From momsrising.com worth the read!!!

I unfortunately while a military wife never got to benefit from this for one of two reasons either my ex chose to hide it from me in his effort to control or two he just wasnt aware of the subsidy himself. So even to this day I am considering the military as a temp job to pay for school and daycare but I would still be miserable UGHH.... because then I would be a full-time mom , student , and soldier & those uniforms are soo not flattering. And one bigger reason as feminist as I may sound at times women just don't belong in the Army at least in most jobs. Women in the Army tend to become men in thier mindstates. The sleep around like nobodies buisness spreading diseases and the like with thier Blue Funnels and other dirty things, they make moves on married men during deployments lol sure send them Pam Anderson to walk around and say hi as a morale boost but IM SORRY send the female cooks to the small infantry camps as a morale boost thats just crap. Those females are just demeaning themselves. So Anyway back to my actual blog I got a little side tracked lol

Chapter Six:
E: Excellent Childcare
Trading her princess nightgown for jeans and a blue denim jacket, Haylee had her binky clipped to her shirt and her hair pulled up into pigtails with bows. She stepped out of her bedroom that her mom, Kim, had decorated for her in lavender and aqua, ready for her big day. The sun was just starting to peek through her curtains making pools of light on the cozy butterfly quilt on her bed.
It was Haylee’s first day at a childcare center, and Kim’s first day at a new job.
They got in the car and drove down a tree-lined hill, took a left at the stoplight, and then pulled into the daycare about a mile down the street. Kim had looked long and hard for quality care for Haylee that was also affordable and close to home.
Several weeks earlier, after hours of research and touring several childcare facilities—some clearly substandard (one with a frazzled teacher crying into a phone in the corner), some full with long waiting lists, and some with very young teachers surrounded by absolute chaos in their classrooms—Kim saw that many of the childcare workers simply weren’t given the resources they needed to succeed in their classrooms, and that lack of resources came through loud and clear as she toured.
Kim finally chose the center where she was now dropping off Haylee. The center was one of the more expensive and “prestigious” childcare facilities in the area, and although Kim still had some questions about that program, her job was starting, and it was the only real option. There simply weren’t many highquality daycares in Kim’s community.
With her childcare search, Kim joined the more than 30 percent of parents who (according to a 2000 survey commissioned by the I Am Your Child Foundation and Parents magazine) say finding affordable quality childcare is difficult.1 This lack of accessibility is a key issue, particularly as millions of children need care every day while their parents work. In fact, the Children’s Defense Fund estimates that each day twelve million children under five years old spend time being cared for by someone other than a parent2 —this is nearly two-thirds of all children in that age group.3 While this book explores ways to give parents more time with their families through policies like flexible work options and paid family leave, there will always be a need for quality childcare so that parents can work and support their families.

High Cost of Care
A Children’s Defense Fund study found childcare in the United States costs between $4,000 and $10,000 a year for each child, with the costs rising for babies and younger children, special-needs kids, and kids living in parts of the country where the cost of living is higher.33 To put this cost in perspective, consider that a full one-quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 in 2001.
The first day Kim left Haylee, both of them cried. Kim held her tears until the parking lot while Haylee cried hysterically in the classroom. Kim expected that she’d have to deal with some initial separation anxiety, as is the norm with many small children. What she didn’t expect was the callous response from Haylee’s teacher.
Haylee’s main teacher had seemed nice at first, a bit stern perhaps, but nothing stood out as a problem. The morning Kim’s impression of the teacher changed is fixed in her memory: “She started getting borderline mean to the kids, behaving in a way that was odd considering she was working with two- and three-year-old children.” One day when Kim came to pick up Haylee, she first stopped outside the door to look through a window into the classroom and saw Haylee crying. She then heard the teacher say, “Stop crying and acting like a baby.” The teacher proceeded to swat Haylee’s binky out of her mouth, saying, “You’re not a baby. You don’t need a binky, and you should stop crying.” Haylee was two years old.
Kim went to the management and asked to have Haylee transferred out of that teacher’s classroom, which they did. She recalls, “I was miserable and angry with the childcare center, and I was also disappointed in myself for allowing it to happen to my child for the short period of time that it did.” Haylee clearly wasn’t happy in the situation, and Kim felt trapped because she needed to work and there weren’t other obvious childcare options.
Haylee finished out the year doing well in her new classroom. When she moved up a year and started in her third classroom, it became clear to Kim that the high staff turnover was a big problem. It was like a revolving door. By Kim’s count, in Haylee’s series of three classrooms, she had twelve different teachers and assistants. Sadly, Kim was discovering a reality of childcare in this country—that of high staff turnover due to low pay, lack of healthcare benefits, and minimal support for the providers. One study of childcare centers in California found that between 1996 and 2000 there was a 76 percent staff turnover rate.4 This issue, combined with the fact that the United States has one of the higher students to teacher ratios in the world (the U.S. tied for ninety-first of 151 countries in preprimary student to- staff ratios5), is a recipe for poor quality care.
The teacher transitions were hard on the kids in Haylee’s class. Kim recalls, “The kids would get used to a teacher, but then they’d quit and the kids would have to start all over again. And this was in a prestigious preschool which was about $900 per month!” Not only was the teacher turnover and lack of training taking a toll, the cost of even that quality of care was hard to afford for Kim. “The price of that childcare took all of my paycheck, and my parents had to step in to help support us.”
