A Modest Proposal to Convince Congress To Invest in Child Care
Fun Fact: In 2018, Senator Tammy Duckworth became the first senator to give birth while in office. Let’s reflect on that for a minute. The United States is over 243 years old. About 2000 people have served in the Senate in United States history. That means 0.0005 percent of senators have given birth to a child while in office. In addition, the typical senator throughout United States history has been a white male over the age of 60. It is no wonder, why childcare has rarely gotten attention in Congress. The people making the laws most likely have no day-to-day responsibility related to caring for young children in their personal lives while in office. Even if they once did have young children of their own, I would be willing to bet many in Congress let their spouse or a nanny or someone else be the primary person handling childcare responsibilities. As any parent, care giver, childcare worker, preschool teacher, nanny, or babysitter, can tell you, children from birth to 5 can be cute bundles of joy, they are also exhausting to deal with. There is constant feeding them, changing diapers, toilet training, making sure they don’t stick their finger in an electrical socket and countless other tasks just to keep them safe and healthy. But we want children to be more than just safe, we want to nurture their physical, cognitive, and social and emotional development which requires a lot of other work. That work can’t just happen in the moment but takes lots of laborious planning whether it a preschool teacher developing an age-appropriate lesson plan or parents finding time to take their children to the library and about a billion other tasks. Caring for young children is all the harder when the adults doing it are dealing with a myriad of stressors in their own life. The vast majority of congress has no visceral understanding of all this from their personal experience even if they have read studies or heard from constituents about the challenges of caring for children.
In some ways Congress seems to have started to understand how important childcare is. There currently is a 3.5 Trillion dollar proposal in the Senate that has major funding for a variety of issues related to child care including making the expanded child tax credit permanent and 200 billion dollars for universal access to preschool. But the momentum for this proposal seems to have stalled.
Something needs to be done to restart this momentum and get this much needed funding for childcare passed in congress and signed into law by The President. Here is my modest proposal.
We take every infant, toddler, and preschool age child in the country, and drop them off at Congress, at The White House, at every State House, every town and city hall, at every governor’s office, in the country and walk away. Let every policy maker understand on a personal firsthand level all that goes into caring for a child and nurturing their development. Then we tell them no one is coming to pick up all the young children until they pass real investments in childcare and early education that matches the scale of the issue.
