Aaliyah Taylor, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, is used to having more responsibilities than a typical teenager. She helped her dad feed and tend to her grandmother until she died in 2023, tasks that frequently stressed her out as she was trying to manage her own health issues, like her scoliosis.

“I felt like every 5 seconds I was called for something, even though I just sat back down,” she said.

Mariyah Carson, Taylor’s best friend and a 15-year-old freshman, managed similar family duties as her uncle struggled with diabetes-related immobility and blindness until his death a few years ago. She remembers planning with her siblings how they would approach his care.

“We’d take turns. Like, if you’re doing homework, it’s my turn, and I go down there and watch him,” Carson said. She and Taylor said they continue to help out with other loved ones.

On a recent afternoon inside a Charles Drew High School auditorium, the two sat next to each other at a table topped with plastic bags, fragrant oils, and sugar pouches. The girls quipped and giggled over the instrumental jazz background music while they made body scrub bags, kits intended to help them relax at home.

Carson and Taylor are students at the school in Riverdale, just south of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The body scrub station was the opening activity for this school year’s final session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, a new Atlanta-area initiative to support high-schoolers responsible for taking care of adults or children.

While most of the in the United States are adults, experts estimate that there are who provide this type of work every year. Research on is limited, but that young caregivers struggle to care for themselves and are at higher risk of anxiety and depression, chronic diseases, and dropping out of school.

These risks are what Young, Gifted and Caregiving aims to address. Once a week throughout February and March, Michelle Bolden, a registered nurse and the founder of the Atlanta caregiver support nonprofit , traveled to Charles Drew to lead lessons for 10 students.

She and an array of guest speakers — like attorneys, nurse practitioners, and mental health specialists — have tried to teach the students how to manage caregiving responsibilities while maintaining their own well-being and ambitions.

It’s the first time Bolden, who recently finished a Chamberlain University doctoral nursing program, has hosted in-person classes for high-school caregivers.

“We couldn’t create that community without them being in-person,” Bolden said.

Erin Kent, a caregiver research associate professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, said that while there’s strong evidence that , there are few, if any, analyses that have examined the best ways to aid high-schoolers with these responsibilities.

But she said evaluating new programs, like the Charles Drew program, is how researchers like herself can determine what could help young people in that position. And school-based initiatives could be more effective at finding teenage caregivers than programs in other settings.

“School is probably going to be the place that reaches more youths,” she said.

School supports teens with caregiving duties at home

Tangela Benjamin had only been Charles Drew’s principal for a few months when she was called to address a student meltdown in October 2023. The sleep-deprived girl complained about how the school’s rules conflicted with family duties.

“She said, ‘A lot of parents don’t parent, and responsibilities that should be on adults are on teenage kids,’” Benjamin said. “And she was like, ‘I happen to be one of these kids with all of these responsibilities.’”

The principal knew there were plenty of students in Riverdale, where the is $16,000 below , who face hardships at home even without tending to their loved ones’ needs. Learning that some faced an extra set of duties, Benjamin said she felt obligated to find a way to extend the school’s support.

“It was very much a great eye opener, and it quickened my spirit a bit,” she said.

It’s a big reason why a year later, when she met Bolden and heard about her work, she jumped at an opportunity to bring a program tailored for high-school caregivers to Charles Drew. Last fall, the Charles Drew staff put together an email survey to find students who have been informal family caregivers. The administrators identified 30 students, and they invited 10 to join the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program.

Bolden wanted to help all 30, but she said it would be difficult to create deep connections with that many students.

“Once it gets too large, they’re not going to talk,” she said.

Those 10 students, including Taylor and Carson, were invited to attend four weekly classes throughout the winter to learn about how to balance their family responsibilities and their own well-being. Among the skills facilitators taught in each session were basic CPR techniques, chronic disease management, and supportive strategies.

The Young, Gifted and Caregiving program also hosted a , a fundraiser for the school and for a program to give from their family duties. Bolden said one of the caregiver students on the Charles Drew cross-country team won the race.

At the start of the high school program, Bolden wasn’t sure how long it would take the students to feel comfortable sharing about home lives and experiences with caregiving. But she said it was clear from the first session that they were open to it.

“I thought it would go really slow,” she said. “But they just picked up and really engaged right away.”

Program helps teens balance caregiving with self-care

At the final session this school year, Bolden invited two guest speakers to share how the students could make plans to prioritize their own health needs while tending to their family members.

