In this episode of Early Childhood Chapters, we sit down with Dr. Sarah Vanover, author of America’s Child Care Crisis and Bridging Gaps as well as two other titles from Gryphon House. Dr. Vanover delves into the systemic challenges facing the child care industry in the United States, from the economic pressures on providers to the difficulties families face in accessing high-quality, affordable care.
Dr. Vanover explains why child care is not just a family issue—it’s a cornerstone of our economy. They discuss the fragile ecosystem that child care programs operate within, including how rising costs, low wages, and inadequate government support contribute to a system on the brink of collapse. Dr. Vanover also shares actionable solutions, including potential policy changes, public-private partnerships, and grassroots advocacy efforts that could pave the way toward a more equitable and sustainable child care system.
Whether you’re a parent, educator, or policymaker, this episode is a must-listen for anyone invested in the future of young children and their caregivers.
For more episodes of Early Childhood Chapters, listen here or subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform.
Episode Transcript
The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the episode.
Emily Garman: Welcome to early childhood chapters. I'm your host, Emily Garman. Today, I'm thrilled to bring you a conversation that couldn't be more important for families, educators, and policymakers alike. I'm speaking with Dr. Sarah Vanover, author of America's Child Care Crisis and Bridging Gaps. Dr. Vanover is a passionate advocate for high quality, accessible child care. In her books, she tackles the systemic issues that leave child care providers underpaid, parents overwhelmed, and the entire industry on the brink of collapse.
In our conversation, Dr. Vanover breaks down why child care is not just a family issue, it's an economic one. We discuss the fragile ecosystem that child care programs operate within, the challenges providers face in meeting rising costs while staying affordable for families, and the urgent need for systemic change. Whether you're a parent, educator, or simply someone invested in the future of our workforce and children, this episode will provide valuable insights into why child care is the foundation for every other industry and what we can do to fix it.
Sarah, thank you for being with us here today on Early Childhood Chapters. So one thing we know about America is that we're pretty politically divided. But one of the things that most people seem to agree on, at least in the policy sense, is that our child care system is broken. And what can you tell us about that? Just in a nutshell, what is going on with child care? Why is it broken? Why is this most important of things so undervalued in America?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Well, for most businesses, they follow the the law of supply and demand. So when the consumers want more, the company makes more. They can charge more because people are willing to pay more. This type of economic system does not work for the child care sector. Employers, child care businesses, they can only charge what parents can afford.
And as they increase prices, you get to a tipping point where parents say it's gotten too expensive. I have to leave the workforce and stay at home with my children. The problem is, though, that child care providers have to charge enough to pay their staff. Right now, we know that 97% of other occupations make more that child care providers do.
So we're talking about a group of men and women caring for our youngest children, doing hard work that make very low wages. And and what happens there is that a child care owner gets tuition for a certain number of children. And often the state says this is the max you can have in your building. This is the max you can have in these age groups.
So they can they can take the the maximum number if everybody's enrolled and say, this is how much money I have, I've got to divide it up. Anywhere from 50% to 85% of their costs is going to be staff. And then they have some fixed expenses that they can't change. You can't really change your rent. You can't really change your utilities or your insurance. And then food really is the one thing that you can try and get cheaper, but you can't get it a lot cheaper. And as many of us know who are buying groceries a lot, that cost keeps going up too. So you have some fixed expenses, and then the only other thing you can adjust is how much you can pay your staff.
And so basically, since there is no government subsidy that happens directly to child care programs, for years we have subsidized the cost of child care on the backs of our child care providers, our teachers, our assistant teachers, our nutrition staff. And when centers get full, like I said, we can't just say, hey, we'll open up more slots, because you don't want one person caring for eight babies.
That's not safe. There are a maximum number of children that each adult can watch. There's a maximum number that you can have in a building based on space and capacity. And we know that there's there's a challenge in finding a workforce. Right now, we're having workforce shortages throughout the United States in many different industries. But if 97% of those industries are making more money, then you know that child care is going to have a hard time getting that staff now.
