If you’re pregnant, you’re already behind. That’s the message parents nationwide receive about child care enrollment, and St. Louis City and County are no different.
With waitlists that span a year or more and rates that can climb as high as a monthly mortgage payment or in-state tuition at a university, nonprofit Child Care Aware of Missouri works to support families amid the overwhelming shortage of quality child care options.
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The organization’s CEO, Robin Phillips, says the state has always faced an infant and toddler care shortage, but it was exacerbated by labor issues due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “The entire workforce has changed for so many industries,” she adds. “[Sometimes, people] take the job and show up for one day and they leave because they don’t realize how stressful of a job it is. You’re not babysitting kids here. You’re educating and interacting with and loving and caring for and holding them and all of that… It’s a very hard job, and yet we expect that 18-year-olds without any child development backgrounds to know how to do all of that.”
One cultural shift necessary for meaningful workforce change, Phillips explains, is the valuation of educators: “Educators aren’t compensated like they’re in a profession impacting the most significant years of a child’s life, getting them off to a great start by the time they get to kindergarten. We’ve come a long way, and a lot more people are speaking more positively about it, but we have a long way to go.”
Among the major fallouts of these issues are out-of-control prices and drastically low capacity for child care options, regardless of whether families are looking for home care or a center. Even though these factors are hardly new, Phillips says many families are surprised by the reality of the severity of those numbers—including the typical two-year waitlist.
This delay in care, Phillips explains, is especially heartbreaking for families who rely on child care to be able to work to make ends meet. Of course, it also impacts families that merely never intended to keep their kids home, either for social-emotional development reasons or to continue educational or career opportunities. Phillips adds that beyond educational growth for children, child care opportunities offer balance amid the stressful world of parenting. Without that balance, mental health tends to suffer. Meanwhile, the economic effects to a community with a high barrier for child care, Phillips continues, are profound.
Child Care Aware works to meet the challenges of the current child care infrastructure in the state. “[We have a real] focus on workforce development—putting more tools in their toolbox through training and higher education scholarship opportunities. That’s pretty amazing to see people be the first person in their family to earn the degree; that has a trajectory impact on the rest of the family behind that person.”
Most recently, the organization launches services under the umbrella of Child Care Keeps Missouri Working to address the shortage of child care from a labor recruitment and retention perspective. “We’re trying to help employers understand how to expand child care benefits to their employees so they can in turn reap the benefit of having a reliable and productive labor force,” Phillips explains.
Child Care Aware also offers child care business support, from budgeting to training, as well as advocacy and policy work to champion affordable and accessible child care from the state goverment level.
One of the most essential services Child Care Aware provides is its child care referral service. “It’s a very time-consuming process to dig into making phone calls, knowing what questions to ask, knowing what’s public information on the child care programs,” Phillips describes of the daycare hunt. “And so our concierge service is a time-saver service. We do all this homework on a number of programs that we’ve already matched with the family and save them a lot of time by calling them and seeing if they have openings. [We research the important questions for them, such as] what are their rates? What’s their teacher education level? What’s the turnover rate?”
Phillips adds that licensing inspection reports are public information, as are the providers’ responses to the reports, which Child Care Aware will gather for families. “We’re just giving them a much more robust toolkit so they’re making a much more informed decision, instead of a knee-jerk decision.”
Additionally, Phillips explains, Child Care Aware is able to offer telehealth, including mental telehealth, access for child care workers and their families. This is especially important given that, she says, many child care services actually function on little to no profit at the end of the day, due to a lack of foundational support systems.
Phillips views the future of the child care crisis as a bit hazy, due to how federal and state funding could change as a result of the recent election results, but adds that Missouri has some catch-up to do versus other states that are further along in their child care support status. “[I find hope in the fact that] more employers and businesspeople are at the tables trying to understand what they can do. You have more legislators talking about it. But the magic wand involves about 30 different strategies to address the whole system—not a bandaid fix… I’m having conversations with people who have more awareness now that those bandaids don’t work, and we have to find something more sustainable. But it requires a significant investment. In my opinion, what I’m seeing happen in other states, it’s a significant blend of private and public money. It’s not one or the other.”
Michigan, which employs a tri-share or three-way cost-share model among the employee, employer, and state, is one example of a program on which Phillips is keeping her eye. Vermont, which uses an employer tax that funnels into an early childhood fund and thereby does not have a child care crisis according to its representatives; New Mexico, which has allocated budget to support parents; and Kentucky, which funds child care through a blend of ARPA and other dollars, are other structural examples Phillips is currently researching. “Child care really should be a non-partisan issue,” she adds.
Phillips cites St. Louis companies such as Nestle Purina, which has had on-site child care for more than 30 years, as ahead of the curve. And although she acknowledges it as a high expense, she adds that the company looks at it as an investment in retention. Overall, she believes an employers’ flexibility is key in sustaining a healthy and essential balance for families. “For example, we have employers purchasing our concierge referral program for their employees to use. They’re offering it as a benefit, which is amazing to see.”
Ultimately, Phillips hopes for an increase in cultural understanding of the urgent necessity of a child care system that functions well—for the workforce, the families, and most importantly, the children. “We’re wanting the best things for kids and we’re wanting to support this system in some way, shape or form and help them be successful,” she says. “We have a lot happening in our state that’s impacting the child care ecosystem. Most recently, the state subsidy system and the malfunctioning of software; people weren’t getting their payments in a timely fashion. For some people, that was a lot of money, and in some cases, they had to stop serving those children because they weren’t getting paid by the state in a timely fashion because of this debacle. It’ll eventually be worked out, but I worry about is, where are the children going?”
It’s a story Phillips hears all too often—households in which guardians need to work to pay the bills, and in situations without child care, older kids as young as 12 are forced to stay home from school and take care of siblings. Other common cases include families being forced to send their children to low-quality care situations because it’s all they can afford, which is of course accompanied by a variety of risk factors.
“We know the first five years of a child’s life, no matter where they are, determines outcomes for the rest of their life,” Phillips concludes. “And having a child care workforce allows us to have a labor workforce, which allows our economies to thrive. We just have to do a better job of taking care of the people in our communities because one size doesn’t fit all.”
