[After the pandemic decimated the child care industry, parents are
now routinely waiting years for care and doing anything they can to
get off a waitlist.]
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DAY CARE WAITLISTS ARE SO LONG, MOMS ARE QUITTING THEIR JOBS OR
CHOOSING TO STOP HAVING KIDS  
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Chabeli Carrazana
March 30, 2023
The 19th
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_ After the pandemic decimated the child care industry, parents are
now routinely waiting years for care and doing anything they can to
get off a waitlist. _

, (Paige Stampatori for the 19th)

 

Erica Manoatl got on waitlists for child care when she was about 12
weeks pregnant with her daughter. It should have been enough time, she
thought then. Now, her daughter is almost a year and a half old.
Manoatl is still waiting. 

In early 2021, Manoatl got on three waitlists for area day cares in
Denver, paying about $150 for each application. With 16 weeks of
parental leave, that gave her almost a year of runway to get off of
the lists. But shortly after her daughter was born in November 2021,
the day cares all told her it could be another year and a half to two
years’ wait.

After her leave ended, Manoatl hired a nanny at a much higher cost
than a child care center, but after a few weeks the nanny quit when
she was recruited to a job with higher pay. So Manoatl and her husband
tried to do the unsustainable: care for their daughter while both
working full-time from home.

The arrangement lasted eight months before it was clear it was putting
an immense strain on their work and family lives. 

“We both looked around and were like, ‘This is just really
stressful and we are not very happy,’” Manoatl said. “I don’t
know what kind of parenting we were able to provide for our kid when
that was the situation.” 

By the end of 2022, they still didn’t have a day care spot. They
couldn’t both keep working from home with a 1-year-old. Something
had to give — so Manoatl did. Her husband took an offer for a job
that paid a bit more, and she quit hers. 

Now, she spends her days caring for her toddler, and at night, after
bedtime, she’ll work three to four hours as a consultant, mostly
writing work for the public health industry. It’s far removed from
her previous work in child advocacy and policy. 

“It’s still rough acknowledging that I spent a lot of time
prepping to come into this career, which I really love,” she said.
She loves spending time with her daughter during the day, and she’s
trying to focus on the opportunities this path is giving her. But the
journey here has been tinged with sadness and genuine surprise: How
could something as simple as a waitlist derail her life in such a
profound way? 

The months- and yearslong wait to get into a child care center, even
for parents who get on lists as early as conceivably possible, is one
of the most infuriating symptoms of a child care industry in market
failure, still struggling to recover after it was wrecked by the
pandemic.   

While almost every industry has returned to pre-pandemic levels, child
care is still short 60,000 teachers
[[link removed]] as of last month.
Nearly 16,000 centers and home-based day cares closed between December
2019 and March 2021, according to a report by Child Care Aware, a
leading child care advocacy organization. That amounts to a drop in
the supply of child care of 9 percent overall and 10 percent
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family child care homes, a more affordable option for many families. 

“The fragile equilibrium, the treading water that child care was
doing before the pandemic, has now failed,” said Elliot Haspel, the
director of climate and young children at the think tank Capita, and
author of “Crawling Behind: America’s Childcare Crisis and How to
Fix It.”

“So we’re seeing a whole lot more parents and a whole lot more
programs end up underwater. There is no question that we are seeing
bigger waitlists in a whole lot of communities.”

Centers spend an enormous portion of their revenue paying for staff
costs. On average, states mandate one teacher for every four babies
for safety, and the ratio grows as kids get older. That requires a lot
of staff to operate a center or even keep a classroom open. As a
result, day cares can only afford to pay teachers just about minimum
wage. In fact, child care teachers are some of the lowest paid people
in the entire country. On average, doggy day care workers
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paid more than child care teachers. 

Yet parents still shoulder a huge sticker price. Day care costs more
than in-state college tuition in 34 states and Washington, D.C.
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with the average cost coming in at almost $11,000 a year. 

It’s a system that doesn’t work for the centers, doesn’t work
for the teachers and doesn’t work for the parents. 

Calculating just how much the pandemic increased waiting lists is a
challenge. There is no centralized source for the data, and extreme
variability exists across states, localities and even individual
centers on how the data is collected. Some waitlists are kept in
notebooks rather than digitized. 

But there’s evidence lists are getting longer. 

An October survey of 12,000 child care providers by the National
Association for the Education of Young Children found that 38 percent
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longer waiting lists as a result of recent staffing shortages and
about half say they want to serve more children. A survey of
Pennsylvania’s child care providers in February turned up much the
same: 38,321 children
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on waiting lists compared with 32,500
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year ago, an 18 percent increase. 

