable first teaching experience for our students but is also fostering positive interactions with the child care staff and our local community.鈥�

If the first child comes from a home in which there are high levels of anger or hostility and poor communication about feelings, they are likely to view the question as hostile and react accordingly. A child with greater awareness of emotions and an ability to empathize might simply respond with a shrug or a request for next.

Though emotional intelligence is often considered a 鈥渟oft skill,鈥� it forms the bedrock of learning and can help set up a child for success in school, their relationships, and their future work and earnings. Knowledge of emotions is the ability to recognize, label and understand emotions in yourself and others. It鈥檚 a prerequisite for emotional regulation: the foundation for effective communication, the ability to listen, the capacity to change one鈥檚 emotional state to meet immediate goals, and even the ability to manage stress.

The child鈥檚 ability to regulate their emotions predicts these attributes across socioeconomic strata, and various racial and ethnic groups, but can be especially valuable for children facing the twin stressors of poverty and racism.

Various studies have shown that emotional intelligence in adults and adolescents can be a significant moderator of stress responses, but no published studies to date have examined the association in any demographic for basic emotion knowledge and stress.

A recent study published in the journal examined for the first time the association between emotion knowledge and levels of cortisol, a major marker for stress, in young children. The 307 children in the study attended Head Start preschool; all their families faced economic hardship, and 80% were Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), positioned to experience systemic racism. The children鈥檚 median age was 4 years.

鈥淚鈥檝e been studying the physiological toll of poverty-related stress, and stress and trauma related to racism and systemic oppression,鈥� says Dr. Eleanor Brown, professor of psychology at West Chester University and the study鈥檚 lead author. 鈥淲e know that poverty gets under the skin, and when you鈥檙e exposed to stress or trauma related to poverty, your whole body responds.

鈥淚f you are exposed to a particular stressor, as in an incident of neighborhood violence, your cortisol levels are going to increase, which helps you marshal the physiological resources to respond. But chronic or repeated elevations in cortisol take a toll on physiological functioning in ways that are detrimental to social-emotional, cognitive and physical health. So, I鈥檝e been interested in what might help children facing high levels of poverty-related stress modulate their physiological response, and a student working with me 鈥� Sara King 鈥� was especially interested in emotion knowledge.鈥� King is co-first author on the current study.

According to the , nearly 40% of children in the U.S. grow up in homes classified as poor ($25,926 for a family of four) or low-income ($51,852 for a family of four). That鈥檚 a lot of stress and a lot of cortisol in some very young kids.

Brown鈥檚 research focused on the Head Start preschool program because it represents the nation鈥檚 largest investment in early childhood education and was designed to support the development of children placed at risk by economic hardship. Head Start enrollment has been associated with improved language and literary skills in preschool children as well as fewer behavioral problems and increased social-emotional competencies. Most Head Start schools have implemented emotions-based prevention programs and curriculum support to increase students鈥� ability to identify, regulate and constructively use appropriate emotions.

A suggested that having strong emotional regulation skills helped mitigate some of the negative impact from repeated exposure to poverty-related stressors. Brown鈥檚 study looks at whether younger children who developed greater understanding of emotions would show fewer stress effects, as measured by their bodies鈥� cortisol levels.

Implementing renowned theorist Carroll Izard鈥檚 coding system that measures children鈥檚 ability to recognize and label expressions of emotion, the researchers found a statistically relevant association of greater emotion knowledge with lower amounts of cortisol. The study highlights the importance of addressing emotional competence in early childhood, Brown says.

When children can identify their emotions, they can exercise a level of cognitive control over their emotional arousal, which enables them to react appropriately to the situations and people they encounter. Emotion knowledge is also linked to the emergence of theory of mind between the ages of 3 and 5, when children become aware that other鈥檚 beliefs, desires and feelings may be different from one鈥檚 own 鈥� a foundational mechanism for navigating social interactions.

This age is the birthplace of empathy 鈥� also narcissism, the inability to imagine the needs or feelings of another. As children鈥檚 ability to understand emotions grows, their ability to negotiate social situations develops, which can set them on a positive course for elementary school and beyond. On the other hand, children who are unable to identify emotions in preschool may face behavioral and social problems as well as internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety.

Across cultures, humans (and some species) have evolved to recognize certain emotions like anger and fear as important knowledge for survival. Understanding potential causes and appropriate responses to these emotions is not so automatic. Much of the teaching of emotions happens naturally as parents and caregivers talk with children about emotion-provoking events they experience in their day-to-day. However, for households facing economic hardship and systemic racism, the picture may be somewhat different.

鈥淎 parent who is stressed about poverty or related hardship may be frustrated, anxious, sad, and exhausted,鈥� Brown says. 鈥淒espite good intentions, they may treat the child harshly or withdraw emotionally and be less nurturing, less able to have the conversations with them about labeling shapes, learning the alphabet or asking, 鈥楬ow did that make you feel?鈥� A parent working multiple shifts or juggling too many responsibilities simply may not have the time or emotional energy for those conversations.鈥�

Children growing up in chronic poverty also may have issues properly identifying their emotions simply because their stress levels are such that they don鈥檛 have the mental and physical bandwidth to do so.

One unfortunate finding of multiple studies is that parents across all socioeconomic strata are more likely to engage in emotion conversations with girls, more likely to offer space for emotional processing, and to support their taking time to work through emotions, Brown says. Parents are more likely to scaffold girls鈥� emotional processing with emotion coaching, talking about it, giving their emotions labels and helping them understand. Practically universally in American culture, parents of boys have less tolerance of them showing emotion 鈥� especially sadness and fear 鈥� and taking space to process it, which possibly explains lower levels of emotion knowledge among boys.

Children during this crucial period of development are not only building their knowledge of emotions, but they are also developing the neurocircuitry that will later support their ability to regulate their emotions, driving home the idea, Brown says, that early intervention with preschoolers may be critical for mitigating the impact of early stress exposure on brain development and functioning.

鈥淭his isn鈥檛 so much that someone who misses this window can never learn that someone who鈥檚 smiling is probably feeling happy,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hey can learn to label emotions earlier or later. But this is a critical period for equipping children with the emotion understanding that will allow them to modulate their responses to meet social and learning goals. It鈥檚 also a critical period for the development of a key stress response system 鈥� the hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis (HPA) 鈥� which influences learning and memory as well as emotional and physical well-being.鈥�

Brown adds, 鈥淭here is a critical period of calibration of that system in early childhood that will influence the child鈥檚 development. You can鈥檛 necessarily reverse the impact of high stress in childhood, and these findings don鈥檛 definitively show that emotion knowledge is lowering the children鈥檚 cortisol, but the existence of the link we鈥檝e shown suggests that there鈥檚 a good chance that by boosting children鈥檚 emotion knowledge, we can help them to regulate at a physiological level.

鈥淭his is hopeful because we may be able to use these opportunities with children in early childhood educational contexts to target emotion knowledge and skill development in ways that promote lower levels of stress.鈥�

The child care movement needs a broad base of support in order to win an effective, publicly-funded system. There have been strides in this direction over the past few decades, for instance bringing into the fold respected national security figures and leaders from rural areas facing a depopulation threat. Now, a is opening another door by showing how child care is impacting that most respected of American icons: farmers.

The paper, from professors Florence Becot of Penn State University and Shoshanah Inwood of Ohio State University, uses survey data from 729 farm families. It also draws on a literature review and prior work from the authors, including farm family focus groups. Becot and Inwood start by noting that 鈥淚n the 1980鈥檚, U.S. farm women identified the need for child care support to further their agricultural careers. Yet, it has taken over forty years for child care to be formally recognized as an issue affecting the trajectory and well-being of both the farm enterprise and the farm family,” with the two largest farm advocacy groups finally adding child care as a policy priority in 2023(!). As a sign of how understudied the issue of child care and farms has been, only two previous studies were conducted prior to this one.

In the popular imagination, children are a boon for farms: they are a ready source of labor and, ideally, take over the family business. This is accurate, yet incomplete. Becot and Inwood explain: “[R]esearchers and policy makers have overlooked the time, energy and resources that the households鈥� social reproduction require. The caring of children is particularly demanding as children need to be fed, educated and emotionally supported. Care work happens simultaneously and in competition with meeting the farm enterprise production needs. As such care work affects the structure and trajectory of the farm enterprise.”

Becot and Inwood鈥檚 study illuminated exactly what kind of changes the arrival of children鈥攁nd lack of good child care options鈥攃auses for farmers. They found 鈥渢he top three most common changes were decreasing resources allocated to the farm enterprise (i.e. cutting down the hours worked on the farm, scaling back farm production and/or farm employees helping with child care), cutting down on hours and/or stopping working the off-farm job, and hiring new workers to help on the farm and/or with household chores.鈥�

While the mere presence of young children has an understandable impact, the need to decrease resources going to the farm itself was particularly pronounced among families with child care challenges. 46% of those without adequate child care reported making such reallocations, versus 23% of those who had decent child care options. Just 18% of farm families struggling with child care made no changes to their business at all. These moves have a predictable consequence on what the farm produces: 鈥�83% of respondents with childcare supply challenges report an impact on their farm productivity compared to 62% for those not reporting that challenge.鈥�

It鈥檚 important to note, however, that this is not merely a story of how much corn or broccoli a given farm produces. It鈥檚 also a story about family flourishing. Becot and Inwood suggest, aptly, that 鈥淚n addition to triggering a cycle of changes within the household and the enterprise with the potential to alter short and long-term farm economic productivity, the choices farm parents must make likely have consequences on their mental health and quality of life as farm parents might already feel stretched thin due to role overlap and child care challenges. Indeed, if child care expenses were lower, over half the respondents would prioritize allocating freed-up resources towards the well-being of the household over the enterprise/business.鈥�

To illustrate their point, consider from one of the research participants: “Running a small farm, taking care of kids and managing jobs is really tough. Every week, we have to plan everything: meals, work schedules, kids’ activities, farm tasks and more. On top of that, we need to find babysitters. It’s a lot to handle, and it leaves us feeling tired and worn out.”

So what kind of external child care do farm families utilize when they can? Perhaps unsurprisingly, they rely heavily on caregivers, an option taken by nearly two-thirds of families who use any non-parental care. That said, a solid 42% of those families also reported using some form of paid provider, whether an occasional babysitter or a slot in a family child care program or child care center. Availability and cost continue to be a challenge for many.

All of this goes to show that farm families need a version of what all families need: good, affordable (ideally free) child care options, including direct support for trusted caregivers like FFNs as well as parents themselves. Hopefully, understanding child care鈥檚 impact on farmers will help open the eyes of recalcitrant politicians. As Becot said about the study from Penn State, 鈥渢he implication here is that child care not only impacts farm success for the families, but food availability for all.鈥�

While there is a unique legislative avenue available to help farm families鈥攖he Farm Bill, which is ostensibly supposed to be passed this year鈥攇etting farmers (and their Congressional representatives) behind a comprehensive approach holds the most promise for a sustainable solution. With such a child care system in place, farm families will be healthier, and the nation will be more prosperous and secure.

It was Dwight Eisenhower who quipped, 鈥淔arming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil, and you’re a thousand miles from a corn field.” I might add, it also looks mighty easy when you鈥檙e not the family trying to run a farm in a nation without a decent child care system.

As movements continue to fight for universal, affordable child care and paid family and medical leave, and for workplace reforms through union organizing and forms of activism, prominent politicians like Republican Vice-Presidential nominee J.D. Vance question women鈥檚 place in the workplace. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, he vowed to represent the in America. In the past he has critiqued the Democratic Party as being run by 鈥渃hildless cat ladies,鈥� and argued that women should be having children rather than working long hours.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay has covered gender and racial inequality in society throughout her career as a writer, editor, organizer and nonprofit leader. In just a few short years she went from executive editor of the now-defunct blog Feministing to executive editor of Teen Vogue, where she oversaw a massive transformation in its coverage, from just fashion-as-usual, to fashion plus all the political, social and identity questions young people were facing. She resigned from that role in 2022.

Her third book, , takes on the problem of women鈥檚 burnout from juggling both the unpaid work of family life and the demanding paid work in thankless, profit-driven jobs, and defends women鈥檚 right to ambition. The question, she asks, is where should we channel that ambition? Early Learning Nation contributor Haley Swenson sat down with Mukhopadhyay to discuss her journey to understand work and ambition differently in the years since she first 鈥渕ade it.鈥�

Haley Swenson: I鈥檝e read you for such a long time, going back to when I was a college student and you were writing for . And then I remember a few years ago, during the pandemic, everybody was like, wow, look at Teen Vogue. We were seeing articles about socialist feminism and dreamers and DACA and prison and policing and everyone was saying, what’s going on over there? And then I found out you were the executive editor, and I said, aha, that’s part of what’s going on over there. 听

And I remember thinking, 鈥淲ow, she’s really made it!鈥� So maybe we could start there. Tell the readers a little bit about that experience, of 鈥渕aking it,鈥� getting that big management job, and how the reality of that led you to this book.

Samhita Mukhopadhyay: I think I also felt like I had made it. You know, I worked really hard to get to a place where I would even be considered for a position like that. I should have felt this tremendous sense of satisfaction, and I did. I really was proud of the work we were doing, and I was happy to have the job. But there was a deeper part of me saying I worked really hard to get here, and now what? Why am I exhausted? Why do I not have space to take care of myself? And I wasn’t making the kind of money that I felt like I should be making for how much experience I had, and what I was bringing to the table, which kind of made me start to question what all of this was for.

But I didn’t really face that question until the pandemic, when I had this moment that many women had of asking, why do I work all the time? Maybe work isn’t the core organizing value for my life. And there鈥檚 a very earnest battle right now to take rights away from women and to say that women should have never been allowed in the workplace. The pandemic forced me to start reporting out what I felt was a reckoning that women were having with their relationship to ambition. I wanted to come in strong with a counter-argument that we weren鈥檛 wrong for having ambition, but we were set up to fail.

Swenson: Ambition is a theme that keeps coming back throughout the book. Prior to that pandemic moment, when many of us questioned it all, you talk about how in terms of workplace feminism we had 鈥渓ean in鈥� and we had 鈥済irl bossing,鈥� the idea, as you say, that, 鈥渢here’s nothing that a little elbow grease and the right shade of lipstick can’t overcome.鈥� What happened in the pandemic that made those ideas of women鈥檚 ambition seem so antiquated?

Mukhopadhyay: This was most pointed with mothers. I think that a lot of mothers have been told that you can have it all. You can work and have your family. You just need to organize your time and you’ll be fine. And many of them realized how burned out they were, especially when they lost all of the support they needed to be successful in their careers, like child care, home health workers, housekeepers. When that underbelly of workers that keep many middle class and affluent women afloat dissipated, I think a lot of women had to face that their ambitions were fragile, that they were resting on this care economy and this false idea that you can have it all. And I think that’s the biggest thing that started to unravel.

I also saw this with my single women friends, who I think had been told to put everything into their careers, asking, 鈥淲ait, why did I work this hard? Now, none of that matters, because I can’t even go to an office, and I can’t even spend the money I鈥檓 earning in a restaurant. My fancy clothes don’t matter. Having a fancy apartment isn’t important anymore, because we’re struggling for our lives out here.鈥�

I think that forced us as a country and a society to ask, what is success? How much do we actually need? A lot of families took a step back from their professional duties to ask these questions. Maybe we got a taste of a balanced life. We got a taste of what it would be like to not just prioritize work at all costs.

Swenson: Sometimes in the child care and paid leave spaces, we say that because the United States doesn’t have robust social policies, you’re really left to the 鈥渂oss lottery,鈥� where it’s up to your manager whether you can have a balanced life. There鈥檚 also this pressure, which you experienced in management positions, of wanting to do right by your employees, the people who report to you, to be that supportive person, to help them develop, but at the same time you have very little power to protect them when push comes to shove. 奥丑补迟鈥檚 your vision of what management could look like?

Mukhopadhyay: I鈥檓 interested in building off of the work of the great feminist theorist Barbara Ehrenreich, to develop her idea of the professional managerial class as this middle layer of management that could become radicalized and stand with other workers. Something promising that we started to see during the pandemic, was white collar workers, or knowledge workers, coming into consciousness about their own labor conditions.

I see an opportunity to think about management less as a climb to the top, and more about people. We should grade managers on that, on how well you build your team and relate to them and support them. And that should be as important as your ability to come up with creative ideas and to execute.

The old model of management isn’t really working right now. Even just for the most basic economic reasons, we really need to start thinking about models that do empower and include larger groups of people to feel purpose-driven.

Swenson: At the end of the book, I was feeling so optimistic. You cite so many examples of workers who aren鈥檛 taking it anymore, and are either forming unions or just saying enough is enough and radically changing their lives to be more about community and less about work.

You offer the idea of instead of channeling our hustle energy鈥攐ur ambition into personal success鈥攖rying to channel that into collective change in the workplace. That seems like a starting point for any of the kinds of changes you want to see, so we are no longer set up to fail. Can you explain how you see us replacing the old feminist dream of having it all with the goal of 鈥渏ust having enough鈥�?

Mukhopadhyay: It really has to be a collective reckoning to say that we’ve had enough of how we’re treated in the workplace. We’re not going to do it anymore. The expectation is that if you have it all, you have to do it all, and I’m not going to do it all. And if you want me to do it all, you’re going to pay me equitably for it. And that may mean making some personal sacrifices. It means that maybe you don’t put yourself up for that promotion. Maybe you don’t, and I鈥檓 talking directly at the camera to myself right now, take that third freelance gig.

Maybe you have to say, I don’t need to keep pushing and pushing, because the more I push, the harder it is for me to actually enjoy what I have and to not make myself sick and stressed out and depressed in the process.

The easy narrative here is to say, well, this is why women should never work. The whole problem with that is whether you’re working outside the house or inside the house, you’re still working. And most women don’t have the choice to be in the house or outside of the house.

I know many women that would love a little more leisure time, but I do not know any woman that’s not out here hustling. This system was designed to make us miserable, to set us up to fail. But [pushing back] is also something that we need to do collectively. You can 鈥渜uiet quit鈥� as an individual, but if the person next to you at work is going to pick up the slack, you’re not creating a collective environment where we’re all saying together, 鈥渢his is what we’re willing to put up with, and this is what we’re not willing to put up with.鈥�

Swenson: Speaking of the moment we’re in right now, politically, has anything changed for you, in terms of your sense of what’s possible, or your optimism about the direction we’re headed in. How is the prospect of a second Trump term affecting your thinking?

Mukhopadhyay: I think that there is such a naked war on women and women’s ambition. J.D. Vance has openly condemned the idea of women in the workplace, women’s independence, . This is part of a working world order and mindset where women are second-class citizens, where their creativity is clamped down on, where their actual human rights are being restricted. And that is very dangerous.

And it鈥檚 not that feminists are against ambition. It鈥檚 not that we’re lazy and it’s not that we don’t believe that women should be ambitious. What we’re saying is it’s too hard and we can’t do it alone. The solution to that cannot be that we don’t try. What are the conditions for us to successfully try? And that’s why I think this moment is very linked to our fight for democracy and for women’s human rights.