I also know that when kids are little and they're five and six years old, they don't grow up and say, when I grow up, I want to stack shelves for a living or I want to cook French fries for a living. But you know, there are kids at home now that are saying, when I grow up, I want to take care of children, I want to work with kids.
And they do grow up. They grow up and they say, I want to work with children and they enter the field, and then they realize that they can't support their own families, and they have to leave and go to Target and stock shelves so that they can pay the bills. So the industry right now, it has to charge enough that it can meet minimum wage to pay staff, but not so much that families leave because it's too expensive.
And many of those organizations, child-care programs, don't provide health insurance, don't provide paid time off because they don't have the financial flexibility to do so. Most of the income for all child care programs comes from parents, families. Some children enrolled in the program may get government subsidy to offset the cost in their state, but we know that that's usually 20% or less of the kids in each state that access that subsidy.
So again, we have an industry that is built completely on what parents can pay. And what parents can pay is going to limit what they can charge. So it's it's based on what a parent can afford and not what the cost of care actually is.
Emily Garman: I've heard that all the time. People saying, well, we made the decision for this for one parent to stay home because the cost of child care was greater than that parent could earn, and it just doesn't make any sense. You said that the cost of this is subsidized on the backs of the workers, and I just wanted to parse that out a little bit, because when I think of subsidies, I think of an influx of money to help pay for something that comes from the government.
But what you're talking about is they're making ends meet to operate child care centers by taking money away from the workers, paying them less than the very, very minimum that they might have to pay them. And like you said, it is hard, consistent work that you have to show up for. You cannot phone it in when you're surrounded by a group of two year olds.
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Oh, no. Definitely not. And we've seen data from Caltrans from, 0 to 3, other organizations that show that in all 50 states, a full time wage as a child care provider does not equal that state's living wage for one person. So you can be working a tough 40 hours a week where you are picking little people up all day long, writing lesson plans, changing diapers, having people blow their noses on you. You're out all day and you still aren't making enough to have one person live. Many child care providers have to take state subsidy on top of their salary, so they might be able to get SNAP food benefits. Medicaid, different different types of subsidies, from the state itself. Along with working a full time job.
Emily Garman: And low pay means we can't attract the best people to the field either. Because, like you said, if 97% of industries pay more, someone's going to choose another job that that that they need to support their family. So if we could elevate the the pay for this field and for teaching, and other caregiving jobs, we could attract better people because obviously we know this is important, right?
The people who care for the most vulnerable populations, the elderly and very young children, are hugely important because the children are our future.
Dr. Sarah Vanover: When we're thinking about the birth to five population, children that may be in full time child care until they enter kindergarten, 90% of brain development occurs during that time period. So what you don't want is child care, where a child is not just surviving during the day. They're placed in front of a television and or they don't interact with others.
What you're looking for is a relationship-rich environment where children are learning to communicate, they’re learning to solve problems, where they have loving caregivers, where they're creating relationships. And these are not entry level staff. When you have entry level staff, they're just surviving in a room full of children and you want well-trained educators who care and nurture for children who meet their basic needs, but are also giving them a lot of those pre academic skills so that they learn how to problem solve.
As three and four year olds, problem solving looks like, Oh, my block tower fell down, what was it? Did I build it too high? Was it leaning? How can I do it again? And you work and start all those pre-academic skills and we need trained teachers to do that. But the salary is entry level. And the job description is not entry level.
And so that's where we have this breakdown. If you look at a job description for an early education teacher, and this is true for infant toddler teachers as well as preschool teachers, because there is a lot of learning that goes on in our infant toddler classrooms. But if you look at these job descriptions, you know, it starts off meeting basic needs, but it goes into planning lesson plans, assessing the child's development, looking to see if they're falling behind in certain areas, and changing those lesson plans, helping children learn to negotiate and problem solve with one another because, two, three, four year olds, that's a great time to get mad at my friend and smack them. And I need somebody to show me how to resolve those issues. And so the skill set that we're asking for is very detailed, but we're we're often--salaries are buffering right above the minimum wage in every state. And so based on that, we're asking for the moon, but we're not willing to pay for it.
