Daycares for kids: CT Care 4 Kids – Connecticut Office of Early Childhood

How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The U.S. Is an Outlier.

The Upshot|How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The U.S. Is an Outlier.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/upshot/child-care-biden.html

Advertisement

Continue reading the main story

Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S. The Democrats’ spending bill tries to shrink the gap.

Oct. 6, 2021

Image

Children, ages 2 and 3, eating lunch at a public child care center in Denmark.Credit…Mathias Svold for The New York Times

Typical 2-year-olds in Denmark attend child care during the day, where they are guaranteed a spot, and their parents pay no more than 25 percent of the cost. That guaranteed spot will remain until the children are in after-school care at age 10. If their parents choose to stay home or hire a nanny, the government helps pay for that, too.

Two-year-olds in the United States are less likely to attend formal child care. If they do, their parents pay full price — an average $1,100 a month — and compete to find a spot. If their parents stay home or find another arrangement, they are also on their own to finance it, as they will be until kindergarten.

In the developed world, the United States is an outlier in its low levels of financial support for young children’s care — something Democrats, with their safety net spending bill, are trying to change. The U.S. spends 0.2 percent of its G.D.P. on child care for children 2 and under — which amounts to about $200 a year for most families, in the form of a once-a-year tax credit for parents who pay for care.

The other wealthy countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development spend an average of 0.7 percent of G.D.P. on toddlers, mainly through heavily subsidized child care. Denmark, for example, spends $23,140 annually per child on care for children 2 and under.

“We as a society, with public funding, spend so much less on children before kindergarten than once they reach kindergarten,” said Elizabeth Davis, an economist studying child care at the University of Minnesota. “And yet the science of child development shows how very important investment in the youngest ages are, and we get societal benefits from those investments.”

Congress is negotiating the details of the spending bill, and many elements are likely to be cut to decrease the cost. The current draft of the child care plan would make attendance at licensed child care centers free for the lowest-earning families, and it would cost no more than 7 percent of family income for those earning up to double the state’s median income. It would provide universal public preschool for children ages 3 and 4. And it would increase the pay of child care workers and preschool teachers to be equivalent to elementary teachers (currently, the median hourly wage for a preschool teacher of 4-year-olds is $14.67, and for a kindergarten teacher of 5-year-olds $32.80).

Among the 38 nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States is second only to Luxembourg on education spending for elementary school through college. But Americans have long had mixed feelings about whether young children should stay home with family or go to child care. Some Republicans say direct payments to parents would give them the choice to enroll in child care or stay home. Though many conservative-leaning states have public preschool, some Republicans have said they do not want the federal government involved. Some business groups oppose how the Biden spending bill would be paid for: increased taxes on businesses and wealthy Americans.

The pandemic, though, has forced the issue.

“I’ve been writing these reports saying this is a crisis for more than 30 years — it’s not new,” said Gina Adams, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute. “But the pandemic reminded people that child care is a linchpin of our economy. Parents can’t work without it. It’s gotten to a point where the costs of not investing are much, much more clear.”

Overall, federal, state and local governments spend about $1,000 a year on care for low-income children ages 2 and under, and $200 on other toddlers, according to a paper for the Hamilton Project at Brookings, by Professor Davis and Aaron Sojourner, also an economist at the University of Minnesota.

Some states and cities offer public preschool, starting at age 3 or 4. But just seven states (and the District of Columbia) serve more than half of 4-year-olds, and 14 states have no public preschool or serve less than 10 percent of children, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research.

Kaitlyn Parker, a teacher, with students at the Omaha Tribe Early Head Start in Macy, Neb. Head Start provides free child care for low-income families, but relatively few children receive the benefit.Credit…Sioux City Journal Tim Hynds/Sioux City Journal, via Associated Press

For children under 3, only the poorest working families qualify for subsidies, through Early Head Start or the child care block grant, but fewer than one in six eligible children receive the help. For most families, the only direct government support for early care and education comes from the child and dependent care tax credit. It benefits higher earners most: The average credit is $586, and $124 for the lowest earners.

The situation is much different in many rich countries. In Europe, new parents have paid leaves of 14 months, on average, and it’s common for children to start public school at age 3. (In the preschool years, the focus in on play — toddlers aren’t sitting at desks doing worksheets.)