It’s not a coincidence to me that we’re having this profound backlash on women in the workplace, that so many mothers were pushed out of the workforce during the pandemic at the same time we saw the overturning of Roe v Wade, and the rise of the, quote, 鈥渢rad wife.鈥�

One of J.D. Vance’s quotes is, 鈥淚f your worldview tells you that it鈥檚 bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you鈥檝e been had.鈥� And that鈥檚 really effective messaging. It isn’t liberating for me to work 90 hours a week, but then neither is forced motherhood.

Swenson: So what is the message you have for women?

Mukhopadhyay: I think a lot of books right now are saying, don’t give up the fight. And I am saying, yes, but pick and choose your battles. You are not alone in what you’re feeling. And I think that one of the problems with neoliberal, lean-in feminism has been that we have put the culpability for women’s progress on the individual woman. You alone cannot change the parental leave policy in your company or in your state. You alone cannot overcome the unequal pay gap. So much ink has been spilled about that moment when you ask for more money, like that’s the core of workplace feminism. 鈥淪peak up in meetings and make sure you ask for more money.鈥� And I would never tell someone not to do those things. I just want us to give ourselves a pat on the back. We’ve done enough. But we alone can’t solve these problems. So what does it look like to use our ambition to build a community of support, around the kinds of lives that we want to live, and the kinds of work we want to do?

These proficiencies are nurtured, the committee wrote, when educators design learning opportunities that meet children鈥檚 needs, engage responsively with children鈥檚 ideas and interests, and when they can hear children鈥檚 ideas and see their successes.

The Next Generation Preschool Science team, led by education nonprofits and the and public media foundation, has been working to promote science in preschool by co-designing innovative STEM resources that can be used across home and school. Their work, funded by the involved co-designing resources with teachers and families, to ensure they leveraged children鈥檚 interest and families’ funds of knowledge. Through this partnership, researchers, teachers, parents, curriculum developers and media designers created Early Science with Nico & Nor庐, a multifaceted program that includes a teacher guide with sample curricular activities, a 鈥渇amily science fun guide鈥� and innovative digital apps to support science investigation in ways that integrate math and engineering.

The program builds on the researchers鈥� previous findings about technology and young children鈥攏ot to replace human interaction, but to explore how digital journals and gamified simulations can strengthen and complement young children鈥檚 engagement in and understanding of science concepts. A rigorous, randomized control trial study found that children who used the 听听听听听Nico & Nor curriculum supplement in classrooms showed significant improvements in their science learning. Children鈥檚 science learning also significantly improved when Early Science with Nico & Nor庐 was used across school and home environments.

Making Use of Everyday Magic

Though shadows, ramps and floppy tomato plants may not be something most of us pay attention to, they certainly get a 3-year-old鈥檚 attention. Children wonder about the world in practical, concrete ways鈥�Why does that ball roll faster on the slide than on the dirt? What makes my shadow look so long? What is a shadow actually 鈥� how it is formed? In the program鈥檚 three units鈥擫ight and Shadow; Force and Motion; and Growth and Transformation鈥� Early Science with Nico & Nor庐 explores such questions with carefully designed materials that foster the child鈥檚 ever-present wonder. Without a whiff of, 鈥淥K, class, we鈥檙e now going to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics,鈥� that鈥檚 exactly what they do.

鈥淭he project is built around children鈥檚 natural curiosity to understand the world around them,鈥� says Danae Kamdar, an early STEM researcher with Digital Promise. 鈥淲e asked, 鈥楬ow does children鈥檚 natural curiosity about the world drive them to ask questions and understand?鈥� The question was not only how we could support children鈥檚 learning and curiosity in preschool classrooms but how we could support learning in communities and families as well.

鈥淎s children begin to explore how shadows are made, they notice through these different activities that they need a light source, an object to block the light, and a surface on the opposite side of the light source for the shadow to appear on. Or they鈥檒l observe that the size of a shadow changes when you move the light source closer to or farther from the object. Their observations create a natural way to connect to that science and they begin to use the visual spatial vocabulary in a meaningful way.鈥�

Playing Around

The key to all this learning, both in the digital and hands-on materials, is play. Play not only helps children in their social-emotional learning and ability to collaborate, but it鈥檚 also essential for reading proficiency and, as Early Science with Nico & Nor庐 demonstrates, can be an important tool in learning math and science skills.

Through play, the children learn that bringing the light source closer makes the object bigger, and that the light source must be behind the object. In the unit on force and motion, the preschoolers learn how items on a steep ramp move downhill faster, and that different surfaces on the ramp鈥攇rass, dirt鈥攐r on the item affect how smoothly or quickly the object moves. Friction slows things down! Whoa.

Although many preschool curricula already include activities in which the children sprout, plant and observe a bean plant, activities in the Growth and Transformation unit enable the children to focus more deeply on the core ideas about plant parts and what they need to live and grow, with some math for good measure: Matt鈥檚 plant is seven units tall. Mine鈥檚 nine. It鈥檚 taller!

The Nico & Nor program didn鈥檛 evolve from a group of adults deciding what kids will like and going with that. It鈥檚 the result of co-design and iteration, based on design ideas and feedback from educators and families, and observation of how the children themselves engage with the materials. Do they actually play with them?

鈥淲hen our team is in the co-design phase with preschool teachers and families, we get together to brainstorm seed ideas鈥攊nitial concepts of what we think would work in the preschool space or be interesting for the children,鈥� says Tiffany Leones, an early STEM researcher for Digital Promise. 鈥淔rom there, the teachers share their feedback about what is engaging for the kids. We then go through the process of iterating and testing it out.鈥�

鈥淔or example, in the Shadow Cave app,鈥� Leones says, 鈥渢he children can actually be in a dark cave. They can manipulate the flashlight, turn it on and off. They can control the conditions in which they鈥檙e investigating to understand the core ideas of light and shadows. Within the app, we鈥檝e designed it so there are audio and visual scaffolds to support children since especially in the 3 to 5 range, children can be anywhere on the developmental spectrum. There are differentiated levels within the app, which get developmentally more complex.鈥�

She adds, 鈥淭hen, to keep play at the forefront, we developed some levels in between where children can create their own fun shadows in the cave, so they can explore that space freely.鈥�

(Full disclosure: this author played all levels of Shadow Cave and Puppy Park and is a bit alarmed to say they weren鈥檛 a slam dunk. I thought for sure those triangles would fit together and that bush would shade two puppies 鈥�)

Collaboration at All Levels

The Next Generation Preschool Science project is based on building collaborative relationships among researchers, educators, families, curriculum designers and media developers, while putting children and families at the center of the action.

An exceptional dimension of the project is the degree to which the researchers sought feedback and input from the preschool teachers, who brought a rich degree of their own creativity to the activities and freely shared what worked and what didn鈥檛 work as well, which often led to modifications to the materials. One realized that before she introduced the bowling activity to her kids, she should show them a video so they could see what bowling was. Another teacher created a 鈥渞amp center鈥� in her classroom where children could explore the unit鈥檚 materials and variables on their own, in their own time.

Parents were also an important part of the feedback and design loop. Though many initially expressed some doubt about their knowledge of engineering concepts, through their discussions about the materials, they found instances where they and their children engaged in engineering practices. They pushed and pulled boxes (Force and Motion) and when they explored their neighborhood to find ramps, they saw plenty of examples, from playground slides to moving trucks with dollies.

Addressing Inequity

In the same study mentioned in the introduction of this article, 鈥淪cience and Engineering in Preschool Through Elementary Grades: The Brilliance of Children and the Strengths of Educators,鈥� the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) decried America鈥檚 struggles to support children in historically marginalized communities in engaging in science and engineering. The educational system is often set up to work against children developing and demonstrating proficiencies in science and engineering, the report stated. Teachers may feel underprepared to teach these subject areas and may lack curriculum materials or other resources to support them in doing so. The children themselves may start to lose enthusiasm for sense-making about the natural and designed worlds if they aren鈥檛 supported.

The report says that all these negatives can be rectified, and the Next Generation Preschool Science project is a step in that direction. Digital Promise traditionally has worked with educators, researchers, technologies and communities to investigate and scale innovations that support learners who have been historically and systematically excluded, Leones says. Equity is baked into the project and one of the project鈥檚 goals was to generate resources that could leverage children鈥檚 everyday experiences and families鈥� funds to promote science in accessible, doable ways. The materials are available in both Spanish and English and are free to everyone with access to an iPad.

There鈥檚 a lot we stand to lose with less local journalism: fewer local journalists, fewer watch dogs, fewer hard-hitting stories to hold governments, businesses and people accountable for their actions.

Also, fewer beat reporters.

This is why I was joined by four other journalists who cover child care as part of their work for a webinar, titled: , which was co-hosted by the Better Life Lab and Early Learning Nation magazine. You can find .

Here are 8 of the top takeaways from our conversation:

1. More journalists covering child care can lead to more data on child care, and we know that data helps inform decision makers on how and what to prioritize. We also know that care work in general has been under-measured and under-valued in our economy, that doesn鈥檛 account for unpaid household work.
2. Even though the economic arguments in support of a more robust, universal child care infrastructure are those that , the reporters who cover this topic would like to shift the focus to include the positive effect on kids, providers, families and our society as a whole that comes with a strong child care program.

   Economic arguments are important, but they don鈥檛 tell the whole story, and can threaten to eclipse what actually matters the most: the young people receiving care and being nurtured into caring, compassionate and engaged young citizens.

3. For child care coverage to matter, the leadership in newsrooms need to also value this. Some of this will come from people in leadership positions who have a firsthand experience with care (the same way that can yield more family-friendly policies). Another way is through publications, like , which focus directly on issues affecting women and LGBTQ+ people.

4. Watchdog stories make a difference and we need more of them. Two of the reporters on the call 鈥� Chabeli Carrazna of the 19th and Jackie Mader of Hechinger Report 鈥� spoke about the rippling effects of their powerful watchdog stories and their desire to do more deep-dives that hold government officials accountable. You can read Carrazna鈥檚 story on and Mader鈥檚 story on .

5. The 21st century journalism model has a strong philanthropic base. All of us on the call who write about child care acknowledged the philanthropic support for our writing. 鈥�$500 million鈥攖o support local news. And for child care beats to get the full funding they need, philanthropic support may be part of that solution.

6. We need more child care journalism to get child care on the national stage. Our conversation lamented that the presidential debate spent more time conversing about golf than child care. Streeter writes a lifestyle column, but child care figures prominently because any conversation around parenting includes the question of who looks after your child?
7. We also need more stories like that to keep child care on the national stage as a major economic issue affecting families, like . By elevating the voices of child care providers, we can recognize them for the professional work they do and compensate them accordingly.

8. Focus on collective solutions, instead of blaming individuals. Right now, each individual family comes up with a child care solution, which is not always workable or affordable. We need to acknowledge that those who are struggling to find workable arrangements are doing so because a system as significant as child care requires a collective solution and robust government investment (just like K-12 education).

I鈥檝e written many stories 鈥� in Early Learning Nation, for and on my 鈥� about why we make parenting in this country harder than it needs to be. It doesn鈥檛 have to be this hard. An Overton window 鈥� the range of politically acceptable policies at any given moment 鈥� exists now for child care. This is why it is the ideal time to keep the child care stories going now.

I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about this issue to watch our webinar, and follow the work of these journalists: Chabeli Carrazana, Jackie Mader, Leslie Gray Streeter and Mark Swartz. You can also read and engage more on child care right here at zero2eight, formerly Early Learning Nation.

Joanne Samuel Goldblum, founder and CEO at the , believes most policymakers are focused on 鈥渢he big picture鈥� to address poverty but often neglect the material basic needs that help families get through the day. She identifies aisles in the middle of most supermarkets stocked with hygiene products, cleaning supplies and toilet paper, most of which can鈥檛 be purchased via assistance programs, but they can be the difference between economic stability and a descent into poverty. Diapers are not typically on the policy agenda, but they should be.

The National Diaper Bank Network defines diaper need as 鈥渢he lack of a sufficient supply of diapers to keep a baby or toddler clean, dry and healthy.鈥� Findings from the organization鈥檚 latest report, , shows that diaper need 鈥渞emains a serious and pervasive issue that impacts the physical, mental and economic well-being of U.S. children and families.鈥� Shockingly, the survey found that nearly half of families (47 percent) reported experiencing diaper need, a drastic increase from the 1 in 3 families that reported diaper need in 2010.

When they can鈥檛 provide diapers, parents resort to makeshift solutions such as using plastic bags, towels and T-shirts as diapers, scouring the internet for instructions on how to make a homemade diaper, and reusing wet or soiled diapers after removing waste. These 鈥渄iaper-stretching鈥� methods to compensate for diaper need can have serious physical consequences, such as severe diaper rash and urinary tract infections.

Diaper need can also have a profound impact on mental health. A soggy diaper is a physical reminder of a child鈥檚 unmet need, and not being able to meet that need is a horrible, unshakable feeling. A found that diaper need was the number one predictor of maternal stress, even outpacing worries about paying for food, electricity or housing.

Diaper need also has economic consequences. Most child care centers require parents to supply a day or even an entire week鈥檚 worth of diapers at once, even if the cost of child care is subsidized. If families do not have the required supply of diapers, they must find another child care arrangement, which often means missing work. Twenty-five percent of families with diaper need who were included in the Diaper Check survey reported missing work or school because they did not have enough diapers to place their baby in child care. On average, these parents missed about five workdays per month, which equates to a loss of $296 for those earning the federal minimum wage. That loss of income can keep families in a vicious cycle of poverty. 鈥淚f you don鈥檛 have a diaper and you can鈥檛 bring your kid to child care, you can鈥檛 go to work, and if you can鈥檛 go work, you can鈥檛 afford the things you need for your child. That鈥檚 true of all sorts of material, basic needs,鈥� said Goldblum.

The National Diaper Bank Network has about 250 member banks in its network, with locations in every state, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico. Collectively, the network has distributed over 1 billion diapers since 2011. While some diaper banks distribute diapers to families directly, others operate on a partner model. These diaper banks work with organizations, such as food banks, to ensure families have a one-stop shop to access what they need without traveling to various locations.

Nakeisha Wells founded the in 2019 after discovering that there were no existing diaper banks in Cuyahoga County despite being Ohio’s second most populous county. The organization aims to fill a critical gap in its community and has partnered with the Greater Cleveland Food Bank to distribute essentials to families directly out of a new resource center. The center sees 200 to 250 families daily, and Wells estimates that 8000 diapers are distributed per month just at that location. The Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland surveys families every month. In survey responses shared with Early Learning Nation, every parent reported that the number of diapers they received from the Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland helped them reduce stress and keep their child healthier. Parents also shared that distributions from the diaper bank helped them pay bills, go to work, purchase groceries and buy non-food items like toothpaste or soap.

is a nonprofit that has served the Tulsa community for over 40 years and helps families access essentials like diapers, wipes and formula. Jacky Escobedo, the organization鈥檚 director of social services, is proud of the 鈥渓ow barrier process鈥� that allows Emergency Infant Services to make a significant impact. There are no income requirements to get help, and volunteers and staff members rely on conversations with families to assess how they are doing, identify what needs can be met in-house and determine how they can be connected to additional resources. This year alone, Emergency Infant Services has seen close to 29,000 families and has distributed over 1 million diapers.

Diaper banks experienced an unprecedented demand during the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Diaper Bank Network estimates that the need for diapers in communities across the country increased by . Today, much of that demand still lingers, and diaper banks are finding it challenging to keep up. Since February, the number of clients at the Diaper Bank of Greater Cleveland鈥檚 weekly diaper distribution has tripled. On any given day, 20 to 30 families are lined up before their doors even open. This year, Emergency Infant Services has seen double the number of families they usually help.

Many have theorized about ways to address unprecedented diaper need, but some solutions are misguided. Policymakers have suggested expanding food-based and nutrition programs like SNAP or WIC to cover the cost of diapers, but the National Diaper Bank Network is not in favor of this option.听According to Lacey Gero, director of government affairs at the National Diaper Bank Network, SNAP and WIC are already under constant threat of spending cuts and these programs will not receive an influx of funding to provide additional support. More than a quarter of families with diaper need surveyed in Diaper Check already report skipping meals to afford more diapers. With SNAP or WIC expansion, families would still be forced to make impossible decisions about providing for their basic needs with limited resources: do I provide food for my children this month, or are diapers more important? Families would also continue to rely on community resources, such as food banks, to provide whatever they cannot cover on their own, which strains an already fragile system.

Others have suggested that families who struggle to afford disposable diapers should switch to cloth diapers. According to Goldblum, 鈥淭he problem with diaper need is not disposable versus cloth,鈥� and it is 鈥渟implistic to say that [cloth diapers] are the answer.鈥� She added that more than 90 percent of American families use disposable diapers, and the vast majority of child care centers require them. Cloth diapers also demand washing machines, and heavy-duty washing machines at that, to adequately clean them. However, many Americans who struggle financially do not have their own washing machines, and in most laundromats, cloth diapers are not allowed. While cloth diapers may be a trusted option for some, they are not a feasible solution for many families.

Still, many people shame families experiencing diaper need and reject efforts to address this crisis. Rush Limbaugh, a late conservative talk show host, made a mockery of legislation introduced by Rep. Rosa DeLauro in 2011 that would have provided federal funding to supply child care centers with diapers to help families who could not afford them. Limbaugh said the proposal .鈥� Others have echoed similar sentiments and often ask, why have children if you cannot afford them? The question itself reflects just how poorly our nation treats those experiencing poverty. Wages have remained stagnant while the cost of living and prices of basic necessities have skyrocketed, an obvious mismatch according to Goldblum. It is no surprise that families are struggling to afford diapers. What else do we expect?

As the Diaper Check revealed, it is not just low-income parents who experience diaper need. This problem cuts across income levels and is present in every community. More than a quarter of families who experience diaper need are classified as middle-income. These families often fall through the cracks because they earn too much to qualify for federal assistance programs but still struggle to afford the cost of basic necessities. Most parents who experience diaper need are employed, many with multiple jobs. Goldblum asserts, 鈥淚f people are working and they can’t afford to take care of their family, that’s a societal problem and not an individual problem.鈥�

Half of American families cannot afford enough diapers to keep their children clean, dry and healthy. This crisis is too big to be solved by diaper banks and kind-hearted volunteers alone. The millions of families who experience diaper need require policy solutions, not condemnation or empty platitudes.

Though previous studies have indicated that exposure to green space is associated with improved mood, reduced risk of mental disorders and a reduction of attention deficit disorders, most research has focused on older children, adolescents and adults. Few studies have considered whether green space is associated with young children鈥檚 mental health outcomes. These recent studies suggest that not only can exposure to green spaces positively affect young children鈥檚 mental health, but that early childhood may be an especially critical time for such exposure.

