Why is child care so expensive and impossible to find? And why are child care providers paid so little? And how come when TV shows depict child care, if they do at all, it’s completely unrealistic—full of super nannies and hapless dads? Child care is the backbone of our entire country and is traditionally women’s work—which is why it’s frustrating, but maybe not surprising, that it’s so often invisible. In this episode, we talk to NWLC experts Jasmine Tucker and Julie Vogtman about who to blame for our child care crisis, how to help child care workers and parents alike, and the child care myths that are hurting all of us, whether you have kids or not.
Why is child care so expensive and impossible to find? And why are child care providers paid so little? And how come when TV shows depict child care, if they do at all, it’s completely unrealistic—full of super nannies and hapless dads? Child care is the backbone of our entire country and is traditionally women’s work—which is why it’s frustrating, but maybe not surprising, that it’s so often invisible. In this episode, we talk to NWLC experts Jasmine Tucker and Julie Vogtman about who to blame for our child care crisis, how to help child care workers and parents alike, and the child care myths that are hurting all of us, whether you have kids or not.
We have so many resources for you!
Julie’s Undervalued report:
https://nwlc.org/resource/undervalued-a-brief-history-of-womens-care-work-and-child-care-policy-in-the-united-states/
Jasmine and Julie’s report on what happened to women after COVID-19:
https://nwlc.org/resource/resilient-but-not-recovered-after-two-years-of-the-covid-19-crisis-women-are-still-struggling/
Child care provider Merline A. Gallegos explains what would help her:
https://nwlc.org/on-child-care-worker-appreciation-day-what-we-really-need-is-action/
An interactive map that shows how each state would benefit if Congress stabilized the child care system with $16 billion:
https://nwlc.org/resource/cc-map/
Data that shows child care workers are being left behind in terms of their pay: https://nwlc.org/press-release/nwlc-releases-data-revealing-child-care-workers-wage-growth-lags-behind-other-low-paid-occupations/
Jessica:
Hi, I am Jessica.
Lark:
I'm Lark.
Hilary:
And I'm Hilary. And welcome to Hearsay where we deep dive into the cultural moments that live Rent-free in our heads and probably yours too. And today we're making it clear that when dads take care of kids, it's not babysitting.
Lark:
Amen and amen.
Hilary:
It's just being a parent.
Lark:
Yep. Novel concept.
Hilary:
Um, so actually today, more broadly, we're talking about child care. Um, and we at the law center work on child care as an issue all the time. But we have this like problem where people don't always care about it.
Lark:
Famously.
Hilary:
Famously. Yeah. And we wanted to kind of figure out why. And of course we look at things through a pop culture lens. Anyway, so we started by naming every child care movie and TV show we could think of,
Jessica:
which was not a lot.
Lark:
exhausted. I think there was a lot.
Jessica:
I think there was a lot once we actually got down to it.
Hilary:
But it, it was hard to start. And we, we found some tropes. Yeah. We found
Jessica:
just a few.
Hilary:
We, we basically created two categories and there's some subcategories underneath. Mm-Hmm. . Um, the first is what I call super nanny. Mm-Hmm. , which is just like a nanny. Right. You know, the nanny depictions do exist in pop culture. So you've got The Nanny,
Lark:
Which shout out to Fran Fine’s wardrobe
Hilary:
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, solidarity to Fran our union Queen. So, um, super nanny, like the actual reality.
Lark:
Oh my God. You you guys are in a crisis. I'm on my way.
Jessica:
Hilary:
Joe something.
Lark:
Joe Frost.
Hilary:
Yeah. Uh, Mary Poppins. And then there's kind of like some subcategories under there. We notice a lot of black women, like the kind black woman. I, I know that
Lark:
Yeah. Savior.
Hilary:
Right. Who's like just a saint there. Um, but not a real character otherwise.
Lark:
Mm-Hmm. Yeah. I feel like that's a common
Hilary:
I've still never seen The Help, but I know that it
Jessica:
I also haven’t seen it. I just saw American Fiction a few months ago too. Did either of y'all see that?
Lark:
Yes. So good
Hilary:
Not yet
Jessica:
Um, and the, their like housekeeper Mm-Hmm. Who ended up being like basically a part of their family, like throughout the movie. Mm-Hmm. , like throughout their lives is also a Black woman, but it's a Black family too. Yeah. So I think that adds interesting, like layers to it. Mm-Hmm. . Um, and even like, they find like home and acceptance in her almost more than like either of their parents, even though one of them had already passed away. Mm-Hmm. and kind of is like the glue of their family. I feel like that is almost a super nanny in a way. Even though all the kids, kids are adults.
Lark
Well, that's a trope of nanny in media also, is that the nanny is like, you're closer with the nanny than the parents. That the parents who get nannies are workaholics and don't care about their kids.
Hilary:
Exactly that having child care at all means in some form means that you don't care about your kids.
Jessica:
You don't care about your kids.
Lark:
Right. Like that's a whole other trope.
Hilary:
Yes. Yes. Well, and then speaking of tropes, the one that we found the most to a degree that I could not believe it, it was like a,
Jessica:
Can y'all guess what it is?