It’s a balance some of the Charles Drew caregivers are still trying to figure out. While working at a local farmers market over the summer, Zahion Mikell, a 16-year-old sophomore who helps care for his siblings and great grandmother, remembers scampering from one task to the next when another employee asked to check his blood pressure.

“I was just ripping and running, ripping and running,” said Mikell, who also serves as a .

The screening showed that he was at risk of hypertension, and the other employees told him to take care of his health.

Mikell said he tried to do that. But at the first student session of the Young, Gifted and Caregiving program, when Bolden and the other facilitators were teaching the students how to use a blood pressure pump cuff with their family members, they used Mikell’s arm in a demonstration. Once again, his numbers concerned the adults around him.

Since then, Bolden and the Call for Caring workers have made sure to check Mikell’s blood pressure at their weekly meetings. While reading his levels at that final session, Bolden told him he had moved from the “red zone” to the “yellow zone.”

“So that’s good,” Mikell said.

“But for you that’s high,” Bolden responded. “No, not good.”

“I like yellow though,” Mikell replied as the adults around him laughed.

Some of the students expressed the mental and emotional toll that caregiving has taken on their well-being. Tiandra Hodge, another 16-year-old sophomore, has only lived in the metro Atlanta area over the summer. She’s from the British Virgin Islands, but she left her parents and life in the Caribbean to finish her education in the United States last summer.

Hodge lives with her sister and helps feed and bathe her sister’s children, all under age 6. When the stress of adjusting to a new country, a new high school, and a new set of family responsibilities becomes overwhelming, Hodge said she can forget to eat.

She said she has few options to vent about her problems with anyone in-person.

“It’s very difficult,” she said.

That’s one of the reasons she said she’s found the Young, Gifted and Caregiving class helpful. At the end of that fourth session, in response to Bolden asking the student caregivers to share one thing that stood out about the class, Hodge focused on the shared community the program had created.

“I don’t have nobody to talk to about this,” Hodge told everyone in the auditorium.

Caregivers get continued support as they dream big about future

Bolden is excited for Young, Gifted and Caregiving’s future. She plans to lead another session at Charles Drew next school year, hoping to engage and support the other caregiver students who couldn’t fit in the first year.

She also hopes to recreate the program in at least two other Georgia schools this year. Bolden wants to host a series at one of Atlanta’s high schools and a middle school in Sandy Springs.

With these plans of expansion, she said she wants to make clear to this year’s Charles Drew students that support for them won’t wither away. Throughout the final session, Bolden brought up multiple times that her nonprofit would continue to engage with the inaugural class members and help with any challenges they might continue to experience.

She even suggested that they could be student ambassadors for the next Charles Drew caregivers in the program.

“These are adults you can trust and still be able to network,” Bolden told the students, gesturing at the Call for Caring workers and the Charles Drew staff who had joined the session. “I don’t want you to think that because you’re here in this situation, it’s not going to get better.”

Kent, the University of North Carolina professor, said one long-term benefit she’d expect from a program like Bolden’s is that the students now know that they are caregivers. With that knowledge, she said, the teenagers can start to seek out help for any issues that may come up.

Just before getting some cake to celebrate the class’s completion, Taylor, the 16-year-old who cared for her grandmother, talked about her future aspirations. She envisions moving to Houston and working as a chef or an entrepreneur.

But if she’s put in a position where she has to care for adults again, like her parents, Taylor said she feels more prepared to meet that task. She’s a little nervous about forgetting the lessons of the past month, but she now knows there are resources for people in her position.

“I would be more experienced to help my mom and my dad once they get a little bit older.”

Allen Siegler is a reporter covering public health in Atlanta for Healthbeat. Contact Allen at asiegler@healthbeat.org.

Healthbeat is a nonprofit newsroom covering public health published by , which also publishes Chalkbeat. Sign up for Healthbeat’s newsletters .

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Q: Why hasn’t the U.S. built systems that support kids?

Alexander: It’s not that we don’t know what to do — and it’s not that we don’t have lots of organizations and people trying to make things better. But we don’t seem to be able to scale anything or change in a big way. If it were easy, somebody would’ve figured it out already. 

But other countries have figured it out.

Alexander: In almost every industrialized country in the world, the kids are doing better than they are in the U.S. And if you look at any one of those countries and how they take care of their kids, you see a different system, but the one thing that struck me is that the health and well-being of kids sat differently culturally in the minds of people there than it does here. 