Dr. Nissa Towe-Goodman was drawn to the research that became the large national study, , published in the April 2024 issue of the journal JAMA Network Open, after reading about the dramatic effect of lifetime exposure to green space on mental health issues. (Longitudinal evidence indicates that adolescents and adults raised in low levels of green space have up to a 55% greater risk for mental disorders than those raised with high levels of green space 鈥� a statistic Towe-Goodman calls 鈥渨hopping.鈥�) At the same time, her daughter was in preschool and Towe-Goodman noticed a dramatic difference in her little girl鈥檚 demeanor on the days they stopped by the park on their way home to play by the river and hike the park鈥檚 pathways.

鈥淭he transition to school is often challenging for kids,鈥� she says, 鈥渁nd I noticed that being outdoors, climbing and playing in nature reliably made such a difference for her. I wanted to take a deeper look at those effects.

鈥淏efore I became interested in green space, I was aware how stress is a major risk for young children鈥檚 mental health. Your stress system and certain behavioral regulatory strategies are developing within that infancy, toddler, preschool period. We think one of the ways green spaces may impact young kids鈥� mental health is through offering stress reduction, a restorative exposure whereby their stress systems can down-regulate.鈥�

High-intensity stress for extended periods can impair cognitive development and development of attention skills, which over time can build up and become mental health problems, Towe-Goodman says.

A research scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Towe-Goodman led a team of researchers who drew their data from the National Institutes of Health鈥檚 Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes program (ECHO), a consortium of socioeconomically and geographically diverse cohort sites across the U.S. that studies environmental factors related to child health. The team studied more than 2,000 children born between 2007 and 2013 living in nearly 200 counties across 41 states. It is the first study to examine the association of green space exposure on internalizing and externalizing symptoms in early childhood across the U.S., Towe-Goodman says.

The study used satellite imagery to estimate live vegetation density up to three-quarters of a mile around each child鈥檚 home and, using standard checklists, relied on parents鈥� reporting their children鈥檚 internalizing and externalizing symptoms. The study found that greater exposure to residential green space in the 2- to 5-year-old children was associated with fewer internalizing symptoms such as anxiety, depression, withdrawal and sleep concerns. Although green space was also associated with externalizing symptoms such as aggression and rule-breaking, the link was not significant after accounting for the effects of neighborhood poverty.

鈥淲e know early childhood is really crucial in terms of developmental plasticity,鈥� Towe-Goodman says, 鈥渁nd the child鈥檚 environmental exposures make a big difference early in development. As kids reach school age, they start getting involved in different activities and are exposed to all sorts of different environments. We were looking at the effect of residential green space. So, our study didn鈥檛 show that effect in older children (ages 6 to 11).鈥�

Green Space in Tennessee

A more geographically focused study led by epidemiologist Dr. Marnie Hazlehurst as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington鈥檚 Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences investigated the relationship between residential green space exposures, and child behavioral and mental health, in children aged 4 to 6 in Tennessee. The children were part of the Conditions Affecting Neurocognitive Development and Learning in Early Childhood (CANDLE) cohort within the ECHO consortium, established to investigate determinants of child neurodevelopment. The CANDLE study is a longitudinal pregnancy cohort located in Shelby County, Tennessee, a socioeconomically and racially diverse cohort that included pregnant women enrolled between 2006 and 2011.

The study examined three measures of green space to assess the overall greenness of the area surrounding the child鈥檚 residence, the percentage of land area covered by tree canopy and the distance to the nearest park. Mothers were given a checklist of questions on a wide variety of their 4- to 6-year-old children鈥檚 behaviors. The final analytic sample comprised 943 children.

Again, higher levels of residential surrounding greenness were significantly associated with lower scores on internalizing symptoms, including anxiety, shyness and emotional reactivity. Lower levels of internalizing problems were indeed associated with higher residential greenness, though not necessarily tree cover or park proximity. Hazlehurst says one of her study鈥檚 unique aspects was its study of multiple forms of green space, though some of its findings beg further investigation, such as delving into the potential barriers to accessing the green space afforded by tree cover or parks (such as an unsafe environment), despite their proximity to the family鈥檚 home.

As with Towe-Goodman鈥檚 study, no associations were observed between green space and externalizing outcomes such as aggression, lack of emotional control and rule-breaking.

The study, , was published in the February issue of the journal Environmental Health.

鈥淚 was interested in studying green space as a beneficial environmental factor in children鈥檚 health,鈥� Hazlehurst says. 鈥淭here has been a growing concern that a lack of exposure to nature and kids not spending time outside in natural green spaces is contributing to health problems, including effects on mental health. Most of the prior work had focused on school-aged children, even though we know that early childhood is a sensitive window for the environment to influence kids鈥� brain development.鈥�

Hazlehurst said the underlying mechanisms of green space鈥檚 mental health benefits are not fully understood, but in part it is believed that green spaces encourage children鈥檚 physical activity and free play. Such exposure may offer children opportunities to restore their emotional resources as well 鈥� a sort of 鈥渇orest-bathing鈥� for the pre-K set. Playing outdoors also allows children to build their emotional regulatory capacities through risk-taking, as well as mitigating some environmental stressors such as heat and air pollution.

One of the takeaways from Hazlehurst鈥檚 research is that green space may be particularly important for children and families with access to fewer resources. Populations with lower socioeconomic status are more likely to experience higher levels of adverse stressors and environmental exposures, she says, and may be more reliant on resources within their residential neighborhoods. More green space in these neighborhoods might help mitigate some of these stressors.

Profound and Lasting Effects

Symptoms like depression and anxiety that develop early in life can continue to have profound and prolonged effects on a person鈥檚 functioning throughout their lifetime. The protective role of green space during these early years may have long-lasting implications for children鈥檚 mental health, as both recent studies suggest. The studies add to the body of evidence that preschool children benefit greatly from exposure to nature, from nature-based early learning, outdoor preschools, and programs that intentionally get children out into the green outdoors.

鈥�(Creating more green space) is one of those potentially low-cost benefits not only for young kids, but for the environment and for families,鈥� Towe-Goodman says. 鈥淲e are all increasingly aware of the ways we are intertwined with our environment. If you can help increase exposure to natural spaces, if you can protect those spaces and offer programs to families early on to increase exposure to the natural areas around them, that seems like a solution with great potential.鈥�

Resource

An emergency for America鈥檚 children: In late 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP) and the Children鈥檚 Hospital Association (CHA) joined together to declare a National State of Emergency in Children鈥檚 Mental Health. The challenges facing children and adolescents are so widespread that these professional organizations called on policymakers at all levels of government and advocates for children and adolescents to join them in the declaration and advocate for a set of proposed actions to address the crisis. The proposed solutions and the declaration can be found on the .

While I often disagree with his conclusions, Matthew Yglesias is a smart pundit who offers his own useful provocations. He also has a big among influential policymakers and thought leaders, making his opinions something of a public mirror to what many in the halls of power are quietly thinking. In his column, 鈥�,鈥� Yglesias argues that the rhetorical reliance on child care鈥檚 job-supporting prowess (both in terms of creating jobs within the care sector itself, and job creation more broadly) no longer holds water. He writes, 鈥淭he main problem is that most of Democrats鈥� ideas about investing in the care economy were formulated in the shadow of the Great Recession and were framed, in part, as ways of putting people back to work鈥oday, though, we are clearly back to full employment.鈥�

As an empirical matter, Yglesias is correct. 奥丑补迟鈥檚 more, the labor force participation rates of mothers of young children鈥攁ka the group most acutely impacted by child care challenges鈥攊s at historic highs. (I have argued before, and plan to go deeper in a future article, about how this can be a gloss: attachment to employment says little about the to well-being required to work without a stable and satisfactory child care arrangement). But Yglesias takes this starting point and goes in a troublesome direction. He writes, citing pro-care arguments by the Roosevelt Institute鈥檚 Suzanne Kahn:

It鈥檚 true, that if the economy is deeply depressed, the care sector is a 鈥済ood investment鈥� in the sense of creating a lot of labor demand per dollar spent. But the economy isn鈥檛 deeply depressed, so this is actually a huge logistical problem with the idea of expanding access to care. You could, of course, try to make care work less labor-intensive, but Kahn argues against that, saying 鈥渟trict staffing ratios should be maintained for those receiving government funds.鈥�

She also wants to ensure that unit labor costs not only stay high but become higher, calling for 鈥渟trict minimum wages and benefits packages set at family-sustaining levels, as well as protections for workers鈥� ability to organize.鈥� She wants to discourage private equity investment in the care sector by banning stock buybacks and 鈥渄emanding that corporate boards receiving significant federal care funds include both recipients of the care and caregivers as representatives.鈥�

鈥his is an agenda for what my [Libertarian think tank] Niskanen Center friends call 鈥渃ost-disease socialism,鈥� where you respond to the high cost of something by subsidizing it, but then attach strings that limit the supply and drive costs up further.

There are faulty premises here, almost all of which start from confusion over what and who child care is for. Yglesias seems relatively disinterested in the impact of care investments on the quality of care, other than a brief aside about child-to-adult ratios where he links to a single paper from the deeply pro-free-market Mercatus Center. There is no engagement with the that shows the greatest predictor of quality is the presence of a stable, warm caregiver; that child care educator churn is sky-high and (presumably due to working conditions). There is no engagement with the question of whether those caring for toddlers should rightly be paid akin to dog walkers and parking lot attendants, or why elementary school teachers should receive vastly higher wages and benefits. There is no engagement with what might happen if we let , given the wreckage they have left behind in other human service sectors like nursing homes and autism services.

Most worryingly, though, is that Ygelsias鈥攁nd he is far from alone in this鈥攆ails to see that care that set it apart from other goods. He writes, in a paragraph that simultaneously contains an important truth and a massive misunderstanding:

That doesn鈥檛 mean there are no problems in the space of child or care, but I do think it makes a difference to realize that there isn鈥檛 necessarily a 鈥渃risis.鈥� The reason to address child care costs is that families like to have more money rather than less, so if you can help them out in this regard, they鈥檒l be better off. But parents of young kids buy all kinds of stuff鈥攇roceries, car seats, clothing鈥攁nd as intense as the prime daycare years are, they are only a small fraction of a child鈥檚 life and a modest share of the all-in expense of raising a child. Making child care more affordable would help young families, but so would reducing minimum lot size rules to create more single-family homes. So would allowing mid-rise single-staircase apartments to create more cheap three-bedroom floorplans. If you鈥檙e focused on the problem (the cost of living for parents of young children) rather than the policy silo (child care), then you have a lot of options that don鈥檛 face the particular sticky problems of care-oriented industrial policy.

The important truth is that the family policy space is overly siloed. We weaken our impact by not making common cause with the full sweep of issues that impact a family鈥檚 overall life experience. In other words, our tendency to focus more on individual programs than comprehensive policy isn鈥檛 great. Housing and healthcare in particular have huge influences on family flourishing, as do items ranging from the to .

The massive misunderstanding is grouping child care with groceries, car seats and children鈥檚 clothing, as if it is merely one material need among many, as if the only problem is the monthly bill. Child care is an essential community support. Sociologist Mario Small that child care programs are key sources of friendships and connectivity for new parents; like schools, they act as assets that enhance entire neighborhoods. Child care providers are among the most trusted sources of advice for those parents, as well. Many times, they act as full 鈥榓lloparents鈥� (non-kin parental figures). In my new book I cite a moment in the documentary where a preschool teacher recalls how important his child care providers were as his family, headed by a single mother, struggled. 鈥淢y mom was both my parents, and my other parent was my preschool teachers,鈥� the teacher says. 鈥淭hey helped my mom when she needed assistance. They helped me. They helped my family. They, in essence, I feel, saved my life.鈥�

I also think that semantic debates over what constitutes a 鈥渃risis鈥� cheapens the human consequences. While it is definitely important that our policy analysis and projections be as careful and correct as possible, and while 鈥渃risis鈥� language has mixed success, there is also a risk of going too far in the other direction. When parents are to try to , falling due to a lack of child care or due to child care, I鈥檓 not sure what the perfect word is, but it sure seems like a big problem. (I am not an expert on elder care or long-term supportive care, but my understanding is that from many of the same structural problems.)

And yes, that means we need to spend public money to increase supply, affordability and quality. But that鈥檚 not 鈥渃ost disease,鈥� that鈥檚 accepting that certain social goods are worth society鈥檚 coin. Allow me from none other than William Baumol, the economist for whom 鈥淏aumol鈥檚 cost disease鈥� is named: 鈥淣o matter how painful rising medical and educational bills may be, society can afford them, and there is no need to deny them to ourselves or to the less affluent members of our society, or indeed to the world.鈥� (italics his.) The real question is whether care belongs in that list: I say it does.

So, we do need to reboot the care agenda. We do need to recalibrate away from jobs-focused messaging. What we need is to position care as a national value and show how care bolsters child, family and community vibrancy. Then we鈥檒l have a shared foundation upon which to do the difficult work of determining how best to pay for it.

Casey Stockstill, Dartmouth College sociologist and author of , and Halley Potter, senior fellow and director of PK-12 education policy at the Century Foundation, want to change that. They鈥檝e joined forces to identify successful economically integrated early education programs and document what they look like and how they make it work. I was excited to hear about their work. In my reporting, I too have explored those , including a my kids attended. So, I reached out to Stockstill and Potter to learn more about their work. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kendra Hurley: Why do you think segregation in early education remains so under the radar compared to K-12, and what do we lose when we don’t speak about it, or address it?

Halley Potter: Part of the challenge of talking about segregation in early education is that we haven’t fixed the question of access yet. For all of the challenges in our public schools, at least we have a guaranteed right to an education for students once they start kindergarten. But in early ed, because we still need to make sure more children have access to quality early learning, that’s where most of the conversation stays. But we do need to be having the conversation about segregation as we’re having the conversation about access. If we don’t, then we can end up expanding access on the backbone of our highly inequitable and segregated system.

And that鈥檚 a big missed opportunity, because in many ways, early learning environments are best set up to take advantage of a lot of the benefits of diverse educational settings. High quality early learning is play-based 鈥� it鈥檚 about children interacting with each other鈥� so there’s this great opportunity to have children coming in with different experiences and different vocabularies, creating a really rich learning environment.

Also, parents are talking to teachers more, and [it鈥檚] kind of the whole family coming in to the learning environment, so a diverse community in a classroom can lead to benefits for families as well. You [might] have social connections between a parent who’s looking for a job and a parent who’s looking to hire someone, or knows about a job opening.

There’s evidence that parents are the most receptive and excited about diverse learning environments, during children鈥檚 early years. I think of that, and I think, 鈥淟et’s capitalize on that.鈥� Getting kids in early education programs when they鈥檙e young could help families see the value in that early on, and that might influence their education choices and the ways that they show up in different educational spaces as their kids get older, too.

Casey Stockstill: For many parents, child care is their introduction to school.听So, it鈥檚 what听they get used to in terms of their child’s classmates, and how to engage with the teacher, and what to expect.

Also, teaching kids can look really different when you have segregated classrooms. In my book, I observe a Head Start classroom where you have six kids experiencing issues at home because of poverty, or they’re new to preschool because their family moves all the time because of poverty.

Teachers are dealing with those issues, and that can take away time from things like sitting down and reading a book calmly with a child. We add a list of demands to teachers when we give them a classroom of students who are all in poverty. And when you think about majority white preschools, where there’s one or two kids of color with a white teacher, sometimes that doesn’t communicate that it’s welcoming to kids of color. So, I wonder how segregation is making it harder for preschools to do this work of closing equity gaps. I don’t think separate is equal here either.

Hurley: There are so many barriers to integration in early education, parent choice being one of them. How did you choose to focus on programs that are tackling it with funding solutions?

Potter: We have this fractured early education system. We have private programs that charge tuition that is typically unaffordable to lower income families. And then we have many public programs like Head Start which are only open to low-income families, or to children who have met certain other criteria for risk factors. So, we’re set up for segregation.

The real solution is big public investments in early education that make it possible for everyone to access this together. But until we get there, we have to work with the fractured, flawed system we have, and one of the ways to do that is to create more programs that are accepting multiple types of funding streams. And then we can have multiple types of families enrolled.

Stockstill: Bringing different funding streams together (called blending and braiding funding) is the first step to increased accessibility for Black, Latino and Indigenous families. That鈥檚 because we have racial gaps in income and wealth. So, if you have a private program that is expensive and inaccessible to middle-income or lower-income families, that program is going to shut out a disproportionate share of Black, Latino and Indigenous families. There’s a hope that programs that do the blending and braiding will also consider racial equity and inclusion, and make their programs welcoming to children and families of color.

Hurley: Tell me about the project you鈥檙e working on to that end.

Potter: We鈥檙e building a list of early childhood programs that are doing different types of blending and braiding of funding, and are using that as a way to enroll children from diverse backgrounds, diverse socioeconomic backgrounds, but also diverse racial backgrounds, and in some cases linguistic diversity and diversity of ability. And part of that will be in-depth profiles of some programs. We鈥檙e hoping that showing examples of where a funding strategy has been leveraged to create diversity will help increase the appetite to do that, answer some questions about strategies that work, and also serve as an advocacy tool.

In most cases, blending and braiding really feels like pushing against the tide. If you are a Head Start provider and you want to enroll families who pay tuition, there aren’t a lot of supports to make that happen. If you’re at a private preschool and you’re interested in taking children with child care subsidies, again, it’s usually up to you to figure it out.

Stockstill: I hear quite a bit from directors who say, 鈥淲e accept the subsidy, but we don’t have any families using it.鈥� And if a family goes through an income loss or can’t make a payment, there are programs that want to be able to continue supporting them. And what I tell them is, 鈥淗aving a [mixed] funding structure is the answer.鈥� So, there’s this appetite for inclusion, but there are these missing links.

And there are parents who would like a diverse early learning environment. You just usually can’t find one, because we know two-thirds of these programs are segregated. I see it as being helpful to certain programs to offer an integrated program, and to kind of sell that as a plus to affluent parents who basically have more choice.

Hurley: What about the big chain child care programs like Kindercare, Bright Horizons and Primrose? Few of their centers take subsidies or vouchers and their tuition is often quite high, making them inaccessible to many families. Yet they鈥檙e capturing a bigger and bigger share of the child care market. Are you planning to look at what they might do to diversity their funding and families?

Stockstill: This category of child care that are chains that do franchising charge the highest tuition, and they do not pay teachers more. For them, it鈥檚 profit-seeking. And the administrative cost of blending and braiding funding streams, and also accepting the subsidy rate does not lend well to profit.

There’s always a gap between the subsidy rate 鈥� which is what the government offers you to provide care to a kid on the subsidy program 鈥� and what programs actually need to serve that kid well. And a lot of the successfully diverse programs like or All Five in Menlo Park, California, make up that difference, through fundraising, or they’ll charge affluent families even more and let them subsidize the diversity. But all of that takes a commitment and an administrative savviness that I don’t see the chains being interested in.

Hurley: Casey, you鈥檙e working on program profiles for this project. What have you seen on visits to diverse child care programs that makes you hopeful?听听

Stockstill: My favorite thing is hearing the stories of continuity of learning and care for the children. The Auraria Early Learning Center at the Auraria Higher Education Center in Colorado, serves student parents who are eligible for Head Start alongside faculty who pay full tuition. When the students graduate, they suddenly earn a higher income.