Hilary:
It's like unfurling before us, like we'd be like, oh, there was that and there was that and there's that. And here's what we're talking about there's a dad and suddenly he's confronted with the fact that there are children in the world that who need help and he has to help them.
Lark:
And they're his own kids.
Hilary:
They could be his own kids.
Jessica:
That he probably had for years
Lark:
He's for one for the first time in his life realizing he has kids and maybe there's something he could do to take care of them.
Hilary:
Yeah. And then, you know, he has to like discover that a vacuum exists Mm-Hmm. and that children have diapers and they need to be fed and that children are messy and hard and blah, blah, blah, blah.
Lark:
I feel like theres always like a school drop off scene or like a school sports. Mm-Hmm. forgot, mixed up the soccer cleats and the ballet shoes.
Hilary:
And ohh the hapless dad. Yeah. The hapless dads. That's what we'll call this . And it can be men more broadly I think. So we're gonna just run through some of these and then we'll, we'll dig into them. This is, surely not the oldest, but to me, the, as the Gen Xer that I am, the, the thing we certainly had on Beta Max . That's right. Mr. Mom
Lark:
Look at you, Beta max and tivo.
Hilary:
Yeah. . Uh, I know. I'm just, I all the technology through the years I have experienced I that such as Gen X. We're so flexible, we adopt everything. Um, exactly. So Mr. Mom and then who's the boss was on Forever and then uh, Charles in charge. Mm-Hmm. . And then we're gonna go up to, um, I don't know, Mr. Nanny, which is a movie with Hulk Hogan. Full house, three men and a baby. Daddy Daycare, Mrs. Doubtfire, which we're gonna get into , The Pacifer. The point is, it wasn't hard to come up with a list. Like it, it felt to me like at first that these, and especially Mr. Mom and Mrs. Doubtfire Mm-Hmm. , which are about 10 years apart, were these like, what if we made a thing about dads and kids . No one's ever seen that before. And the dad isn't gonna be good, but then he is gonna get good at this and he is gonna appreciate women’s work.
Lark:
Reconnects with his family. Yeah.
Hilary:
And what drives me bananas about this is that the entire idea that the only depiction we're interested in when it comes to like taking care of kids is if dads do it. When in fact, it is women's work. Mm-Hmm. . And it has traditionally been, so we generally don't care about it unless men do it.
Jessica:
It’s only powerful if the man is doing what women have been doing quietly and tirelessly
Lark:
Since the dawn of time. Yeah,
Hilary:
Exactly. Yeah. And I mean, this me off on a lot of levels. , I, I can start with the like, so I, long time listeners as if we've had a show you could listen to a long time
Lark:
if you've been from the beginning, you will know
Hilary:
original hearsay heads. Is that a thing?
Lark:
. It is now. Wait, that's cute. Hearsay heads.
Jessica:
Hearsay heads. Hearsay bobbleheads
Hilary:
But so yes. Anyway, um, I have kids. That's all I was trying to say. I have kids and a husband. Um, it's so traditional of me. Um, but I got pregnant and before I told anybody else, like, we put ourselves on like wait list for daycares in DC where we lived at the time. Um, we never, for our first kid and we never got off the wait list. They never called. We just kept waiting like we were on like 15 and you have to pay money to be on these wait lists.
Jessica:
Wait, seriously?
Hilary:
Yeah. The deposits
Lark:
To like hold your spot. If you get one.
Hilary:
Yeah. So you're on these wait lists. And then it was just like not happening. And this is when like people start to panic and like form nanny shares. Mm-Hmm. Or like, but my husband hated a job at the time and was like, I'm just gonna stay home. And I was like, okay, let's just do it. Yeah. And he's been a stay at home parent since until this year where he started working at drum roll. A preschool. So he's now a child care provider as well.
Jessica:
Daddy DayCare DC edition.
Lark:
Yes! Go Dad
Hilary:
Yeah. So my life is like built into this. Like we are running in a different direction. Right. already, like we are already not this. The number of times that he has been applauded by random strangers for pushing a stroller down the street. Mm-Hmm. , like, nice job, dad. So like, I'm not gonna lie, I'm sensitive to this trope.
Jessica:
As you should be.
Lark:
But rightfully. Yeah. Yeah.
Hilary:
There's good out of it though. My oldest when he was about three or four came up to me one day and he's like, do you know that some mamas stay home and some dadas actually go to work
Jessica:
Hilary:
And I was like, yeah. Yeah. That is
Lark:
It never occurred to him
Hilary:
Yeah. But he didn't know because that's his little world. He saw what he saw. And so even our youngest, like when we, for so long, we asked him, what do you wanna be when you grow up? So he's like a dad.
Lark:
Aw.
Hilary:
So like, you know, the modeling can happen, but, but not if you watch tv 'cause you can't see it.
Jessica:
To have representation and exposure to it. I think there has to be a way to do it without being like, whaaaat? But so much of it is like sensationalized. Yeah. Versus, and I, I trying to think like, in my mind, I'm trying to imagine like a profile piece, but even like profiling a dad taking care of his kids would, would warrant like, mom aren’t being profiled. Versus like having that representation, um, and countering that narrative. I think it would take so much undoing in so many different ways. Mm-Hmm. for it to be normal. Mm-Hmm. .
