Harris needs to champion moms’ biggest issue

Sarah Green Carmichael, Tribune News Service

The June presidential debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump was marked by a series of low points, each more abyssal than the last — but for working parents, the absolute nadir was when the moderators asked about addressing the cost of child care. The two elderly men responded by bickering about their golf handicaps. In a country where it’s not unusual for child care to cost more than housing, that’s an insult.

But now Biden is a candidate emeritus, and the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz ticket is heading into the Democratic convention. It’s a perfect opportunity for them to outline how their administration would solve the problem of soaring day care costs — and to explain how doing so will benefit society.

The average family with young children spends about 24% of its household income on child care. The rising cost of living is by far the most important issue for female voters under age 50, and the cost of day care pushed 66% of moms to consider leaving the workforce last year.

It’s obvious that affordable child care is a) both too hard to find in the US and b) essential to women’s earning power. And those are the messages Democrats usually hammer. But I’d argue they’ve overlooked the most directly affected population: kids. Those littlest beneficiaries should be front and center in our conversation about child care.

During the COVID pandemic, many families were forced to go without care for their young children. We immediately saw the impact in parents’ plunging employment rates — something Vice President Harris called a “national emergency” at the time. But only now are we starting to understand how awful it was for the youngest kids.

Toddlers isolated at home struggled to pick up new words. Pandemic babies have turned into little kids who struggle to meet developmental milestones, like feeding themselves, regulating their emotions or using the toilet. Those kids are now showing up to grade school unprepared. Some lack fine motor skills — perhaps because during COVID, they spent so much time sitting in front of screens. They are having a tougher time with math and reading, perhaps because they never had the chance to develop so-called “foundational skills” — like identifying letter sounds, recognizing shapes and numbers, or being able to hold a pencil. Kids who are non-White or from poorer backgrounds generally have fared worse.

This has come as a surprise to some, since we tend to think of toddlers as typically spending lots of time at home. But the findings didn’t shock me. My child regularly comes back from her five-day-a-week day care having picked up some new skill. It’s also where she made her first friends and learned to say “pweeze” and “tankoo.”

Americans have long thought of day care as a subpar experience; for decades after women entered the workforce en masse, Americans continued to say that children are better off when a parent stays home. But I don’t think it’s a knock on my own mothering to say that my kid is happier and more resilient because she goes to day care.

Kids who attend an attentive, loving child care or preschool show better control of their emotions and are more likely to eventually graduate high school and go to college. Some studies suggest the effects are larger for poor children and for boys.

True, studies on mediocre day care centers — where caregivers are not down on the floor, playing with the kids — show mixed results. (They increase parental employment but don’t show the same benefits to kids as higher quality care.) And the searing COVID experience could have been traumatic for kids in many ways, not just because it cost them the chance to go to preschool. But the pandemic-era evidence is pretty stark: affordable, reliable, quality day care is a social good.

Harris and Walz both have pro-child records to highlight. Walz, as governor of Minnesota, has signed a paid family leave law that allows workers 12 weeks at 90% pay to stay home with a newborn, given grants to raise wages for child care workers and expanded the state’s child tax credit, among other reforms.

As a Senator, Harris co-sponsored a bill to increase the child tax credit, something she also pushed for as vice president. The Biden-Harris administration famously used its CHIPS Act to stimulate the creation of new child care centers. And in March, Vice President Harris unveiled the administration’s plan to cap day care costs at 7% of income — the level at which its considered officially “affordable” — for about 100,000 families that receive federal aid. It was a small step taken after the administration’s more ambitious plan failed to get through Congress.

The ultimate goal, Harris explained then, was free, universal preschool for kids starting at age 4, and day care costs for younger kids capped at $10 a day for middle-class families. (As a point of comparison, the average in Massachusetts, where I live, is more than $80 a day per child.) If that’s still her goal, Harris should use next week’s convention as an opportunity to say so.

Parents need help. Bloomberg reported last year that families have had to get creative to cover the costs of care — working at the day care center to get the employee discount, for example, or tapping a home-equity line of credit. And a small share of parents try to combine a work-from-home job with keeping an eye on their children.

And kids need help, too. I have no doubt that today’s munchkins will eventually learn the difference between a circle and a triangle. But the disruptions caused by COVID should be a reminder that child care isn’t just something that allows women to work. It’s an investment in the next generation.