So they鈥檙e now past eligibility requirements for Head Start, but they can’t afford the $1,200 a month for care. If a family went to a pure Head Start program, they would have to move centers because they鈥檙e no longer eligible for Head Start. But because the program has mixed funding, their children can stay as they increase their income or the reverse, like if someone loses the job. It’s like, 鈥測ou still get to be in this school; you still deserve to come here; it’s not about how much money your family makes.鈥� I love that.

Are you a teacher or parent in a diverse child care program? Reach out to Halley Potter and Casey Stockstill by writing to potter@tcf.org.听

The sector in discussion is child care, and the discussion focuses on what can happen if private equity firms take over a larger share of the child care market. Slaughter was speaking on a panel at a day-long event in Washington D.C. to mark the by the National Women鈥檚 Law Center and Open Markets Institute: 鈥淐hildren Before Profits: Constraining Private Equity Profiteering to Advance Child Care as a Public Good.鈥澨�

The concerns about private equity鈥檚 influence are well founded. by researchers at Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers result in significant job losses. These firms reduce wages, benefits and staffing at firms they acquire 鈥� with devastating consequences to thousands of workers, their families and their entire communities. Private equity funds also should their tactics to maximize profits fail. And for a business like child care, primed to receive a possible influx of federal and state investment, private equity鈥檚 interest in the sector is likely to increase.

鈥淭he report isn鈥檛 anti-private equity, it鈥檚 pro-child care,鈥� said Melissa Boteach, vice president for income security and child care/early learning at the National Women鈥檚 Law Center and one of the authors of the report. Boteach and her co-author, Audrey Stienon from Open Markets Institute, advocate that child care should be understood as a public good that鈥檚 in need of sustained government investment. The report lays out a vision of how a robust child care system would provide universal access to high quality child care with appropriately compensated providers. The goal, says Boteach, is that if private equity firms, or other outside investors, are going to enter the child-care market, they should do so in a way that upholds this vision.

The timing of this report coincides with several states 鈥� including , and 鈥� instituting record levels of government investment in child care. from the First Five Years Fund also shows strong bipartisan voter support for more child care funding, with 93 percent of voters believing it鈥檚 important for working parents of young children to have access to affordable quality child care programs.

Private equity has a history of chasing after industries that receive sustained sources of federal funding. Eileen Applebaum, co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an , who also served as a panelist at the event, detailed the way in which private equity firms began investing in a substantial share of hospice care services. Much of hospice care is funded by Medicare, which pays a fixed amount to the hospice agency for each day an eligible Medicare beneficiary is enrolled, regardless of whether the patient receives actual services on a particular day.

Other tactics from the private equity 鈥減laybook鈥� as Applebaum discussed, include myriad anti-competitive behaviors, including consolidation, creating higher debt burdens, cutting labor costs and staff benefits, and enacting policies that maximize short-term profits to the private equity fund while passing on the liabilities and burdens to the individual companies they鈥檇 invested in. Applebaum points to the wide discrepancies in profits and patient care for hospice services: profit margins for a nonprofit hospice provider were around 4-5%, and for those owned by private equity firms, it was 19 percent. Nonprofits are more likely to use funds to invest in staffing and the business, debt-financed acquisitions to restructure these companies to maximize their profit margins, and try to sell them to the highest bidder within three to five years.

In the case of hospice, Applebaum that private equity hospice providers have higher rates of neglect, low staffing and are more likely to pass on the higher costs to patients and families.

Child care is in a unique position of being primarily a small business industry, with low profit margins yet with high demand because it is a necessity for many Americans to go to work and for the economy to function. 鈥淎 textbook example of a broken market鈥� is how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin in the United States. Yet if a child care center is forced to declare bankruptcy, the private equity company may still see a high return on the investment, even though the individual businesses may have shuttered, and the communities that rely on such child care centers may no longer have a viable option.

Boteach emphasized that the presence of private equity and the private sector itself is not problematic – and that the existence of more child care options with high quality care can be a profitable industry if sufficient government funding is provided. Often the individual child care centers are owned by women, many of them Black and brown, with strong ties to the communities they serve. Making such industries profitable so that they can pay their employees a living wage is a noble goal, she said. 鈥淭he problem,鈥� Boteach explains, 鈥渋s that private equity firms have a traditional playbook, whereby the firms collect the profits and pass the risk and liabilities back to the companies they鈥檝e taken over. And with the influx of possible public funding, external investors should have guardrails in place to protect the child care industry and the families they serve.鈥�

The report is coming out at a moment in which private equity is poised to enter the child care market, but it is 鈥渘ot yet entrenched,鈥� said Audrey Stienon of Open Markets Institute, and the report鈥檚 co-author. 鈥淚t is possible to get ahead of the problem and change patterns.鈥�

Experts encouraged action to counter the threats of private equity takeover. This can be done at both the state and federal level, though guardrails surrounding government funding.听Examples cited included to create standards and restrict profit for for-profit preschools that receive state funding. In Massachusetts, efforts are underway to limit the amount of state funding any larger company can receive. And for an industry like child care, which many families rely on for their own work, there is potential for real momentum in organizing parents to insist on such accountability measures for the involvement of outside investment groups like private equity. And as Rebecca Slaughter told the group, they need to bring such examples of poor conduct to the attention of the FTC. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 solve a problem if I don鈥檛 know about it,鈥� she said.

Child care may have a constituency that is primed to be vocal proponents. 鈥淧arents of children are a really good group of people to organize,鈥� said Eileen Applebaum.听 鈥淵ou have to let them know that they are not alone.鈥�

It鈥檚 been a years-long search for the right care provider, starting from the earliest days of my pregnancy. We talked to neighbors and friends about their child care experiences. There have been never-ending online searches, writing down the names of centers we see driving around town so we can look up reviews about them later, noting the names and numbers of providers that parents we meet at the library or the splash pad have liked to find out if they have openings.

I expected 鈥渟ticker shock.鈥� What I didn鈥檛 expect is needing to go on a virtual scavenger hunt to find even basic pricing information from the providers of interest.

Where my family lives in Southern Utah, there are just four child care providers listed on Winnie, a free database for parents to search for care providers in their area, with pages providers can claim and update with details about their offerings at no cost (providers can pay to upgrade their pages to contain more features and to show up higher in search results). Not one of the providers in my town lists the cost of care on their Winnie page. In St. George, the larger city next to us, 26 providers appear in a search, with just 2 listing their prices. One provider鈥檚 Winnie page lists its price as a huge range, between $450-$750 a month, which at least helped me to get some ballpark sense of cost. Unfortunately, in lieu of a price or a price range, most providers鈥� pages say simply, 鈥淐ontact this provider to inquire about prices and availability.鈥� My wife and I have emailed providers and left voicemails. Usually, we don鈥檛 hear back at all. It鈥檚 hard to make an educated decision when you don鈥檛 have all the information in front of you.

Until you鈥檝e been in a child care search, you may not fully appreciate just how frustrating it is to not readily find price tags for what will be one of your family鈥檚 greatest expenses and most important decisions. One way to test Treasury Secretary is to ask how you would react if something common in the child care sector were to take place in another equally vital industry, say in the search for a new vehicle.

Imagine walking around a car lot, looking for your family鈥檚 next sedan. Buying a car is critical to your ability to get to work, to earn a living, to your family鈥檚 livelihood. You need a car. You spot a couple options that look like the right size and style for your family. But instead of seeing a price painted on the windshield, you see the phrase: 鈥淚nquire for pricing.鈥� You go online to the automakers鈥� website and read a full sales pitch about the make and model of the cars of interest. They鈥檙e perfect. But can you afford it? Who knows? Finally, you contact the car dealership. A few days pass before you hear back from a sales person who says they鈥檒l walk you through the price of the cars when you come for a tour and test drive. After all this effort and taking time out of your schedule to visit the dealership, you finally see the price tag, only to realize you cannot afford the car you liked so much. This is often the experience of families searching for child care in America, where public funding is scant.

One of the many problems with child care as a private market is that providers, especially the largest ones with the most funding behind them, have far more power than the families they鈥檙e serving. Demand for high quality early care and education far exceeds supply, which means families are competing for much-coveted openings. For many families, child care is a necessity, critical to their ability to earn a living; and good, reliable child care is such a rarity that most families will feel forced to pay whatever the cost. But some families simply cannot, and there are increasingly stark divides between higher income families who can access paid child care services, and lower income families who cannot. found that 鈥渁mong parents with younger children, those with higher income were about twice as likely as those with lower or middle income to use 20 or more hours of paid child care per week.鈥� The lack of price transparency in the sector is a sign of a much larger problem with a profit-driven child care system and the way it ends up treating parents and caregivers alike.

Winnie鈥檚 CEO Sara Mauskopf says it鈥檚 unfortunate that many providers they encourage to update their pages are reluctant to list their prices directly, worrying that the 鈥渟ticker shock鈥� a parent feels when they see the cost initially will stop them from considering the provider. Mauskopf says the theory is that if you can get a parent in the door of the center and give them the opportunity to 鈥渇all in love鈥� with what they see, they鈥檒l be more likely to enroll their child, even if the price is high.

But Mauskopf says that鈥檚 a myth. 鈥淲hen it comes to child care,鈥� said Mauskopf, 鈥淵ou know what you can afford and you can’t really stretch much beyond your range. If some place costs twice as much as your range, there’s not really anything you can do to afford it. So, I think that is just the wrong philosophy.鈥�

In fact, internal data analyzed by Winnie suggests that providers who list their price on their Winnie page than those who do not, likely because people are more likely to pursue the provider once they know they can afford it. Mauskopf also says this hide-and-seek pricing model could only ever make sense for big providers, those with staff members who can give tours to prospective parents during the day, and field phone calls from people just inquiring about prices.

KinderCare, for instance, is the in the United States. Its is bright, inviting and laden with information on their approach to safety, care and education. But nowhere on the website are specific numbers about costs. Even on the individual web pages for specific KinderCare locations, like , which includes a button that says, 鈥淭uition and Openings,鈥� no actual tuition information appears.

I reached out to both KinderCare and another large provider, Bright Horizons, to ask why they don鈥檛 include pricing information on their websites, but they did not respond.

Mauskopf said not all providers approach pricing this way. Home-based providers or small center-based providers are less inclined to see the lack of price transparency as a strategic, marketing decision. They already have staff wearing multiple hats, acting both as teachers and as administrators. Needing to also act as tour guides and sales people to families who may not even have the budget to cover tuition is wasted time they can鈥檛 afford. For them, the bigger problem with listing their prices may be the burden of updating a website with their costs or even having a web presence to begin with. For most child care providers, whose labor and infrastructure costs alone are incredibly high, margins are too tight to afford a robust marketing team, or even a team that can stay in contact with the host of child care databases like Winnie about their prices and openings.

Dana Levin-Robinson started her company UpFront in 2020 to tackle this problem, as well as a host of problems with transparency in child care. She says private databases like Winnie are at a disadvantage when it comes to getting up-to-date pricing information from providers, simply because it鈥檚 hard to get their time and attention when they have so much else going on. She says individual consumers and private companies are both unlikely to have the leverage they need to get providers to share their data and to update it regularly.

Unlike private websites, resource and referral agencies have leverage. Government-operated resource and referral networks contract with UpFront to create user-friendly databases with search filters parents can use to find child care that truly works for them. They not only play a role in licensing providers, but they also connect providers in their networks with publicly funded resources and support. Additionally, Levin-Robinson has found, reaching out with clear, simple asks to providers makes the work of updating information much easier. Instead of emailing a contact with a list of required data fields, Levin-Robinson says, they鈥檝e had more success by being very specific and very simple, asking something like, 鈥淵ou previously listed your price for infant care as $300 a week. Is that the same or has it changed?鈥�

One of UpFront鈥檚 clients, the , has pricing data for 4,567 out of 6,256 providers they work with, an astonishing 72 percent of providers. Families looking for child care can search for providers in their area using dozens of different search fields and filters, to almost learn instantly who would and would not work for their family and their budget.

Ultimately, Levin-Robinson suggests, these resource and referral agencies would have even more leverage if transparency about pricing and regular updates a requirement for state licensing and renewal were, something state legislatures could consider enacting. I鈥檇 be relieved if my state had information as robust as Maryland鈥檚 available with the click of my computer mouse. But ultimately, price transparency is the tip of the iceberg in the ways the child care market has failed American families.

Last week, I sent a desperate, terse website inquiry to a center ten minutes from my house that didn鈥檛 list their price online but did offer me the chance to fill out an application that asked me to agree to a particular pay schedule before I even knew if I could afford it. 鈥淚鈥檓 wondering the price of care for a 15-month-old to see if it鈥檚 in my budget. Could you send your cost information?鈥� I wrote. To my surprise Karen, the center鈥檚 director, emailed me back within 24 hours. She answered my question directly 鈥� $80 a day or $260 a week 鈥� and said they had an opening three days a week for a one-year-old. If the price worked for my family 鈥� it was steep but no worse than we鈥檇 been anticipating 鈥� she said she鈥檇 be happy to give us a tour and answer any other questions we had.

A few days later, we went for our tour and fell in love with the child care center, something I鈥檇 begun to think would never happen. It was the facilities, the teachers, the way even the director and assistant director knew the names of every kid in their care, the way they spoke to us and took our questions seriously, and the environment of play and learning we saw as we poked our heads into each classroom.

I realized that what frustrates me most about our child care search isn鈥檛 just the lack of numbers. It was the way this whole experience seemed to disregard the humanity of everyone involved. We鈥檝e been forced to play a shell game in a process that is ultimately about the care and education of our baby, a subject about which we could not feel more tender and vulnerable. Meanwhile, caregivers are attempting to give their time and attention to our children, while also being asked to manage websites, tight budgets, grants and licensing, facilities maintenance and marketing strategies.

If a country truly invested in the care and education of young children 鈥� rather than leaving it to the private market and overstretched, overworked parents 鈥� child care pricing would not only be transparent, but simple and affordable. It would be abundant and easy to access in every neighborhood. Perhaps I could have saved myself the dozens and dozens of hours I have spent looking for child care since before my son was even born. With publicly funded child care, we could invest what amounts to a huge portion of our income we currently spend on child care in our son鈥檚 future. Maybe my stress levels would be lower and my health and happiness higher if figuring all this out and making it work weren鈥檛 constantly on my mind.

Maybe the teachers and caregivers who have dedicated their lives to this work would be paid what they deserve for caring for our communities鈥� youngest human beings and the parents who have entrusted them with their lives and development. Maybe we could all focus, first and foremost, on people.

While Helen Russell鈥檚 clever, well-researched exploration of the parenting culture of Denmark and other Nordic countries might not fully map onto the experience of most families in the U.S. or U.K. (Russell鈥檚 original home), it offers refreshing insights that can help parents relax a bit, give themselves heaps of grace and have much more fun raising their family. For societies like ours that are confronting crises in practically any arena that concerns our children, Russell鈥檚 deep dive into the 鈥淰iking way鈥� offers practical, doable approaches that entire nations have proven can work in creating healthy, happy families.

Russell had been in London, 鈥渓iving the city dream鈥� as an editor for MarieClaire鈥檚 U.K. online edition when her husband was offered his dream job working for Lego in Denmark. Both were feeling overworked, overwhelmed, burned out and ripe for a change. Denmark had just been voted the happiest country in the world (not for the first time) and she was intrigued. The couple emigrated and soon found themselves parents of 鈥渢he redhead and the IVF twins,鈥� which placed them in the thick of Nordic childrearing culture.

After 10 years in her new homeland, Russell still maintains sufficient outsider status to offer observations that are helpful, thought-provoking and sometimes hilarious. Her culture shock winds through anecdotes such as the reminder from her son鈥檚 Scout group that, 鈥淥n Wednesday, we build bonfires! Bring daggers,鈥� or the fact even in big cities, you鈥檒l see rows of 鈥渦nder threes鈥� bundled up in huge Mary Poppins-style prams no matter the weather while mom or dad runs inside for a latte or a sandwich. (It鈥檚 considered crucial for babies to be able to lie flat rather than be curled over in a buggy or car seat.)

The Nordic countries 鈥� Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden 鈥� share the Viking heritage, descendants of the seafaring folks who roamed (and yes, often marauded) across northern Europe from 800 to 1066 CE. Their hardiness is genetically baked in from those beginnings in a harsh environment, and culturally is encouraged today through common practices such as encouraging babies as young as two weeks to take in plenty of fresh air 鈥渢o help the lungs develop.鈥� Viking children live outside, Russell says, rain or shine. Given the local climate, this often means rain or worse. If the Nordic countries have a shared motto, it鈥檚 鈥淭here is no bad weather, there are just the wrong clothes.鈥�

Those of us who prefer the warmth of the hearth to unrelenting cold drizzle easily recognize Russell鈥檚 shock at the realization that not only will her children be splashing around in the cold and drear, she, too, will be expected to join in and actually play in all that mess. Viking parents volunteer. They go along. They get out there. Danish children are not issued the appropriate wardrobe at birth, she writes, but they might as well be. In some places, posters are put up reminding parents exactly what children need for each season, from the all-in-one snowsuit and Gore-Tex boots for winter, to the balaclava 鈥渆lephant hat鈥� that all children wear much of the year in varying thicknesses. Wind-resistant, waterproof and thermal clothing come in the smallest of sizes and are simply a fact of life. Luckily, she writes, the thriving hand-me-down culture means no one has to buy all that kit from scratch. Just look around鈥攁nd pass along whatever your kids grow out of.

In chapters running the gamut from Viking health and safety to school time, to singing and the social brain, Russell touches on many elements that create the unique Nordic approach to children鈥檚 lives 鈥� encouraging the risk-taking that fosters resilience and self-confidence; the idea that it鈥檚 great to cut loose, go wild and get dirty; the view that play is a sign of well-being; the necessity of developing grit, the freedom to mess up and learn from one鈥檚 mistakes 鈥� all go into creating happy, well-adjusted children.

It is a given in Nordic parenting that children will figure things out, learn to use their bodies and manage their surroundings. They are raised to trust themselves and others from the very beginning. Samfundssind, or community mindset, is the bedrock of Nordic society and from infancy, children are raised to consider the ethos of 鈥渢he greater good,鈥� even when it means a bit of discomfort for themselves. In Nordic society, fathers are parents and are expected to be involved in all aspects of their children鈥檚 upbringing. Real Viking dads change diapers and wouldn鈥檛 respect a father who didn鈥檛, she writes.

In each chapter, Russell offers observations that even the most urban, most non-Nordic parent can incorporate to create opportunities for greater freedom and self-reliance for their children, even at very young ages. Her tone is chatty, self-deprecating and sometimes veers a bit cute, but especially for new parents, “How to Raise a Viking” is a delightful, liberating handbook that encourages loosening our grip a bit, trusting our children and each other a lot, and helping our children grow into their richest, most authentic selves.

