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Friday, July 31, 2020

Child-Care and COVID-19

The pandemic upended child care plans for many parents in the United States, forcing them – particularly mothers – to grapple with tough choices that are only becoming more difficult as states push return-to-work policies to try to revive the battered economy. Do they hunt for expensive and hard-to-find child care that could expose their families to COVID-19, which is still raging across much of the country? Or do they scale back on work, or even quit, threatening their financial stability?

The barriers risk stalling or reversing the economic gains of recent years made by working women, who are more likely to take a career hit than men when they are unable to find child care, studies show. 

“If women don’t have child care, they can’t go back to work,” said Karen Schulman, Child Care and Early Learning Research Director for the National Women’s Law Center. If that doesn’t happen, “you end up creating a system that is going to result in vast gender inequities”.

“There’s this fragile, invisible thread holding the lives of our moms, holding the lives of our economy together,” said Chastity Lord, president and chief executive of the Jeremiah Program, a Minneapolis-based nonprofit organization that supports single mothers and their children.

Pressure looks certain to mount on families in the coming weeks, as various aid programs and protections that offered relief to jobless parents expire, including enhanced unemployment benefits, eviction moratoriums and a freeze on student loan payments. While child care places are hard to find for toddlers, they are even scarcer for school-age children and many summer programs for this age-group went online, leaving parents facing a quandary.

Child care was already scarce before the coronavirus led to the shuttering of thousands of centers. More than half of all Americans lived in a child care “desert” as of 2018, defined by the Center for American Progress, a liberal nonprofit group in Washington, as an area with no licensed child care providers or less than one slot for every three children under five. Now, in many states, care centers accept only limited numbers of children to prevent the virus from spreading. Additionally, families that relied on grandparents or other older relatives or neighbors must weigh up the risks of asking for their help again and perhaps exposing them to a disease that has proved especially deadly for the elderly. Under the CARES Act passed in late March, parents who lost access to child care because of the pandemic became eligible for unemployment benefits. But the process of qualifying for the program, which varies from state to state, became less clear cut as the school year ended and some day care centers began to re-open with limited capacity.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-childcare-anal/coronavirus-child-care-pinch-in-u-s-poses-threat-to-economic-gains-of-working-women-idUSKCN24W2EX

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