An analysis of data for The 19th by WaitlistPlus, a software provider
that manages lists on behalf of child care centers, found that the
average length of a list has ballooned 28 percent from February 2020
to February 2023, growing from 185 kids on average to 236. 

For those who linger on those lists, like Manoatl, the waiting has
uncovered just how little autonomy parents actually have when it comes
to choosing what care they want for their babies. They are at the
mercy of a phone call: Whichever center calls first is where they’ll
go. And if they don’t call, it’s usually mom’s work that will be
disrupted. 

“In my opinion, we were not given a choice here,” Manoatl said.
“Maybe if we had been given a choice we would have chosen this
setup, but this setup now doesn’t really bother me as much —
it’s more the lack of choice. We wanted her to be in a child care
center.

“It’s very hard for me to accept that we can’t do that.” 

As waitlists grow, many of the parents stuck on them have resorted to
all manner of workarounds to get a slot. 

Some get on lists before they even conceive a child or the second they
find out they’re pregnant — before the “stick is dry,”
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one parent put it. Day cares have found out about pregnancies before
family members. 

Centers often field incessant calls from parents hoping their interest
will bump them higher on lists. Other parents have joined churches to
get priority in those child care centers. Even Mother’s Day Out or
Mother’s Morning Out programs, part-time child care programs
typically run by churches, have seen parents camping out in parking
lots [[link removed]] on registration day to try
to get a slot. 

Parents with means have offered to pay several months up front if it
means skipping the list, Haspel said. And in some cases, parents told
The 19th they’ve had other families with kids already at a center
write them letters of recommendation to see if that will push them
higher on a waitlist.

It’s a system born of desperation, but it’s deepening the
inequalities already present in child care. 

[An illustration of parents in waiting in line on hour glasses for
childcare.]

(Paige Stampatori for the 19th)

“The bigger concern there is who tends to have the wherewithal to
navigate complicated systems, and it tends to be those with privilege
or the affluent,” Haspel said. “The vast majority of child care
administrators do their level best to have a fair system,” and
ultimately there is only so much maneuvering that parents can do
because there are so few spots to begin with. 

Child care is hard to access even for high-or middle-income families.
At best, there is one spot for every two children who need care, said
Linda Smith, director of the early childhood initiative at think tank
the Bipartisan Policy Center. Add any additional factor — a single
parent, a child with a disability, twins — and getting quality child
care is near impossible. It’s those same families who most need the
care that have fewer resources when it comes to finding a way off a
waitlist. 

“In the years I’ve been doing this, the folks that are always the
hardest hit by this issue are typically single parents and
simultaneously parents of disabled children. The options of care are
so few and far between for them,” said Nina Perez, the national
director of early learning at MomsRising, an advocacy network made up
of mothers across the country.

There’s a knowledge gap to even begin the process: The families who
know they need to get on a list during pregnancy often are in higher
socioeconomic brackets, Smith said. Low-income families and families
of color with fewer resources may not have the information sources —
from a quality gynecologist and obstetrician to a highly involved
parent group that knows the ins and outs — to inquire about child
care early. 

There’s also the cost barrier. The 19th spoke to nearly a dozen
parents who were on waitlists, and most reported application fees of
$50 to $200 to get on a list, some of which are nonrefundable. 

Places with no waiting list tend to be higher cost, and the option of
going to a center with a smaller waitlist that is further away could
be nonexistent for a single-parent household.

When things don’t line up, single parents usually can’t quit a job
to focus on care. 

“We work with moms who live at the poverty line, and candidly, there
is no option — you have to work,” said Chastity Lord, the
president and CEO of the Jeremiah Program, a nonprofit that works with
more than 1,500 single mothers and runs five child care centers. Moms
have to compromise “the development of their child, the development
of themselves, as well as the financial implications.” 

Not getting off a waitlist means putting a child in the care of a
family member or a neighbor. It means sacrificing the educational
environment a center offers. It may mean moving to another city closer
to family to cobble together some child care, or mounting credit card
debt to pay for the only center without a wait. It could mean being
stuck in a situation where you’re not confident in the care your
child is getting. 

It means you are deprived of choice.

Perez is currently working with families whose children go to a center
in Florida that has been accused of child abuse. While those families
wait for the investigation to conclude, they can’t move their
children elsewhere. 

