Labor Day celebrates contributions that workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. The holiday makes me think about the hard-working families with young children in Wisconsin and across the country struggling to make ends meet financially while ensuring that their young children have a good start. This is a challenge for most families: see Washington Post article on working families and child care.
Wisconsin Work Ethic
Americans value work. Wisconsin’s work ethic is emphasized by the high level of working parents with young children. Wisconsin has a very high percent of young children with all available parents in the work force: 74%, 3rd highest in the nation. Wisconsin is ranked 7th among states for the highest percent of children age 0-4 in some form of paid child care.
Wisconsin relies primarily on federal funding to help working families with young children, through federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds and “welfare” funds, and through child care tax deductions. But the federal funding has been largely stagnant for the last decade, and most states are struggling to meet demands.
While Wisconsin has made great headway toward universal 4-year-old Kindergarten, funding for child care for low-income families has plummeted, with a decline in the last five years of over $100 million in the child care budget, and a decline of over 13,000 children receiving child care subsidy help. Recent efforts to improve child care quality under the YoungStar quality rating and improvement system have made progress, but the financial sustainability of high-quality child care programs is questionable.
United States Does Not Measure Up With Europe
The United States has focused primarily on private solutions for work-family challenges, and the results are not good. In comparison with European countries, we lag way behind in parental leave policies, support for high-quality child care with reasonably paid child care workers, and affordable child care costs for families. See: European policies for working families
In 1989 I was part of a delegation that studied the French early childhood system. It blew my mind! We saw a remarkable, high-quality early education system easily affordable to parents, with nearly universal political support.
Neither the U.S nor Wisconsin is likely to move significantly toward a European model. On this Labor Day I am dreaming of a solution for our working families and their children: affordable, high-quality early care and education and a solid parental leave support. What happens in the early years lasts a lifetime.
