Tokyo Business Today

As women around the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, a startling reality sunk in. 47 million women – the equivalent of the entire country of Spain – have dropped out of the labor force due to the coronavirus pandemic, according to the United Nations.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics stated that in January 275,000 women left the labor force compared to 71,000 men.

One primary solution is child care.

That is why President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion Covid-19 relief bill is putting $50 billion into the child care sector.

Child care providers will get about $40 billion for operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers, and families will get about $8 billion from a temporary expansion of tax breaks subsidizing dependent care. The goal is to help centers handle revenue shortfalls and increased costs while making it easier for mothers in particular, to return to work as the economy reopens.

“The law, in addition to $10 billion in assistance from December legislation, represents the largest one-time U.S. investment in child care,” said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group.

Read the full article.

New York Times

These stories, from four different parts of the United States, aren’t isolated pockets of struggle. They are emblematic of a larger problem that has been widely acknowledged by people from the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to Amy Schumer: America’s child-care industry is in crisis.

Initially, as parents pulled their children out of child-care centers in the first months of the pandemic, revenue plummeted. Then, as child-care centers opened back up, the burden of safety for the community’s children — including, in many cases, schoolchildren whose parents couldn’t help them with remote learning — fell on providers that were already struggling to survive on thin budgets.

By summer, 50 percent of providers were still closed, according to a research and advocacy group, Child Care Aware of America. That number fell to 13 percent by December but those that have opened are debt-ridden, pinching pennies here and there, and short-staffed to keep costs down.

Read the full article.

Lynette M. Fraga, Ph.D., CEO of Child Care Aware® of America, released the following statement in response to President Joe Biden's American Jobs Plan: 

“We agree with President Biden that investment in the facilities and the supply of the child care system is needed as we work to build back from the pandemic. Our economy requires the infrastructure of a sustainable, equitable, high-quality child care and early learning system in which children, families, and educators thrive. 

The $25 billion Child Care Growth and Innovation Fund and the $45 billion for grants to reduce lead exposure in homes, schools, and child care facilities, are an investment in the safe and healthy development of children and in our child care system. Investing in a stronger child care system today helps build the foundation children need to thrive in the future. 

Miami Herald

Mario Cardona knows child care is critical. He’s currently chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, a nonprofit that helps families access care. In his former role as a congressional staffer, he wrote and led staff negotiations to pass the Child Care & Development Block Grant Act of 2014, which comprehensively updated the quality and standards in federally subsidized childcare for the first time in years. We checked in with Cardona and asked him to take the pulse of child care in the U.S. today.

Morning Consult

President Joe Biden has signed the American Rescue Plan into law, granting $40 billion in child care funding and providing much-needed relief to providers, parents and children alike.

This child care relief is notable for three reasons: First, it is the largest investment this country has ever made in child care, and is roughly 20 times larger than the child care relief provided in President Barack Obama’s stimulus measure. Second, despite the investment’s size, it has been uncontroversial and has not attracted the types of criticism directed at other relief policies. Third, because it is a one-time investment, it will not be sufficient to advance longer-term transformation in the system of child care.

Congress and the administration will need to build on this investment so that communities can make permanent changes to ensure all families have access to affordable, high-quality child care.

Read the full op-ed.

We mourn the recent acts of violence in Atlanta and reaffirm our solidarity with our Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) colleagues, family members, friends and community members, and we condemn the violence and racism directed at them. 
 
We realize that the murders perpetrated in Atlanta are the latest in a long history of violence and discrimination against the AAPI community. Discrimination, prejudice and racism have no place in our country or our child care system – which relies on the work of women, particularly women of color and women from immigrant communities. We are committed to reversing the structural and institutional racism, poverty and lack of opportunity that exist in the United States.  

Equity and anti-racism will continue to be at the center of our work to support all children and families.   

Additional Resources: 

Whether children have witnessed a violent event, or have seen coverage of events in the news, it is important for parents and caregivers to be ready to help and talk about their feelings. Visit our page for resources to help children understand and cope after facing traumatic events, including a white paper that outlines what stress may look like in children younger than five years old (also available in Spanish).

You may also be interested in our three-part webinar series on racial justice and equity in the child care system  in which we discuss how we can create an equitable system that supports providers, children and families. 

CNBC.com

There already was a child-care crisis in America. Then Covid hit.

Child-care centers shut down. Working parents lost care and child-care workers found themselves without jobs. Parents, namely mothers, left jobs or reduced hours to fill the gap.

“Before the pandemic, the U.S. child-care system was in trouble,” said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group that works with local and state child-care resource and referral agencies.

“Layer Covid on top of that and the system, as it stands, really ceases to work well for anybody.”

“The system has to rely on a patchwork of funding streams that place a high burden on families to pay the price of care,” Cardona said.

Read the full article.

Cheddar

Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America and former senior policy advisor for the Obama Administration, discusses how the latest round of coronavirus relief impacts the child care sector and whether the U.S. has done enough to help.

Watch the interview.

American Resolution podcast

Host David Jolly, a former Congressman, is joined by Mario Cardona, the Chief of Policy and Practice for Child Care Aware of America. Early childhood education is a passion of both the host and guest in this episode and David and Mario dive into the details of how beneficial investment in early childhood education can be for the child, their family, and the entire surrounding community. They also touch on the historic investment in early education that the Biden Administration just made via the American Rescue Plan.

Listen to the podcast

Wall Street Journal

The coronavirus relief law signed by President Biden last week pours nearly $50 billion into child care in a bid to keep struggling daycare centers from closing just as the people who rely on them return to work. 

Child-care providers will get about $40 billion for operating expenses and tuition assistance for the children of essential workers, and families will get roughly $8 billion from a temporary expansion of tax breaks subsidizing dependent care. 

The child-care assistance is smaller and less attention-grabbing than $1,400-per-person stimulus checks or the expanded child tax credit worth more than $100 billion to families. 

But the law, in addition to $10 billion in assistance from December legislation, represents the largest one-time U.S. investment in child care, said Mario Cardona, chief of policy and practice at Child Care Aware of America, an advocacy group. 

“It’s largely been uncontroversial,” he said. “Some things were targeted for complete elimination or reduction. Child care wasn’t one of those things.” 

Read the full article.