In fact, quality childcare without some type of subsidy is unaffordable for many American families. Consider that a full one quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 in 2001.6 Add that to the fact that only one out of seven kids that are federally eligible for childcare assistance actually gets any help.7 This is a failing system.
In fact, America ranks low in global comparisons of childcare support: The United States ranks twentieth out of seventy-two countries in terms of the percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) spent on early childhood education.8 A report by the Project on Global Working Families out of Harvard University concludes, “Initial inequities across social class are markedly exacerbated by the public policy decisions the United States has made, including, among others, the failure thus far to provide public preschool or early childhood education to parallel public school. . . . In many other nations, working families can count on publicly guaranteed parental leave; and in many, preschool childcare or early-childhood education is already publicly provided.”9
This is a missed opportunity for our country. Excellent childcare has been proven again and again to have longstanding economic and educational benefits. The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, as reported by the Children’s Defense Fund, found, “Children in higher quality care for their first four-and-a-half years of life scored higher on tests of cognitive skills, language ability, vocabulary, and short-term memory and attention than children in lower quality care.”10 One study (Significant Benefits by Lawrence Schweinhart and others) that researched the long-term impacts of good quality childcare for low-income children came to a similar conclusion, the Children’s Defense Fund reports. That study found, “After 27 years, each $1 invested saved over $7 by increasing the likelihood that children would be literate, employed, and enrolled in postsecondary education, and making them less likely to be school dropouts, dependent on welfare, or arrested for criminal activity or delinquency.” 11 Early learning opportunities will help build a generation of responsible, smart, and working adults. Yet these opportunities aren’t widely available in America.
Yasmine Daniel, of the Children’s Defense Fund, is concerned. “We feel childcare should be accessible and affordable to every family, and clearly it’s not when right now childcare costs families between $4,000 and $10,000 per year.” She suggests we think of early childhood education as we think of other education, noting, “When a young adult goes to college we subsidize their education. Ironically, at that point, parents are usually further along in their careers and are often more able to afford the costs of education than when their children are younger and they are just at the beginning of their earning potential. Generally, we are for subsidizing childcare on a sliding scale based on parental income.”
Back at the childcare center, Haylee’s problems were escalating. Although the teachers were nice to the students in her third classroom, they just weren’t very organized or engaged in what was going on with the kids. “Sometimes I’d go there and the teacher wouldn’t even be in the classroom. They’d be in another room, or on the phone a lot,” notes Kim. And Haylee, then four years old, was getting picked on regularly by three other boys in her class. “I told the teachers several times about what was happening to Haylee in her classroom, but nothing changed and the teacher was completely out of it. And then I went to pick up Haylee one day and found out a little boy had kicked her hard in the stomach.”
“That was it for me. The kick in the stomach pushed me over the edge. I took Haylee out and she never went back there,” remembers Kim. At that point Kim’s mom was able to cut back at work and watch Haylee for the next five months. The next year Haylee went to school in a Montessori preschool program, which she loved.
Kim felt enormous relief when she finally found good childcare for Haylee, “There weren’t any screaming kids running around. On my first site visit, I was there for an hour and a half and everything was so under control—the children were smiling, happy, and learning. I wanted to break down and start crying because I felt like such a mean parent for sticking my child in that horrible daycare for two years.” Unfortunately, this Montessori preschool wasn’t initially available for Haylee because at first she was too young to attend, and then she was waitlisted before being admitted. The Montessori preschool was also quite expensive.

Childcare In America
Of preschool children in childcare arrangements because their mothers work, 10 percent are cared for by “nannies, babysitters in their homes, or other similar non-relative situations”; 11 percent are in the care of independent, in-home daycare providers; 31 percent are in childcare centers or preschools; and 48 percent are in the care of relatives.36
Clearly the quality of care at the first childcare center Haylee attended was substandard; the teachers didn’t have appropriate training, the pay wasn’t high enough to retain good teachers, and the classroom regularly bordered on chaos. Haylee’s experience in the childcare center is particularly troubling because it occurred in a center that was supposedly one of the best in the area. All too often childcare facilities have uneven, poor quality care. The Children’s Defense Fund reports that a study (Cost, Quality, and Child Outcomes in Childcare Centers) examining childcare in four states found, “childcare at most centers in the United States is poor to mediocre,” with 12 percent of centers providing less than minimal quality care—defined as care that could harm “children’s health, safety, and development.” As for the centers that rated well for good quality care, those comprised only 14 percent.12
There are a wide variety of childcare configurations, ranging from childcare centers and preschools, to in-home care by independent providers, and informal care by relatives and friends. Though this variety of options sounds comprehensive, they are not numerous enough to provide for all the children who need care. With increasing frequency, grandparents or other relatives, who sometimes fill childcare gaps, are having to work into their later years to support themselves, making them less available for childcare assistance. Families are stretched thin. In fact, due to high costs and otherwise inaccessible programs, many school-age children end up home alone or caring for younger siblings before they are ready to handle that responsibility.
Too few American families have access to excellent childcare, and the poor-quality care many are receiving can harm children in the short-term and effect long-lasting damage: A recent study found that inadequate childcare situations negatively impact future educational achievements, with kids in lower quality childcare scoring lower on cognitive-ability tests.13 A growing number of families have two parents in the labor force, making excellent childcare a necessity, not a luxury.
6.2 - Childcare Providers Also Caught in Bind
It’s not just families that are caught in the childcare bind of high costs, quality issues, and low availability. Childcare providers also struggle, particularly with low wages.