Lark:
And I've seen like on TikTok and Instagram, a lot of dadfluencers posting like, yeah, I'm stay at home dad, you know, here's, and reclaiming some of the stuff we talk about of you can take care of your kids, you're not a babysitter. Kind of the weaponized incompetence trend that was going around of poor straight women talking about the shit their husbands don’t do . Um, and I saw quite a few men creators take that over, which I do think that's a little bit more peer-to-peer rather than a feature in New York magazine. Yeah.
Hilary:
But on the flip side of that, of TikTok
Lark:
Trad wife.
Hilary:
Exactly.
Lark:
Yeah where there's, it's, I can never stop talking about trad wife TikTok. It's still being glorified of being this quote, stay at home mom. Homesteading having a million kids. Those, all those women have caregivers. They all have someone watching their kids
Hilary:
And do you seem them on TikTok?
Lark :
No you don't see them. You think Ballerina Farm is watching all her children on that compound. No, she is not. Even Nara Smith. Mm. Those people have people that watch their kids.
Hilary:
Well, maybe let's dig into some of these. Uh,
Jessica:
I watched Daddy Daycare for the first time.
Lark:
I know. How was that?
Jessica:
Like my first time ever watching it? Um, I think it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be in terms of like the sensationalization. Um, Eddie Murphy can also do a voice. Yeah. I always forget. And every time he
Lark:
And isn't Regina King his wife?
Jessica:
Regina King is his wife. And I was, I was like, ahhh Regina. She was so good. Um, and the whole premise is that like his wife is going back to work. They put their child in, they wanna put him in daycare and this is really expensive. And it was also funny, like when they go to pay for, and they're like, oh, this is how much tuition is per year. And she goes, no, per month. Yeah. And I was like, okay.
Lark:
And isn't it like a stereotypical
Jessica:
Again, we're in the elite preschool trope
Lark:
Yeah. They have like uniforms. It's like Hemel’s boarding school-esque
Jessica:
So lots of tropes of that. And the dad, Eddie Murphy gets laid off along with another dad. Mm-Hmm. . Um, and so they can't afford to pay for the daycare. And then they go around shopping for other daycares. And I thought that the representation of like home daycare was really interesting and dramatized. Like, it was so crazy. But also
Hilary:
At least it was there.
Lark:
Because that's what they ended up doing. Yeah. Was making a home care center.
Jessica:
They ended up making a home daycare. But it was like, there was one where like the lady was holding a baby and like smoking and
Hilary:
Oh that’s not good.
Jessica:
And another where like the kids are like in a basement.
Lark:
Oh my God.
Jessica:
And then eventually he convinces another dad to like start a home daycare center. Mm-Hmm. make some money out off of them having to watch their kids. Right. They're raising their children. Um, and, you know, it expands this, that and the other. And I thought it was interesting to talk about like, the lack of affordable options. And then that's how they sold it to a lot of parents. Like, we'll give you like a free trial or like, it's already significantly cheaper while like, you can also like, trust us. Mm-Hmm. maybe. And eventually, like the parents do learn to trust them. Um, and then there, former boss like found out that not only did they, were they doing this, but they were watching his kid. And he goes, well, like, you're wiping boogers for a living. And Eddie Murphy's like, well, you're paying us to do it so
Hilary:
I mean, that's more representation. I'm, I'm not thrilled about the home care representation but at least they're acknowledging it’s a profession.
Lark:
But better than I thought that was gonna age.
Jessica:
But either way, throughout the whole movie, they were talking about like, until you get a real job, you're doing the daycare.
Hilary and Lark:
Ooh. Yeah.
Jessica:
They're like, yeah, I can't wait till I get back to real work. Or like a real job. Like care caregiving is work. They are working.
Lark:
And it allows everyone else to work. Like,
Jessica:
Yeah.
Lark:
Yeah. I think that's what makes me so mad about all of these tropes is not only is it invisible, but when we do talk about it, it's made fun of, you know,
Hilary:
Minimized.
Lark:
Yeah. Or downplayed minimized and like joked about and that's just so demeaning and condescending for no reason.
Jessica:
Because nothing happens without people watching kids. Like, you can't get your coffee with like, with the baristas, child care gives out. You can't
Lark
Who's driving the bus to take you to work? Someone who probably needs child care.
Hilary:
I watched, uh, Mrs. Doubtfire last night for the first time.
Lark:
For the first time.
Jessica:
I, I've also never seen the whole thing.
Hilary:
Wow.
Jessica:
I had a lot to choose from.
Lark:
It’s always on tv.
Hilary:
It is. And I just avoided it. It was a really depressing movie actually. I don't, I mean, There's like a lot of gender panic stuff that's not good. And like, obviously like Robin Williams dressing up and as a, as a woman, they're not really like ready to interrogate that in a real way. So that aside, which is like a big thing to put aside, I think um, it just had this like, he's a good dad and like, that's the plot of it. He's a really good dad. So he, you know, makes himself into this like, British super nanny , uh, Mrs. Doubtfire and um, then takes care of the kids and antics do ensue. But the twist is, he's like really good at it. He's like, better than he was as a dad 'cause he is like dedicating his whole self to it.