Emily Garman: And like you said, most child care providers who own facilities or run facilities would want to pay their workers more, but they just can't, because there's a threshold, like you said, to which parents and families can pay. Sure, they want their child in a safe environment at a minimum, but they want their kid to be ready when they go into kindergarten. And that's a whole other conversation. But they want more than just, you sat my kid in front of a TV all day. They want the report about the diapers and what they did and how how much of their lunch that they ate and all that. So you're asking more and more from these folks who have to have some kind of training to do this. I mean, you can't just take a 19 year old and sit them in there and expect them to write lesson plans and understand child development. So what can we do about this?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Well, I think it has a lot to do with priorities. We look at it from two different lenses. We look at the current workforce and we look at the future workforce, the current workforce or the parents who are out there working now. And in order for them to be in the workforce, they have to know that their kiddos are safe. Because if my child is not safe, I’m leaving my job to come and be with them, if I don't feel good about where they are, then I'm not going to go to work. And then when I leave work, that means that my job has to replace me. They have to retrain me, or maybe they they can't find somebody at all to fill that job.
And then the whole economy, the economy within my town, the economy within the state, those things kind of all seem to have negative impacts of parents leaving the workforce when there's not child care. Now, the future workforce is the kiddos that we're caring for and what we want to instill in them at a young age.
We want to create problem solvers and creative thinkers instead of kids who sit back and wait for information to be shared with them, like watching television. And so to find kiddos and to train them how to seek out information to move through their environment and look for sensory information, then we have to have classrooms where they can explore, classrooms that are set up by trained teachers.
And those are two aspects that, you know, they've always been looked at by our health cabinets in terms of safe environments. The office of the Inspector General typically goes out and inspects these the same way they would nursing homes and things like that. But it's time within states that our economic development cabinets and our cabinets of education start taking a greater interest as well.
And they start thinking, okay, so if we need these rich classroom environments, then what are we doing to attract teachers? How are we recruiting educators and how are we training them? Are we increasing apprenticeship programs in our states to train these kiddos when they're in high school? And they can do an apprenticeship as part of their school work, and be workforce ready when they graduate.
Are we finding ways to have scholarship programs that get them interested in high school? Maybe they have some kind of dual learning or an early education co-op that they do, and then they go into college with an idea that, yes, I want to work with a classroom full of small children, and I know what that entails and what it's going to be like.
Because we have a lot of young teachers that think, I babysat in high school. And so I want to work with young children, and they come in to a room of 20 children, and it's a very different environment than working with a child one on one. And some of those new teachers don't make it past their first lunch break.
So the workforce development piece to find and recruit teachers is really key. We also have to think about the compensation piece. And that's huge because many early childhood educators go into this field knowing they're not going to be rich. They're doing it because they love children. And that's the age group that they want to work with.
So they're not expecting a huge salary. But then when they can't feed their own family, they have to leave for self-preservation. So how do we avoid getting to that point? And there are states that are implementing programs in order to avoid that. North Carolina has a wage compensation program; Washington, DC is implementing a pay scale they’re trying to enforce for their teachers. They’re going to move the salary scale. And over a certain number of years, Kentucky has provided free child care for all child care providers. So even though the salary might not be high, the teachers don't have to pay for child care for their own children. And so that can save $20,000 a year that you might make if you were, you know, you would have to pay if you're working in retail or hospitality.
So finding ways that states are supporting these individuals in the workforce, finding ways to increase compensation packages as a whole, is another huge way to support the teachers so that we have that in place. The other thing is thinking about the families that we have now and how it impacts the workforce now.
Many businesses have stepped up and said, I can't have the best employees that I want if the families don't have the resources in this area, they don't want to come work for me in this part of the country or in this town if there aren't things available. So you have large businesses like Toyota who have put onsite child care, many hospitals consider this because of the unusual hours that their employees might need to work second and third shift weekends, things of that nature.