The average childcare provider earns a salary of just $18,060 a year.14 Low salaries in turn lead to high turnover rates because of the financial hurdles faced by the childcare providers, many of whom are parents themselves. In fact, what can happen, particularly with childcare providers that care for children in their own homes, is that providers actually end up subsidizing the families whose children they watch. They end up paying out-of-pocket for food and educational supplies, but are unable to charge higher rates to parents for their time because many parents simply cannot afford to pay any higher rates.

Low Salaries for Childcare Providers
Childcare providers earn a salary of just $18,060 a year on average.34
Angenita is an in-home independent childcare provider in Illinois whose clients mainly come from a state-subsidized program.
In tears, Angenita had to tell her childcare assistant that she was going to delay paying her yet again because the state was behind on their payments for the children. She was embarrassed and horrified that she couldn’t pay her assistant for work that was already done, but she, herself, hadn’t been paid by the state in six months. The state program was supposed to work like clockwork: In-home childcare providers watched children that qualified for state subsidies, and the state paid the childcare providers those subsidies. In this case, the clock was broken.
Yet she kept her center open because “at that point I was dedicated to the field. I’d been in childcare for six months and didn’t have another job avenue immediately available. I was stuck. I already quit my other job. I also had parents relying on me everyday. I couldn’t just wake up and say, ‘Okay it’s all over. Find someone else to take care of the children.’ ”
She notes that with eight children in her care, if she stopped providing childcare then eight sets of parents would be forced to take time off work to find another sitter. And she knew these families well, knew they desperately needed her services in order to go to work to support their families—she was watching her sister’s children, and also children on her block. Another factor, Angenita’s a fighter: “I’m not one to accept failure. I had to think positively like, ‘Okay, the check is coming soon.’ I never imagined it would take that long.” While childcare providers are often woefully underpaid, this situation was over the top.
Angenita’s doorbell rang less than an hour after the tearful discussion. It was a union organizer named Maggie. Maggie sat down with Angenita and asked if she had any issues that need to be addressed with late checks from the state or other topics. “I said, ‘Late checks! I’ve never even gotten mine,’ and then I just started talking and talking,” she recalls. Maggie told Angenita that there are a lot of providers in the same situation, and that there are even providers who lost their homes because of the state’s failure to pay in a timely manner. Then she invited Angenita to an in-home childcare providers’ union organizing meeting, and asked her to speak.
Several days later Angenita went to that meeting. She stepped out the front door of her house and drove to the center of Chicago’s downtown. It was 1996. As she parked her car and entered a building with an old bicycle shop on the ground floor, she anticipated finally getting a chance to connect with other childcare providers in situations similar to hers.
Ready to take action, Angenita walked purposefully through the lobby to the elevator waiting area. The elevator door opened, Angenita pressed floor four, and her ride up began. Stepping out of the elevator, she turned and walked through an open door into a small conference room packed with at least forty women.
Angenita got up to speak about her role as a childcare provider and people listened. “I talked about the fact that I’m a teacher, a cook, a lawyer, a doctor, a nurse, a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a mediator, a cleaner, a mind reader, and an employer as well as an employee, and I have not been paid for the services that I do render.”
The ice was broken. Women broke into applause, and cheers were called out after every title Angenita named. “Everyone was yelling. I'm a cook (Yeah!)! I’m a mind reader (Yeah!)! Yeah!!!”
Her speech continued. “There is a difference between a need and a want, and just like oxygen to breathe, we need a living wage to live. With all the many hats I wear daily the state only wants to pay me $2.53 an hour per child and I have not been paid yet for six months.”
The crowded room was awash with clapping and cheering.
The women who filled the room were also in-home childcare providers for the Illinois state childcare subsidy program in which the state allocates funds to providers based on a sliding scale of parent earnings. The state was behind in payments, not just for Angenita, who had been watching eight children a day for six months without pay, but for many other providers as well. On the day of the union meeting, Angenita was excited to share her predicament and experiences with other childcare providers and find out how to make a positive difference for everyone.
The organizing was a success. After banding together with the help of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and lobbying the Illinois state legislature, the childcare providers began to see real change.
“In 1999 we got a living wage increase from $19.18 to $20.50 per child per day from the state. In 2000 we got another increase for the cost of living, and in 2004 the federal subsidized food program increased payments for the children’s food,” notes Angenita.
In 2005 the SEIU had an election, the biggest in Illinois history and second biggest nationally, and 49,000 providers voted to officially unionize, becoming the first union of state-subsidized home childcare providers in the nation. These women and men are making history and positive changes for families right this very moment. As Angenita says, “We’re a powerful force when you think about it. We’re the people who take care of children after they enter the world.”
Angenita is not alone. Tens of thousands of family childcare providers in more than twelve states around the country are organizing through unions. For example, SEIU and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) are working together to organize over 45,000 family childcare providers in California. In Oregon 5,000 family childcare providers won the right to a union with AFSCME in 2005. They are now headed to the bargaining table to fight for health insurance and other benefits that childcare providers need.