Where would they go? The waiting lists are too long. 

When Deyanira Contreras looks down her waiting list, she sees hundreds
of families she will never be able to serve. 

The list for her day care center, Kids Campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
has 504 children on it. The longest wait is for her two infant
classrooms — 185 kids for two classrooms with 16 total spots,
neither of which has current availability. Already for the next school
year, one of the two infant classrooms will be made up entirely of
siblings of older kids who are at the center already and get
priority. 

The wait is one to two years for most classrooms. Contreras said her
staff is often fielding calls from desperate parents asking where they
are on the list. The center gives priority to students and staff at
the nearby Santa Fe Community College, and parents will go so far as
to take classes if it’ll mean moving up on the list. 

“Every time we open a spot they feel like they won the lottery
because it’s hard to get,” said Contreras, who is in her first
year as director. “It’s sad at the same time because we receive
[difficult] phone calls from families — ‘I can lose my job if I
don’t find child care.’”

Since the pandemic, Contreras can count at least four area day cares
that closed, and some could only reopen at reduced capacity because of
insufficient staffing. That has made her waitlist longer, and she
knows that investing in her staff is the only thing that is going to
shorten it, if only marginally. 

The median hourly pay for a child care worker in the United States was
$13.22 in 2021, the most recent date for which data is available from
the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Workers earn more in retail ($14.03 an
hour) or as housekeepers ($13.84 an hour). One of Contreras’
prekindergarten teachers was working at McDonald’s and making more
money than working at the center, she said, adding that it was “very
embarrassing” for her.

That’s why Kids Campus spent nearly all the money it received
through the pandemic’s American Rescue Plan economic package —
that largest single investment in American child care
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history — toward raising salaries. About 90 percent of the $453,700
received from a stabilization grant went to salaries, raising hourly
pay for teacher assistants from $13 to up to $17 depending on their
certification. Hourly teacher pay went up from $14 to $20 if a teacher
had an early childhood certificate or as much as $28 with a master’s
degree. Cooks now earn $15.50, from $13 an hour. 

“Some centers were investing in playgrounds. We were like,
‘That’s not OK, we have to invest in teachers,’” Contreras
said. The money helped them retain every single teacher at the
center. 

But the labor shortage at child care centers is difficult to tackle.
In Hawaii, for example, there’s a requirement that educators have a
degree in childhood education to work at a day care, which makes
attracting college graduates to earn about $15 an hour in one of the
most expensive states in the country an enormous challenge, said Carol
Wear, the interim executive director of PATCH, the state’s child
care resource and referral agency.  

As a result, some centers have entirely closed their infant
classrooms, where the ratios of teacher to student are smallest and
it’s most expensive to provide care. On one island, Kaua’i, there
are no spots for infants under a year old at any licensed child care
center. Other centers have stopped keeping lists altogether.

In Alaska, many providers have also stopped keeping lists — demand
is so high and there are so few spots spread out across the state
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it’s easier for centers to take the next referral or “fill those
spots with the next caller” than to manage a list, said Stephanie
Berglund, CEO of thread, Alaska’s child care resource and referral
agency. It’s an equity issue that is potentially blocking parents
who don’t have the means to constantly call or travel to a center
for a tour.

Among the calls that thread receives from parents are those who say
they are quitting their jobs because they can’t find care, she said.
Parents are leaving the state. They’re deciding not to have more
children.

“We’ve never seen parents more desperate and more frustrated,”
Berglund said.

There are some things that can be done to help with the waitlists
themselves, like helping centers automate and “clean” their lists.
That’s where companies like Kinside have been growing — they work
with centers to digitize lists so that they are searchable and they
are up to date, reflecting parents who are still searching for care.
Offered as an employee benefit, Kinside helps parents see where they
are on a list, and the company will call centers on their behalf to
search for an open spot.

“What’s happening for a lot of providers is when they do have an
open spot … they are calling 10,12, 20 families to offer a seat and
those families have either found other child care, they are no longer
of age or they’ve just made it work by leaving the workforce or
changing their schedule or changing jobs,” said Julia Barfield, the
head of employer engagement at Kinside.

But list automation only goes so far. What Smith and other advocates
see as the real solution is to funnel money into child care — to
subsidize it. And that will take investing in a workforce and an
industry that has been undervalued because of “gender attitudes,
racial attitudes in terms of who is doing the work, how the work is
seen,” said Karen Schulman, the director of state child care policy
at the National Women’s Law Center. 