Hilary:
Mm-Hmm. . And so, um, the end result, after all of it, it gets discovered and the, you know, the judge is like, you went this far. Like you're bananas. You shouldn't be, you know Mm-Hmm. with them and he loses custody entirely.
Lark:
I forgot about that.
Hilary:
Without visitation. It's like so depressing. Robin Williams can break your heart on camera. Right. Like, he's like, ugh. He's he's being heartbroken. That's crazy. Yeah. It's so sad. And then the, and then, um, he ends up like taking the character onto like a public television kid show. Which is like a weird side twist, but they see him and then she, Sally Field feels bad that she like took him from him and lets him, the big result, the big win, ready, is that he then gets to take care of the kids after school as himself, not as Mrs. Doubtfire. He's the dad. And so, like, that's his custody rights at the end is he gets to babysit his kids. Ugh. Going back to not parent his kids. He watches them for three hours after school and helps 'em do their homework. And I just, and that's the big win.
Lark
I don't know if I've, now that I've,
Jessica:
I don’t think I’m gonna watch it
Lark:
I don't think I've ever seen the end. I think I watched till court
Hilary:
It was so upsetting. He should have never lost custody in the first place. And then second
Lark:
And also just be a dad.
Hilary:
That's just back to babysitting. I like, lost my mind.
Lark:
I would. Wait, what year was that?
Hilary:
93.
Lark:
Like all the tropes in that feel specific to the time
Hilary:
Yes. To the time. For sure. And I think,
Lark:
I mean, it's like the business woman time.
Hilary:
Yeah we're only interested in watching domesticity when it's a man. Yeah. Like, I guess it's the novelty of it or something, but it just drives me like, I want more TV shows that are in like, the throes of what it is to take care of children, to raise a family, to go to work, to like this. There need to be more shows like this. They're the ones I've always liked. I've, you know
Lark:
The few that there are
Hilary:
Yeah. But,
Lark:
Well, I, I just think it shows we can't ever get better if we don't have our depictions be better. I mean, I don't even have children, but we sit here at work, do this work our hearing from providers and from parents of how awful things are, but also how important care is. And women are shouldering this work in every sense of it. And it's just never gonna set in if our media depictions don't do that.
Jessica:
So I'm, I'm child free, childless, however you wanna have it. But I'm also 23, so like, calm down . Um, but even thinking about it, like, if I don't move back to where my parents live and in the future, I have a kid with a partner whose parents also don't live in the same place. What are we gonna do?
Lark:
Yeah. I talk to my mom about that all the time. I've been radicalized on the understanding that child care is, should be a universal good. That we all have, that the government pays for it. 'cause they can and they should. And they choose not to.
Jessica:
They literally choose not to
Lark:
Its a choice they make every single day. So I've been talking to my parents about it. 'cause similarly I've been thinking if I have kids with someone here, I'm childless by choice and I don't foresee myself having children. Mm-Hmm. . But if I do, I don't have family here. And we traditionally probably would work similar hours, me and my partner. So that would be really hard. And they'd have to go into child care. But I've been telling my parents like, it doesn't have to be hard for any choice you make. Right. If you choose to patchwork and keep your kids in your home. If you choose to go to a home daycare center, if you choose to go to a giant child care center, if you choose to have a nanny, nanny share, you actually shouldn't have to worry about it at all. The government should pay for it. And I feel like we've come to this, I don't wanna call it a breaking point in the child care.
Jessica:
I think the pandemic, and I know you're gonna talk about this more later, Hilary. Um, but yeah, I think the pandemic really like, like why are both parents at home and the moms still taking care of the kids.
Lark:
Correct. Yeah. Yes. I know here at the center we've been talking about just truly how bad it is and there are ways to fix it. Yeah.
Hilary:
There's a lot to unpack here, obviously for everybody . Uh, but I think what I wanna do, and, and we're gonna have a conversation next, I'm, I'm gonna talk to two amazing people I work with, um, Jasmine Tucker and Julie Vogtman, both, uh, geniuses at the law center.
Lark:
Extraordinaires. Icons
Hilary:
Yeah. Really smart people who have looked a lot into why is it this way? Mm-Hmm. , why is child care so expensive and so hard to find? Why are child care providers paid so little? And, you know, we'll do a little history lesson, but then also like, how can we change it? So that for maybe both of you, the choices aren't, Aren't, you know, like it that it's a choice at all really, to have kids. And we, we know younger generations are deciding not to. Right. For those very reasons.
Jessica:
There are so many reasons not too
Lark:
and this Is one of 'em. Yeah.
Jessica:
This is one of them.
Lark:
It's scary.
Jessica:
And Like, how are you gonna pressure someone into having a child? Whether that's through reproductive restrictions or whether that's through just like societal pressure, And then do nothing to provide for those children.
Hilary:
Right? Yeah. So we're gonna unpack it all, um, in the next conversation, but, uh,
Lark:
And they're both mothers?