Higher wages, benefits, and better public funding help both childcare workers and children. Low salaries and poor benefits lead to high provider turnover rates, creating unstable situations for our nation’s children. Increased wages, as well as funding for continuing education for childcare providers, are needed to attract, and retain, top quality providers. And the benefit of top quality providers is incalculable: “Millions of preschoolers are spending precious years caught in a maze of unstable, substandard settings that compromise their chances of succeeding in school. For them, the years of promise represent lost opportunity at a crucially formative stage in their development,” states a Carnegie Corporation report.15
6.3 - Parents Also Caught in Economic Crunch
Long-term solutions are needed just as urgently on the parent side of the childcare equation. After all, it’s not just the childcare providers like Angenita who are dealing with an inadequate, broken system. Even with the low salaries childcare providers receive, childcare itself is often too expensive for many working families. A Children’s Defense Fund study found childcare in the United States costs between $4,000 and $10,000 a year for each child, with the costs rising for babies and younger children, special-needs kids, and kids living in parts of the country where the cost of living is higher.16

MOthers are Important Breadwinners:Childcare is a Need Not a Luxury
A 1995 study, Women: The New Providers, interviewed women and found 55 percent brought in half or more of their household income (18 percent brought in all of the income, 11 percent more than half, and 26 percent brought in half). And of those in married families, 48 percent of working women brought in half or more of the household income.37
Ten thousand dollars per year, per child, is simply out of reach for many families. The big picture shows a tremendous number of American families in crisis. Remember, a full one-quarter of families with children under age six earned less than $25,000 in 2001.17 Consequently, many families have only informal and sometimes dangerous, or inadequate childcare options because they are free or affordable. All too often the TV becomes the primary sitter, not to forget latchkey children that are too young to really take care of themselves. Parents are simply left with too few affordable, accessible, quality childcare options.
These three criteria—accessibility, affordability, and quality—define precisely what parents need. Accessibility means that parents are able to find and get their children into good childcare programs, not simply onto a long waiting list. Affordability indicates childcare costs that also allow parents to pay other necessary monthly expenses, like food and rent.
Defining high-quality childcare is more complicated, and requires a number of factors to come together: The providers need to be well-trained, supported, and paid a living wage; the facilities need to be safe; educational materials need to be up to date; healthy food needs to be available; there should be low provider turnover; and more. In order to assure quality childcare, some have suggested implementing uniform quality standards that govern all childcare and early education programs across the nation. Other possibilities include requiring state licensing and provider education, as well as seeking ways to increase the salaries necessary to attract and keep good childcare providers.
How do we handle this crisis, where providers are paid too little and the cost to parents is still prohibitively high? Childcare centers generally aren’t making high profits either. Frankly, childcare doesn’t come with a low price tag. Fixing this system requires a real investment by the community, much as we support the public school system. Decades ago, because more mothers were home with their children, childcare wasn’t a necessity for as many families. Today, with most parents working, good childcare is essential. As a country it is time to ask: Why do we support an eight year old with public school funding and not a four year old?
6.4 - Military Dreams
Surprisingly, there is a successful model childcare system operating right here in our country, and it might not be where you expect: the military. At this very moment, the Department of Defense has over 200,000 children in their care.18 Two hundred thousand children. It’s such a good system that many tout it as the example of large scale success—among those is the National Women’s Law Center Co-President Nancy Duff Campbell, who in 2005 said, “The military’s systemic approach to childcare continues to serve as a model for our nation’s civilian childcare needs.”19
Many of the problems outlined in this chapter have been successfully dealt with in the military childcare system. For example, care is available on a sliding scale to parents to make it affordable. Parents have easy access to the military childcare system and don’t end up lost on long waiting lists. The military offers high-quality care, fair compensation and training for providers, and holds its centers to national uniform standards. Of the nearly holy trinity of childcare needs—affordability, quality, and accessibility—the military hits the mark with all three.
One person taking advantage of the military childcare system is Wendy. Wendy married her high school sweetheart after they first met at a county fair in Idaho; she was only sixteen when they first met. She and her girlfriends were walking into the fair, and he was leaving for the night. As they passed each other on the grass path lined with noisy fair games—toss the ring around the bowling pins, shoot the ducks, dart the balloons—and with the happy screams of roller coaster riders in the background, they recognized each other from their high school hallways.
She remembers the sticky sweet smell of cotton candy that night. It was summer. Wendy was sixteen when their eyes met and the, “Oh hi,” passed her lips to her future spouse.
Then they started talking, and got along so well that he borrowed a magic marker and wrote his phone number directly on her arm. She called him the next day before the marker could wash off, and they talked for hours. They talked through high school, taking a break to dance at her senior prom, and right into marriage when she was eighteen.
Just after she got married, Wendy had a baby, and her husband joined the military. Now twenty-four, Wendy and her husband have two children, Naomi is five and Xavier is just over one year. The childcare services provided by the military have been essential. When asked where her family would be without it, Wendy answers, “Poor. We would have struggled a lot more than we are now. We’re better off mostly because of the subsidized childcare offered by the military.”
Wendy’s financial assessment is accurate. The cost difference of subsidized military childcare really makes a difference. Consider that in the Army a family that makes below $28,000 annually pays no more than $43 per week for childcare, or around $2,000 annually.20 And then compare that to the national average cost of childcare, which can rise to $10,000 per year or more.21 Childcare subsidies make a real difference, particularly as the number of children and families who live in poverty grows. According to the U.S. Census, 35.9 million Americans lived in poverty in 2003, up from 31.6 million just three years before.22
Wendy’s children aren’t the only members of her family who benefit from the higher standard of military childcare. Wendy also works at the facility, where her pay is significantly higher than if she worked at a nonmilitary daycare. Full-time pay at civilian childcare facilities averages out to $8.47 per hour, compared to military entry-level wages of between $9.34 and $13.23 per hour.23 The military pay can go up to $18 per hour for classroom leads with Child Development Associate degrees.24 In fact, the Department of Defense has taken the added step of creating policies to ensure caregivers are paid similar wages to those who work for the Department of Defense in other jobs that require similar amounts of “training, experience, and seniority.”25
In the end, it’s actually the very affordability of military childcare that allows Wendy to work at all. Without the subsidized childcare, Wendy would run the risk of making less money than the family pays out for childcare—a catch-22 that afflicts many modern families. “I wouldn’t be going to work without the subsidy here,” Wendy recognizes, “and we definitely would be having more financial problems if I wasn’t going to work.”