And they say, I know that we will lose this much money per year having onsite child care. However, I'm willing to do that as a company benefit to make sure that I get the best employees and that my turnover rate for employees is lower, and that I'm not constantly having to try new employees and stepping up that way to say that this is why I'm going to support the families that work for me so that they will in turn stay and support me longer.
Emily Garman: A lot of families in the United States don't have two parents, so it isn't even a reality that they can say, well, one parent is going to not go to work anymore and take care of the children.
Dr. Sarah Vanover: While we have a lot of families that one parent might want to stay home, but they have to work simply for health insurance. If you had a family of four that had two adults in it and the cost of child care is too big and they would like to stay home. But if you put all the health insurance for four people on one person, then the income that they brought home would be so small that they couldn't support everybody, because the cost of health insurance for the family is so big, so there are a lot of factors that contribute to why we don't have the financial ability to do this.:
Now. Like my my mother was a stay at home mom. She stayed at home with my sister and I until we were both in elementary school, and I'm blessed that that was an option. But when I look at the options that my husband and I have today, that health insurance piece is a huge part of it. And also just the large amount of expenses that that we have, school fees and increased taxes and things like that, that factor in that might not have been an issue in previous generations, but now working families just have a higher percent of every adult in the house being in the workforce.
Emily Garman: The way I understand the public school system work. So most American children of school age are enrolled in public schools, and public schools also don't have super great teacher pay, but they receive money from the state government. They receive money from the federal government. That flows into the school in a number of different ways and sort of subsidizes the operation of, of the school.
So why don't we have something like that equivalent for preschool-age children, you know, infants to five or so when, when kids can start in public schools, would that kind of situation work? Obviously it would be expensive. But why does the cost of caring for the very, very youngest children fall completely to families?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Well, for a long time there was an idea that education doesn't start until you're in kindergarten. And so prior to that, it wasn't an issue of whether or not our children are learning because they they didn't need to be, and you just needed an adult to watch them. And again, as we know now, 90% of that brain development occurs before a child gets to the kindergarten point.
And so there's a great deal of attention that needs to be paid. Now, that does not mean children sitting in seats, holding pencils and doing writing work. Because our learning at a young age is more exploration, sensory based, always on the move. And that's what we want to see in child care settings, is play-based learning.
But we just had this idea that whatever happened before or five was not a big deal. Now the other thing with K through 12 schools, a very small amount of federal funding goes into K through 12 education; that's almost predominantly by the state. The biggest source of federal funding is special education funding through the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
And there's a couple of other federal streams that go into schools that help at-risk children who might have low income situations, things of that nature. But the state is predominantly responsible for all of the K through 12 school system. And because the state is, and we've got 50 individual states, we see 50 different models of how much money the states choose to invest in child care.
And in some states, we see things like universal pre-K that has been implemented, and they're choosing that that's one way that they want to invest state dollars. Other states, we see public school preschool or partnerships between private child care and public child care, and different variations of that. And then, you know, we have states that have much more limited incomes.
If we look at income based on income tax, states that have high poverty levels, lots of rural areas, you know, it's harder to come up with those state dollars to provide these types of programs. And so education is one of the largest funding sources. But they're really going to focus on that K through 12 because they may not have funding sources to go to those younger kiddos and states that we've seen that have done a lot of expansion in their early childhood systems, like New Mexico, for example, they have funding sources that is coming from oil money, or like Georgia using lottery ticket money or, you know, different investment sources that they are saying, hey, we have this investment source, let's funnel it towards early childhood education and make a big impact on the front end and then see how it impacts our workforce, our higher ed things of that nature at a later point.
Emily Garman: And are they seeing that? I mean, I know the state I live in did that with lottery money, and it's been a number of years now. I would think that we would start to be seeing some data like, hey, is this investment paying off, are kids doing better in school? By all the ways we measure that, are they better prepared for school?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Well, it often depends on how well the state tracks its own data. So that's one thing that factors into what kind of data we get, we see longitudinal studies of, like the Perry preschool project that we're coming up on 20 year anniversaries of some of these projects, and data and longitudinal studies are so fabulous to show.