Hilary:
Yeah. Yeah. So we're, it'll be a mom's caucus, , um, the, the next
Lark:
That's what we need.
Jessica:
Yeah. As you, as you deserve. As we deserve.
Hilary:
Yeah, yeah,
Lark
Yeah. As all moms deserve, really,
Hilary:
Today I'm joined by two truly lovely and smart humans who happen to work with me at the National Women's Law Center. Jasmine Tucker, our VP of research, and Julie Vogtman, our director of Job quality. And I was gonna describe their work, uh, for, for you all, but it's probably better if they do it.
Jasmine:
I oversee the qualitative and quantitative work that we do. I think that a lot of our work is grounded in defining the problem that we need to solve.
Hilary:
Problems for women and families.
Jasmine:
Right
Hilary:
So, jasmine's the brain behind our numbers and our stories at the law center
Jasmine:
One of the many brains.
Hilary:
One of the many. Yes. The lead brain and Julie?
Julie:
So I'm the director of job quality at the law center. I focus on the policies that we need to put in place to improve the quality of jobs that surprise are not great, especially for women and especially especially for Black women, Latinas, native women, other women of color.
Hilary:
And part of why I asked you both here is because you've done a ton of work, um, and research on child care, which is of course what we're talking about this episode. Um, and not just child care, but child care providers. And so we're gonna get into that, but I think we, it's the middle of the workday. We're recording this. Who's watching your kids right now? What is the child care that that led us to be here?
Jasmine:
Yeah, so I have a kindergartner who's at kindergarten. Um, but, you know, school hours do not coincide with like, working parents schedules. So she goes to an aftercare program at school, and then I also have a nine month old. And he is at an in-home daycare provider. Um, sometimes his grandma comes to watch him, but he's at, um, his daycare providers today.
Hilary:
Awesome.
Julie:
And I am very lucky to have two kids right now in elementary school at the same elementary school in the same aftercare program. So after many years in which that was not the case, uh, I feel lucky to have a, a pretty steady, happy thing going on..
Hilary:
Nice. Yeah. So my two kids are also in, uh, elementary school, though we don't do aftercare 'cause my husband is home and is their primary kind of parent on, uh, when I'm not there. So there's all our care providers for whom this episode would not be possible without them.
Jasmine:
Shout out.
Hilary:
Yes, exactly. So what we talked about, uh, in our earlier discussion with Jessica and Lark is that there are so many movies and TV shows where we don't even see child care providers, you know, if they're depicted, they're sort of sole nannies too. They're never at like care centers or, or daycare facilities or child care facilities. There's just no depictions of them at all. And so I think the whole point of this is we wanna make visible what's invisible. So for both of you, um, could you tell me who is the typical invisible child care provider that you've done so much research on? And, and then kinda the second question is, why does pop culture ignore them? Why don't we ever see them?
Jasmine:
Ooh, there's, there's some loaded questions in there. so when we're talking about child care providers, we're talking about, uh, a workforce that's over nine in 10 women. So this is women's work and Right. That's like inherently like the second question. we don't see them because we don't care about women's work. You know, it's like totally undervalued in, but You just laid out. We're here because of our child care providers. . Right? We're able to work because they're providing care for our children. Um, and so in this workforce that's 94% women, it's also largely women of color immigrant women. So Black women, Latinas, they're all overrepresented in this workforce. The backbone of our, of our entire economy is being held up by Black and brown women who are providing care for our children.
Hilary:
Julie, why do you think we, we don't even see them?
Julie:
I have so much to say on this topic. I'll try to keep it brief enough. But I mean, as Jasmine said, we know in this country, child care is like the ultimate example of women's work. It's work that happens behind closed doors. It's work that for much of our history women were not ever paid for at all either because it was women caring for their own children or because it was enslaved Black women caring for white children. And so we have really devalued this work from our very beginnings as a nation. But like so many things in our history, I think really the devaluing of women's care work, and especially the devaluing of the care work performed by women of color comes down to racism and sexism.
Jasmine:
Say it .
Hilary:
Yeah. It's not surprising, but, um, it's, I think for folks who haven't ever spent time thinking about it, and certainly, you know, for us, like in digging into child care depictions and media and realizing like it's not there, there, you know, a little light bulb goes off. Of course, it's not there if, uh, we're trying to hide that this exists in the first place.
Julie:
So in, in doing all of the research for this report a few years ago, I actually learned a ton and became even more depressed about sort of where we are today. Because there actually was a moment about 50 years ago when we came so close to having universal child care in this country. And I don't think everybody knows that. Um, so we're going all the way back to 1971, even before the xennial cohort right here before any of us were born
Hilary:
Thank you for the representation there.
Julie:
Um, but you know, that's a moment when women's labor force participation had really been skyrocketing for, you know, decades. And, and Congress concluded that it was time to do something about it. I mean, after years of course of dedicated advocacy. Um, but in 1971, Congress passed a law that basically would have established universal child care in this country, and it would have shifted it from a private responsibility to a public good that was publicly funded. But President Nixon vetoed it. Any guesses? Why ?
Jasmine:
because it's women's. Because because women don't matter.
Julie:
Yeah. I mean, because sexism and racism again, but also communism in this case.