While some may picture military childcare as harsh classrooms full of kids in uniform with strict, noncreative curriculum, that’s far from the truth. Many parents find their children are warmly welcomed and that their children respond in turn. Alberta, mother of two, has a daughter in a military childcare facility. Daliyah is four years old and full of life. She’s learning fast, including learning to speak Spanish right along with English, and runs into her classroom each morning to greet her teachers with a warm, snug hug. Each night Daliyah includes her teachers in her bedtime prayers of good wishes.
The attention to provider training and curriculum detail shows when you enter a military childcare center. The Clarkmore Development Center at Ft. Lewis in Washington, for example, has a ratio of ten children to one teacher, and serves infants through school-age children. Each classroom has several age-appropriate learning stations. These learning stations range from art areas, sensory tables, play stages, music and “gross motor” or big movement rooms, to book listening stations, reading and writing centers, and all sorts of other learning activities that the teachers and students fit into their regular daily curriculum. The sound of happy kids playing floats in from the outside play area, yet chaos is kept to a creative minimum. The space is designed for child safety with windows into all closets, open restrooms, and open-view corridors through the classrooms.

High Quality Care Saves Money In The Long Term
Studies show that investments in quality early education for preschoolers saves money in the long run through a reduction in crime rates and welfare needs, and also by lowering the need for special education and grade repeating. High-quality early education is an investment that pays off in the future.35
Art, ideas, and colorful sponge paintings decorate the classroom walls, pictures of kids and teachers hang outside the classroom doors, and the smell of hot food fills the air at lunchtime. One such wall lists preschoolers’ ideas for the definition of “dissect”: “Sounds like an insect to me.” “Dissect is a glove.” “You have to cut before you eat.” “It sounds like a broken fish.” These young children were working on water curriculum and learning about fish (including how sometimes people dissect fish). They also worked with a water table and water animals— a favorite being the pretend turtles—and listened to curriculumrelated stories. There was clearly enthusiastic, controlled learning going on in those classrooms.
These creative sparks don’t happen by accident. The military has a rigorous childcare provider-training program designed to raise staff quality and pay, as well as uniform certification standards with an enforcement component based on regular inspections. 26 The military also has a uniform accreditation system, which has built in ways to assist providers in giving better care and education.27 The Army, for example, requires extensive initial training for eighteen months, with an ongoing annual training requirement of twenty-four hours per year.28 A childcare provider’s employment is dependent on training, and all go through national and local background clearance checks.
Although the federal government is a long way from implementing an adequate nationally subsidized childcare program despite a host of proven benefits, there are local programs scattered across the country. A Wisconsin study that looked at the impacts of extending their kindergarten through twelfth grade education system to include free preschool for four-year-olds found that such programs save money in the long run. The study found early education reduces later crime rates and welfare needs, while increasing the total educational cost-benefit by 68 percent—partly through lowering the need for special education (saving $42 million) and students needing to repeat grades less often.29
Helen Blank, a nationally recognized leader in childcare policy from the National Women’s Law Center, shares her dream vision for the future of childcare in America. “My ideal solution would be to have universal childcare—first it would start with paid family leave so parents have the choice of staying home those first few months, and then ideally at least some of the childcare would be available on a sliding scale, and some would be universally available for no cost.” Blank envisions a future where some parts of childcare are universally funded just like the public K–12 school system.
Blank’s ideal fix for now? “I’d give childcare programs money through the federal childcare Development Block Grant so we could have a combination of neighborhood childcare centers that are networked around a core resource referral program that could offer training, support, materials, and more—the military has a similar structure.” Support like that envisioned by Blank is needed more now than ever. Federal funding for childcare has been frozen for four years, laments Blank, while at the same time the number of people in poverty—the very people who most need help with childcare costs—has grown. In fact, in the face of budget trouble, many states have been cutting their childcare assistance programs. The lack of public funding for childcare further impacts the accessibility, quality, and affordability of good care. In addition, new welfare-to-work requirements that went into place in the 1990s increased the number of parents in the workplace while the childcare supply remained relatively stagnant.30 Sad to say, childcare in low-income communities is the least available.31
6.5 - Other Options
Lettecia was breaking up with her boyfriend, and with two children between them she was worried about staying afloat as a single mom. Her son Alex was about a year old, and her son Mason was two. Lettecia was worried about paying for childcare, working, and also going back to school so she could change to a more lucrative career. She clearly remembers the moment she found out about a nonprofit subsidized childcare center available in her town.
She was working in an H & R Block office with the standard green accent walls and crisp setting. It was a rainy winter day; there was just enough of a chill in the air to combine with the rain in a way that sent the cold under doors, through windowpanes, and directly to the bones. The office was slow that day because it was the beginning of January and people weren’t rushing in to file their taxes.
One woman did walk through the door that day, though. It was a client with an unscheduled appointment, and Lettecia walked up and introduced herself. Then they both went back to Lettecia’s desk to look at the client’s tax documents, “She pulled out her tax documents and W-2 form, and I asked her if she had childcare for her kids because that’s a credit.”
