For years, Martine Rodney supported her three children on her salary as a nursing assistant in Miami. But finding quality child care is one of the many daily struggles she now faces as she recovers from breast cancer and a work-related back injury, and attends business management classes at the local community college. Seeing to it that her children are well cared for and kept from harm is her top priority, even if it means giving up potential work or missing class. “I just center my life around my kids,” Rodney says
Our children are the treasures of our lives. We want the best for them, and we make enormous sacrifices to help them thrive. For those of us struggling to make ends meet, access to good, affordable child care is critical. We are often working more than one job, and we need good care for our children, both those in preschool and those of school age.
Without affordable child care, we, as working parents, cannot keep our jobs. Quality care provides a safe learning and social environment and keeps our children out of harm’s way. Child care that offers a safe, stimulating learning environment is an important part of our children’s early education. Those caring for our children need training and professional development in order to help our children grow.
Quality care costs anywhere from $3,000 to $13,000 a year, well beyond the reach of our low- and moderate-income families. Public policies that support affordable quality child care are essential to our well-being as working families. It is especially important that we address federal policy and funding because state policies and funding are varied and unequal, resulting in different standards of health and safety in child care settings.
When public funding is used for local economic development – for example, attracting new development or businesses to a community or helping established businesses grow – we ask local government to require developers to set aside, at low cost, space for a child care center. This will increase the number of child care spaces available in the community and lower the cost to parents.
We ask our local leaders to join us in encouraging churches, libraries and other community institutions to step forward to provide child care and youth recreation activities.
Our public school systems can work with child care providers to make public-school space available for care before and after school, to transport children to after-school programs, and to support children as they move from preschool into public schools.
States play a major role in deciding how subsidized child-care programs operate. They set income eligibility, the costs to parents and how much child care providers are paid. We ask our state elected officials to secure adequate funding to help our low- and moderate-income families pay for child care, and to ensure that working parents in need of child care are not put on waiting lists.
We encourage states to require formal training programs for those who care for our children.
We ask our state leaders to help us find and gauge child care providers by funding information and referral services.
We urge states to ensure that teen parents have access to affordable, quality child care. And we ask that all families have access to child care, regardless of immigration status.
The Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) is the main federal funding source for affordable child care, providing resources to every state to help families pay for child care. We seek increased CCDBG funding. Federal law should include baseline health and safety standards for all child care settings and ensure regular inspections. Funding should be included for the professional development of child care workers in multiple languages and in all child care settings.
We urge the adoption of a federal child care tax deduction.