In other countries I visited, in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, there was a sense of responsibility as a society to make sure kids did okay. Whereas in the United States, we see it as the family’s responsibility.

Is racism the big difference there?

Volmert: Racist mindsets do contribute to a sense of undeserving-ness. We talk about pathologizing the Black culture mindset, which leads to this assumption that there is some sort of dysfunctional culture or bad values. Which then makes it not a collective responsibility. The thing that’s required to fix that problem is those communities need to improve their own culture. And so that provides a justification for not being concerned about kids outside “our” own sphere of orbit, and particularly for Black and other children and families of color who obviously are dealing with inequities that are a result of structural problems and structural racism. 

We’re basically saying, “Hey, there’s nothing we can do about that collectively.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

(Spotlight for Poverty and Opportunity)

And we as a country don’t like government very much.

Alexander: And we especially don’t like government interfering with family life. And it doesn’t matter how liberal or conservative you are. If you’re liberal, you tend to be willing to have government help out families that are in trouble — “not ‘my family,’ but those other families that are in trouble.” And in other parts of the world, they look to government as sort of the bedrock of the way we take care of families. It’s a core function of government, similar to how Americans look at the military.

Volmert: The question comes down to, how do we talk about government in ways that enable people to recognize the critical role that government can and should play in supporting children and families?

What was the research process like?

Volmert: We developed a set of frames explicitly and frontally reframe the role of government vis-à-vis families. We experimented with different frames. For example, “Government is a critical partner for families.” “Government is one of the pillars of children’s well-being alongside families and communities.” “Government is us.” And so on.

How were those frames received?

Volmert: They not only were ineffective; they actually backfired in various places. 

So what did work?

Volmert: If you talk explicitly and straightforwardly about the public policies and programs that are needed, things that government can do that are essential to provide collective care for families and children, people are very open to it and open to that conversation. So instead of attempting, “Let’s have a big conversation about government’s role,” you just talk about the specific things that government can and should do.

People will buy into something called “Collective Caregiving” more than they will government-sponsored caregiving.

Volmert: For sure. Now, we didn’t test “government-sponsored caregiving,” but I can tell you that would not work. “Collective Caregiving” gives people a sense that they are part of it. 

They sometimes struggle to think about themselves as part of government. So it’s not that you’re hiding the ball. It’s just that you’re talking about government policies and programs as a set of actions for providing care as a society.

Alexander: People like the programs that government provides. They just don’t like the government because they think of it as “those people that we don’t like doing things that we don’t trust.” The joke was, the more excited I got about a way of talking about government, the worse it did. 

It’s the G word.

Volmert: You can say it, but don’t lead with it. 

In your survey of field communications, you reviewed white papers and messaging and nonprofit communications of all kinds. What did you find about their messaging?

Alexander: There are some messages that advocates are using that actually work, counter to what we think they’re doing — especially messages around vulnerability. If we want to bring more people into the tent and more people to have a common concern about kids, and really create an upswell of interest in supporting kids and families, we have to try some different things. 

Volmert: It’s not that the field isn’t doing some good things. We saw trends that were promising but that need a nudge to be fully effective. There has been a tendency to talk more explicitly about racial equity, and while taking that is important, the way that the field was doing it, it tended to be by dropping in the phrase ‘racial equity.’ 

I often try to use that word in my writing, but it’s hard when you have to define it, because then it’s three paragraphs later and you’ve lost the thread. What do you recommend?

Volmert: In order to provide collective care, we have to make sure that we are doing it for all kids, not just our own kids. And we are explicitly talking about race partly by highlighting the ways in which historically and currently our society doesn’t provide care evenly across groups, that we don’t extend the same kind of collective care to Black children, other children of color, that we do to white children. 

Alexander: That has a really strong positive effect on the way people think, especially Republicans. Instead of using that term equity, saying, “We do not provide care to all kids in the same way” does the same thing, but it gets people over a hump. 

It was mind-boggling to me the first time the Frameworks team showed me this stuff. You can get people to think differently by just talking about equity in a different way. 

And how about “Citizen Caregiver”? How did that arise in the conversation?

Volmert: Care is the central thing that people think kids need. So is it possible to stretch that idea so that when people think about care, they’re not just thinking about interpersonal caregiving; they’re thinking more broadly about the range of actions that we can take as a society, including public policies? 