For children ages 1 and 2, parents are expected to pay more for child care, and there are similar tensions as in the United States about whether it’s best for children to be home with their parents, said Hans Bos, senior vice president studying education policy at the American Institutes for Research. But governments still pay a significant portion of the cost of care — including payments for stay-at-home parents in countries including Finland, South Korea and Denmark.

Nordic countries have the most generous child care systems, including free care for low-income families. In Denmark, in addition to heavily subsidized care for children up to age 10, which is mostly government-run but includes private centers and home-based care, parents of toddlers receive a quarterly child benefit of $700.

A Danish public child care center. The country guarantees that parents pay no more than 25 percent of the cost of care from the time their children are babies.Credit…Mathias Svold for The New York Times

In Germany, children can attend forms of “kita” from early months through elementary school. In some places, parents pay tuition based on their income, and in others, including Berlin and Hamburg, it is free. In France, parents of babies and toddlers receive tax credits of up to 85 percent of the cost of attending child care centers called crèches or hiring home-based “childminders,” before public preschool begins at age 2 or 3.

Parents pay a much larger share of their earnings in certain other countries, but still receive more government assistance than in the United States. Japan has subsidized child care, but parents’ share of tuition is large and it is very hard to find spots. England and Ireland offer free preschool, but only for a few hours a day.

Governments sometimes help pay for child care to further various policy goals.

One is increasing fertility (though studies have found government policies don’t necessarily make people have more babies over the long run).

Another goal is increasing women’s labor force participation. In Europe, research shows, child care has had a bigger effect on this measure than policies like paid parental leave. Studies in the United States have also found that subsidized child care and preschool increase the chance that mothers keep working, particularly low-income women.

A third goal is ensuring that children of all backgrounds are equally prepared. Rich families can more easily afford high-quality care, which contributes to achievement gaps as early as kindergarten. Research in the United States shows that children are less likely to have formal child care if their parents are low earners, Hispanic or aren’t college graduates. Universal programs have been shown to shrink the gap in kindergarten readiness. Yet in the United States, one in three American children start kindergarten without any preschool at all.

A correction was made on 

Oct. 7, 2021

: 

An earlier version of a photo caption with this article misstated the location of a public child care center. The center is in Denmark, not the Netherlands. 

How we handle corrections

Claire Cain Miller writes about gender, families and the future of work for The Upshot. She joined The Times in 2008 and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. More about Claire Cain Miller

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bill Would Aid U.S. in Closing Child Care Gap. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Universal Child Care: A Bad Deal For Kids?

Editor’s Note: Continuing with our family policy symposium this week, Jenet Erickson of The Wheatley Institution and Katharine Stevens of AEI explore the research on government-subsidized child care and child well-being.

Emphasizing a “caregiving crisis” caused by inadequate access to affordable care for children under age five, the Biden campaign highlighted a universal child care plan that aims to “cultivate the potential of young children” through high-quality early learning, while enabling their mothers to work. And now-President Biden’s “American Rescue Plan,” announced last week, suggests that a big scale-up of federal child care spending is indeed a top administration priority—a “win-win-win,” as Senator Elizabeth Warren has described it, supporting young children’s development, advancing women’s careers, and boosting the economy, all at the same time.

Universal child care would clearly enable women to earn more income and pursue careers. Mothers’ increased participation in the labor force would raise GDP. But is it good for children in general?

When Quebec, Canada, launched its universal child care program in 1997, they believed the answer was yes: ensuring a “healthy start” for all children through high-quality early care and education, while simultaneously enabling larger numbers of mothers to join the workforce. Women’s workforce participation did increase significantly as a result of the program, rising from 74% in 1997 to 87% by 2018. As it turned out, though, this came at a cost to the well-being of Quebec’s children.

Years of emotional and behavioral assessments collected on children who had attended child care after the launch of Quebec’s universal child care program indicated cause for concern. On average, 2- to 4-year-old children who had been in child care showed significant increases in anxiety, aggression, and hyperactivity, and experienced more hostile, inconsistent parenting and lower-quality parent-child relationships compared to children who had not attended. As children grew older, these negative outcomes did not dissipate: among 5- to 9-year-olds, the social-emotional problems not only persisted, but in some cases increased, particularly for boys with the most elevated behavioral problems. 