It was this simple routine question that opened a door of opportunity for Lettecia. She and the client started talking about children and it turned out the woman worked for Hope-Link, a nonprofit organization that serves homeless and low-income families, children, seniors, and people with disabilities. The client suggested that the newly single mother of two look into a childcare program they provided just a few miles from Lettecia’s office.
“She definitely was like an angel in disguise for me,” recalls Lettecia.
At the time, Lettecia was mainly working nights part-time. Because of her break-up, Lettecia knew she was going to have to work full-time in order to support herself and her kids. What she didn’t know was how she was going to afford the childcare, and where to find high-quality care on her budget.
That’s where the Hope-Link Adelle Maxwell Child Development Center came to the rescue. The Center serves about eighty homeless or low-income children, from infants to eight-yearolds, and charges qualifying low-income families on a sliding scale based on their wages. Funded through a combination of sources including public and private foundations, United Way, government support, and by donations from individuals, organizations and corporations in the community, Hope-Link provides small class sizes with individual learning plans for students. They also provide before- and after-school care, hot meals, onsite medical and mental healthcare, parent education, and a nutrition program. Needless to say, there’s often a waiting list for space in this childcare center.
After hearing about the center, Lettecia went in and filled out an application for each of her two sons. “They were really sweet and smart,” she recalls of the staff. The in-house childcare advocate helped her apply for a subsidy program though the state. The cost without subsidies was about $1,100 per month, roughly Lettecia’s monthly take-home pay. She remarks, “That’s pretty much what I was making after taxes.” So when Lettecia applied and qualified for a subsidy she ended up only having to pay $350 per month out of pocket.
“It was incredible. It was like, ‘Wow, we can eat!’ ” She notes, “I probably wouldn’t have been able to work and would have gone on welfare if not for the subsidies. I just don’t know. I hate to think of what would have happened . . .”
Her son Mason started first at the childcare center, while Alex stayed on the waiting list for a while and then started too. Not surprisingly, Lettecia’s children are thriving in the preschool. Her son, Mason, at age four is now an avid early reader. At a recent dentist appointment he surprised his mother by reading, “I like to brush my teeth” from a poster in the dental office. The preschool creates an individual curriculum for Mason to keep up with his speedy learning. And Lettecia also feels supported. “They make an effort to help me because they know it’s difficult to combine work, going back to school, and being a mom.”
This is a prime example of a childcare center that’s truly supporting families—a worthy goal for all families. Without the public and private partnerships, extensive funding network, and sliding scale subsidized care, this center with its excellent academic and community programs simply wouldn’t exist. Frankly, it doesn’t exist for most parents.
6.6 - Endings and Beginnings
The two-year-old with the mean teacher at the beginning of this chapter is now a nine-year-old with a zest for life. Haylee was a pirate for Halloween this year—one with big black platform shoes, several tangled skull and bone bracelets, pirate shirting, and lipstick (for a new twist on an old image). A quick, intelligent kid, she loves horses, reading, fishing, and all things adventurous. Her mother was able to find a better, yet quite expensive, preschool where Haylee thrived as a little girl. Haylee’s story ended well, but too many working families have little choice but to stay in inadequate care. As a nation, we must do better.
With little tasseled graduation caps on their heads and gowns over their clothes, the five-year-old graduates at Angenita’s inhome childcare center lined up to show their stuff to parents and classmates. They took turns sharing their prowess in Spanish; sign language; counting by twos, fives, and tens to one hundred; and telling their names and phone numbers. As they each walked up front for their special moment, cameras were flashing, video tapes recording, and the children beamed. The parent of each child came up to the front of the room to publicly congratulate their child on their early success. The room was full of laughter, clapping, and even some tears.
Angenita created a special environment for the children in her care. The story of the obstacles she overcame as an in-home childcare worker is one with huge heart and a hopeful ending. That said: Joining a union to consolidate the workers’ collective power is only a beginning. Even with the incremental successes mentioned in Angenita’s story, the majority of these in-home childcare workers that care for children forty to sixty hours a week still don’t make a living wage, and don’t have health insurance. In fact, childcare workers as a whole—from those who work in independent childcare centers to those who work from home—don’t have the benefits they need to protect themselves and their families from falling into poverty.
Childcare workers are providing our society with a crucial service. They should not be asked to personally take on an unfair share of the burden of supporting our nation’s children. As a country, we must find ways to provide them with benefits and a fair living wage so they can continue to do the work they love, work that is so valuable to their communities and to the economic health of our nation. Community education, organizing, pressure, and support can help change the way childcare workers are compensated, as we saw in Illinois.
Daliyah, four years old, clearly loves going to the military child development center she attends during the day while her mom is working. “When I drop her off, she runs to the teachers and gives them a hug. She always wants to be the last one left because she wants to have more fun,” recounts Alberta with a smile in her voice. “She’ll tell me, ‘I’m not ready to go home yet. Pick me up last.’ So I know my baby’s being taken care of.”

Learning From Union Programsby Netsy Firestein, Director of the Labor Project for Working Families
In 1992, 1199SEIU, representing hospital workers in New York City, negotiated a childcare fund to address the overwhelming need of its’ members for high-quality, affordable childcare and services. Today, the 1199 SEIU/Employer childcare Fund (the “Fund”) has over 450 employers contributing over thirteen million dollars. The Fund provides benefits to over 10,000 children each year.