We played around with that idea and found that it was somewhat productive, and then we asked, “How do I have a role in this collective thing?” It’s not something that’s happening over there or something that someone else is doing. It’s something that people have a personal stake in and a personal responsibility for.

Which other issues might this framing strategy apply to?

Alexander: Gun violence, for one. Don’t start talking about “the epidemic of gun violence.” Start by saying, “One of the most important ways we can care for our children is to make sure that their schools are safe from gun violence.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Volmert: With environmental issues, if you talk about healthy air and water, people immediately get, “Wait a minute, yes, of course that affects kids’ well-being. And there’s actually nothing that I can do individually or that families can do to solve that problem on their own. There’s nothing I can do as a parent to make sure that my kids are breathing healthy air, because this is something outside of any individual’s control.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

And so it becomes a way to prevent people from defaulting back to this idea that, “Oh, it’s just the family’s job. This must be parents’ responsibility.” Instead they think: “Okay, wait a minute. I wouldn’t usually think of this as a kid’s issue, but it requires collective action in order to make sure that all kids have what they need to do well.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Maintaining a holistic view of care avoids characterizing any one type as more or less worthy of public investment so we can forgo arguments about whether seniors or young children are more deserving; the care sector is stronger united than divided.

I spoke to Julie Kashen (senior fellow and director for women’s economic justice at ), Anna Shireen Wadia (executive director of ) and Robert Espinoza (CEO of ) to learn more about other parts of the care sector and what child care advocates should understand.

These conversations took place before Vice President Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee for President and before she named Minnesota governor Tim Walz as her running mate, but Kashen, Wadia and Espinoza’s insights couldn’t be more relevant at this moment. As Jonathan Cohn has , Harris’s personal and political experience indicates firm commitments to child care, paid leave and related issues. Walz has presided over historic public investments in care.

As Kashen observes, the care workforce is mostly female and disproportionately women of color. Low pay and few benefits and protections are the norm. “It’s a challenging sector,” she admits, “but at the same time, many people doing this work really love the work of care and find it’s incredibly rewarding.”

Wadia says care is distinct from other forms of work because of “the intense and intimate relationship between consumers of care and the workers they are entrusting to care for their loved ones.” Don’t forget that while these are economic issues, they aren’t just economic.

Compensation: The Bottom Line

Care work makes all other work possible. Unless this challenging, skilled labor pays a living wage, caregivers will continue to defect to retail and customer service. Wadia underscores the irony: “In some ways, this is the most important work that can be done in our society, and yet it is among the worst compensated work.”

Kashen offers a grim if undeniable historical perspective. “Caregiving has long been undervalued,” she maintains. “You can look back to the origins of chattel slavery that forced Black women to nurse and care for the children of white landowners, to the detriment of their own children.” Women of every race and ethnic background have traditionally been the default caregivers for children, disabled loved ones and aging relatives. This free domestic labor has tended to make care undervalued and invisible — cultural norms that need to be challenged forcefully if things are going to change.

“The better you’re able to compensate caregivers,” Kashen states, “the more likely they’re not going to be economically insecure and stressed, so they can be more present with the people they’re caring for.”

While the paycheck is paramount, other factors count, such as respect, predictable hours and a pathway for advancement. Without a clear career ladder, Wadia says, “Moving up generally means moving out.” Early educators apply for jobs in K-12 education, and those caring for seniors seek qualification for nursing and other health care professions. Experts are coming up with ways for these providers to gain relevant skills and credentials that retain them in the sector if that’s where their passion lies.

Espinoza foresees technology altering the economics of care, making the job more efficient and supporting workers—without replacing them. He cautions, “We’ll also need strong policies to ensure tech innovators and businesses are drawing on workers’ expertise to inform this technology and safeguards to prevent unnecessary worker displacement.” Family supports, including child care for care workers as well as public transportation and a more equitable system of benefits, would also make the sector more sustainable.

Advocacy: Caring Out Loud

around the time her book, Parent Nation, came out, surgeon and advocate Dana Suskind described the gains for U.S. seniors made possible by the AARP. The organization pushed for the Older Americans Act of 1965, and since then has secured prescription-drug benefits and protection of Social Security, among other measures. Calling for a “National Association of Parents and Caregivers,” she declares, “We have the economic case, and the general consensus, that parents need more support. What we lack is political clout. Older Americans galvanized because there was finally someone looking out for them, not the other way around. Parents need a similar revolution.”