However, none of Russell鈥檚 great examples or clever observations would be sufficient for someone living in a non-Nordic country to raise a child gloriously expressing all the best Viking values. No matter how hard you might try to go it alone, you need a society that supports those values. A quick answer to 鈥淗ow do you raise a Viking?鈥� would be, live in a society that values children in real, practical, unwavering ways, not as entities deserving of lip service prior to elections, but as the bedrock of a society that intends to have a future. This is where policymakers might want to look at “How to Raise a Viking” and check out the lengthy citations in each chapter. It鈥檚 no secret that American society must make fundamental changes in how we support parents and children if we are to move forward in a functional, even sensible way. In “How to Raise a Viking,” resources abound that might help move that needle.

Reading Russell鈥檚 chapters on government-subsidized child care, parental leave, free healthcare, free education and free dental treatment and a work week that generally clocks in at 33 hours can make the reader wistful for why we can鈥檛 have nice things. Yes, taxes are high, but it鈥檚 hard to argue with the societal payoffs. (See 鈥渉appiest country in the world,鈥� above.)

Nordic society isn鈥檛 perfect. Some U.S. educators would no doubt take issue with how reading and academic achievement don鈥檛 really receive much emphasis until a child is 8 or so, though as Russell points out, children in Nordic countries play for longer, learn later, but still do better in the long run than children in the U.S. and U.K. 鈥� and are happier. There are clouds on the horizon, as children in Nordic countries are now getting smartphones and devices at earlier ages, which is causing as much headache and consternation there as it does over here.

In her Epilogue, Russell writes that she knows the idea of the Viking spirit isn鈥檛 a package of ideas that can be shipped and adopted wholesale; they are elements to strive toward. By 2050, she writes, economists predict that 40 percent of current jobs will be lost to automation. Right now, we simply don鈥檛 know what our jobs our children will be doing in their adulthood. But they will need resilience, adaptability, grit and the ability to think for themselves.

That鈥檚 the Viking spirit.

I about the strange schism between early child care and school-aged child care, and I don鈥檛 want to belabor the point other than to say parents of school-aged children represent a shockingly untapped care constituency. Instead, I want to talk about summer care, and summer camp specifically. I recently had the chance to do a podcast recording with the American Camp Association (ACA), alongside the outstanding economist Kathryn Anne Edwards. I also don鈥檛 want to get out ahead of the podcast, so I鈥檒l just say one part of the conversation that stood out to me was thinking about summer care needs as a door to movement-building. [UPDATE 6/7/24: The podcast is now live and available .]

After all, one of the major mindset barriers that holds back child care policy is the idea that child care needs are entirely individual family obligations, and thus the state has little-to-no role. I frequently quote a : 鈥渢he conceptual shift away from thinking about one鈥檚 situation as an individual problem or as a problem caused by fate or nature, to thinking about it as a social or public problem, is widely understood to be a necessary, if insufficient, condition for political action.鈥�

Summer care seems to offer many of the factors necessary for that conceptual shift. For one, it鈥檚 easy to see the absurdity of providing free public schools (and its child care) for seven hours a day, nine months out of the year, and then suddenly leaving a multi-month gap. While the discussion over how we got here is interesting, and has , the fact is summer鈥檚 a for millions and millions of families. This is also a distinctly American headache: journalist Katherine Goldstein recently in which she reported:

I was not able to find any other Western country that has the combination of long summer breaks, no mandated paid vacation time, minimal subsidized options and a dominant cultural belief that kids need constant supervision, especially in public places. Clearly articulating all of these factors really helps me understand how we find ourselves in Hunger Games-like registration battles and spending thousands per kid per summer, just so parents can continue their jobs (emphasis hers).

Moreover, summer camp has the advantage of nostalgia. Early child care is still fighting for its reputation, and there are plenty of Americans鈥攁s many as half, 鈥攚ho think young children have little business being cared for outside the home. Not so with summer camps. According to the ACA, more than 26 million kids attend a form of summer camp every year. that they look back on fondly decades after the fact; I know I do. It is what marketers might call an 鈥榚asy sell.鈥�

Finally, it鈥檚 worth noting that the falls heavily on middle- and upper-middle-class families. Lower-income families are from camp participation altogether due to things like cost, transportation and not being available to sit at a computer at 8 a.m. repeatedly hitting refresh as if trying to acquire a Taylor Swift concert ticket. Thus, there is a major opportunity for cross-class solidarity in improving summer care options. (Reducing the length of summer break is unlikely to be a viable lever: despite the summer scramble, year-round school by parents.)

It is not uncommon for less popular policy ideas to ride along with more popular ones. To use the example of a different ACA, the Affordable Care Act鈥檚 restriction on insurance companies discriminating due to preexisting conditions was one of the keys to its passage in the face of opposition. Child care has its own history here: as Sally Cohen details in on federal child care policymaking, the Child Care and Development Block Grant passed in 1990 largely as a 鈥渟idekick鈥� to the more-popular Earned Income Tax Credit. Yet as far as I鈥檓 aware, there is currently no major national proposal around summer child care.

I don鈥檛 want to overstate the case. Creating a comprehensive birth-to-13 child care system is going to be expensive and complex, and no one is going to be hoodwinked by including a robust mechanism for increasing the supply and affordability of summer camps. We still need to argue for early care and education on its own merits, and we should not pretend that early care needs and school-aged needs are identical. I wonder, though, if summer care shouldn鈥檛 be closer to the tip of the spear, rather than a forgotten cousin.

There鈥檚 a reason why women in this country feel that so much pressure rests on their shoulders, that parenting is hard, that too many expectations are heaped onto them and that if they don鈥檛 hold everything together Macgyver-like with pluck, grit, duct tape and dental floss, their worlds could fall apart.

The reason is because it鈥檚 true. Maybe not the part about the duct tape, but the reason so many women feel they must take on so much work and caregiving is that the United States doesn鈥檛 have a robust social safety net the way many other industrialized countries do. We have no federal child care infrastructure and no federal paid family leave plan. We鈥檝e skipped over the safety net chapter on how to run a country and instead, we rely on women to pick up the slack.

Calarco, who works as an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, made headlines in November 2020 when her quote: 鈥淥ther countries have social safety nets; the U.S. has women鈥� went viral. It resonated while still getting to the heart of what makes being a caregiver in this country so incredibly frustrating: it鈥檚 hard, it鈥檚 time-consuming and women are expected to do it while being given no support, financial or otherwise. It also served as the basis for Calarco鈥檚 new book, Holding It Together: How Women Became America鈥檚 Safety Net.

Calarco spoke with Early Learning Nation about everything from the outdated Supermom myth to the role humor plays in perpetuating misogynistic stereotypes.

A lightly edited and condensed Q+A is below.

Rebecca Gale: Your book talks about the United States鈥� insistence on maintaining the illusion of a DIY society 鈥� that each of us should make our own decisions and take care of our problems without help from anyone else. But given that people actually need caregiving support at some point in their lives, why do you think this illusion has endured for such a long time?听

Jessica Calarco: This DIY society is beneficial for the billionaires and big corporations and their supporters who profit from maintaining this idea and the illusion that we don鈥檛 need a social safety net. Think of the big universal systems – child care, health care – they cost money. Who is paying the costs? We would be raising taxes on very wealthy people and corporations, which is threatening to people as it reduces social inequality in ways that manipulate the rest of us: exploitation. They have an interest in maintaining the illusion that we can get by without maintaining a social safety net. There is this belief that goes along with supporting the DIY model that not having a social safety net makes us safer because we are likely to make better choices without that safety net.

RG: Really?

JC: Yes, this is the idea of neoliberalism economically. It originated in Austria in the 1930s, then was imported to the U.S. for manufacturers to use to push back against New Deal policies. They were imported to the U.S. and used to train economists like Milton Friedman, who then went on to shape policy for decades.

RG: So does this DIY model contribute to the way we value care and why women are expected to make up the difference?听

JC: Part of this gets back to the DIY model. If we don鈥檛 have a social safety net like universal child care and universal health care, we still need those kinds of care. Within this kind of system, care work is too intensive to be profitable. This quickly becomes unsustainable, which means that it鈥檚 not ever going to work within our profit-based economic system, without high levels of government investment, charging high costs to consumers, or exploiting people and paying too little for their work.

We have pushed the labor-intensive work disproportionately onto women. You can see that in industries like child care, home health care, services, retail and house cleaning. And we push this onto people who are highly vulnerable: women, prisoners and immigrants. We have an interest in this DIY model: the more we create conditions where people are forced to take the job reinforces the perception that this job must be less valuable.

Women hold 70 percent of the lowest wage jobs. The jobs held by women get further devalued over time. We treat care work as the moral or emotional benefit that must make up for what is not paid. So, you have this system where women are earning far less than men do.

RG: One framework you discuss in the book is that low-income women are unable to say no as they need the work, especially those in caregiving roles, so they say yes, even to situations that may be untenable to them.听

JC: Yes, we see this especially for low-income women, disproportionately women of color, who have nowhere to turn for support. It is a two-way trap. I give the example of a woman named Patricia in the book. She鈥檚 a low-income Black mother who has a number of young children, also working a full-time job. She is carrying the burden on that front. She decides to cut back to working four days instead of five. Once her extended family finds out she has the day off, she winds up driving folks to the grocery store and doctors鈥� appointments. She wants to find a way to say no, but says “I鈥檓 their only hope.”

We have decimated communities so they have so few resources to go around. They know the people they love have nowhere else to turn. Patricia worries, 鈥榳hat if I need help one day?鈥� She ended up divorcing her partner, had five young kids at home, including newborn twins, and when she was home recovering from a c-section, she ended up needing that support from her network. She was glad she had not pushed them away at that moment and opted instead to help the other people around her as well.

RG: You have an entire chapter devoted to this concept of 鈥淕ood Choices Won鈥檛 Save Us.鈥� I know that ties into the neoliberalism you mentioned earlier, but let鈥檚 unpack that further. Is the idea that if people made the right choices, they鈥檇 never have a need for a social safety net?

JC: Yes, exactly. This gets back to the idea of the Neoliberal myth of the DIY society. Neoliberal economic theory states that societies are better off without a social safety net because if people don鈥檛 have a net to protect them from risk, they will be less likely to engage in risky behavior. The less protection you have, the better choice you make. This has been fully debunked – a social safety net does protect people.

People are told, if you just make good choices, you will be fine: marriage, college, a STEM education, waiting to have kids. The appeal of that kind of mythology makes sense. In such a precarious world, it feels good to have a sense of agency. The problem is that correlation is not causation. The model that we have is based on the people who are able to make good choices. If someone is able to get married, buy a house, go to college and get a degree in a STEM field, they may have better outcomes but it most likely has to do with the fact that they had the privilege to make the decisions in the first place. It鈥檚 not that choices don鈥檛 matter, but we have to be cognizant of the level of privilege to make those choices that we equate with the path to success.

RG: What about childbirth? That鈥檚 a pretty binary viewpoint. Plenty of people undergo all the risks involving gestating and birthing children, and have little control over those outcomes.听

JC: This is why this kind of model deeply ignores that there are risks that good choices can鈥檛 manage. Whether it鈥檚 childbirth or environmental risks with climate change, there are plenty of risks we can鈥檛 manage as individuals. This kind of messaging runs the risk of gaslighting people. They should be able to figure out what the choices are and how to protect themselves from risk.

We see this with mothers and adverse outcomes in childbirth and child rearing. As if there is a right choice to make, and it鈥檚 your fault if you didn鈥檛 figure it out and make it.

RG: Let’s talk about the sexism jokes. Your book explains that some men rely on humor to cover their own misogynistic tendencies, and you鈥檝e posited that such humor actually makes things worse. Why is that?

JC: These were two pieces that were surprising to me. When I talked to men about the inequalities in their lives, they were quick to write it off as a joke. Even when they were making choices that looked deeply egalitarian, it was treated with a level of humor and a lack of seriousness.

I did a lot of reading and research on gender and sexism in the context of humor. Couching sexism in humor makes it more poisonous, because it becomes more palatable to men who can buy into the ideas without thinking of themselves as bad people. It also makes it harder for the women to push back. They鈥檙e told: 鈥楽top being a nag. Can鈥檛 you lighten up?鈥�

Sexist humor seems benign, though I would argue it can be deeply damaging. It is harder for women to push back in their context of the relationship and broader society they鈥檙e part of.

RG: Can you give an example?

JC: Andrew Tate is a former Mixed Martial Arts fighter turned YouTuber who is banned from a number of different public platforms for his misognystic messaging, like 鈥榃omen should be men鈥檚 property in marriage.鈥� One of the problems with that is that if he is able to write it off as a joke, it makes it harder for those who have been harmed by that rhetoric. It gives men an easier way to buy into the softer ideas by saying 鈥榓t least I don鈥檛 believe the extreme version of it.鈥�

RG: My favorite chapter in your book is the one that concentrates on the Supermom Myth. Why do you think this myth persists, even as so much research and general wisdom seems to contradict that idea that women should be doing it all?

JC: We tell women in our society that they are the best protectors for children. If all else fails, it is their responsibility to make sure children are safe. In a society with a lot of risk, there鈥檚 a lot to protect them from.

This kind of messaging鈥攚here women are supposed to view motherhood as the top protector from the threats of the world鈥攊s that it primes them for fearmongering. It can persuade women that they need to go above and beyond. Some are cloaked in religious messaging like Critical Race Theory, or transgender kids and public schooling, or similar fear mongering along those lines.

It can take more secular forms too, like the fear of downward mobility; the idea that if听you don鈥檛 get into the right college your life will be a disaster, or if you don鈥檛 have that investment banking job, your life will be ruined.

These fears can lead mothers to sacrifice themselves. Even if they have the resources for full-time child care, these fears can lead them to decide to stay home full time, believing that is the way to protect the child.

RG: But why are mothers the ones to shoulder this burden?

JC: We have these twisted ideas about biology because women have historically done that work, as opposed to recognizing the socialization influences. For example, girls are trained to be mothers from the time they can hold a baby doll. All the evidence suggests that young girls are pushed into these responsibilities at a young level.

With early socialization, these roles get more ingrained and it becomes easier for women to do that work. In the Supermom Myth, if moms have the most experience managing the responsibility, it can feel threatening if dad isn鈥檛 doing it as well. One of the saddest things we found about the pandemic research was the way angry dads were exacerbating the situations at home.

We did a big national survey in September 2020, and asked how often are you yelling at your kids? For college-educated white fathers, the numbers were off the chart. Those are the dads that were able to work remotely during the pandemic. In couples where both parents could work remotely part of the time, dads didn鈥檛 have the experience of working for pay while caring for children, which led to high levels of frustration. In one example from the book, on the days a dad was home he was angry, yelling at the kids. He didn鈥檛 have that kind of experience to navigate the challenges, so the mom was deeply worried and took on all the child care herself.

RG: When people read this book, and as you lay out all the concerns for the way we structure society so that an undue burden falls on women to act as the social safety net, what鈥檚 your takeaway?

JC: We have managed to maintain this illusion of a DIY society by pushing the risk and responsibilities onto women. Some women, often more privileged women, are able to push that risk onto underprivileged women. But the engineers and profiteers of this system have managed to persuade enough of us that the system works, which makes it incredibly hard to create the safety net that we need and deserve.

People are inclined to secure the resources to protect their own families even if it comes at the expense of others.听We need to be up front about how a better social safety net could help to improve all of our lives – even as it reduces some of the inequalities between us.

My hope is that by understanding this system, it can help people see where this DIY model comes from and how it鈥檚 hurting all of us, especially women. We need to demand a system that can work better for everyone, and reject some of the myths that tend to delude and divide us.

And that鈥檚 a good thing, says Dr. Susan B. Neuman, professor of childhood and early literacy at New York University, even if a parent or caregiver feels as though they might crack if they read their toddler “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?“听one more time. Repetition is one of the elements that help connect children not only with words but with the world those words create.

Neuman has researched and written extensively on literacy learning for young children. Her paper for the journal Contemporary Educational Psychology, 鈥�,鈥� examines an intervention designed to improve low-income children鈥檚 vocabulary and knowledge in science.

In choosing books for the study, Neuman says, one of the criteria was the book鈥檚 鈥渞epeatability.鈥�

鈥淲e wanted short reads,鈥� Neuman says, 鈥渙nes where the child could say, 鈥極h, that was so much fun. Read it to me again!鈥� And that鈥檚 when you say to yourself, 鈥楢ll right. I鈥檝e made it.鈥� 鈥�

The year-long study involved pre-K through first grade classrooms in 12 elementary schools with from 71% to 100% free-and-reduced lunches (a community poverty measurement) in a large metropolitan area. Classrooms were randomly selected to participate in a supplemental program in which the children were read aloud to about science topics. The control classrooms simply offered the usual curriculum; the study鈥檚 total sample included 24 intervention classrooms and 21 control classrooms. Before classes began, pre-K and kindergarten teachers for the intervention classrooms participated in a day of training to review the texts to be used and examine how the topics built on one another to establish big ideas in science. Teachers in each school were assigned a coach responsible for supporting the intervention throughout the year.

The results were noteworthy: Children in the read-aloud group learned significantly more words and science concepts than those in the control groups, with growth for English language learners (ELL) exceeding that of native speakers.

More than Words

has long been a passion for Neuman, who helped bring public attention to the fact that exist in the U.S. in which there are virtually no books for children living in poverty. Indeed, poverty is one of the most powerful determinants of whether a child is ready to learn to read at the 鈥渟tarting gate鈥� of preschool and kindergarten. In the late 1990s, acknowledging the 鈥渨ord gap鈥� experienced by children in poverty helped spur interest in foundational skills such as print concepts (for instance, that we read from left to right in English), word recognition and phonics, Neuman says. But even recognizing and addressing the word gap fails to tell the whole story. Before they reach kindergarten, the average cognitive score of children in the nation鈥檚 highest socioeconomic group is 60% above the score of children in the lowest-income group鈥攁n even deeper problem for children who are non-native English speakers, who now represent nearly one in five U.S. students.

Learning to read and acquire knowledge is a cumulative process. As children begin to grow their vocabulary and gain conceptually rich knowledge, they鈥檙e then able to learn at a faster rate, a snowball effect that enables them to keep deepening their understanding of the world. So, while the focus on teaching children fundamentals and phonics was important, Neuman said she and her team were concerned by how little interest there seemed to be in vocabulary-building and seeing to it that children developed the background knowledge so central for comprehension.

鈥�(For a long time) there was the notion that children should just learn words without them being connected to knowledge,鈥� she says. 鈥淓ven when I went to school, we would have this list of words to learn, and we鈥檇 have to look up their definition in a dictionary. But we never knew exactly why we were doing this.

鈥淲hy should a child learn to read? Why would they want to do this?鈥�

One very good answer to that question? Science!

鈥淥ur study focused on science for a number of reasons,鈥� Neuman says. 鈥淐hildren are fascinated with their world. They鈥檙e interested in their environment; they鈥檙e fascinated with such common things as the weather. Worms are interesting. Animals are interesting. Everything is new.

鈥淢ath is important, but to a young child, it isn鈥檛 as intriguing as science. Also, science is very structured as a domain, so you can use it to develop concepts. When you develop concepts, you begin to cluster ideas together and children begin to make inferences,鈥� Neuman explains.