Okay, yes, we have some data that shows that this investment on the front made our fourth grade reading levels higher and our eighth grade math levels higher. And then we had more kids that were graduating than in previous years. And that kind of data is fabulous. But again, 20 year anniversaries, it takes a long time to to collect that kind of data.
And so what most schools are or most districts, most states are looking at is, okay. If we invest in three and four year old preschool, then what are we going to see as far as our kindergarten readiness scores? A lot of states do entrance exams, so to speak. Basically a developmental screener. When the children enter kindergarten, to see are you kindergarten ready?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: What skills do you have and how many kiddos have them. And so you you can look at short term where how many of our kiddos went to some type of child care or preschool program in advance? And what were their kindergarten readiness scores? And then what were their fourth grade reading scores? And so that's a much shorter norm.
But you have to take into account, too, that we have kiddos with disabilities that are always going to be part of those numbers, and they're not ever going to be kindergarten ready. But were they more ready than we anticipated them to be, if they didn't have that early intervention and earlier support? So there are different data factors that that we have to look at along the way.
There have been some national studies that look at the pre-investment of early education versus kind of remedial investment down the road in the justice system. So if we invest in early education, give kids a really upfront boost at being successful in the education system, then are we saving money down the line on children that need more special education and eventually might be part of the prison system?
And so it looks like from those national data center surveys that you can save, like a 1 to 7 ratio for every dollar that you're investing in, early education in the front of a child's life, it can save up to $7. in later special education and justice enforcement later on.
Emily Garman: We can go back and look at systemically why this is a thing. Maybe. Why? Caregiving fields, particularly people who care for young children, traditionally those are and were women's fields. I wonder if that has anything to do with this continued idea of, well, that's it's those are soft skills. It's women's work. It's not worth paying them a lot of money to do it.
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Well, in, in the field of early childhood education, right now, 98% of the jobs are female, or 98% of the workers are female. So we have 2% men that work in the field, and a lot of times they don't spend long in the classroom. A lot of times when a man works in the field of early childhood education, he is eventually bumped up to administration.
I think that there is kind of a stereotype related to a woman being the best nurturer, particularly in our infant and toddler classrooms. You'll see some parents that push back if a man is hired to work in infant toddler classrooms; parents will say, I don't feel comfortable with a male teacher working with my child at this age.
Of course, we know that there is a lot of data surrounding the fact that women do not make the same hourly return, as men do, maybe $.70 to $.80 cents on the dollar. And so another trend that you see in the field of early childhood education is that the younger the child is, the younger the pay is.
So preschool teachers typically make more than infant toddler teachers. Kind of assuming that, okay, a baby doesn't need to learn. Well, the first year of learning, more brain development happens than any other year. There are so many things that happen in the first year of life. And exposing children to a rich language environment and bonding with that baby so that they have strong relationships the rest of their life, that's also essential. But we assume that, you know, that you need to be higher trained the older the child is, so that an infant teacher wouldn't need any training. And so there's a lot of stereotypes that follow these pay rates and, and how we support kiddos of different ages with their education.
Emily Garman: Okay. So tell me about programs like Head Start. So what is Head Start and could we use this as a model to make it bigger available to more families?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: Okay. So Head Start is a federally funded program. It was created back in the 1960s as part of the war on Poverty. And, Head Start is one of the most comprehensive early education programs. Head Start itself is for 3 to 5 year olds, but it has a portion under its umbrella called early Head Start, which is for kids from birth to three.
And so they can be in the early Head Start program and then graduate to Head Start. Families have to be at 100% of the federal poverty level or below to qualify, or there are some slots reserved for kiddos with disabilities, kiddos experiencing homelessness, things of that nature. And so those children can be exempt of the income qualification.
But the, the main goal of Head Start is to serve three and four year olds whose families are living in poverty and help get them ready for kindergarten, so along with the education comes some significant wraparound services. So families enrolled in Head Start, the parents can get support. Getting a GED, the children can get support getting their immunizations, eye exams, hearing exams, getting to their doctor and dental appointments if they haven't been able to do that.