Some of this work is already taking place, though not on anything like AARP scale. ( also packs a wallop.) Wadia sees potential in advocating for significant public investment. “It’s the only way that we are going to have quality, affordable and accessible care, whether for children or older people or people with disabilities and decent jobs for care workers,” she says.

Kashen similarly recognizes the power of workers and advocates joining forces across the care continuum and alongside the people whose jobs are only possible thanks to the care sector: “Bringing together the consumers of care with the providers of care,” she says, “you have a much stronger conversation, especially with , which is now at the center of the Care Can’t Wait movement. We’re all part of the same ecosystem, and we all need the same things.” , the domestic employers network, is another piece of the advocacy puzzle, she says.

“Care is such a powerful mobilizing and unifying set of issues,” Wadia explains, “because people experience care crises and care responsibilities across income and across race. It has become a unifying issue.”

Organizing: Union-Strong Care

One key difference between child care and elder care can be found in the power of unions. Nursing home workers participate in unions — chiefly, and — at greater rates than their counterparts in child care centers, family care and other settings. Membership, as they say, has its privileges, including job security and health benefits.

Although child care workers are a long way from catching up, they are beginning to catch on () — and no wonder. As the , “High unionization levels are associated with positive outcomes across multiple indicators of economic, personal and democratic well-being.”

For Kashen, the care sector as a whole advances with policies supportive of organizing and bargaining, especially where providers have government grants or contracts, as opposed to subsidies that go to individual families.

Thanks to the efforts of SEIU and the , those who care for seniors and disabled people in their homes have gained more traction with organizing. The home, Wadia notes, is a very different workplace setting. “It leads to a lot of challenges for organizing because people are atomized. Employers of home care workers will say, ‘You feel like family to me’—which is often very positive, but it also means that the consumers or the employers don’t necessarily see these as real jobs or see themselves as employers.”

Immigration: Getting the Care Job Done

, immigrants constitute at least 27% of workers in “direct care” — which covers working with seniors and people with disabilities — while a found that 18% of early child care workers were born outside the U.S. (compared to ). The percentages may be even greater, Espinoza notes, referring to undocumented home care and child workers in the so-called gray market, but clearly, immigrants make up a significant part of the care workforce, and solutions to chronic problems aren’t viable unless they make sense for this subsection of the labor market.

Espinoza, who formerly served as executive vice president of policy at PHI, says that as the son of a Mexican immigrant, he has a personal interest in “imagining sound and humane policies that support immigrants and support our country’s economy.” He acknowledges that more work needs to be done to help a considerable portion of the American public see the value in federal and state policies that make it easier for even more immigrants to participate in the care sector. ” might be a solution worth exploring.

In addition to immigrants, Espinoza says older workers and Generation Z men might be engaged to address shortages.

The pandemic made caregivers more visible—their value to families and the gaps and inequities that have persisted for decades. Espinoza points to labor shortages and other trends across the U.S. labor landscape that are buffeting the care sector. “A large percentage of workers are retiring and reducing their hours, and have done so even more since the end of the pandemic,” he says. Looking at new pipelines of people to take these jobs should be a priority.

The big takeaway from these three experts? A thriving, fair economy depends on a robust, equitable care sector — across lifespans and around the country.

More than 250 Kentucky child care providers responsible for 150,000 children across the state sent lawmakers a letter Tuesday pleading for more support, saying in the state budget “is not enough” as their industry is “.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

The letter asks lawmakers to pass a supplemental lifeline funding bill in the final days of the 2024 legislative session Friday and Monday.

Such support, the providers said, should “at a minimum:” 

Provide routine, direct sustainability payments to child care providers to help keep doors open, stem tuition hikes and prevent wage cuts. Maintain Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) eligibility at 85% of state median income to prevent thousands of parents from losing access to this aid, which could result in many dropping out of the workforce and withdrawing kids from child care. The current version of the budget hold eligibility at. Provide enrollment-based CCAP reimbursements to providers. 

