Isabelle Cajka takes an evening stroll with her son, Hector, through their gardens to wind down for the evening. Isabelle is the mother of an 8 month old who is involved with the Campaign for Childcare, which aims to increase awareness and spur action on the lack of affordable (or even unaffordable) childcare. She was previously a children’s librarian. (Photo by Alexis Wary/PublicSource)
Mothers, teachers — and at least one librarian (me) — are uniting to fix the affordable childcare system. It started with a Reddit post.
First-person essay by Isabelle Cajka, PublicSource
I’m in the halls of the U.S. Senate in a stodgy, muted committee room with signs, strollers, pump bags with freezer packs for breast milk and activists ranging from 11 months of age to 40-some years with the Campaign for Childcare. We have come to Washington D.C. at the end of May with petitions signed by over 3,000 folks from all over the country wanting universal child care. I’m giving myself and my friends a late Mother’s Day gift: organizing for a better world.
We are a committed group of mostly mothers and childcare workers (or both) who are fed up with unaffordable childcare costs, lack of access to quality care and the pittance childcare workers are paid to do their critical work.
We met on a Reddit thread (r/workingmoms) in December 2022, when a mother of infant twins and a toddler posted that she was sick to her stomach looking at her take-home pay versus her childcare costs, and asked if she was crazy because she was seriously thinking of organizing for universal child care in the United States. I read the post in the dead of night, daunted by my own family’s childcare costs, marathon nursing our hungry (very adorable, achingly sweet) 2-month-old baby, and replied to ask if anyone in Pennsylvania wanted to start talking.
Universal child care, while not the default in most of the United States, isn’t such a rare or out-there idea as it might seem. While most people who think universal child care think Scandinavian countries, New Mexico is closer to home. The state is leading the nation in childcare reform with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing early childhood education and dedicating $150 million a year in state funds to early childhood programs, with the aim of keeping centers open and making child care affordable.
Canada, as close as one tank of gas away from Pittsburgh, recently launched a plan for children to attend child care at an average cost of $10 a day. The national plan lays out exactly how many jobs it creates (thousands) while creating (tens of thousands) of needed childcare spots, and it also outlines how many jobs it fills (thousands) because parents are able to re-enter the workforce after having children. How much does this plan save Canadian families? If you guessed “thousands,” you are right. Canada’s GDP is expected to rise 1.2% over the next 20 years due to this plan.
According to UNICEF’s report “Where Do Rich Countries Stand on Childcare,” the United States sits in 40th place out of 41 ranked nations.
Getting on the childcare waitlist
In my own work with children and families as a librarian in Pittsburgh, some of my least favorite moments were when patrons would come to the reference desk to ask for help locating care, and were often gobsmacked by the lack of affordable, accessible options for their children. There is nothing like watching someone in real time realize that the best time to get their child onto a waitlist was before the child was conceived — and then to watch them realize that they probably could not afford full-time child care anyway.