Childcare workers criticize JD Vance’s idea of ​​grandparents helping with childcare

“One way that you could take some of the pressure off of people who are paying so much for day care is if grandma or grandpa might want to help out a little bit more, or maybe there’s an aunt or uncle who wants to help out a little bit more,” Vance told Kirk. “If that happens, you’re taking some of the pressure off of the resources that we’re spending on day care.”

Vance continued, arguing that states should also relax regulations on training and certification requirements for child care workers to reduce costs for providers and their customers.

Many experienced childcare workers believe more needs to be done – while family support and easy access to the industry are helpful, they are not enough to break the cycle of low pay and slim margins.

Vance has previously said he opposes only one child care model and wants policies that are “good for all families.”

“Senator Vance, who was raised primarily by his own grandmother, knows firsthand the enormous sacrifices grandparents, aunts, uncles and other relatives make when caring for a child who is not their own,” Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, told BI. “Senator Vance believes in addressing kinship care through federally supported initiatives so that these families are relieved of this enormous, often invisible, financial burden and have the resources they need to care for these children.”

Debbie Drew, an administrator at a nonprofit child development center in Portage, Wisconsin, hadn’t seen Vance’s comments when several parents at her center sent them to her. After a third parent contacted her with his concerns, she decided to review them. She wasn’t happy. Many parents simply can’t afford to rely on family for child care, Drew said, and they shouldn’t.

Drew argued that politicians like Vance do not support sufficient direct funding for daycare because they do not respect the importance of early childhood education. “Birth to age five are the most important years of a child’s development,” she said. “To say that anyone can do this job is absolutely ridiculous. That is not childcare.”

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Few parents who send their children to Drew’s center have family they can count on, she added, something Drew can relate to, having traveled as a member of the U.S. military while raising his family. “My mother, my father, or my husband’s mother and father were nowhere in sight,” she said. “And a lot of parents, a lot of families are like that now.”

And as a grandmother herself, she doesn’t feel it’s her responsibility to raise her granddaughter. “I can tell you, I’m 63 years old and I don’t want to babysit my granddaughter or teach her. I want her to be in a program like this,” Drew said.

Problems and solutions in childcare

Child care centers are notoriously expensive to run — and providers often barely make a profit. Babies and toddlers require a lot of supervision, and many centers are also burdened with expensive regulations. For a growing number of parents, day care is simply out of reach. Centers also have trouble attracting quality staff, given the low wages they receive. Drew said her center is barely breaking even — and she’ll have to close its doors if she loses another teacher.

“A lot of them can’t stay in the field when you’re making $14 an hour and you don’t have insurance,” Drew said of her employees. “You can go to any gas station or McDonald’s and make more money than you can here. Not just on my show. On any show.”

Wendi Schell, 48, has worked in child care for 27 years. She said turnover is high — in part because teachers leave because of stress and low pay.

“They’ll go into retail or even fast food, almost any other entry-level job, and they’ll make the same amount — or more,” she said. Teachers in her area are required to take a 30-hour course in child care and are often encouraged to earn an associate degree, all of which are considered important for the role, “and yet it doesn’t affect their pay level because it’s well above minimum wage.”

Schell believes that more funding from the government or at the county level, going directly to employee salaries, could help address the problems facing the industry. It would help reduce stress on teachers — no more worries about having to take on extra work when someone leaves to get a higher salary — and it would also mean centers could open more spots.

Schell said grandparents have actually stepped in to help provide childcare for some parents, especially during the pandemic. That means many of those grandparents are already burned out on childcare, she said.

“We have grandparents who were babysitting and they’re like, can we sign up for two days a week to just relax?” she said.

Child care spending is a bipartisan concern: Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agree that national spending on child care assistance is too low.

Renee Bock, 57, has worked in the child care industry for more than a decade and said Vance’s comments “fail to acknowledge the reality of Americans today.”

Bock has led schools since 2010 and currently serves as the Bronx’s early childhood director, working with the New York Department of Education. She said she has seen firsthand the challenges older adults face in providing child care.

“When you ask a typical grandmother, great-aunt, to essentially take over the care of a very young child, you don’t even consider that they may not have the physical or mental capacity to safely care for a child, right? They may not have the financial resources to care for a child,” Bock said.

“Grandparents should not be a substitute for childcare,” she added.

Bock also noted that at a time when future Social Security benefits are uncertain, grandparents face an even greater burden as they must find a way to support themselves and their child.

Bock said an easy solution to making the childcare system more efficient is to raise wages.

“Really investing money in early childhood programs and colleges providing financial aid to kids to encourage them to participate in programs that will get young people interested and engaged in this field, and then offering incentives like student loan forgiveness or salary after graduation so they can go into these positions in high-need areas would really go a long way,” she said.

Bock said it would be helpful to find a way to pay grandparents to care for their children. Elliot Haspel, a senior research fellow at nonpartisan family policy think tank Capita, previously told BI that federal support for family caregivers, friends or neighbors, would strengthen the childcare system and make it more sustainable for older people. “If better support for grandparents and other FFN caregivers were part of a comprehensive approach to childcare, that could be really effective in making sure that American families have access to the care options they need,” he said.

However, without this additional support, it is not possible to hand over the care of children to grandparents.

“We can’t rely on grandparents as an unpaid national labor pool,” Bock said. “That’s just unfair, unrealistic, and it won’t work.”