She adds, 鈥淔or example, a child might learn that insects have six legs and three body parts. Is a moth an insect, then? Yes. Well, what about a spider? Well, no, because spiders have eight legs. The child begins to understand similarities and differences, which form concepts that provide them with the rich knowledge base that allows them to fill in those semantic gaps where the meaning may not be crystal clear, but you fill in the blanks. That鈥檚 how children begin comprehending.鈥�

From concepts like, 鈥淏ugs have six legs,鈥� the conversation expands to domains, such as 鈥淏ugs are living things; lions are living things. What do living things need?鈥� That discussion leads to big ideas that crosscut the concepts, such as all living things needing food, water and air. And from there, it isn鈥檛 long until you鈥檙e talking with a bunch of kindergartners about habitats.

鈥淲hat you see them doing is building a schema, or a knowledge network that allows them to remember those concepts and recall them when they鈥檙e needed,鈥� she says. 鈥淲hen they learn about survival, for instance, and they read in different genres, they have that knowledge of vocabulary that becomes deeper and deeper over time.鈥�

Reading Aloud

The researchers set up the study as a read-aloud program because studies have shown that this is one of the most important vehicles for developing rich vocabularies and content knowledge. Before the children can read on their own, a teacher or parent reading to them introduces the idea that those squiggles on the page are words, those images are connected to the squiggles, and they can learn to read those squiggles, too.

鈥淣othing else is quite as powerful as the read-aloud experience,鈥� Neuman says. 鈥淲hat we know is that very often when parents read to a child, they鈥檙e not just reading the book, they鈥檙e talking about things related to the book 鈥� how they鈥檙e living, what they鈥檝e done. For instance, a parent might say, 鈥楧o you remember when we did this?鈥� The book will recall events and histories between the parent and child, which becomes so powerful for them.

鈥淎nd when a child is looking at a book and asking questions, the parent responds, and the questions keep coming. So, parents need to be responsive to children鈥檚 queries.鈥�

Those questions and answers create our old friend, , the back-and-forth mechanism that adults use to extend children鈥檚 language.

It鈥檚 also important, Neuman says, to call it quits when the book isn鈥檛 working for the child. Nobody wants bedtime book-reading to be like soldiering through a bad book-club selection.

The Right Book

The researchers used specific criteria to select books for the program, Neuman says.

1. The books had simple text, with beautiful, simple pictures that represented the diversity of the children they were working with.
2. The books were 鈥減redictable,鈥� meaning they had repeated lines that would encourage the children to chime in and would encourage the reader to solicit the child鈥檚 response, 鈥淲hat do you see?鈥�
3. The illustrations were clear. Neuman says even many pre-K books that may have only a few main words often have confusing illustrations. Clear illustrations with bold colors are best because children love bold colors and will pay attention to them.
4. Keep it simple and short. 鈥淎 lot of times, parents make a mistake by selecting something a bit too complicated for children,鈥� she says. 鈥淭hey鈥檒l look and see that it鈥檚 a picture book. But you need to look inside and if there鈥檚 too much detail or too many words, maybe pass on that one. I鈥檇 rather read, repeat and read the story again than have a too-complicated book that loses the child鈥檚 interest.鈥�

Nonfiction for the Win

Though some adults may think children need storybooks with cute animals and characters to pique their interest, Neuman says the research shows that they鈥檙e equally interested in informational, nonfiction or narrative nonfiction texts.

鈥淲e just did an eye-tracking study where we were looking at children鈥檚 attention as they鈥檙e being read to,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very clear from our study that they like informational text just as much as storybooks and their attention was high with both genres. Yet, they remembered more, and the learning was stronger from the informational text. So, I encourage parents and teachers to think about that.鈥�

The bottom line, Neuman says, is that children need both word and world (content knowledge) to learn to read and understand complex texts in later grades. Starting early is crucial, and children learn to understand words when they hear them frequently over time and in multiple domains.

So go ahead; start from the top. And again.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see 鈥�

These are magic words for Alvin Irby, a former teacher and the founder and executive director of Created in 2013, Barbershop Books is a nonprofit organization that distributes books to barbershops across the country, provides literacy training to barbers and inspires Black boys to read for fun.

A chance encounter with a student was the inspiration behind Barbershop Books. While Irby was getting a haircut, he noticed one of his first-grade students looking bored and antsy in the chair sitting next to him. 鈥淎ll I kept thinking the whole time was he should be practicing his reading right now. I wished I had a children鈥檚 book to give him, but I didn鈥檛,鈥� said Irby. As a Black man and an educator, Irby recognized that a barbershop setting presents a unique opportunity for educational support and enrichment.

Barbershops are not simply places where Black boys get a haircut a few times each month, but rather, places where they bond with and learn from Black men. According to the Pew Research Center, of public school teachers are Black men. Irby believes that an absence of Black reading role models at school and at home can contribute to decreased reading motivation and poor reading performance, but barbers can help close the gap by encouraging young boys to read.

Instead of rifling through old magazines, boys at participating barbershops can choose from a wide range of stimulating, funny books geared toward children. The bookshelves are intentionally kid-sized, and the material is chosen based on the recommendations of young Black boys. Barbershop Books has distributed over 50,000 books and partnered with over 250 barbershops in over 50 cities. 鈥淓very inch in a barbershop is valuable real estate, so if a barbershop owner lets you keep something in their shop, it is generally because it adds value. So the fact that we have all these barbershops that continue to remain program partners year after year is a testament to the efficacy and the value of the program,鈥� said Irby.

This year, to sponsor Barbershop Books programming in 10 new participating barbershops in Las Vegas. During Super Bowl week, the NFL Commissioner and 20 former NFL players helped them give away free haircuts and more than 1,000 children’s books. Although the program is intentionally non-rostered and its drop-in nature makes it challenging to quantify the number of boys Barbershop Books impacts, the organization estimates it reaches 15,000 boys annually. One of those boys, , is a ten-year-old from Harlem and a former New York State Youth Poet Laureate who is often found reading at his local barbershop.

Watch:

Although Irby is the leader of an organization dedicated to inspiring kids to read for fun, he admits that he did not enjoy reading as a child. His mother was an elementary school teacher who practiced reading lessons with him and expected him and his siblings to read proficiently, but he never saw her curl up and enjoy a good book. Irby now recognizes that there is an important distinction between reading identity and reading proficiency. When people hear about Barbershop Books, they typically think that the program helps kids develop a love of reading. Irby believes children can fall in and out of love with interests, just like adults, but when kids identify as readers it becomes a part of who they are and their regular practices and habits. The organization鈥檚 work, therefore, 鈥渋s not just to help kids develop a love for reading, but to create the type of conditions and curate the type of content that cultivates Black boys鈥� reading identity.鈥�

Susan B. Neuman, professor of Childhood and Literacy Education at New York University and specialist in early literacy development, conducted a two-year evaluation of the Barbershop Books program in Philadelphia. In a new report exclusively shared with Early Learning Nation, Neuman found that the presence of books at participating barbershops and barbers鈥� support for reading positively affected self-image and Black boys were more likely to identify as readers. The study divided barbershops into control and treatment sites and worked with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) students to observe children’s behavior and reading patterns. The treatment sites were given a bookcase filled with books geared toward children, and barbers received literacy training.

Neuman says, 鈥淪tudents appeared to benefit from the program in their views of reading as fun and cool, and scored statistically higher in identifying themselves as readers compared to the control group.鈥� That finding is particularly meaningful for Irby. Barbershop Books has been cultivating the reading identity of Black boys for the past decade, but this is the first time that independent research has shown how their programming impacts reading behavior. To Irby鈥檚 knowledge, this is the first time an organization has demonstrated that an intervention has significantly impacted the reading identity development of children.

Books at participating barbershops are all 鈥渂oy-approved,鈥� meaning selections are made based on what children in Barbershop Books鈥� target demographic are most interested in reading. The vast majority of boys express that they enjoy reading funny books. Survey results from Scholastic鈥檚 echo this trend. Scholastic found that and that humor is the top criteria that kids consider when selecting their reading material.

Funny, silly books can make reading a fun and positive experience for children and encourage them to read more often. It seems like a simple formula: understand what kids like and make that content more readily available to boost reading engagement. However, Irby believes that 鈥渕any adults have opinions about what children should be reading, and far too often those opinions are not informed by the actual interests or preferences of children.鈥� That鈥檚 one of the reasons he created Reading So Lit, a reading identity exploration and assessment platform that helps children better understand and articulate their reading preferences. The tool asks children about their interests and invites them to reflect on things like their favorite genre or their favorite reading spot in an effort to capture their reading attitudes and behaviors. The platform collects data that helps educators develop curriculum that is more relevant and engaging for students and can accelerate their reading achievement. Last year, Reading So Lit and was recognized as a catalyst in the field.

Barbershop Books recently launched 鈥淩eading So Lit Summer.鈥� This virtual 2-week reading identity exploration program inspires boys to read for fun, and trains high school students of color to lead interactive literacy lessons. In turn, the program can inspire more Black teens to become educators and give young boys relatable literacy role models. The program has already made a profound impact. Teacher and caregiver surveys from the pilot program found that 鈥淩eading So Lit Summer鈥� increased student vocabulary and world knowledge, increased reading self-efficacy and confidence, improved reading engagement and motivation, and supported positive reading identity development.

Our nation is in the midst of a literacy crisis that requires innovative solutions. of Black fourth-grade boys in the United States are not proficient in reading, and reading scores have fallen to their lowest levels in decades. It is time to think beyond phonics and boosting proficiency scores and to understand what kids are actually interested in reading, the conditions in which they like to read, and how to make reading a natural part of children鈥檚 routines.

鈥淚f as soon as the school day ends kids don’t want to touch a book, and as soon as the school year ends and they are not reading anything at all, then a lot of those gains in proficiency are lost,鈥� said Irby. That is precisely why Barbershop Books is 鈥渦napologetically鈥� and 鈥渄oggedly鈥� focused on reading identity development. The organization is part of an emerging field that emphasizes the non-academic elements of reading success such as reading identity, confidence and motivation that have not traditionally been the focus of literacy assessments. These elements are essential for sustaining reading progress and encouraging kids to read for fun and for themselves. Irby believes that cultivating reading identity is especially important in this time of budget cuts, library closures and book bans so that children are motivated to read outside of school hours and are passionate about reading regardless of external factors.

Barbershop Books has taken a unique, innovative approach that helps kids develop a lifelong relationship with reading and empowers them to say words that unlock a world of possibilities, 鈥淚鈥檓 a reader!鈥�

These moments of connection are sweet, emotional encounters, but researchers know they are much more. Research scientists at the University of Washington鈥檚 (I-LABS) recognize this 鈥渟ocial ensemble鈥� as the nascent that lay down the pathway to language 鈥� the gateway to connection, education and the world of ideas. Given that these distinctive interactions appear to be universal and uniquely human, I-LABS researchers wondered what their developmental purpose could be. What they found was not only that the babies鈥� brains 鈥渓it up鈥� during these interactions, but that the degree to which individual babies responded to social interactions predicted the child鈥檚 language growth beyond 2-陆 years of age.

鈥淲hat we were trying to see is whether that social ensemble 鈥� the parentese, the warm smiles, the touches, and the back and forth that says you’re paying attention 鈥� has a (developmental) goal in addition to the emotion that鈥檚 connecting these two people,鈥� says Dr. Patricia Kuhl, I-LABS鈥� co-director, and holder of the Bezos Family Foundation Endowed Chair in Early Childhood Learning, who led a groundbreaking longitudinal study linking infants鈥� individual brain responses to social interactions and their future language development.

Using a magnetoencephalography () brain-imaging device 鈥� a safe, silent, noninvasive technique I-LABS has tailored for studying infants 鈥� the researchers monitored the brains of a group of 5-month-old infants during social and nonsocial interactions with an adult. The researchers then followed up with the children at 18, 21, 24, 27 and 30 months. Their findings were published in the April issue of and represent the first such study to track the relationship between infants鈥� social responses and their language acquisition.

Arriving Ready for Language

Even before they produce their first words, infants are learning phonetic sound patterns. They come into the world able to pick out the human sounds that make up words in any language. Previous independent studies have shown that there is a 鈥渟ensitive period鈥� for phonetic learning between 6 months and one year when these initial universal phonetic capacities narrow down and become specific to their native languages.

鈥淭esting the babies at 5 months was important because we were trying to establish that this social connection that lights up the baby鈥檚 brain and gets them ready to learn comes first and sets them up for when this sensitive period begins,鈥� says Kuhl, the study鈥檚 lead author. 鈥淭he social interaction is of cognitive importance and gets the baby ready for what鈥檚 coming around six months. The exaggerated face and silly-sounding speech (the 鈥榚nsemble鈥�) come intuitively and are the original 鈥榟ook鈥� that pulls them and primes them for the learning to come.鈥�

For the study, Kuhl says, researchers set the infants up in the MEG device and an adult female researcher engaged with the baby, speaking in parentese and reacting warmly back and forth using the tried-and-true adult-baby call and response. For the experiment鈥檚 nonsocial control, the researcher would then turn and speak to another adult seated just out of the infant鈥檚 view. The intention was to capture typical social interactions that babies experience regularly in their home environments.

The researchers鈥� findings showed that at 5 months, face-to-face social verbal interaction between an infant and an adult who鈥檚 sensitive to the baby鈥檚 cues significantly increases the child鈥檚 brain activity in regions involved with attention, compared with a nonsocial control. Even more exciting to those interested in babies鈥� language learning, the scientists found that babies鈥� individual levels of brain activity during the social interactions showed a strong positive association with their subsequent language skills.

鈥淣ot all children鈥檚 brains lit up to the same degree to the social ensemble,鈥� Kuhl says. 鈥淭heir social attention is different. The ones with more social attention learned language faster.鈥�

The Joy of Face-to-Face

Kuhl says the researchers knew from previous studies that social interaction 鈥� rather than, say, watching a video or app 鈥� is essential for language learning. The current study shows that parents鈥� natural use of parentese, coupled with smiles, touch and their warm volley and return captures infants鈥� attention at an early age and makes them ready to latch onto language when that sensitive window opens around 6 months.

The researchers didn鈥檛 use the children鈥檚 parents in this study because they were concerned their history of interaction might color the babies鈥� responses, nor did they have the researcher turn from the baby to use a smartphone or device because they have seen in other research how upsetting that is to the babies. The researcher interacting with the babies had not met them before the experiment began but started the kind of natural interaction with them that might occur in the grocery store or when other adults drop over for a visit. She cooed back and forth with the baby, then, on cue, looked away to interact with another researcher 鈥渙ffstage鈥� for a moment. On another cue, she turned back to the baby and began the social interaction again.

The babies鈥� little brains loved all that attention and weren鈥檛 happy (as observed by MEG鈥檚 neural light show) when they were being ignored. Some babies鈥� brains really sparked at the social interaction and those were the babies who, by 2-陆 years, showed the greater vocabularies and more sophisticated use of language.

This doesn鈥檛 mean that babies have to be attended to at all times or they鈥檙e going to lose out on language skills, Kuhl is clear to state. No helicopter parenting here!

鈥淭hat would be the wrong message to take from this research,鈥� she says. 鈥淧art of these interactions鈥� special nature is that they only come occasionally. The interaction is there, then it goes away, and next time it comes, it鈥檚 like Christmas 鈥� something to be anticipated and excited about. So, parents shouldn鈥檛 stress and think, 鈥極h my gosh, here鈥檚 one more thing I have to think to do.鈥� Its magic is that it鈥檚 unexpected and babies are overjoyed by that.鈥�

More Questions, More Studies

As good studies do, this one has prompted almost as many questions as it鈥檚 answered. For one thing, researchers want to know about what鈥檚 happening with the brains of babies whose mothers are dealing with clinical depression.

鈥淚n mothers who have clinical depression, you don鈥檛 see the smiles, the parentese and the warm interactions,鈥� Kuhl says. 鈥淭here are all kinds of issues with these children, one of which is a depressed affect and a slow growth of language.鈥�

The current study also points to a greater understanding of autism and draws attention to other research, such as that of Dr. Karen Pierce of t he University of California San Diego, et al, showing that babies鈥� reduced attention to parentese can both contribute to downstream language and social challenges, and help diagnose toddlers with autism spectrum disorder.

鈥淲hen (Pierce) tests young children who are at risk for autism (because they have a sibling with autism) with a social versus nonsocial stimulus 鈥� such as people interacting versus cars or just sound 鈥� the children with autism tend not to like social, people-oriented stuff,鈥� Kuhl says. 鈥淎nd the more they tend not to, the more severe their clinical symptoms for autism are.鈥�

Another fascinating study in the I-LABS pipeline is the differences between mothers and fathers in their deployment of parentese. Preliminary research indicates that men are talking to their babies only 25 percent of the time, compared with mothers. They do use the social ensemble to interact with babies, but ongoing research is looking at whether fathers stop using parentese earlier in the child鈥檚 development, and if they do, why that may be the case.

奥丑补迟鈥檚 that about? We鈥檒l have to stay tuned.

Meanwhile, we can go ahead and indulge our impulse to engage in that silly social way with babies and know that we aren鈥檛 just forming emotional connections; we鈥檙e helping open their pathway to life with other humans.

鈥淚 suppose if you were on an island by yourself and had all the survival skills you needed to discover food, water and shelter, you might be able to survive as an isolate,鈥� Kuhl says. 鈥淏ut everything we know about human beings is that we inherently crave connection with each other. And language is the gateway to any communicative connection we have. It鈥檚 our social-emotional glue.鈥�

So when Elliot approached me about the he was working on regarding the role private equity plays in shaping the child care industry, I knew he was on to something. What followed was a deeply reported, thoroughly investigated and meticulously fact-checked piece which ran on Early Learning Nation in April.

To follow up, Elliot and I recently conducted a fireside chat webinar, again hosted by Early Learning Nation, in which he had a chance to explain his findings and outline his vision for a potential way forward.

What follows is a condensed and edited version of our Q+A.

Rebecca Gale: Elliot, many of us know that you are a prolific writer, but a piece of investigative journalism like this is different from your normal byline articles. Could you tell us a bit about how and why you decided to pursue this topic on child care and private equity, and what your process has been to conduct such research and digging, and the sense of fact checking for such a piece?

Elliot Haspel: Back in 2022 when many of the pandemic effects on the child care system were still raging acutely, I started to see a couple of headlines pop up about some of the large corporate chains acquiring sites and continuing to grow.听I sort of figured in my mind this question of well, there always seems to be a 2-tier system where the chains are having a different experience than everyone else.

And when you start looking into it, you start to realize interesting things. Eight of the 11 largest chains by capacity are owned by private equity firms. And a ninth used to be run by a private equity firm and is now publicly traded on the stock market.听And that’s a fascinating feature that almost no one was really talking about.

So I published a with some information about that.听And then the next month in December, 2022, the looking at private equity and child care, and also revealing for the first time some information about the political activity of those chains when it came to the efforts to improve the child care system.