“Without these crucial supports, there is no chance of survival for many of our child care centers and home-based care providers,” the letter states. “Families will be left with even fewer options that are more expensive, quality will suffer, and many will decide it is better to leave the workforce.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Kentucky’s child care industry — which some would like to — is about to lose the federal COVID-19 dollars that helped stabilize the industry during the last few years. This leaves many centers to cut pay for their workers, raise tuition for parents, cut services and even close,

The budget that the legislature passed  includes $42 million in new spending on child care in 2025 and $50 million in 2026. That includes $1.3 million a year to cover the cost of background checks for potential employees and  $1.5 million a year to add a six-month adjustment period for families who are no longer eligible for CCAP.

The Kentucky Center for Economic Policy previously estimated that $300 million is needed to replace the federal aid that’s ending. The state Department for Community Based Services says the need is closer to $100 million.

In its  of the legislature’s budget, the center says: “While all of the policies the budget funds are necessary to support   and the  ,   in light of the coming fiscal cliff, particularly with the loss of quarterly stipends to child care providers previously funded with federal dollars.”

The largest legislative proposal for child care this year, . Its sponsor cited its $300 million price tag as the main reason behind the demise. 

Lawmakers return to Frankfort on Friday and Monday for the last two days of the 2024 session, during which they could pass additional legislation. But they must send Gov. Andy Beshear veto-proof bills at that point, since they will no longer have the ability to override him. 

“An investment in child care is an investment in the commonwealth’s present and future,” the child care letter states. “The Kentucky General Assembly should step up and make that investment now, before you gavel out on April 15. We cannot hold on until the next budget.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

Letter to lawmakers from child care providers

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

Long awaited financial help will be coming to “” Kentuckians who are raising a minor relative such as a grandchild or niece, thanks to a bill that received unanimous approval in the House Friday.

now heads to Gov. Andy Beshear’s desk for a signature or veto. It passed .

, president of the , hailed the bill’s passage as a “game changer for a lot of families in the future.”

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The bill allows kinship caregivers to change their placement status from temporary custody to a child-specific foster home, a change that will come with financial assistance, as the .

It will also let children being removed from homes list their potential preferred caregivers, allowing them more say in their placements.

Rep. Samara Heavrin, R-Leitchfield, brought the Senate bill to the House floor. The bill, she said, is all about giving kinship care families in Kentucky more flexibility.

“This flexibility will close the services, supports and resource gap that is currently plaguing many of the families,” she said.

, who has been raising two grandchildren for nearly a decade, is a longtime champion of kinship families and renewed her push for help from the legislature this year. She told the Lantern on Friday that the bill’s passage was “hugely emotional.” She said she cried in the House gallery  as the bill was approved.

The fact that both chambers passed the measure unanimously “says very clearly this needed to happen,” she said. “And it’s the right thing to do. I mean, there’s just absolutely no doubt anywhere.”

Terry Brooks, executive director of Kentucky Youth Advocates, said  final passage of HB 151 means “thousands of Kentucky’s kinship and fictive kin families flat out won today.”

“Just as these caregivers step up at a moment’s notice to provide a safe space for their young loved ones to grow and heal, our General Assembly has stepped up once again to prioritize the well-being of these children who have experienced abuse or neglect,” Brooks said.

Still, work remains, Hatfield said. She’s closely watching a that, if passed, would establish a . Members would study kinship in Kentucky and submit findings by Dec. 1, which Hatfield said could provide needed data revealing needs facing kinship caregivers.

“I’m hoping that the study will clearly identify those things, educate the legislators as well, educate the public, and then we can start working on the rest of the supports that are needed for these families that are kind of caught in a gap that don’t have anything,” she said. “I have high hopes for that.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kentucky Lantern maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jamie Lucke for questions: info@kentuckylantern.com. Follow Kentucky Lantern on and .

As with many innovations, this is less about a brand new idea and more about scaling. Some child care programs have for decades offered discounts to employees as an incentive. What’s happened in the past year is that two institutions — the state of Kentucky and the United States military — have taken the idea universal within their jurisdictions.

In Kentucky, as NPR recently , “The state made all child care employees eligible for free child care, regardless of household income.” This was accomplished by a policy change making child care educators who work more than 20 hours a week at a licensed program categorically eligible for the state’s child care assistance program (which is otherwise means-tested and has a sliding scale of parent co-pays). Similarly, the Secretary of Defense to offer at least a 50% discount to child care educators. The Air Force went further, putting into place a “first child free” policy for child care staff.[1]

The effects have been impressive. While there are always multiple influences in a labor market, these incentives appear to be helping recruit and retain staff at a time when child care employment nationwide at around 40,000 educators below pre-pandemic levels. On a recent panel, Alex Wagner, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, “what I’m really proud of is from June of 2022 to now August of 2023, [Air Force Child Development Center] staffing has gone from 65% to … 80%.” One Kentucky child care center owner told NPR, “That is a beautiful incentive. Any of my teachers who have children — they can work for me, and their children are paid for by the state.”

