Every November, voters have a critical opportunity in every state to elect candidates to public office at all levels of government. The winners of these elections will be positioned to make public policy decisions that will directly impact future generations. The pandemic highlighted the vital role child care plays for millions of children and families, while simultaneously underscoring the precariousness of high-quality, affordable, and accessible child care for all families. It has never been more important to ask candidates to speak to their policy plans for child care.

At Child Care Aware® of America, we have a vision that every family in the United States has access to a high-quality, affordable child care system. Child care is an integral part of children’s growth, development, and educational advancement, and creates a positive economic impact for families and communities. Continuing to foster and grow these positive impacts requires comprehensive policies that are equity-driven, child-centered, family-engaged, and community-focused, and CCAoA uses these four policy goals as our guiding principles to ensure policymakers are engaged in fixing our broken child care system so that it serves all constituents.  

Elections provide an opportunity to clarify the issues and ensure that our public officials understand what policy changes are needed to support accessible, affordable child care for all families. Anyone can ask candidates the following questions during public events (both in-person and virtual), over email, via social media, or by placing a phone call.   

What Equity-Driven Child Care Policies Do You Support?

Equitable early childhood education must lift up all children, giving them a fair shot at the future. It must not perpetuate—but instead reverse—the structural and institutional racism, poverty and lack of opportunity that exists in the United States. Expanding access to all families is only one aspect for achieving equity in the child care system. The care itself must embrace and support all families, providing quality care that is culturally informed. 

One approach to assisting these families is to deliver business advice, fair subsidies, and other supports to all child care providers, including family, friends and neighbors, and home-based family child care providers. CCAoA strongly believes in supporting Child Care Resource and Referral agencies and FFN/FCC providers by helping them start their businesses and meet critical health, safety, and quality standards. 

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COVID-19 has clearly exacerbated the inequities that exist in the child care system. Child care educators—who are mostly women and disproportionately women of color and immigrant women—will be among the most impacted by the pandemic. Failure to support them will leave providers without a workforce and families without providers on which to rely. CCAoA strongly supports a significant federal investment in child care to meet the needs of child care providers, educators, and parents, and to reflect the essential role child care plays in supporting our communities and powering our economy.

What Will You Do to Support Child-Centered Child Care Policies?

Quality early childhood education nurtures the whole child, including their social, emotional, physical, and cognitive development. Early childhood educators take a holistic approach to educating young children, building close, positive relationships with each child in their care. Studies show that access to high-quality care can help close the kindergarten achievement gap, leading to better educational outcomes throughout schooling. 

Children deserve a safe place to grow and learn, and we must work toward a child care system with the health and safety of children as a baseline. CCAoA strongly believes that state and federal efforts to deregulate child care in order to “fix” the supply crisis can put children’s health and safety at risk. More, not less, needs to be done to help child care programs implement health and safety standards and invest in quality.

What Family-Focused Child Care Policies Do You Support?

The actual experiences of families should guide the development of legislative and regulatory changes at all governing levels. To start, we must address affordability. CCAoA believes that Congress and the administration must make robust, long-term investments in child care and early learning. With investment, we can ensure we reach all eligible families, and that child care is affordable, while appropriately compensating providers and educators. Anything less will leave families without the child care they need to fully participate in the economy.  

States play a pivotal role in this effort, alongside the federal government. States can begin by increasing their investments in child care and early learning, in order to further reduce wait lists and get more children into subsidized care. State policies have the ability to raise the income cut-off for eligibility to accurately reflect the cost of living and the cost of child care within local communities. In addition, states have the responsibility to increase provider payments, incentivizing providers to increase capacity and open more slots to subsidy-eligible families and increasing compensation. These payments are also essential to supporting adequate cost coverage for providers, ensuring the sustainability of their businesses.

What Community-Focused Child Care Policies Would You Advocate For?

For child care policies to be relevant and sustainable, they must focus on the entire community and the role child care plays within it. In addition, child care must be accompanied by robust, well-funded complementary services, such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program coverage, Early Head Start/Head Start, Home Visiting, and more. 

One key aspect of community-focused policy is the status of early childhood educators as professionals and experts in the field of child development. Too often, ECEs are dismissed as unskilled workers, and their low wages reflect this societal perspective. States are overdue in ensuring ECEs can earn increased wages and have access to additional benefits, including paid leave and healthcare.

During the pandemic, many states enacted temporary policies to support child care workers, but these policies are not permanent shifts. ECEs must be fairly compensated and supported in their career development.