Hilary:
Ahhh it would've been a good
Julie:
Yes, exactly.
Hilary:
And a public good. And how dare we have anything that befits the whole country.
Julie:
Precisely. So, um, he said that the child care system that this law established, and here's the quote, would commit the vast moral authority to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over the family centered approach. So it like explicitly was like, wait a second, you would actually have this responsibility be shared among other people rather than inside the family, in private with women where it belongs. And we cannot do that.
Hilary:
I really wanna fight with him right now because there's no part of our society that exists in a vacuum. And it's like this idea that, I mean, individualism is like the problem that that kind of hits us in all places. It's the reason, I mean, it's problems with education, it's problem with healthcare. All these rights that are like people need to survive. child care is one of them. And yet we've decided that we are just gonna make everyone go in alone in some sort of like, display of American success as if we all live alone in this country separately from each other.
Julie:
The themes of this campaign to make sure that we never did get child care, that it was like dead for good. It was a parent's rights campaign. And it's just so evocative of like 50 years later where we are with, um, moms for Liberty and like pushing.
Hilary:
Right. That the fake outrage of, off what it means to decide what your kids know about the world.
Julie:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hilary:
But they called it parents rights.
Julie:
It was the seventies. So it was like this actual like paper flyer campaign from conservatives where Congress was like literally flooded with these flyers that were, the title was raising Children, government, or parents' rights. And they made just absolutely bananas claims. It was like, if we have these child care centers, children are going to unionize, parents will not be allowed to take their children to church or tell them to take out the trash. Like just utterly wild.
Hilary:
Full scare tactics. Well, and it's the same tactic stuff with banning books right now.
Julie:
Exactly. The same. And it totally worked. I mean, that like, made sure that that veto was the end, that it was like buried for years and years and years.
Jasmine:
But they love to tell you that it takes a village to raise a child
Hilary:
which village? .
Jasmine:
Which village? Right.
Jasmine:
Like Mm-Hmm. . We were in the office one week and I was going to be here longer than my child care provider was open. So what do I do? Then? I have to go and piece together family friend network, this. So-called FFN Network, you're getting care that's outside of sort of these more formalized paid processes, uh, or systems. And you're relying on your neighbor to pick up your kid from school because you can't make it there in time. You're calling a grandparent. Right? And so you have to then build this village on your own. And it's so overwhelming and so insurmountable, um, to piece together something that works for you. Um, didn't we almost have it all?
Hilary:
Yeah. Nixon. Okay. Well, so now we know who to blame. Mm-Hmm. . But
Jasmine:
one of the many.
Julie:
one of the many.
Hilary:
One of the many. Right over. Yeah. That was our history lesson. Um, so I think, I think the conversation around this has shifted over the last four years. Like many things did because of the Covid pandemic, and I think all three of us were in the same boat. Right? Uh, suddenly we were home with our kids. We were all, remember our two weeks that stretched on of, of staying home? And we were told to work from home if you could. And, and I'll say like, we are in a privileged position where we could work from home. We didn't lose our jobs. We had pay, we, you know, like all of that was still there. But you couldn't work and also take care of your children at the same time. And it's like the whole country woke up to that idea. And you both did this incredible research on women and work and what happened to women in Covid. And so, um, I'd love for you to, to talk a little bit about what you learned and also what you think has shifted, uh, since then.
Jasmine:
This is all data that we're looking at from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So if you look at the shift between February, 2020 and April, 2020 mm-Hmm. , like there was a loss of over 22 million jobs, right? So people like us were able to sort of be cushioned. We could work from home, work with small children in the background, but lots of people, you know, child care providers, waitresses, restaurant cooks, right? Things shut down grocery store, right? Like there things, jobs went away, right? And so they started coming back. But if you don't have care for your child, if your child has virtual school, how are you supposed to go in person anywhere to work? So we saw a lot of people leave the labor force altogether, then we saw them start to trickle back. and then in September, 2020, I think a lot of people, probably yourselves included, I didn't have a school age kid at that point, were like, is school going to be open?
Hilary:
Right?
Jasmine:
Is it going to happen? Spoiler alert, it didn't happen. And so like a million people left the labor force that month. And so of those million people, eight in 10 of them are women. It meant that women could no longer be a worker, a teacher, uh, right. Like all of the things that we're putting on them, they couldn't handle it anymore. So they all left the labor force..so since then as schools opened back up as, as other businesses have opened back up as we've like recouped the jobs lost, we're still at a deficit, both men and women in terms of the labor force participation rate. But we're, we're heading back to our pre pandemic level. But everything is
Hilary:
Have women gotten their jobs back though to that same degree?
Jasmine:
Women lag behind men. We have not recouped our labor force participation. So the share of people who are in the labor force as a right, like that's your numerator and then the whole population is your denominator. We have not reached our pre pandemic share, but men haven't either.
Hilary:
Got it. Cool. Listening to that, the underscore for me is like, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. It's that kind of cool, um, is right. Like, who is gonna stay home first? Who is gonna lose their job?