But again, we're talking about a very small population of families that fall into the lowest income bracket that we have available. And then for kiddos with disabilities, Head Start is one of the only programs that you can find that does not expel children. So, for many children expulsion in early childhood is a significant problem.
Children get expelled from early childhood programs more than three times the rate of the K through 12 school system. And it's because child care programs are private entities. They have a child that exhibits challenging behaviors. You're worried about a teacher being stressed out. It's easier to expel a child and replace them with a child on your wait list than to lose a teacher and not have anybody to teach a whole classroom.
So expulsion rates are high, but Head Start does not expel kids for behavior challenges. And these are kiddos in the Head Start program that have experienced trauma, that may have significant disabilities and behavior problems associated with that. And so Head Start provides some services that no one else does and to in a way, to support low income families in Early Head Start.
They will provide formula, diapers, many of the essentials that the family may not be able to provide. So these are true wraparound services. They have some of the highest education requirements for their teachers, and training. And so program standards are high. If you go in and evaluate a Head Start program, they are tip-top. Now the challeng is that they only serve a small group of children.
There's also Head Start partnerships. And these are amazing. So what happens in a partnership is the money for Head Start goes straight from the federal level to a local grantee. So maybe a community action council in the area will apply for the grant and say, we want 120 slots in this area based on the size of our community and the income level and they can house 80 of those in their facility, but they've got 40 slots left over.
So they will reach out to child care programs that serve some low-income kiddos and say, hey, what if I give you 12 slots? What if I give you 20 slots? And when the program accepts that, they get the per-child amount from the federal government for those kiddos, which is great and helps them with their economics.
But then the program has to meet the Head Start standards. So it benefits all the kids in the program. They will help them with lesson planning and high-quality training and education specialists that come in. They'll help make sure that the children that are there, the facility that our Head Start kids get those wraparound services.
And if the Head Start kids need new materials for the classroom, then the whole classroom will get it. And all the kids benefit. And so those partnerships have brought a lot of support to child care programs within the area. And they reimburse per child at a rate that will afford a teacher to have a more livable salary than most licensed child care.
Of course, Head Start is expensive because they're covering a lot of these programs, but we are looking at a population of kids that really needs a lot of support. And so we've been able to fund Head Start, through the federal government, as a kind of division of the Child Care and Development Block grant. Since the program was initially started in the 60s, during that war on poverty, when you look at what 100% of the federal poverty level, what it actually is, for a family of three, you think there's no way in the world anybody can live on that.
Most of these families do have other government supports that, that they're utilizing, like Snap, or, Medicaid, things like that. Because the income level is very small. A lot of times that means that somebody in the home is unable to work, but sometimes maybe they have a part time job or a very low-income job that just is not sustaining what their family needs.
Emily Garman: So it's expensive. Is that really the main reason that the federal government isn't looking at expanding these programs? I mean, we know it's important. We know that the people who provide these services to our kids are critical and that their work is difficult, and they need to be highly trained. Is it just a money thing?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: It is definitely a money thing. Money is definitely part of the issue because the state budgets, federal budgets, everybody sits down and agonizes over these every year. And we we see different parties get into huge fights over should we spend more on this or should we spend more on that?
Private child care is typically independent small businesses. And so there are some discussions on whether or not we subsidize small businesses. And, you know, do we only pay for government efforts and subsidize small businesses? Well, quite honestly, we subsidize a lot of private businesses. I mean, think about airlines and the car industry and all the types of government bailouts that the United States has been a part of in the past.
And we did it because of the economic impact that it would have on the country if those businesses failed. Child care is as much a part of the infrastructure for this country as many of these large businesses are. When we think about the infrastructure we need in order to be successful as an economy, we need to stop thinking just about roads.
And whether or not the the city planning committee thought about how to design the city. But we have to think about whether or not child care is there in order to support the workforce, because, again, this one industry supports every other industry. So without it, you won't have the infrastructure you need for working families to be a part of the workforce.