The Fund offers the following benefits to its members:
Voucher Reimbursements — Reimbursements to offset the cost of childcare and after-school programs. The reimbursement amount is based on salary, number of dependents and type of care. (For example, a father earning $28,000 with two children in licensed daycare may receive approximately $845 each quarter.)
Childcare Resource and Referral Services — Access to counselors who provide referrals for licensed centers, family daycare providers, after-school programs, summer day camps and special-needs programs.
Subsidized Childcare Slots — Slots at licensed childcare centers that are available to members on a sliding fee scale.
Workforce 2000 — A year-round program for teenagers, designed to help them prepare for college and explore career choices.
Cultural Arts Program and Stipend — Parents who work weekends can place their child in full-day Saturday classes, sponsored by the Fund. Classes include dance, music, theater, and tutoring.
Holiday Program — The Fund contracts with local holiday camps during school breaks throughout the year.
Summer Day Camp — The Fund contracts with 140 local summer day camps for parents to access during the summer holidays. Summer Camp for Special Needs Children—Parents of children with special needs may enroll their child at a camp of their choosing, appropriate for their child.
Parenting Workshops — The Fund works with universities to provide parenting workshops to 1199 members.
SAT/PSAT Prep Courses — The Fund offers test preparation classes to high school students who are thinking about college.
—Adapted from “A Job and A Life, Organizing and Bargaining for Work Family Issues, A Union Guide”. Labor Project for Working Families. Available at www.laborproject.org
It’s clear to Alberta that the teachers not only care about the kids, but also are on top of their education, “Every time they bring her out, the teachers tell me her progress—the things she learns, what’s she’s doing,” says Alberta.
The military’s well-funded child development program enriches the lives of both families and childcare providers. This doesn’t happen by chance. The military prioritizes excellent childcare, not just with their policies, but with funding: For example, in 2004 the Department of Defense budgeted $379 million to support serving over 200,000 children, not including additional supplemental funds.32 A majority of problems with the civilian childcare picture come back to a shortage of funding—funding to help parents that need assistance, funding for providers’ salaries and education, and funding for educational resources. It is penny wise and pound foolish to underfund childcare.
Lettecia doesn’t know what she would do without Hope-Link’s Adelle Maxwell Child Development Center that provides excellent care for her sons while taking into account what she and her family can afford. Her sons Mason, four years old, and Alex, three years old, are blossoming in the center. Knowing her children are in good care, Lettecia is going back to school herself to get a nursing degree while also working. This is so she can eventually bring in more money to support her family. Clearly, the children are thriving, and so is their mother. Without the subsidized childcare, this family, like many others, would likely stay stuck in a cycle of poverty.
The stories of local subsidized childcare through Hope-Link, and that of the military childcare program, are two examples of success from which we can learn. It’s time to work to ensure that all children and families have access to excellent childcare.
The current childcare landscape is diverse and reflects the creativity of parents under pressure—parent co-ops where parents take turns watching groups of children, internet matching of childcare needs, so parents can share the cost of childcare providers, unionsponsored or negotiated childcare, company-provided childcare, more access to quality emergency backup daycare in some areas, and an increasing understanding that some working parents need care for children after 6 P.M. as they work nontraditional schedules.
Yet there aren’t many easy answers or quick solutions, notes Netsy Firestein, Director of the Labor Project for Working Families. “Some of these options are complicated, particularly because the root of the problem is allowing parents the time they need to parent. So for example, instead of backup sick care for children, we as a society should make sure people have paid sick days for when they need to care for their child or other family members. Some of this can be solved through flexible schedules, but some workers don’t get that option because of their type of job.” She concludes, “It’s striking a balance between living in a 24/7 economy and being able to raise a family. If we want people to work different shifts and weekends, then we have to come up with better solutions for people to be able to care for families.” Ultimately, we need to address the fact that as a nation we must prioritize supporting the care of our young children.
6.7 - Setting Priorities
Top quality childcare is a fundamental requirement for our children’s academic and emotional development. With this in mind, we must do two things:
1. Make quality, accessible, and affordable childcare available to all parents.2. Give childcare providers training, a living wage, and benefits in order to attract and retain excellent childcare workers.
Parents and children suffer when childcare is substandard. Early childhood education is a huge opportunity for us to advance the success of children, and to support working parents. When children are put into childcare that amounts to a holding tank, those children lose precious opportunities to develop socially and academically, and we all are diminished as a result. Parents and children need more community support for early care and education; it is smart to invest in our future.
6.8 - Manifesto Point "E"It is a reality of modern life that most mothers need to reenter the workforce before their children are in elementary school. Moreover, many mothers cannot depend on relatives to help. Mothers need highquality, nurturing childcare to ensure that children are safe, well cared for, and ready for school. America must invest in early care, not just because necessary for mothers and kids, but because each child is precious to society as a whole—they represent the future productive engine of our economy.
ACTION: Mothers want—(1) Quality, affordable Childcare that is available to all parents who need it.(2) Childcare providers who are paid at least a living wage and healthcare benefits.(3) Programs to ensure that education and training opportunities are available to childcare providers, and childcare providers’ compensation should be increased commensurate with their education.
Chapter Six Notes6. Excellent Childcare Endnotes:

1. Karen Schulman, Key Facts: Essential Information about childcare, Early Education and School-Age Care (Children’s Defense Fund, 2003), 8
2. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 3.
3. Julia Overturf Johnson, Who’s Minding the Kids? childcare Arrangements: Winter 2002, Current Population Reports, U.S. Census Bureau, Washington, D.C., 2005.
