How COVID Shaped Child Care and Early Learning

In March 2020, when states and cities ordered widespread school closures in hopes of curbing the spread of COVID-19, many local leaders urged child care programs — especially family child care providers — to stay open for the nurses, doctors, ambulance drivers, grocers and other essential workers who needed child care in order to work. So began the United States’ crash course on the importance of child care to its entire economy.

As some child care programs kept their doors open, others struggled to make ends meet. With parents pulling children out of early learning programs because of health concerns, financial constraints and other pressures, many providers suffered tuition losses and low enrollment, while struggling with the rising costs of new safety measures. By March 2021, nearly 16,000 child care programs had shuttered, according to a report from Child Care Aware of America, which was based on data from 37 states. Some experts suggested that the number was closer to 20,000 if all states were accounted for. Much of the early learning workforce had lost their jobs or left the field. Additionally, without care for their children, many mothers left their jobs — a phenomenon some economists refer to as a “shecession.”

The pandemic temporarily devastated the field, but five years later, a number of these effects seem to have rebounded. There are now slightly more child care jobs than before the pandemic, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment. Mothers with young children have entered or returned to the workforce in record numbers. What has endured is a sense among the public and lawmakers that affordable, accessible child care is essential to a healthy economy.

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

But experts say that such good-on-paper developments can cloud a more nuanced story. To better understand the ways in which COVID-19 radically altered child care and early learning in the U.S., I interviewed five experts about what they consider key to the legacy of the pandemic on the field. Here’s what they shared, edited and organized for length and clarity.

Julie Kashen is a longtime child care advocate and the director of women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, where she conducts research on families, caregiving, economic mobility and women’s labor participation.

The pandemic showed elected officials how much the public cares about child care.

The pandemic shone a spotlight on a challenge that many of us knew had been there all along. For so long, people had bought into [a] false argument that child care and early learning are an individual problem for each family to solve on their own. Seeing the impact of school and child care closings on parents and the workforce around the whole country, and at the same time [changed that].

CEOs and employers were finally understanding the [child care] challenges parents face. There was increased media attention on the issue because it was so prevalent, and also more reporters had firsthand experience with it. So as members of Congress got ready to put money into the airline industry, the restaurant industry and the retail industry — sectors that Congress has long been comfortable bailing out — we were able to make the case that child care is a sector that’s impacted, and that also impacts all those other sectors, and therefore needs investment.

It quickly became clear that this was not being treated as a partisan issue. Leaders on both sides began stepping up to say, “child care needs to be part of our pandemic relief package,” and that led to significant investments.

Now more elected officials are eager to be child care champions. They understand that they need to have a position and perspective on child care, that leading on child care is a popular thing to do.

Mary Cheng is the director of childhood development services at the Chinese-American Planning Council, which has several early childhood centers and after school programs serving low-income families in New York City.

We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span and families depend on us even more than before.

Providers feel exhausted by everything that’s been happening. I feel like they haven’t had a full break since COVID hit.

There has been a definite drop in enrollment in our programs due to the pandemic, but [we now serve] a higher number of [children with] special needs. In our classrooms, like 50% [of the children] need services such as early intervention or speech and occupational therapy.

I think parents were scared to bring them out for services [during the pandemic]. But it also has to do with the way that kids were being occupied at home. If parents were working remotely, they weren’t paying attention to children the same way. They were giving them screens to keep them quiet. Today, a lot of the children want that instant gratification. We’re seeing a lot more children with a limited attention span.

We’re also finding it harder to get parents to the table to work with us. When people are cornered and feel like they have no choices, and no connection, [the way they did during the pandemic], they close up. A lot of families are still not willing to gather together the same way as before, so there isn’t that same family support or peer system that they need. A lot of families don’t feel like there are systems in place to really support them. They want us to do it all.

Chris Herbst is a professor at Arizona State University focused on the economics of child care and early childhood education.

The child care workforce is like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.

Prior to COVID-19 not a lot of child care research was focused on the workforce. Now, a lot is very much focused on the workforce. Pretty much every [recent] paper I’ve written has focused in some way on the workforce, documenting its skill level change, or how public policies — whether it’s the minimum wage or immigration enforcement — have affected it.

The child care workforce is a bit like a leaf blowing in the wind. It’s very sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is inextricably linked to the larger labor market. When there are shocks to the larger labor market — like if lots of new parents are entering or leaving the labor market — that has obvious implications for the child care sector.

The shocking piece of news coming out of the pandemic that keeps me coming back to the workforce is how hard it has been for child care providers to hire and keep teachers, never mind highly qualified teachers. In the wake of the pandemic, the pay in the low wage labor market really started to increase, but child care providers couldn’t keep up, so it made hiring and retaining highly qualified staff even more difficult, and you continue to hear that to this very day.

Erica Phillips is the executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care, a non-profit dedicated to promoting high quality child care by strengthening the profession of family child care.

The pandemic showed the world how important family child care is.

Before the pandemic, many home-based providers felt invisible and not supported. The pandemic gave a window into how important they are. Family child care providers were lauded as heroes for staying open when many child care centers closed, and a lot of parents were interested in their small size.

Some advocates leveraged that spotlight to talk about the systemic changes needed to support home-based child care. [When COVID funding became available to stabilize the child care sector,] a lot of family child care programs entered the public funding system for the first time. More began engaging with their state child care registries to access technical assistance or grants. In several states, family child care providers unionized and were able to collectively bargain, resulting in increased pay or access to retirement plans or health insurance.

We continue to see a significant hunger and momentum for ensuring that our sector is respected and supported. But as COVID funding has dried up, many family child care providers are beginning to feel forgotten. There are states that have invested in their early education systems who have been inclusive of family child care. And then there are states where the providers feel like they are trying to shut down family child care.

The sentiment we hear from family child care is, “We are essential for a lifetime, not just for a pandemic.”

Steven Barnett is founder and senior co-director of Rutgers University’s National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), which publishes an annual report tracking preschool policies, funding and enrollment in the U.S.

Because of the pandemic, we began collecting desperately needed data that our country had not been monitoring before.

During the pandemic, kids weren’t in classrooms so studies in classrooms were completely disrupted. A lot of data collection was also delayed. On the flip side, we started a survey of a representative sample of 1,000 families of 3-5 year olds on their preschool learning activities, including home learning activities. We wanted to see the impacts of this moment on kids’ learning activities, because a bunch of them were not going to preschool, they were getting this remote stuff — and who knows how well that was working. We started in the spring of the pandemic and we’ve been doing it every year since.

Our data show that parents read less to their kids during the pandemic. It was like, “I’ve had that kid all day while I’m working at home, and we’re both too beat to do this.”

Eventually, the reading bounced back up, but it never came back to where it was. Even in the spring of 2020, before people had really been wrung out by the pandemic, the reading levels were still a lot higher than they are now.

We [also] found that children’s social emotional development tanked during the pandemic. [Some] behavior problems and mental health issues seem to have receded, but the prosocial — how well do you get along with other kids part — hasn’t come back to where it was before.

There’s way more screen time than anyone recommends for young children, and the converse of that is there’s way less outdoor time. That’s a problem. If kids are outdoors less, and on screens more, then wouldn’t we think they would have fewer experiences playing with other kids? These aren’t things we had been monitoring nationally, and we know they have consequences for kids’ learning and development. We plan to continue this work.