Research shows that many FFN caregivers share the same attributes and intentionally engage in the same activities as other high-quality early learning and care programs. FFN caregivers meet a number of indicators associated with high quality child care, including:

1. FFN caregivers are ;
2. Have many years of experience ();
3. Are ;
4. with low adult to child ratios;
5. ; and
6. .

This month, the Department of Defense (DoD) announced the expansion of its FFN program, that allows military personnel to use trusted family and friends to meet their child care needs. This program, initially piloted in five communities, will now be available in 11 military communities in the U.S., and “provides fee assistance for full-time, in-home child care providers.” The and an exemplar of what our child care system nationally might ideally look like. By recognizing and compensating FFN caregivers in this high-quality system of well-funded center-based and licensed family child care options, the U.S. military acknowledges that families still want and need other child care choices, including family and friend care.

While federally-funded research and data recognize the importance of family, friend and neighbor care, federal child care policy largely ignores and fails to compensate FFN caregivers for most families who desire that care. The federal Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families . Introductory comments reflected a belief that families select unlisted or informal care when they cannot find or afford institutional or center-based child care, and that this care is of lower quality. Research demonstrates, and the DoD recognizes, that FFN care is quality care. Even when other options are available, families often still prefer FFN care. When we collectively recognize FFN care as a quality option that many families prefer, we can build programs and policies that support these caregivers and the children and families who rely on them.

That’s basically the degree of wisdom involved in raising child-to-adult ratios as a way to help with the child care crisis. Raising ratios is a false remedy that does active harm. We need to stamp out that ill-advised brushfire of an idea before it spreads.

Iowa is currently poised to be the first state in quite a while to raise their ratios. As the news site reported, the bill, which already passed the Iowa Senate:

“would increase child care center staffing ratios, allowing providers to increase the number of children enrolled in their care without hiring additional employees. Under the bill, each child care worker could be responsible for as many as seven 2-year-olds or ten 3-year-olds, up from six 2-year-olds and eight 3-year-olds at present.

The bill passed 32-18 along party lines, with Republicans arguing it was necessary to address Iowa’s workforce crisis. Child care providers and advocates have criticized the bill, arguing it could decrease the quality of care, cause more teachers to quit, lead to the ‘warehousing’ of children, affect children’s development and possibly even put kids in danger.”

(Iowa Senate Republicans also rejected an amendment that would have required programs to notify parents when ratios were being raised — so much for parent empowerment.)

Now, let’s be fair. Iowa’s new ratios wouldn’t be the highest in the nation, and the ratios would be in line with nearby Democratic-controlled states like Minnesota. However, just because your neighbor chooses to drive without a seatbelt doesn’t mean you should stop wearing yours (i.e. Minnesota’s ratios could probably stand to be lower). It is notable that many Iowa child care providers — those with expertise in the field, those whom parents trust to care for their children, those who would hypothetically “benefit” from having more paying customers, those who know the real-life difference between eight and 10 3-year-olds — are loudly .

For that matter, there’s no reason to think that raising ratios will even have the intended effect. States with high-ish ratios, like and , are having awful child care shortages just the same! To put yet more strain on an already beleaguered and exhausted workforce in this particular moment is simply egregious. While some argue no provider is required to fill up to these maximum ratios, the pressure to do so is likely to be huge.

It’s true that there is no “magic” ratio, but as a general rule of thumb, fewer children per caregiver is better. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children & Families , “Many research studies have shown that low child-to-provider ratios and small group sizes have a positive impact on the overall quality of early and school-age care and education programs, and the experiences children have in those programs.” A 2017 by ChildTrends researcher Brenda Miranda further explained:

“Research shows that smaller child-to-staff ratios have been associated with . Moreover, when early childhood caregivers are responsible for more children than they can manage, it . Indeed, the presence of a second caregiver has been associated with a lower likelihood of child abuse in the child care settings

In addition to ensuring that young children are cared for in healthy and safe environments, children who are cared for in ECE settings with lower child-to-staff ratios receive , and engage in with their caregivers. Such interactions and lay the foundation for children’s ability to build healthy relationships in the future. Lower child-to-staff ratios and smaller group sizes have also been associated with children’s positive development, including higher , and .”