4. “While no national data are available, a study of childcare centers in California revealed that the average turnover rate between 1999 and 2000 was 30 percent for all teaching staff. Over half (56 percent) of these centers that reported turnover in 1999 had not succeeded in replacing the staff they had lost. Three-quarters (76 percent) of the teaching staff employed in the childcare centers studied in 1996 and 82 percent of those working in programs in 1994 were no longer working in those childcare centers in 2000,” wrote Karen Schulman, National Women’s Law Center, in a December 16, 2005 e-mail to the author, sourcing Marcy Whitebook et al., Then and Now: Changes in childcare Staffing, 1994–2000 (Washington, D.C.: Center for the childcare Workforce, 2001).
5. Jody Heymann et al., The Work, Family, and Equity Index: Where Does the United States Stand Globally? (Boston: Project on Global Working Families, 2004), 2.
6. Children’s Defense Fund calculations, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey Annual Demographic Supplement, Detailed Income Tables, “Table FINC-03. Presence of Related Children Under 18 Years Old—All Families, by Total Money Income in 2001, Type of Family Work Experience in 2001, Race and Hispanic Origin of Reference Person,” http://ferret.bls.census.gov/macro/032002/faminc/new03_000.htm.
7. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 7.
8. Heymann et al., The Work, Family, and Equity Index, 2.
9. Ibid., 44.
10. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 4.
11. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 4.
12. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 5.
13. Raquel Bernal and Michael P. Keane, “Maternal Time, childcare and Child Cognitive Development: The Case of Single Mothers,” 2005, http://eswc2005.econ.ucl.ac.uk/papers/ESWC/2005/1405/Bernal_Keane_Maternal%20Time_01_2005.pdf; and Reuters, “Childcare Choices Impact Kids’ Achievement,” MSNBC, August 2, 2005, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9042555/.
14. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 1. National Employment and Wage Data from the Occupational Employment Statistics Survey by Occupation,” November 2004, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.t01.htm.
15. Carnegie Corporation of New York, “Years of Promise: A Comprehensive Learning Strategy for America’s Children,” September 1996, http://www.carnegie.org/sub/pubs/execsum.html.
16. Karen Schulman, The High Cost of childcare Puts Quality Care Out of Reach for Many Families (Washington, D.C.: Children’s Defense Fund, 2000), http://www.childrensdefense.org/childcare/childcare/highcost.pdf.
17. Children’s Defense Fund calculations, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, “Table FINC-03.”
18. According to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, spokesperson for the Department of Defense (in a May 2005 email to the author), “For FY 2004, the appropriated fund budget was $379 million. This does not include the supplemental funds as they are not meant for or used for regular operations. The number of children served in our child development program according to our 2004 annual report from the Services and Defense Logistics Agency is 207,211.”
19. National Women’s Law Center, “Military childcare Continues to Serve as Model for the Country, NWLC Report Shows,” news release, August 10, 2005, http://www.nwlc.org/details.cfm?id=2357&section=newsroom.
20. Ibid.
21. Schulman, The High Cost of Childcare.
22. “The official poverty rate in 2003 was 12.5 percent, up from 12.1 percent in 2002. In 2003, 35.9 million people were in poverty, up 1.3 million from 2002. From 2000 both the poverty number and rate have risen for three consecutive years, from 31.6 million and 11.3 percent in 2000, to 35.9 million and 12.5 percent in 2003.” U.S. Census Bureau, “People: Poverty,” http://factfinder.census.gov/jsp/saff/SAFFInfo.jsp?_pageId=tp8_poverty.
23. National Women’s Law Center, “Military childcare Continues to Serve as Model.”
24. Barbara Sporcic, child and youth services coordinator at Fort Lewis in Washington State, interview with the author, May 19, 2005.
25. National Women’s Law Center, “Military childcare Continues to Serve as Model.”
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Sporcic, interview with the author, May 19, 2005.
29. Clive Belfield and Dennis Winters, An Economic Analysis of Four-Year-Old Kindergarten in Wisconsin. (Trust for Early Education, 2004) http://www.preknow.org/documents/WIEconImpactReport_Sept2005.pdf.
30. Karen Schulman Key Facts, 8; J. Lee Kreader et al., Scant Increases After Welfare Reform: Regulated childcare Supply in Illinois and Maryland, 1996–1998 (New York: Columbia University, National Center for Children in Poverty, 2000), http://www.nccp.org/media/ccr00c-text.pdf.
31. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 8.
32. According to Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Ellen Krenke, spokesperson for the Department of Defense (in a May 2005 email to the author), “For FY 2004, the appropriated fund budget was $379 million. This does not include the supplemental funds as they are not meant for or used for regular operations. The number of children served in our child development program according to our 2004 annual report from the Services and Defense Logistics Agency is 207,211.”
33. Schulman, The High Cost of childcare.
34. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “National Employment and Wage Data.”
35. Belfield and Winters, An Economic Analysis of Four-Year-Old Kindergarten in Wisconsin. http://www.preknow.org/documents/WIEconImpactReport_Sept2005.pdf.
36. National Association of childcare Resource and Referral Agencies, Childcare in America, http://www.naccrra.org/docs/Child_Care_In_America_Facts.pdf; and Eugene Smolensky and Jennifer Appleton Gootman, eds., Working Families and Growing Kids: Caring for Children and Adolescents (Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press: 2003), http://www.nap.edu/openbook/0309087031/html/43.html.
37. Karen Schulman, Key Facts, 5.