Jasmine:
Right. And, and it's part of it is, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in some ways, right? If you're looking at a two parent, We're, we're making some assumptions here. Two parent, heterosexual, husband, wife, household who's making more, who can, who can afford, right? Right. If you are going to go without one income, whose income is that gonna be? It's gonna be the one who's already under underpaid and undervalued. Um, because you're more reliant on the other person's earnings.
Julie:
Two years into the pandemic. Jasmine and I worked with a polling firm, GQR to try to dig in at more at the individual level, to see what happened to women during those first two years. Um, when that was already a point where the unemployment and labor force participation rates were looking better. But what we found was that in so many ways, women really had not recovered. And that caregiving had so much to do with it. And those interruptions in their careers, meant that some of them hadn't gone back to work. Some of them had lost savings. Most people were at minimum feeling some sort of strain on their mental health.
Hilary:
We talked a lot about frontline workers through the pandemic, but the frontline of like how our country works still rests on whether care is happening or not, and whether women are able to do it or receive it so that they can work somewhere else. Like that's sort of the underline of, of what the pandemic showed us. Our country doesn't work without it, but then women can't work without care either.
Julie:
Right. I do feel like it's important to note too that because that care crisis was so like clear during that pandemic period, the
Hilary:
People saw it for the first time.
Julie:
Yes. The people saw it for the first time.
Jasmine:
A lot of men saw it for the first time.
Hilary:
Yeah. They're stuck home with their kids. Right. Right.
Jasmine:
Yeah. Mm-Hmm. ,
Julie:
Exactly. Like that was a moment where we did see big federal investment in child care, like unprecedented levels of federal investment in child care. Um, and that essentially kept our child care system from like totally collapsing. And that is something that a lot of our colleagues worked very hard to make happen. And it was super important. But most of that, so-called emergency funding actually expired last September, and the rest of it will run out later this year. But it was not funding that we actually can afford to lose. Right. Because our child care system was in crisis before the pandemic and it's on the verge of being in crisis again without this funding.
Hilary:
Well, so let's talk about the system. You talked a little bit about how we had a way out with Nixon. Mm-Hmm. . But, um, way child care works generally is you don't need it until you do. child care is hard to find. it's not available easily and then it's really, really expensive and the rates, you know, depends where you live, obviously. But it is often sometimes more than your housing costs. Right. And, you know, if you take your salary and break it up, child care ends up being sometimes the biggest expense. And then on the other hand of that,child care providers are, paid very little, a minimum wage or just barely more. And those wages then don't let them support their own family. they're important valuable jobs, and yet they're barely compensated. And so this doesn't feel like a good system to me. , we know like, there, there's a thing we all need. No one can afford it, no one can get it. And then the people doing this incredible work aren't given enough to, to let them do it as, as a job that, that lets them take care of their families. And so, um, why, why is it like that now and how can we fix it?
Jasmine:
Lemme touch on the scarcity piece for a second. In the pandemic, we lost about a million child care workers, right? They didn't get relief in time, In the early days, some of them closed altogether and never reopened. Um, the demand was down for a long time, right? People were too scared to send their kids back. And so a million jobs were lost in the pandemic. Okay? As of like January, 2024, which is four, almost four years after the pandemic started, we have just now recouped those million jobs lost. So that means, we have four years of population growth where we were going to have to have increased the number of child care providers from that, you know, February, 2020 baseline to even keep up with the kids that were being born to care for them. Yeah. And so in the four years in the interim, right, if we had a crisis in February, 2020, imagine worse. Now imagine it's way worse now. It's way worse now.
Hilary:
So that's why no one can can find it.
Jasmine:
You can't find it.
Julie:
I, I mean really it is just such a textbook example of a broken market because most people can't afford to pay a good salary or even a good chunk of a good salary just so that they can go to work themselves.
Hilary:
Right right. You hear that all the time. You see someone say, it's cheaper for me to stay home.
Julie:
So we have this situation where a typical child care worker is making 13, $14 an hour. Um, and now we're in a moment where that's the case even as wages in other lower paying jobs have actually gone up due to the sort of high demand and labor scarcity in the wake of the pandemic. But wages for child care, workers can't go up because families just can't afford to pay more without some kind of assistance.
Hilary:
Julie, like you said in the intro, your work focuses on what makes a job a good job. So what would make being a child care provider a good job? What do they need? what needs to change for them?
Julie:
I think essentially child care providers need what we all need from a job. You know, enough money to support ourselves and our families benefits to help us afford health insurance and a secure retirement. Paid time off to care for ourselves when we get sick or for our kids, time to rest. And also sort of some sense of autonomy and that the work that you're doing matters in some way. Um, what we hear from child care providers is that they do often have a strong sense that their work matters. Like they're working with kids. They can watch them grow. They see every day how important this is. They know the families they care for, depend on them, but that's about it. They don't, they don't get, really get anything else on the list. And that's so wrong. I mean this work is so important and any person who is entrusting their child to a care provider knows it. But their compensation and their benefits and their time off and their time to care for themselves and their ability to support their own families, none of that is what they're getting because our system is too broken to allow it.