Directionally, too, raising ratios is a policy decision akin to Michael Scott . It suggests that the cause of the child care crisis is merely regulatory, not a persistent refusal to put in enough public funding to with adequately-compensated staff. It is the worst kind of political sleight-of-hand: making things worse in order to look like you’re doing something.

Parents should know that lawmakers have the opportunity to create real solutions for affordable, accessible, quality child care via permanent public money. Parents should also know that lawmakers trying to raise ratios are abdicating their responsibility for actual positive change in favor of a gimmick providers don’t want and which is liable to harm children.

Shame on the pigeons.

The latest evidence comes from the Nordic nations. Denmark, now with five weeks of data under its belt, as a result of reopening those settings for young children. Finland, two weeks into where a spike would have become visible, . Norway’s Prime Minister Enra Solberg even last week, “’Was it necessary to close schools? Maybe not. But at the same time, I think it was the right thing to do at the time.”

And indeed, it was. Back in March, shutting down schools and most child care programs was not only a wise precaution, to keep them open would have been reckless bordering on malpractice. We didn’t yet know anything about COVID-19 and kids.

Now we do. While the scientific community is , there is strongly suggestive evidence that children rarely get COVID-19, and, when they do, rarely transmit it to others.

As the World Health Organization’s chief scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan, : “Children are less capable of spreading it even if they get the infection, and certainly are at very low risk of getting ill from the disease,” adding that, “there have not been many cases described of children transmitting it to others, particularly within school settings.” (The strange inflammatory syndrome that has been making headlines, while scary-sounding, a truly tiny percentage of children).

Confirming Swaminathan’s remark, an Australian study, one of the first to focus specifically on transmission within school settings, “looked at 18 infected teachers and students in 15 schools and found that despite them coming into contact with 863 people at the schools, only two had been infected.”

The good news only continues from there. Twenty-two European Union member states have now re-opened child cares and schools in some capacity, as a result. In fact, no nation in the entire world reports child cares or elementary schools as significant sources of transmission. (The elementary school component is particularly relevant for early learning because of how many school-based pre-K and Head Start programs are currently shut down as the result of broader school closures).

As someone who works daily partnering with the early care & education community, I realize this is not necessarily a popular opinion. Parents are understandably scared for the safety of their children and for what happens if their children bring COVID-19 home. Providers — most of whom are badly underpaid and may have little access to PPE or cleaning supplies — understandably have no interest in being guinea pigs. Staff who have underlying medical conditions are understandably terrified for their own health. But we cannot keep pretending the stack of encouraging research and empirical evidence about young children isn’t growing higher and higher.

The stakes, too, are high. COVID-19 restrictions are pushing many child care programs into insolvency, and it is not just providers who are suffering. from the University of Oregon reveals that “Parents and other caregivers who have lost childcare reported significantly higher rates of stress and anxiety, compared to those who have been able to continue using the same form of childcare.”

Further, “caregivers who have lost childcare report that their children are significantly more fearful and fussy than those who have not lost childcare.” Yet despite this, “over 70% said that they were worried or uncomfortable about returning to the prior arrangement,” with fully one-third concerned that external child care is “not safe.” This concern, as we can now see, is likely overblown.

A common objection is that the U.S. is simply not comparable to other nations. Our testing and tracing regime is worse, our citizens less likely to abide by commonsense precautions like masking, our health care system struggling. Yet while apples-to-apples comparisons are difficult, each passing week and each new country that reports exactly the same result starts to knock down these alternative explanations. This is no longer a small sample size, no longer an ultra-early data point.

We actually have evidence right here in the U.S., since most states kept at least some of their child care centers open to serve the children of essential personnel, even in COVID-19 hotspots like New Jersey. As , “We called [New Jersey’s] Department of Health to see if COVID-19 had been spreading within the child care centers that had opened April 1 to serve children of essential workers. There have been no reports of outbreaks of two or more cases, an official said.”

