Mothers ‘took the pandemic on the chin.’ Childcare should not be their burden alone | Editorial

Amanda Prieto has the résumé that major companies covet: a doctorate in education and years of experience, including as an instructor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. But the 45-year-old, who now lives in West Kendall, turned down a promotion from a part-time to a full-time job at her company during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The reason was all too common for many mothers: With two elementary-school-age daughters at home the entire school year, a full-time schedule didn’t give her the flexibility to help them navigate the intricacies of online learning.

With her children going back to school this fall, Prieto is looking for full-time work again. Her husband works in the airline industry and travels constantly, so she’s willing to take a lower paid job if it means working from home or more flexibility.

“I feel like there’s, you know, more pressure for me to be available when the kids are sick, for pickups and those types of things,” she told the Herald Editorial Board.

Prieto doesn’t regret her decision to help her children through the most challenging time in their short lives. But when millions of women make similar decisions to leave the workforce or work less, their own professional ambitions aren’t the only ones that pay the price. Even a modest increase in female labor force participation could add $511 billion to gross domestic product over the next decade, according to a 2020 study by S&P Global.

“Mothers have really taken the pandemic on the chin,” Lauren Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies how the pandemic impacted women, told the Editorial Board.

“Going back to normal” post COVID is not enough. The U.S. should emerge better and that begins with focusing on the group that was disproportionately affected by the pandemic: women, in particular women with children. Their problems, wrongly labeled “women’s issues” for decades, should be given priority moving forward.

If we want more women to work and contribute to the U.S. economy, that won’t happen without, first, addressing childcare.

Women haven’t caught up

As of July, more women than men remained out of the workforce compared to February 2020, the month before the COVID-19 pandemic started. Women’s labor participation was down 2.2% (or 1.7 million fewer women) and men’s fell 1.6% (1.4 million), according to U.S. Department of Labor data compiled for the Herald Editorial Board by Maria Ilcheva, assistant director of planning and operations for the Metropolitan Center at Florida International University. These numbers account for people over the age of 16 who are working or seeking work.

The primary reason women dropped out of work is because they are overrepresented in fields, such as food preparation, that were most impacted by COVID, followed by gender differences in child care roles, according to a Gallup report released in March. Women were also far more likely than men to cite the need to provide care for children out of school as reasons to leave work during the pandemic, Gallup found by analyzing data from the U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey.

The numbers seem to bear that out. One of the sharpest drops in women’s labor participation happened in September 2020, after children started school, many remotely, with 2.2 million fewer women in the workforce compared to the same month in 2019, according to Ilcheva’s analysis.

‘She-cession’ is everyone’s problem

When we’re still in the midst of a pandemic many dubbed a “she-cession,” it’s time to stop treating childcare and motherhood as an individual family’s problem.

In the case of Prieto, it starts with companies changing how they employ parents.

The private sector benefits when it makes the lives of working parents easier, whether it be by businesses partnering with each other to provide low-cost daycare for employees or allowing them to work non-traditional hours or from home, as the pandemic proved they can do.

Prieto has her own creative solution: “job sharing,” where two or three people share a full-time job and serve as each other’s backup when life happens.

But a remote or flexible schedule isn’t a reality for many women. That’s especially true for mothers, in particular women of color, who work in Miami’s largest industries, hospitality and services — the essential workers who couldn’t afford to stay home during the pandemic. For them, daycare is too expensive and, when they can afford it, often of subpar quality.

Childcare needs to be reframed as a matter of economic progress and the nation’s infrastructure, as President Joe Biden proposed in his American Families Plan. While that didn’t make it into the bipartisan infrastructure agreement the U.S. Senate approved in August, it’s included in the $3.5 trillion federal budget resolution Democrats are trying to pass, which would reduce the cost of childcare for low- and mid-income families and establish universal preschool for all 3- and 4-year-olds.

And no, this isn’t an expansion of a nanny state, as many conservatives will claim. This is about the U.S. economy’s future. The White House estimates that more than 1 million parents, mainly moms, would enter the labor force if childcare became more affordable.

So what are we waiting for?

Mothers are tired

A simple Google search will retrieve an abundance of policy solutions for childcare, but they don’t account for the invisible forces — gender roles, culture and relationship dynamics — that women have to negotiate their way through every day.

Women have been sold the lie that they can “have it all”: the dream job, the nice house, the supportive spouse, the children and the dog. But having it all often means more — more responsibilities, more stress and more guilt over not dedicating enough time to your family or your career.

Alas, mothers are tired.

During the pandemic, working moms of children under 13 did eight hours on average of childcare on weekdays, according to a Brookings Institution report appropriately titled “Time waited for no mom in 2020.”

Working fathers spent 5.2 hours performing the same duties.

This is telling: Employed mothers did more childcare work in 2020 than unemployed fathers (7.5 hours) and fathers not in the labor force (4.6 hours).

What are working fathers doing with those extra hours? Putting in more hours at work? Studying? Taking time for self-care?

The good news is that the pandemic forced some fathers to step up. Dads of children ages 5 to 12 spent two more hours in 2020 doing “secondary” childcare — for example, watching the kids while they worked from home — compared to 2019, according to Bauer with the Brookings Institution.

“I take this as evidence that elementary-school dads really changed their behavior and did much more childcare than had been expected of them,” Bauer told the Editorial Board.

But women still carry the brunt of childcare and they reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers early in the pandemic, according to an academic study published in June 2020.

As Prieto has learned over her 14-year marriage, equity requires negotiations.

“I think several times we’ve had the conversation of, ‘But you’re able to work because I’m not,’ ” she said. “We both have a valuable role to play. There was also a certain point where I realized ... he comes home [from work] and dinner is cooked and the dishes are done and he doesn’t have to do any more work that evening, and that other role is a 24-7 role.”

The childcare crisis

Childcare and nursery school costs in the U.S. more than tripled in the past three decades, according to a report by the Metropolitan Center at FIU. It says that childcare should cost no more than 7% percent of a family’s income, but families spend on average 10%, according to the report.

Current childcare subsidies cover only the poorest of parents, those making up to $32,000 for a family of three. The Miami-Dade Children’s Trust, which is funded through local property taxes, runs a scholarship program for families earning up to $65,000 for a family of three. But the program cannot keep up with demand and there were more than 800 families on a waiting list in late July, Associate Director of Programs Rachel Spector told the Editorial Board. The demand is such that the Trust’s board approved injecting an additional $1.5 million into the program in July to help more families.

“I have women calling me every single day that they can’t go back to work because they don’t have anywhere to leave their kids, and they cannot afford to pay $300 [for daycare],” Spector said. Though some in this community can turn to family members, not all families are fortunate enough to have a grandma or other trusted relative who can look after their children during the workday.

The other problem is that not all childcare centers and workers are the same. Their qualifications range from people with a degree in early childhood education to workers with minimum training. That means the quality of care you get depends on what you can afford.

There are plenty of studies that suggest the years before a child enters kindergarten are crucial for their brain development, vocabulary, future education attainment and even incarceration rates, which is more of a reason to treat pre-K as part of the country’s educational curriculum, as envisioned in Biden’s plan.

If we are not doing it for the women, let’s at least do it for the children — or the economy, or the businesses that need qualified workers. There are too many reasons to do it and very few excuses to keep kicking the childcare can down the road.

This story was originally published September 5, 2021 at 7:00 AM.