Hilary:
Again, it's a policy choice. Well, and it, it's been interesting in thinking about all this, how much there are shades of, um, conversations we have around education and teachers. Though I think the difference is, again, in that cultural depiction, if we were to make a list of media depictions of teachers, there's a million, right? Mm-Hmm. . And, uh, it doesn't mean they're paid well or enough, but at least that conversation is happening. Mm-Hmm. With child care providers, it's, there's nothing, you know, there's no Abbott Elementary for
Julie:
There should be. That's what we need
Hilary:
Yes, we have a pitch. Uh, networks come talk to us, , we have some ideas. .
Julie:
And on the policy level, actually, one of the key things that we are fighting for is essentially just to bring compensation for child care providers up to parody with kindergarten teachers and like first grade teachers. We know that kindergarten teachers and first grade teachers are not paid enough, but they are paid far, far more than the people who are caring for younger kids.
Hilary:
So we have this like, broken system, but like how do we, what, what do we want? What will fix it? Like, you know, if we were starting over , if we were gonna give a new bill to, uh, president Biden instead of Nixon. Right? Like what are we asking for? I think both realistically now and then what, what's the dream? How do we make the system work?
Julie:
So what we're asking for right now as a baseline is to restore that emergency funding that like the pandemic levels of funding actually should be our starting point. But that is definitely not our end point. So $16 billion a year is the number we're asking for now. And that's what the law center and parents and workers and advocates all across the country are pushing for right now.
Hilary:
That's like the plug in the hole funding.
Julie:
Exactly. exactly. It's the, I think the name of the bill is the child care Stabilization Act cause that is what it would do is just stabilize where we are. But that's really just, uh, down payment on the universal child care that we should have had in place for half a century by now. Um, and it's actually pretty easy to come up with the dollars that we need for that child care for all. Um, if we just make sure billionaires and corporations are paying their fair share.
Hilary:
This isn't actually hard. These are all just choices. Yeah. I think I I wanted to like ground the numbers here. the 16 billion. What would that mean for child care providers and for families?
Julie:
Again, that would be stabilizing the system. It would mean that states that had invested in paying child care providers more, for example, would be able to keep up those pay increases. It's not necessarily enough to make every child care job a good job, but it keeps us moving in the right direction instead of going backwards. And it prevents child care centers from having to raise rates for families at minimum.
Hilary:
Got it. So it keeps it affordable. More people can access it and it means that providers can stay in these jobs 'cause they're getting paid enough to be able to work at all
Jasmine:
And support their own families.
Hilary:
Right. Exactly. And that's what I mean. Yeah, exactly. And so, universal child care its a right. We should have it. Our whole country needs it. And even if you don't believe, even if you're Nixon, this is me . Sorry. Even if you're Richard Nixon, I'm just gonna keep on picking on him here a little bit. It makes good business sense. if you want power and money, you still can't do that without child care. Your workers can't work without child care. You, you know, like our whole system requires it. So it's good. Like universal child care would be like a good investment for the country.
Julie:
It absolutely would. It doesn't work this way in other countries, There are other models. We can choose a different path. We haven't yet. But we're working on it.
Jasmine:
We need to move this whole child care conversation into like an infrastructure conversation. You cannot get to work, right. If you're going to work in person, you can't get there if there's no road. Right. You cannot go to work unless there's somebody there to care for your child. Right. Like it's as simple as that. It's infrastructure.
Hilary:
Well, and we know a lot of people make these decisions based on what happens with their families, but I, I think part of why we're talking about this and why we started this all, you know, in like looking at movies and TV is that until you go to look for child care, you have no idea how bad the system is. You don't encounter it because it's also not depicted. And so I think that's another piece of this. Like we need movies and TV shows that actually show what it looks like to have child care and recognize what's possible because of it.
Julie:
100%. Honestly, I will confess, I thought maybe I was just totally blanking on all of these shows and movies that surely, surely there was some depiction of it. So I was googling, I was searching and literally the only thing that came up was daddy daycare. That was it.
Hilary:
Thank you both for, for coming and getting angry with me about the state of child care in our country.
Jasmine:
So glad that like, this is reaching a larger audience because more people need to know about it. Just like you said, people don't have kids, people do have kids. People who are passed the kids stage.
Hilary:
Right.
Jasmine:
It's important for everyone.
Hilary:
It affects everybody.
Jasmine:
It does.
Julie:
Yep. child care is important for all of us. We can all have it. We just need more folks to join us.
Hilary:
A bigger village
Julie:
A government sized village.
Hilary:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Julie:
Thank you, Hillary.
CREDITS
Hearsay is a Wonder Media network, production in partnership with the National Women's Law Center. It is hosted and produced by Jessica Baskerville, Lark Lewis, and Hilary Woodward. Our producers are Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch and Taylor Williamson. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer. And Maddy Foley is our editor, production assistant by Luci Jones and Show Art by Andrea Sumner.
BLOOPER
Hilary:
Mary Poppins.
Lark:
Mm-Hmm. . I never watched the reboot
Hilary:
You know, you ever watched the reboot? We took our kids to that as like the first movie they were ever gonna see in a theater.
Lark:
Oh my God. Yeah.
Hilary:
They made it about six minutes . And they were out. No offense, Emily Blunt,
Lark:
We're done.