But Elliot, you may be saying, aren’t you a crusader , and isn’t this technically an employer-sponsored child care benefit? Sort of. This is a unique and narrow use case.[2] Directly improving staffing levels of child care programs has widespread benefits. It allows programs to keep more of their classrooms open and serve more families. A useful by the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment (CSCCE) at the University of California, Berkeley concludes that “For each early educator who benefits from a child care subsidy in Kentucky, as many as 13 other children under age six benefit from stable enrollment in her classroom or group.”

Stable educators are also a critical element of quality; young children don’t generally do well with . And, importantly, this innovation relies on public dollars rather than the largesse of corporations.

Now, here come the caveats. This is not, as the NPR headline suggests, a way to “fix” child care staffing shortages. The only sustainable fix is to have enough public money in the system to offer educators family-sustaining salaries and comprehensive benefits. Subsidizing educators’ own child care doesn’t put new money into the system. Some providers may actually take a modest financial hit: with few exceptions, states reimburse providers for each child enrolled in the subsidy program at a than the true cost of care, or even what providers can charge ‘full-pay’ parents.[3]

Moreover, the benefit is limited in scope: this may be obvious, but it only helps educators who have young kids. As , about one-quarter of child care employees nationwide had a child under the age of five. That’s a substantial minority — using most recent data, the CSCCE brief suggests more than 200,000 child care employees could potentially benefit — but still a minority.

There’s also a temporal question. An educator who takes a lower-paying job with a child care program as opposed to a higher-paying one with Amazon or Target because their toddler gets free care–effectively a $10,000 raise plus the ability to be near their child–will face a crossroads within a few years. What happens when the child reaches school-age (or eligibility for free pre-K, if their state or locality offers it) and the financial calculus changes?

So long as the incentive is kept within its proper context and not seen as a replacement for permanent public funding, however, it is well worth pursuing. It can legitimately put a finger in the dam of staffing challenges. It is good for kids, and good for the health of child care programs who will experience less turnover. Child care educators should never have to face the painful irony of leaving their jobs upon having a child…due only to the lack of affordable child care.

I was discussing this topic with a colleague, and she wisely pointed out that unlike how pushing corporate child care benefits cements child care as an individualized and private service, making child care free for staff actually makes a positive philosophical contribution. It is a tacit acknowledgment — coming from ruby-red Kentucky and the U.S. military, no less! — that for at least for a certain segment of the population, society has a compelling interest in providing free child care regardless of an individual’s income. The more precedents that normalize the idea of a strong, choice-based child care system with public backing benefitting all of society, the better off we’ll be. I hope other states take note.

I often say that people too often look for some outside-the-box solution to child care, when the real problem is we’ve never been willing to build a box at all. Offering free child care for child care educators isn’t a solution, but perhaps it’s a solid strip of duct tape.

[1] Subsequent children are discounted 25%.

[2] For what it’s worth, I’d also argue that the armed services are a unique employer; the Department of Defense also operates 180 publicly-funded K-12 schools!

[3] That financial hit may be offset by having enough staff to keep classrooms open — it’s a much bigger problem to be majorly below capacity because of staffing shortages! — but the point is that this incentive does not make programs more financially sustainable in the broader sense.

On the one hand, I’m just living another round of the fall parenting ritual—the seasonal cold that one of my three kids brought home. 

But on the other hand, that viral downbeat sure hits differently when—like me—you’re one of . After six months of COVID-induced asthma, which was actually lung scarring, which — shucks — is perhaps a pulmonary embolism, which turned out to possibly be heart damage, but instead might be or the curse of the pharaohs or goodness knows what. We’re all just guessing now. 

Anyway boyo, lemme tell you, it doesn’t feel like a standard-issue head cold. 

I suppose, as I lay here, flattened by these twin maladies, at least I can take some succor from the fact that Or, erm, that’s how it seems, anyway. Most of you out there — most of us, I suppose — are with avoiding the virus. Masks are optional — and scarce — pretty much everywhere now, what few we had are evaporating in the face of widespread apathy, and the “your kid was exposed to COVID in school notifications” are down to just one every few weeks. Hang on, gotta reset that particular counter, my phone just rang with a new one. 