And what that means, a lot of times if working families have to drop out, is that moms are dropping out of the workforce; if it's a two parent family, then maybe they're struggling and only one person is able to work. If it's a one parent family and the mom has to drop out of the workforce, then that's significant because the family then begins to rely solely on public benefits.
So one way or another, the government is supporting many of these families. If it's not through child care, then it's through government support programs. For a single parent family, when they do have a job, a child care can be 23% of the total family income. You know, we were always told that your housing should be ten, you should save ten. You know these breakdowns. When we had consumer and family economics classes, when we were growing up and how you structure your budget.
Well, child care is the most is the single most expensive thing that families pay for. It surpasses mortgages in most states. It's more than a year of college tuition, and you go from having to pay none of it to the most expensive year of care that that you'll ever have, and you have to completely redo your budget.
So these types of structural things have to be thought of when we're thinking about how do we support families moving forward when we rather pay more in TANF and SNAP and all these government support programs that provide food and temporary shelter and medical insurance, or would we rather pay for a robust plan for child care where state, federal, parents, the business community all contribute and make sure that it's in place for families so that families can be autonomous and not use these support programs and feel successful.
Emily Garman: For those of us who are not politicians and not policymakers, what are ways we can support this? Because it just seems like a no-brainer to me. This is so many things about the government too. It just doesn't make sense what they're funding and what they're not funding. But that's just me as a layperson. So do we contact our legislators? What do we do?
Dr. Sarah Vanover: I was going to say, a lot of this comes down to grassroots efforts. Legislators vote on policies that their constituents want, and most frequently, legislators hear from advocacy groups and lobbyists, because those people that are paid job to reach out and say, I want to tell you about why this is important, but it makes a lot more impact on a legislator when a constituent calls and says, this is why this is important. And it doesn't have to be a parent; it's great for them to hear from parents. But let me tell you, it's great for them to hear small business owners and business owners say, I can only be here if I have staff, and my staff need child care, because when those businesses small, medium, large, when they're in the communities, they make the communities run, they're bringing in tourists, they're bringing in income tax or bringing in all kinds of things that that make the communities run.
And so the legislative members really want to hear from the business owners saying why this is important from the parents. On why it's important. From a from a whole group perspective, I know that our U.S. chamber and many of the state chambers have taken child care up as a significant issue because, you know, the members of the chamber, the businesses that belong to the chamber are saying this is one of the things that we need or we can't function.
And so when you get those businesses unified and they're saying, we have to have this, it has to be safe child care, you know, if it's just bare minimum, then my employees won't stay long. But we need accessible child care that is safe in order for me to get the employees that I need. And, you know, community leaders in city councils need to be telling at the state level, our city only works when we have people in jobs.
There's a lot higher percentage of people who are eligible to be in the workforce right now that are not than the communities really want. And child care and housing are two of the biggest issues, and they're two of the things that families with kiddos desperately need to be affordable and accessible.
Emily Garman: Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today on Early Childhood Chapters.
I hope you found my conversation with Dr. Vanover as eye opening as I did. She highlighted some of the most pressing issues facing child care in the United States, and shared actionable steps we can take to ensure that families, educators, and communities receive the support they need.
As she reminded us, child care isn't just about giving parents a place to leave their kids during the workday. It's about fostering relationships, building problem solving skills, and setting the foundation for a lifetime of learning. It's also about strengthening our economy by enabling parents to remain in the workforce and creating meaningful, sustainable jobs for educators. If today's conversation resonated with you, I encourage you to share this episode and get involved in advocating for change.
Whether it's reaching out to your legislators, supporting local child care programs, or simply spreading awareness, every voice matters in creating a better system. Stay tuned for another episode with Dr. Vanover, where we'll dive deeper into related topics, including equity in early childhood education, the role of public funding, public private partnerships, and much more. Until next time, I'm Emily Garman with Early Childhood Chapters, the podcast from Gryphon House Books.