About 95 percent of child care workers are women, and nearly 40
percent are people of color. 

President Joe Biden’s 2024 budget calls for more than $600 billion
over 10 years to expand child care access for more than 16 million
children. It includes an additional $9 billion for the block grant
that currently serves as the main mechanism for funding child care in
the states and expands a tax credit that encourages businesses to
provide child care benefits to employees. Another $325 billion would
go toward creating a paid family and medical leave policy over the
course of a decade with up to 12 weeks of leave covered for
“eligible employees,” though it’s not yet clear what those
parameters are. It’s something of a magnitude that has never been
proposed by a presidential budget.

But Republicans are in control of the House with goals to lower
spending, meaning that plan is not likely to get far, despite
bipartisan agreement that child care is in crisis
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In the meantime, the president is trying something else. Manufacturers
who are looking to tap into subsidies under the Chips Act, focused on
bolstering U.S.-made semiconductors, will have to offer their
employees child care if they want to qualify for $150 million or more
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government subsidies.

It’s a well-intentioned attempt, Haspel said, and an acknowledgment
that to attract more women to those fields there have to be better
care options. But it could also help make the case for child care as
an employer benefit
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like health care, which could lock out workers in low-paid industries,
making a dire situation even worse.  

“It’s not a short-term solution because it’s such a marginal
impact and the danger of getting this idea of, ‘child care should be
done through employers’ in the water does material damage to the
case for universal child care,” Haspel said. 

If the United States really wanted to fund child care, it could look
like Germany, where every child over 1 has the legal right to a child
care slot and their parents can sue the government
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lost wages if they are unable to find adequate care, Haspel said. Or
the United States could just look closer to home and fund child care
like it does public education for kids over the age of 5. 

“There are plenty of issues [in public education],” Haspel said,
“but no one’s on a waitlist for a slot at their public
school.” 

Until there’s major change, families like Manoatl’s and countless
others will see their lives foundationally changed because they could
not get care when they needed it. 

It’s what happened to Lindsay Saunders and her husband when she got
pregnant. He had just immigrated from Zambia and she had a high-risk
pregnancy that drained them both as they focused on keeping her
healthy. When she did get on a wait list, she was more than halfway
through her pregnancy. They put down a nonrefundable deposit for more
than $100 at a center they liked, but couldn’t afford to do so at
more day cares. 

When her baby was born in October 2021, there still wasn’t a spot
for him. Because she’d changed jobs that year, Saunders didn’t
qualify yet for any paid leave. The most she could afford to take were
seven unpaid weeks. Her husband, meanwhile, was trying to find a job,
but because they were still waiting for care, it was difficult for him
to commit to anything. 

“How could he know when we could start a new job and we could both
work full-time if we didn’t know when we would have care?”
Saunders said. 

They were offered part-time care in January, and they tried to cut
every expense possible to make it work. They were going to a food
pantry, she said. And then in February a full-time spot opened up, and
her husband got a job. Impeccable timing. 

But getting care was the first challenge. Saunders knew the cost would
likely be high, but she wasn’t fully prepared when the final price
tag was $1,590 a month — more than their $1,100 mortgage for a
two-bedroom townhouse in Raleigh, North Carolina. Saunders works from
home, her son’s changing table next to her desk. 

She’s called other centers to check for lower costs, but the tuition
was higher. Why bother going through the waitlist debacle again
then? 

“When you want the best for your child and your resources are
limited, then that really does completely limit your trajectory, but
also your children’s trajectory,” Saunders said.

She feels trapped. They can’t move to a house that better fits their
family’s needs because care costs them a second mortgage. They
can’t even fly to Zambia so her son can meet his family. He’s
almost 2.

And Saunders recently came to another devastating conclusion.

In large part because of the high cost of care, she now realizes she
will have to compromise on another dream: It is unlikely they will be
able to have a second child.

“I am still not accepting of that decision,” said Saunders, who
has two siblings and always imagined having multiple kids. “But that
is the best decision unless something were to dramatically change with
both our resources and the child care system.”

_CHABELI CARRAZANA is __THE 19TH'S__ economy reporter. Previously,
she worked as a business reporter for the Miami Herald, where she
covered the tourism industry, and the Orlando Sentinel, where she
covered NASA, the private space industry and labor issues._

_The 19th is a nonprofit newsroom supported by a mix of membership,
philanthropy and corporate underwriting. Our goal is long-term
sustainability to support a lasting future for news and information at
the intersection of gender, politics and policy. Donate
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