But there were more questions here. How were these chains making money? What does this mean for parents, for educators and for kids on the ground in a very real way?

It took me about six months to research and write this piece for Early Learning Nation, with a combination of using all my networks to try to identify folks who were current or former employees of private equity-owned companies and were willing to speak, looking at financial records, legal filings and just compiling all of that.

We engaged an independent experienced fact checker to vet it and an editor who had experience doing investigative pieces like this.

We really took this through a lot of different iterations to make sure that what we finally published was something that we feel proud of and can stand behind.

RG: One thing I admired about your piece is that it included a bit of something I called private equity 101, explaining how these firms work and how they can make a lot of profit in the short term in industries that are not usually considered very profitable, like child care specifically. And yet they do make money. One of the lines that stuck out to me is that private equity firms, and I’m quoting this, 鈥淒on’t need to serve the whole market. They only need to serve the profitable parts of the market.鈥� Can you walk us through what that looks like?

EH: The number one question I get when I talk about this is: why is private equity even interested in child care? All we hear about is how financially difficult child care is as a sector. Programs can barely keep the lights on and educators are getting paid next to nothing. It’s incredibly expensive for parents. So, who is possibly making money off this?

What I found is there’s a playbook that鈥檚 worked in many other sectors for private equity, including nursing homes, autism services and prison services. The playbook shows five main ways that these companies are making enough money to return the profit private equity firms are looking for, which according to The New York Times can be up to 15% to 20% profit margins.

The first one is targeting an affluent clientele. These chains tend to want to serve middle, upper-middle and truly affluent families, then they charge them a lot.

Second, there is a real push to maximize enrollment because in this country we treat child care much more like a private market good, right? So, the number of enrolled families you have is the amount of revenue 鈥� that’s the multiplier to the amount of revenue that you’re getting. There鈥檚 lots of pressure to always keep enrollment as high as possible.

And you can lower your operational costs as much as possible. These chains don’t tend to pay their employees considerably better than the ones that aren’t making this kind of profit.听I found in some cases teachers were asked to basically reduce the number of sheets of paper per day they were giving kids, and chains were shifting daily cleaning responsibilities from outside companies to teachers.

A third way is you can engage with institutions. Corporations, public, local and state governments, and universities and colleges are all clients that tend to work with these large chains when they’re providing onsite child care for their employees.

A fourth way to make money is real estate. For many child care programs, one of the best financial assets they have is owning their building. And the common private equity tactic is to have the child care center sell off their property. But the proceeds of that sale do not generally go back to the site; they generally go up to the private equity firm so now the site must lease back the property previously owned. The center now has a line of debt that it must pay, which can be more than a mortgage.

The fifth way, which is really constrained just to the franchise chains, are the ones that require franchise fees and royalties.

So, when you combine this basket of different profit-making strategies, you can start to see, okay, there actually is a path to making profit in child care. But that’s not one that tends to be pursued by independent community-based programs.

RG: One quote from Elizabeth Leiwant from Neighborhood Villages asks, 鈥渉ow would you feel if I told you that Morgan Stanley owns your child’s elementary school?鈥� And when I read this, I actually laughed out loud because we have this expectation in our country that elementary school is not up for profit sharing. So why do you think elementary and secondary education is treated very differently than early education?

EH: We have a history in this country of treating child care as a market good, especially since the 1970s. For-profit child care started to kick up in the late 1960s when we started to see an increasing number of middle-class white mothers entering the workforce. Previously there had always been some mothers who worked but predominantly those had been mothers of color or poor mothers. In 1971, you know, Richard Nixon vetoed the Comprehensive Child Development Act that would have created a nationally funded, locally run system of child care programs.

But there is a massive need for child care. If you look at the graph of women’s labor force participation starting in the late sixties, going through the 1970s and 1980s it’s almost a straight line up. So, you can understand how an entrepreneur 鈥� someone looking to make money 鈥� would be like “sure, I’m going to start offering some sort of for-profit child care” because at that moment unlike other countries, the United States decided to say, we’re going to push this into the market. We’re not going to invest enough public money to create a functional publicly funded system. We’re still dealing with that legacy today. So, it is a real discontinuity when you think about all the reasons we have public schools, right?

RG: You mentioned that as private equity gains a larger share of the child care industry, their political influence will grow. One example you gave was the opposition to Build Back Better by the Early Care and Education Consortium (ECEC). How do you see the role of such political interests evolving as private equity gains a stronger foothold in the child care industry?

EH: Yeah, absolutely. I think the broader point you’re getting at is: is there an inherent conflict of interest? If we put in hundreds of billions of dollars to create a publicly funded child care system where parent fees are significantly reduced 鈥� if not making it entirely free for everyone like our public schools 鈥� but the tradeoff is that there are conditions that restrict profit, what will private equity-backed chains do?

Build Back Better did have mandatory caps on parent fees and living wage minimums for educators. And according to the New York Times, we saw the Early Care and Education Consortium, an advocacy and lobbying group that represents many of the large chains, working behind the scenes with Senator Manchin to lobby against the bill.

And then the month after Senator Manchin kills Build Back Better, executives for many of these chains provided donations to his campaign PAC.

Also, we recently saw the Massachusetts Senate passing a bill that involves quite a lot of public money 鈥� $475 million a year in grants to help child care programs鈥攖o keep their operations going鈥� and pay their staff better. But they put some guardrails in place. They say, if you have more than 10 sites in Massachusetts, you must agree to certain conditions that include things like accepting a reasonable number of children who are on subsidy, which is a proxy for lower income children. You must agree to use a certain percentage of the grants to pay your educators better and to follow a wage ladder that’s going to be put in place. You must agree to a certain number of financial disclosures with all strings attached, right?

We found that ECEC quietly tried to get those particular provisions stripped out. They sent a letter to the chair and vice chair of the committee asking them to amend the provisions that would have targeted the larger chains.

The concern here is that economic power often equals political power, and private equity is enormously powerful politically. I have a quote in there from Brendan Ballou, who’s the former U.S. Special Counsel for Private Equity at the Department of Justice, that 鈥淐ongress works for few constituencies harder than they work for private equity.鈥�

RG: You mentioned that private equity groups are focused on expanding child care for middle- and upper-class families because these families can theoretically pay more. One of the solutions that you’ve discussed is increasing the subsidy rates.听 Some states are already doing this through the pandemic era funding they receive for child care. Can you walk us through how increasing the subsidy rates for child care providers changes the calculus?

EH: One thing that is clear from private equity鈥檚 work in other sectors is that they really love a steady source of government money. There is a reason private equity firms own most of the companies that deal with prison food and prison phone calls 鈥� they get money for those sorts of things. It鈥檚 the same reason they want to be in health care 鈥� there’s Medicare and Medicaid dollars available.

Public money is a reliable, predictable source of money. In child care, the subsidy reimbursement rate is set so that the government will pay that program $X for each child. In most states and for most of the past several decades, that reimbursement rate has been pretty low.

The target that the federal government sets for states until recently was 75% of market rate. Market rate is based on what people are currently paying, which as we know is actually less than the true cost of care. So, we鈥檙e already at an already artificially depressed market rate (75% of that) and many states aren’t even at 75%. And it’s not that much money per child. Compare that to a full-pay parent, right?

As the subsidies start going up and as more places start to receive the true cost of care, I would argue that would likely incentivize some of these chains that are only serving upper- and middle-class families to come down into the subsidy market and start to try to capture those dollars.

RG: One way that the large chains could help us with that compensation is their ability to provide health insurance and other fringe benefits that many independent and nonprofit programs are unable to offer. Particularly in places where they don’t have programs like paid family leave at the state level, these child care providers can’t afford to do that. In your research has the involvement of larger child care chains meant higher or more stable wages for staff?

EH: I鈥檝e not seen substantially higher wages looking from what analysis I can do, including looking at states where they must publish salary ranges. They seem to be about on par with the small independent and nonprofit community-based programs. Many chains will offer benefits, like health insurance, which as you say the others are not able to do.

I want to put a fine point on something because I think these conversations can get a little bit fraught. What I’m talking about in this article is about management and corporate decision making. I am not talking about the front-line educators and directors at these sites. They are working just as hard, under difficult circumstances, as any other child care educator. And then to this point, they’re not actually getting paid significantly more.

So, the compensation package overall might be slightly better in some of these change sites, but one thing we see, which is interesting, is actually the turnover is much, much higher.

There鈥檚 a Department of Health and Human Services study using 2019 data and it found that the rates of what they call high turnover, which means 20% or more of the child- facing staff in a program, leaves over the course of a year. It was nearly 50% among the large for-profit chains that they looked at and even among for-profit independence is quite high as well. This is compared to about 30% for the nonprofit and government programs of school-based pre-k, Head Start, things like that.

That is an enormously high turnover rate, which when you think about everything we know about child development and the importance of reliable, consistent, stable caregivers, is not great for the children either.

What that tells me is that a slightly better compensation package is not outweighing some issue going on with working conditions. And it鈥檚 causing the educators at these chain sites to turn over at just a really alarmingly high rate.

RG: There鈥檚 a quote from Melissa Boteach at the National Women’s Law Center, where she basically asked: 鈥淒o we want private equity and a heavily financialized model focused on short-term profit to be the appropriate model for child care?鈥� Is child care really a public good or is it up to individuals? If you and I revisit this conversation in a few years, there would be different expectations on how child care should be treated and therefore what role public equity would play.

EH: We’re at a really interesting hinge point. It’s hard for me to predict because there are multiple kinds of paths we could go down. Most parents don’t know that a private equity firm owns their child care provider.

I do think there’s a question about what decisions policy makers make because if there are no guardrails put up and there’s more public money flowing, we are going to start to see increasing capture by private equity firms.

We are at a point now where private equity and investors together have captured about 10 to 12% of the licensed child care market. That’s large but not dominant yet. If that gets up over the next couple of years, to 20 or 30%, it’s going to be incredibly difficult to do anything.

Maybe it’s naive of me to say in 2024 America, but I don’t think this needs to be a partisan issue. I don’t think anyone in red states, blue states, small towns, large cities, are going to be comfortable when they start getting really deep into the implications of having private equity firms making decisions about what’s going on in programs that serve infants and toddlers. That鈥檚 the first step 鈥� we need to be able to talk about this with each other.

In the early days her business was sustainable and Simms was able to pay her teachers reasonably well. Then in about 2009, Ohio started steadily reducing reimbursement rates for families who get subsidies, and increased quality rating requirements. Today the state has the country鈥檚 reimbursement formula. It also pays providers based on attendance, not enrollment, which means that if a kid is out sick she loses money despite keeping the spot open for that family. Simms only has one family that pays completely out of pocket; nearly all of her other children receive government subsidies.

鈥淚鈥檓 working now in the negative,鈥� Simms said. It costs her somewhere between $470 to $500 a week to care for an infant, but she鈥檚 only reimbursed $375 by the state. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 not no money,鈥� she said. But her parents can鈥檛 make up the difference, so she has to take it out of her teachers鈥� pay. 鈥淚鈥檝e got some dedicated, loving, caring, outstanding teachers who come to work every day,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 can鈥檛 pay my teachers what they鈥檙e worth.鈥�

That changed briefly after the American Rescue Plan was passed, which spent $39 billion on propping up the struggling child care sector, the amount of funding the industry has ever received. Simms used the money she received to give her teachers bonuses knowing that it would someday run out. Run out it did鈥攖he money to states this past September. Simms鈥檚 bonuses are no more. One of her teacher鈥檚 electricity recently got turned off because she couldn鈥檛 afford to pay the bill. Another had to move houses into something less expensive because she couldn鈥檛 afford where she was living.

That鈥檚 why on May 13鈥攖oday鈥攕he鈥檚 joining 1,080 other child care providers across the country who will be closing their doors and calling out to demand more funding for child care. They鈥檙e taking part in the third annual Day Without Child Care, and this year a record-breaking number of providers are shutting down. The event comes after the so-called 鈥渃hild care cliff,鈥� when federal pandemic relief money for the sector has almost completely dried up. In a January survey, of providers knew of at least one program that had closed in their community over the previous six months, and about half said they had to increase tuition.

Providers who close down today will hold 84 events across 26 states to demand the government pay them better, make care more affordable for families, include gender and racial justice in the system, and expand the Child Tax Credit. That last demand is new this year and inspired by the experience of 2021, when the government increased the amount of the benefit and gave it to more families, cutting the child poverty rate in . Expanding it again 鈥渨ould help us build a solid foundation for all of our children who all deserve an equal opportunity to thrive,鈥� Dorian Warren, co-president of Community Change, which is organizing the Day Without Child Care, said on a press call last week.

The day of action will also focus on Republican lawmakers who have refused to pass more child care funding; along with two conservative Democratic members of congress, who stood in lockstep against President Biden鈥檚 Build Back Better legislative package that had in child care. Republican鈥檚 refusal to pass more funding for the sector is 鈥減ushing our system to the brink of collapse once again,鈥� Warren said. 鈥淭ime is running out.鈥�

The lapse in federal funding, without anything else coming now that it鈥檚 gone, has put many child care providers in a bind. Johnny Anderson, who owns the largest family-owned child care company in Utah and shut down all of his 16 centers on Monday, said his state required providers to pay teachers at least $15 an hour when they got relief money. 鈥淲e were obviously happy to do it, because we wanted to pay teachers more, and the grant gave us the ability to afford that,鈥� he said on the press call. But that money will run out entirely at the end of the summer. Without more government funding, providers like him can only maintain that level of pay for teachers by raising prices for families, who are already struggling to afford care. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a recipe for disaster,鈥� he said. The result, he said, is providers forced to close their doors permanently.

Some states have from the cliff, finding their own sources of funding to fill the gaps. In those states, there was in how many parents lost access to child care, compared to nearly a quarter in states that didn鈥檛 provide their own funds. Utah is one of those that hasn鈥檛 put more money into the sector. 鈥淯tah鈥檚 a conservative state,鈥� Anderson noted. 鈥淲e have been unsuccessful.鈥�

鈥淪hutting down on the Day Without Child Care is a glimpse of the permanent closures that might happen in our communities if we don鈥檛 take action,鈥� Warren said. 鈥淲e know our system is in crisis and we also know it does not have to be this way.鈥�

This is the first year that Simms will be shutting her program down as part of the Day Without Child Care. 鈥淚 decided to shut down for the same reason that Rosa Parks refused to stand up. Enough is enough,鈥� she said. 鈥淚鈥檓 a business. Pay me what I鈥檓 worth.鈥� Her teachers and parents are completely behind her, she said, and they鈥檒l be going with her to the capitol for a protest as part of the day鈥檚 actions.

One of the people she serves is Rose Elheazy. Last year Elheazy got a call from her grandchildren鈥檚 other grandmother saying her daughter had died and her grandchildren鈥攁ges 18 months, four, eight and 12鈥攚ere in custody of the state. She needed someone to take them so they could go to their mother鈥檚 funeral. Eventually it turned out that no one could take the children in full time, and Elheazy made the difficult decision to take them in herself so they could be close to family members.

Her decision came with a lot of hardship. At first she didn鈥檛 get any public benefits to help care for the kids, and Elheazy can鈥檛 work due to a shoulder injury she sustained on the job four years ago. She had been living on workers comp payments and taking care of her elderly mother 24 hours a day, seven days a week while also going to physical therapy appointments for her shoulder. She didn鈥檛 have enough resources to feed the kids, let alone the time to care for the ones too young for school during the day. She was in a 鈥渞eally bad, broken situation,鈥� she said.

Then she got in touch with Simms, who connected her to a state program that allowed Elheazy to send the two youngest to Playtime Nursery School for free. 鈥淚 didn鈥檛 always have breakfast,鈥� Elheazy said, but 鈥淚 knew the kids could go to the center and she would make sure they got something to eat.鈥� Simms has given the children clothing. When Elheazy has had to take her mother to the hospital in a medical emergency, Simms has taken care of the kids so she didn鈥檛 have to worry.

鈥淪he has just always been there for a great support,鈥� Elheazy said. Simms has of course taught the children important educational skills. But Elheazy now sees child care as far more than that. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 think they get the credit that they鈥檙e due because they do a lot. They form a family. They form a bond with the children and with the parents,鈥� she said.

Going without the center鈥檚 help on Monday while Simms is shut down won鈥檛 be easy for Elheazy. She鈥檚 had to cancel all of her appointments and do nothing but care for her kids. But she still supports Simms鈥檚 decision. 鈥淚 am all for them closing down for a day to say, 鈥楬ey, we鈥檙e going to close down because this is what we need, we鈥檙e not getting what we need. Y鈥檃ll need to listen to us, y鈥檃ll need to hear us,鈥欌�� she said. 鈥淚f it means them getting their voices heard then I鈥檓 all for it, because I can鈥檛 imagine one day without the center, let alone weeks or months.鈥� She knows that if the center were to have to shut down for good she would be far worse off. She wouldn鈥檛 have a way to give the kids breakfast or even the time to go to the grocery store. She would have to miss her appointments to take care of her shoulder. And, without the time to care for her mother, she thinks she鈥檇 have to put her in a nursing facility.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 know what the world would be like without the center,鈥� she said.

Simms has served many people like Elheazy and her family over the decades. She took over the current location of her business from someone who opened it in 1959. Playtime Nursery School is a 鈥減illar of the community,鈥� she said, 鈥渢hat has educated and brought up so many different varieties of children.鈥� Many of the children she serves are second or third generation, with a grandparent, parent, aunt or uncle who went to the same center when they were kids. Some of her students have gone on to be doctors, others police officers. One mother struggled with her son, who had trouble learning, but Simms told her, 鈥淗e鈥檚 smart, he鈥檚 a scientist, he鈥檚 going to be an engineer, he鈥檚 going to do something.鈥� Lo and behold, today he鈥檚 an engineer. 鈥淚 am able to help many families and many children get their full potential,鈥� Simms said.

But it takes a massive amount of underpaid work. The center serves kids as young as 18 months old to as old as 13 years old. Simms opens her doors at 5:30 to care for children before they go to school, then educates younger kids during the school day, and at the end of the day also has school-aged kids for after school. Without more resources to hire more teachers and staff, Simms takes on multiple roles throughout the day. 鈥淚 am the administration, I am the school bus driver, I am the preschool lead teacher,鈥� she said. She sometimes arrives at work at 3:30 just to get paperwork done. When she opens her doors she watches the early kids, then after they leave, she oversees the preschool classroom. She then picks kids up from schools at 2:00 and watches them until 5:00. 鈥淪ometimes I don鈥檛 get home until 10:30 at night because I鈥檓 doing administration work,鈥� she said.

鈥淲e鈥檙e educational programs just like a school district,鈥� Simms said. 鈥淧ay us what we鈥檙e worth.鈥�

Elliot Haspel: First off, tell me: Why did you decide to write this book?