The variable, quite simply, seems to be children.

There are cogent scientific explanations for why young children are such poor COVID-19 transmitters. Though nothing has been conclusively proven, children’s relative shield from some combination of immature ACE2 receptors that the virus uses to bind onto, and a better-calibrated immune system already primed to fight COVID-19 because of exposure to other common childhood viruses.

University of North Carolina epidemiologist Daniel T. Halperin in a Washington Post op-ed that even when children do contract the virus: “Many children with covid-19 are asymptomatic; in the absence of coughing and sneezing, they emit fewer infectious droplets. Remarkably, contact tracing studies in China, Iceland, Britain and the Netherlands failed to locate a single case of child-to-adult infection out of thousands of transmission events analyzed.”

At this point, it takes significantly more effort to look at the evidence board and conclude that child cares and elementary schools should remain empty, rather than conclude the U.S. should be preparing to safely return its young children en masse. (Note that by the same token, this evidence base does not yet exist at the same level for teenagers, so little can be concluded about middle and high schools).

Of course, re-opening child cares and elementary schools — even with precautions — is not zero risk. Children are far less susceptible to the virus, but hardly invulnerable. France 70 cases of COVID-19 among their 1.4 million children who returned to child cares and primary schools. In Texas, in 60 of its 11,000 open licensed child cares. Still, one way of thinking about these numbers is that more than 99 percent of settings have operated with no cases. Those ratios are pretty darn good.

Precautions certainly must be taken. None of these nations are going pell-mell back to the pre-COVID days. All are taking to lower the risk as much as possible. Moreover, there is no humane way to argue that medically fragile staff should be dragooned back in front of classrooms. Nor does the emerging reality of young children’s special status change the need to and fully fund providers and schools to implement risk mitigation plans.

But the emerging reality does beg certain questions. If young children barely transmit the virus, then what is the logic behind stringent group size restrictions, much less refusing to open at all? Why the concern that young children will get in each other’s faces while playing or doing a group project? There is a real chance that some overzealous if well-intentioned measures cross the threshold into doing more harm than good.

As one Vermont in describing the steps her reopening program has had to take, “This is going to be an emotional nightmare. Curriculum as we knew it, for a little while, is going to be by the wayside.”

It does not have to be so awful. Science tells us that it is a false binary to balance turning these facilities into locked-down wards against the health of staff or the community. The most important precautions should be for adults so that they are largely isolated from one another. Keeping groups of children together rather than rotating teachers, staggered drop-off and pick-up times, physically spreading out adult-led groups, vigilant sanitation, ensuring the ability to rapidly test-and-trace when rare cases do emerge: these are all examples of wholly reasonable and necessary steps.

So it is time for the U.S. to catch up with the rest of the world, acknowledge that young children are at very low risk for catching or spreading COVID-19, and act accordingly. Particularly since there is a very from keeping children away from their early care and education settings, this new understanding should drive all manner of policy and communication decisions.

As early childhood expert Erika Christakis in The Atlantic, “The effects of remote learning are the worst for young children, whose brains grow rapidly from in-person relationships and active, hands-on exploration. Their boisterous physical play strengthens not only gross and fine motor skills but also interpersonal relationships, problem-solving, visual-spatial thinking, confidence building and stamina. Babies and toddlers are still learning to read social-emotional cues and need to see and feel unobstructed faces. The known adverse effects of screen time on the developing brain are clearly more damaging to young children, whose emerging language and literacy skills depend on plentiful, meaningful conversations with teachers whose mouths are unobstructed by masks.” (Or who have .)

We must therefore shake off the paralysis of fear, embrace the evidence and begin moving forward in a way that simultaneously honors the needs of children, early childhood practitioners and parents. For a disease whose hallmark is respiratory distress, the state of our young children is one place we can start breathing easier.