Sigh. 

This coming will likely fall somewhere between those two hands—pre-2020 normalcy and the past 2.5 years of crisis. On the normalcy side of the ledger: schools are open everywhere, and essentially all COVID mitigation measures have been driven from campuses. Insofar as we’re talking about the pandemic and schools, we’re relitigating school closure from 2020. have gotten the latest COVID booster vaccine. Why bother? The virus is last year’s story, and avoiding it feels inconvenient. 

And yet, have been above a quarter million since April, with a summer wave cresting at nearly one million new weekly cases. Note, of course, that waning public attentiveness to the pandemic has meant that we’re only administering around 15% as many weekly COVID tests as we ran at our mid-January 2022 peak. In other words, the actual case counts are assuredly much higher. 

Meanwhile, long COVID appears more and serious than we’d like to imagine. Hospitals are being by an unprecedented of respiratory infections. suggest that the U.S. is poised for yet another frustrating, deadly COVID winter. 

Many in education have avoided thinking about the potential need for reinvigorated mitigations — widespread masking, serious quarantining rules and so forth — by narrowing the field of COVID consequences. As I wrote in October 2021, when we were about six weeks into our family’s first COVID case, “When humans interpret the world, when we try to make sense of the situations before us, we’re always in danger of misunderstanding them in self-serving ways. … The key to reasoning this way — interpreting the facts so that they almost always confirm what you’d rather do anyhow — is carefully framing the terms of debate up front.”

And so now, as we muddle into another fall with lower-than-hoped vaccine and booster uptake and already overwhelmed pediatric hospital wards, too many in education focus on narrow truths like these: 1) Most kids don’t appear to get particularly ill from the virus; and 2) Virtual school will never be as effective as in-person instruction. Those are facts, and they flatter these folks’ prior convictions about what must be done next — schools must remain open, making scant-to-zero effort to reduce infections. Schools, scarred after years of trying to keep kids and staff safe in the face of sustained pressure to reopen, shorten COVID quarantine rules, and unmask their campuses, are largely unwilling to risk restoring any protections against spreading infection. 

And yes, if only those were the only facts, the pandemic truly would be over, schools’ winter 2022 path to a consequence-free embrace of a spike in pediatric respiratory infections would be crystal clear. But, naturally, the world of schools, families, children and their broader communities is vastly more complex than that deductive two-step. 

Note, for instance, that we’ve done a generally poor job of protecting children from COVID infection—, more than had been infected, . By the end of the summer, had been infected at least once. The consequences of pediatric infection remain mostly unknown, but many kids, including one of mine, aren’t lucky enough to prance through COVID infection with minor, short-term cold symptoms. 

Or, more grimly, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor put it in a New Yorker article last month, “By the end of February, 2022, under the age of eighteen—more than one out of every three hundred and sixty—had lost a caregiver to [COVID]. Black and Latino kids lost their caregivers at nearly twice the rate of white children.”&˛Ô˛ú˛őąč;

I know that no one wants to think about the pandemic as a pressing health crisis anymore. Please believe that I don’t want to write this column yet again. I know that we’ve aligned our default COVID approach with our approach to mass shootings: we do nothing to stop the problem and express impotent frustration when it persists. 

But I submit to you that that sort of magical thinking will work no better now than it has throughout the pandemic. We convince ourselves that the pandemic’s health risks are nothing compared to the impacts on student learning or working caregivers’ careers. Then, naturally, we learn that refusing to mitigate against health risks actually produces ample damage to learning and careers anyway. Indeed, COVID stole a Latino father from his two children in my family’s school community several weeks ago. 

But at least masks are now optional in D.C. schools. At least COVID quarantining has become largely voluntary and on the honor system. At least we can console ourselves with the appearance of normalcy — even if propping up that mirage turns out to be unnecessarily deadly for many in our communities. 

It’s simple: if we yet again refuse to face the public health facts this winter and adopt basic mitigations like mask mandates, social distancing, an aggressive push to increase booster rates and similar … COVID will take the lives of more parents and caregivers, disproportionately low-income and/or disproportionately people of color, in communities around the country. That’s a high price to pay to allow the remainder of us to pretend ourselves into a false dawn of pre-pandemic normalcy.