Elissa Strauss: So, it really came from two almost contradictory places that came together in the end. On one hand, I reported for years all about why we don’t have paid leave, why don’t we have universal and affordable child care or eldercare, why is there still so much maternal discrimination in the workplace, why are too many moms still dying during labor? So, all this stuff that moms, and caregivers more broadly, had stacked up against them in society. And part of me felt like I got to a place where I couldn’t write one more paid leave article鈥擨鈥檓 absolutely, very glad other people are still beating that drum!鈥擨 wanted to dig deeper. And I thought, you know what, there’s something else that I could be focusing on: the cultural roots of the care crisis.

Track two was that when I became a mom in 2012鈥攁nd I think this is still alive and well鈥攖here was very much a sense that it was not cool to like motherhood. You had Rachel Cusks鈥� being passed around a Brooklyn playgrounds like 鈥業’m handing you the truth,鈥� and that’s a book that really presents motherhood and selfhood as a zero-sum game. And look, I don’t wanna come down against the burden narrative of motherhood, because I think it’s important to also talk about the stresses, especially in the United States. But it felt like there was so much of it.

It took me a beat to realize actually these things are connected. I was writing about why our society doesn’t value caregiving, but I myself in my life didn’t really value caregiving. I wanted to have kids. I love my son, but I thought I had to partition it off from everything else in my life, in order to be legit.

Haspel: That’s one reason I really appreciate this book. It does come at a different angle than a lot of the books, even the books that I write, which are much more on the policy side of things. You had this fascinating chapter on when women鈥檚 movements embraced care, talking about this lesser-known feminist history of women who saw care as something really to be valued. Could you talk a little bit about what you found when looking into that?

Strauss:听Yeah, that was some of the most exciting research in the book, that and the whole world of care ethics.

Haspel: Oh, we鈥檙e going to get into that, don鈥檛 worry!

Strauss: They were the two like, 鈥極h, my gosh, why was this never taught to me?鈥� parts. So you know, many of the feminisms I cycled through鈥攁ll important, all which fed me and nourished me, and made a world that I like living in, whether a career feminism or sex-positive feminism or reproductive rights feminism鈥攅ither they ignored care or they didn’t necessarily have terribly nice things to say about care.

And then when I went digging, I found right there were lots of other feminisms, and they don’t say women should be home, you know. I feel like we’ve been set up by Phyllis Schlafly stuff, we’ve been set up as you鈥檙e either pro-women staying home and valuing care, or you鈥檙e pro-women leaving the house and seeing care as something that holds women back.

And it turns out there is a third way鈥攁nd not just one we’re imagining now, but that women imagined a hundred-plus years ago. So, the first time I saw this, historically speaking, was with the fight to get women the vote, and how women actually relied on their authority as mothers and caregivers to make the argument that their voice mattered in the populace, that they needed to contribute to selecting our leaders because they had special insights on account of being active caregivers.

They were called 鈥榮ocial housekeepers鈥� or 鈥榤unicipal housekeepers,鈥� and it was a very powerful movement. One named Rheta Childe Dorr wrote that a woman’s place is home, but home is everywhere. Even that feels like such an inversion of all categories we use to think about women’s participation in public life. And you know, these social housekeepers make great gains, in addition to helping successfully get women the vote. They also made sure that there were public playgrounds, children weren鈥檛 working, there was clean drinking water.

And, of course there鈥檚 a tension: this may not have been palatable if these women didn’t wear the motherhood cloak. But I think to fully take away that care was its own powerful lens to look at, that is demeaning care. To be overly cynical about it and say, 鈥榳ell, of course they had to do that because men wouldn’t have wanted their voices if they were trying to be truly equal to men.鈥� That’s true! Yet, I personally refuse to accept the idea that a bunch of moms or caregivers don’t have interesting things to say.

You know, there were a number of Black feminist leaders that thought like this, especially as welfare became a dirty word because Black women needed it. So, we have Johnnie Tillmon, one of the great welfare activists, and her vision of feminism is one that really makes room for being able to care: when the household needs you and the family needs you, you should be able to do that. It should be a right, not to mention a privilege and a joy.

Haspel: So, I want to jump to the last two chapters and the conclusion, because that’s some of the stuff that honestly stopped me in my tracks a little bit. We’re so used to talking about care in instrumental terms, right? Like what it can do for your ability to work. We lose sight of the bigger questions. Can we start with the fact there is this field of philosophy known as care ethics that is, I think, pretty under-acknowledged and under-appreciated. What is that, and what can we learn from scholars of care ethics?

Strauss: To start very broad, we have these ideas of what it means to be a good person and what it is to do the right thing, and how we figure that out. One of the big ideas is a rules-based way to think about it: We follow, maybe, the Ten Commandments or the classroom rule. So we don’t cheat or steal because 鈥榯hou shall not cheat or steal.鈥� Or maybe we have a more virtue-based approach to ethics, and we think 鈥業 have these core traits that are good traits,鈥� like I am honest. Therefore, I don’t cheat or steal. And then there’s something that’s very fashionable here in Northern California which is a more utilitarian approach, that if you can just data-ify everything you could somehow come up with a formula鈥攏ot to dismiss any of these, even though some people take it too far鈥攖hat you could figure out what’s the right thing to do by figuring out what would create maximum good in the world.

So, care ethics comes in, and it introduces something to the world of philosophy that was left out for a long time — and that is relationships. That sometimes the right thing to do is actually rooted in that one and only person before you, and that one and only moment that you’re in. An example I use in the book is around when you have to think about cheating or being dishonest. If your kid had a horrible day of bullying at school, and they had a book report, and it’s ten o’clock at night, maybe you help them more than you usually would, and you think it’s not the best and most right thing, but that is actually the best thing for that relationship. Care ethicists are hardly saying, 鈥極h, relationships should be everything,鈥� but they want them included in our conception of what it means to do right by others.

Adding to that, once you’re in relationships, it is an area where there are deep ethical and moral epiphanies possible. Through these relationships we learn so much about ourselves, we learn so much about human nature. We can actually cultivate the goodness inside of us.

One of my favorites, Nel Noddings, talks about how the 鈥榤emory of care鈥� is the foundation of morality for many of us. You know, care was just so left out of conversation for so long. And care is not always this beautiful, harmonious, frictionless place of love and ease. When you have someone you care for, and they’re dependent on you, you do have to privilege them versus other people; it鈥檚 just the nature of the game. So how do you balance that? When is that right or wrong? For us, we made the decision to send our kids to private school. We still feel really bad about that, even though we also know why we did it. That’s something that is actually at the heart of care ethics, too: how do our care relationships interact with our other relationships?

Haspel: What really struck me was how deep the implications of a care lens take you. You talk about the founding documents of the United States — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You have this quote that 鈥渃are is as fundamental to the good life as justice, but it’s rarely presented in fundamental terms.鈥� It suggests a broader social contract. And that to me is a very interesting mindset shift. So I’m curious: what would be different if we did start to talk about care and more fundamental terms?

Strauss: I’ll go straight to a very concrete thing: we would care for the caregivers. So, justice is seen as ultimately about equality, right? It’s two independent people having a relationship that’s fair. Once you mix in dependency鈥攚hich was there all along but ignored鈥�,it just doesn’t relate. Like, there’s no justice with me and my children. It’s never gonna happen! So when we really incorporate care, it opens our eyes: there’s something else going on that we’re trying to achieve. That is, making sure all people that are dependent on others have the ability to survive or thrive, or be treated with dignity at the end of their life, which I think is a universal value now. We just forget that dignity happens through a one-on-one relationship; the core element of dignity is care.

So, if care is a core value of our society, we have to care for the caregivers. Dependency is a chain. It’s a natural part of what it is to be human. And when someone depends on you, you’re not independent anymore. So not only is that person dependent, you yourself become dependent. You yourself can’t fully inhabit the world as an independent person anymore. It’s just not how it works, but right now caregivers are expected to live with dependency while living in a world where there’s a total blind spot for dependency. And no one’s made it easier for them, from the smallest things of, if you bring your elderly parent with dementia who moves very slowly to a certain restaurant, people might just get annoyed with you, there won鈥檛 be easy access. If you bring children in the public arena in this day and age you often get a stink eye. So caring for the caregivers is about making space for dependency in the public sphere, and also providing that critical support that caregivers need and don’t get — and it’s tragic.

In mid-April, nurses in Wichita, Kansas, ratified their first-ever union contracts with two Ascension health system hospitals. The victory followed a similar win in March in Austin, Texas, when nurses at Ascension Seton Medical Center voted to ratify their first union contract with Ascension. Neither success came easily or quickly, say members of (NNU), the country鈥檚 largest union and professional association of registered nurses.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think [Ascension] calculated on our determination and resolve to get the results we wanted, and our patients needed,鈥� says Marvin Ruckle, NNU member and a veteran nurse who has worked at Ascension St. Joseph in Wichita since 1989, with 24 of those years in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. 鈥淥ur community has been so supportive, coming out to our strikes, bringing us food and water. Workers from all the other unions around the Wichita area 鈥� steel workers, UPS, Spirit (airplane factory) 鈥� joined us. Most of these people have either been a patient or had family in one of our facilities and they know there needs to be change.

鈥淭his (contract) is an incredible step forward for nurses, so we can work with the hospital to make patient care better for our community,鈥� Ruckle says. 鈥淏ut it shouldn鈥檛 have taken this long. We were determined, we kept pushing, and all Ascension did was drag out the process.鈥�

One of the nurses鈥� most significant wins was safe staffing ratios enforceable through a nurse-led Professional Practice Committee. In Austin, hundreds of nurses spent more than a year in contract negotiations and organizing efforts, participating in two strikes to focus attention on their demands including guaranteed lower nurse-to-patient staffing ratios. At all three facilities, Ascension management responded to the nearly 2,000 nurses鈥� historic one-day joint strike on June 27 with a three-day lockout.

Mission-Driven Ascension

Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Ascension is one of the largest health systems in the U.S., boasting 140 hospitals and 40 senior living facilities in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Becker鈥檚 Hospital Review listed Ascension as No. 2 in its 2019 list of 100 of the largest hospitals and health systems in the U.S. and the largest nonprofit health system by hospital count. The nonprofit Catholic health system鈥檚 stated mission is to deliver 鈥渃ompassionate, personalized care to all, with special attention to persons living in poverty, and those most vulnerable.鈥�

A deeply researched analysis from the National Nurses Organizing Committee and NNU, 鈥�,鈥� questions how closely Ascension hews to that mission, particularly in communities with high poverty rates and a disproportionate number of Black and Latino residents. Ascension, the report states, is one of the nation鈥檚 worst offenders in closing obstetrics units and obstetrics services. Over the past decade, Ascension has eliminated obstetrics services at 16 hospitals and slashed more than a quarter of the labor and delivery departments that it had been providing in 2012, a rate three times higher than the national average of 6 percent.

Since 2022 alone, Ascension has closed five maternity wards, all health care markets where Ascension maintains a monopoly or near-monopoly on health services. Half of the hospitals where Ascension closed labor and delivery units are in counties with a higher proportion of low-income residents and people of color, and higher rates of infant mortality than the national average (also known as 鈥減ersons living in poverty, and those most vulnerable鈥� 鈥� see Mission Statement above).

Profits over Patients?

By now, the statistics are familiar to anyone paying attention: the U.S. has the highest rate of death among pregnant women and infants of any wealthy country; maternal mortality is more than 10 times and infant mortality almost double the average among comparably wealthy nations. It is no longer even a nasty secret that Black women are nearly three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women.

As 鈥淒angerous Descent鈥� points out, for the first time in two decades, infant mortality has risen in the U.S., largely due to pregnancy-related complications, which experts attribute to limited access to specialists who deal with complicated pregnancies. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than of pregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable 鈥� and healthcare leaders have a major role to play in improving these outcomes. Tragically, many systems focus their eye most keenly on the fiscal bottom line rather than the fundamental health of their patients.

Hospital consolidation has been on the march over the last two decades, with more than 67 percent of U.S. hospitals now belonging to a larger system, compared to 45 percent in 2000. NNU鈥檚 report cites numerous studies that have shown that such highly consolidated markets can lead to price increases and diminished patient outcomes. Hospital corporations say such consolidation creates 鈥渆fficiencies鈥� that enable them to cut costs. What they don鈥檛 say as loudly is that steps such as eliminating and obstetrics services 鈥� both major casualties of hospital cost-cutting 鈥� also improves their profits. In practice, consolidating labor and delivery limits access to care for many patients in low-income areas who may not have vehicles or good access to public transportation. Increased distance to medical care can result in missed prenatal appointments or an inability of patients to get to the hospital in time to deliver their babies safely.

According to the , more than 400 maternity services closed in the U.S. between 2006 and 2020. Between March and June 2022, 11 health systems announced they were closing their obstetrics services. When birthing units close, obstetricians and nurse-midwives are more likely to go elsewhere, exacerbating the epidemic of maternity care deserts in the world鈥檚 largest and most robust economy.

鈥淲hat was really striking to us,鈥� says Elana Kessler, author of NNU鈥檚 鈥淒angerous Descent鈥� report, 鈥渋s that this is a mission-driven hospital system under the Catholic church that is to care for the poor and to create a more just society. Their actions are not in line with that mission statement. By closing labor and delivery units in Medicaid-heavy areas with higher proportions of Black and Latino patients, they鈥檙e hiding behind their mission while they鈥檙e increasing their profits.鈥�

Health reporting news site stated in a 2021 investigation that Ascension, 鈥渁 wealthy, religious, tax-exempt health system,鈥� had migrated toward behaving like a Wall Street firm, using its wealth to create a sophisticated investment strategy that includes a partnership with the private equity firm, TowerBrook Capital Partners. Ascension stands out from other nonprofit hospitals that have dabbled in private equity investing in the sophistication and expansiveness of its $1 billion partnership with TowerBrook, the STAT investigation found.

On its 2021 federal tax return, Ascension reported that CEO Joseph R. Impicciche received a salary of $13 million. In 2022, the reported that Ascension had spent years reducing its staffing levels to improve profitability even though the chain is a nonprofit organization with nearly $18 billion in cash reserves. At that time, its charity care accounted for 1.9 percent of operating expenses (against a national average of 2.6 percent).

Even with the additional revenue from its investments, Ascension pursued cuts to safety-net hospitals in Washington, D.C., and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, abruptly closing its Labor and Delivery unit in December 2022, leaving Milwaukee鈥檚 south side, home to a large immigrant community, completely without a hospital to deliver babies. The move prompted a scorching letter from Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who demanded answers from Ascension on its questionable priorities that funnel cash to its investment funds and executives, putting providers and patients at risk. In her letter, Sen. Baldwin called on Ascension to reinvest its cash reserves in hospitals that serve vulnerable communities and to increase pay and improve working conditions for its 鈥渂urned out and overextended health care workforce.鈥�

In an April 19 email response to Early Learning Nation magazine, Sen. Baldwin stated that Ascension had replied to her letter. 听鈥淲hile I鈥檓 encouraged that Ascension appears to be taking the communities鈥� concerns seriously and working to rebuild relationships,鈥� she wrote, 鈥淚 remain concerned that their business practices appear more like a private equity firm than a nonprofit hospital whose stated mission is to serve the public.鈥�

Understaffed NICUs and Obstetrics Units

鈥淚t鈥檚 been like working in a MASH unit,鈥� Ruckle said, describing his experience in Ascension St. Joseph鈥檚 NICU. Mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH) units, which were phased out in the early 2000s, were known for their primitive conditions, grueling work schedules and frustrating lack of resources. As reported in 鈥淒angerous Descent,鈥� nurses at multiple Ascension hospitals have noted the perpetual crisis caused by staffing cuts and equipment shortages.

鈥淚t鈥檚 heart-wrenching to go home and wonder if you were able to help that critically ill baby as best you could and worry that they aren鈥檛 going to have the best outcome,鈥� he said.

The result for nurses can be not only stress and frustration but, according to Zenei Triunfo-Cortez, one of NNU鈥檚 presidents, moral harm.

鈥淎s nurses, we have an obligation to advocate for our patients, to do what鈥檚 best for our patients,鈥� she says. 鈥淏ut the situation we鈥檙e being put in, especially Ascension nurses, is that we know we have to do the right thing and are being prevented from doing so because of the situation in our hospitals. Then we suffer from moral injury. Our hearts are breaking because we want to do what鈥檚 best, but our employers are not providing what we need to do so.

鈥淲e start asking, 鈥業s this really worth my health?鈥欌�� says Triunfo-Cortez, who has been a registered nurse for 44 years. 鈥淭he majority of our nurses will be out there fighting for our patients and fighting for what鈥檚 right, but it does make us question.鈥�

Recommendations from NNU

Pointing out that Ascension enjoys hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks thanks to its nonprofit status yet continues its abandonment of low-income mothers, parents and newborns, NNU and the National Nurses Organizing Committee recommend systemic changes that would align Ascension with its mission:

• Come to the table and listen to nurses; staff every unit to ensure the best care for patients.
• Commit to reopening closed labor and delivery wards.
• Provide obstetric services at all new hospitals Ascension opens or acquires.

Ascension has the opportunity and resources to become an industry leader, says Kessler, the report鈥檚 author. 鈥淎s nurses advocating not only for nurses but for the patients they serve, we know that safe staffing and readily accessible care are completely entwined in the work nurses do 鈥� they鈥檙e one and the same.

鈥淎scension will say, 鈥楥onsolidation is part of our business strategy. It鈥檚 better for the patient,鈥� but at the end of the day,鈥� she says, 鈥渋t doesn鈥檛 happen that way. It creates barriers for patients to face 鈥� transportation, child care 鈥� and when there is not ready access to obstetrics services, pregnant patients are less likely to get prenatal care, which then has a cascade of harmful effects.鈥�

础蝉肠别苍蝉颈辞苍鈥檚 1 in 50 Report

In late April, Ascension released a in which it reported that one in 50 U.S. babies is now born at an Ascension hospital, no doubt in part to what The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) cited as the corporation鈥檚 role as the 鈥渕ost active dealmaker鈥� in its hospitals鈥� expanding into wealthy areas while shunning poorer ones. Nonprofit hospitals now account for half the $1 trillion U.S. hospital sector. Across the sector, the 奥厂闯鈥�s investigation found, though they receive local, state and federal tax breaks in exchange for providing charity and benefiting communities, nonprofits are less generous in providing aid than their nonprofit rivals.

Though the Ascension report states that its commitment is 鈥渞ooted in the loving ministry of Jesus as healer鈥� and the 32-page report details positive health outcomes throughout the system, NNU鈥檚 Kessler says the report doesn鈥檛 tell the full story of how those numbers arrived.

“Outcomes for patients no longer served by Ascension wouldn’t be included in the hospital’s data, so the report is incomplete,鈥� she says, 鈥渇ailing to consider the impact on communities where Ascension has shuttered obstetrics services under the corporate strategy of ‘consolidation.’

鈥淎scension asserts that one in 50 babies are born in their care, which only underscores the importance of Ascension keeping obstetrics services open for the thousands of expectant mothers they serve each year.听Furthermore, a snapshot of data from one year, in one health system, doesn鈥檛 tell the whole story of the impact of 础蝉肠别苍蝉颈辞苍鈥檚 decision to close services. It should also be noted t听could weigh the data in favor of showing better than average outcomes.”