Follow-up studies conducted 20 years after the program’s inception further revealed that negative social-emotional outcomes associated with attending child care persisted through adolescence and into young adulthood. Among young people from ages 12 to 20, self-reported health and life satisfaction decreased significantly. The scale-up of universal child care in Quebec was also associated with a subsequent “sharp and contemporaneous increase in criminal behavior” across Quebec, as the rate of crime conviction jumped 22 percent. As the following figure indicates, though crime rates in Quebec are lower than the rest of Canada, there was a significant increase in crime accusation and conviction rates for cohorts exposed to the child care program.  

Source: Baker, M., Gruber, J., & Milligan, K. (2009). American Economic Journal, 11(3), 1-26.

In the United States, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of Early Child Care (NICHD-SECC)—a longitudinal investigation following a group of 1,364 children from birth onwards—yielded findings that have also raised concerns. Although some of the study’s evidence showed that high quality child care increased children’s basic academic skills at kindergarten entry, extensive hours in a child care program during infancy and toddlerhood predicted negative social-emotional outcomes into adolescence.  

By age four-and-a-half, children who had spent more than 30 hours per week in child care had, on average, worse outcomes in every area of social-emotional development—weaker social competence, more behavior problems, and greater conflict with adults—at rates three times higher than their peers. Just 2% of children who averaged less than 10 hours per week exhibited behavioral problems, compared to 18% of those who averaged 30 hours or more and 24% of those who averaged 45 hours or more per week. The negative effects associated with extensive hours in child care rivaled the effects of poverty. Family income, maternal education, child care quality, and quality of the child’s relationship with the caregiver had no impact on those effects (see figure below). 

Source: Data drawn from Table 8 of NICHD Early Child Care Research Network (2003). “Does Amount

of Time Spent in Child Care Predict Socioemotional Adjustment During the Transition to Kindergarten?” 

Child Development 74(4): 976-1005. Per the study, “Proportions are adjusted for site, child gender, child

ethnicity, maternal education, average income-to-needs ratio (6–54 months), 6-month temperament, maternal

depression (intercept and slope), parenting (intercept and slope), child care quality (intercept), proportion of center

care, proportion of peer group exposure, instability of care.”

The number of hours spent in child care continued to predict negative social-emotional outcomes into the third and sixth grades: at both points, children who had experienced at least 30 hours per week of non-parental care were rated by teachers as having worse social skills and poorer work habits. Children who had spent more time in center-based—rather than home-based—child care had the highest rates of behavior problems and conflict with teachers. By age 15, the link between hours in child care and problem behaviors was still nearly the same as it had been at age four-and-a-half: adolescents from both high- and low socioeconomic backgrounds who had spent more than 30 hours per week in any type of paid care before age four-and-a-half had higher average rates of risk-taking behaviors such as alcohol, tobacco, and drug use, stealing or harming property, and participating in unsafe activities

What might have caused these effects? A fairly new body of research comparing children’s stress levels in child care and at home sheds new light on that question. Researchers assess children’s stress levels in both environments by measuring salivary levels of the stress hormone cortisol, produced by the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system in response to psychological or physical stress. A growing number of studies (see here and here) have found that some children’s stress levels increase significantly when they are in child care—especially full-time, center-based care—indicated by persistently elevated cortisol levels when in the child care setting, specifically. When at home, their cortisol levels return to normal. 

Children are “hardwired” to develop within a small group of familiar people and require one-on-one nurturing relationships to develop well; for most of human history, in fact, children’s early development unfolded in the home, usually with full-time maternal care. The much bigger groups and more chaotic conditions characteristic of child care settings compared to home and family environments may cause elevated stress levels among some children. The effect of this phenomenon is not precisely known. But persistently elevated stress during early childhood has been established as a risk factor for adverse developmental outcomes, including disruptive behavior.  

What Parents Prefer and Children Need

Parents themselves perceive that young children benefit by being cared for at home. A major survey of parents with children aged 5 or under, conducted by Public Agenda in 2000, found that a high-quality childcare center was the “least preferred” arrangement for almost half (46%) of parents surveyed. Four out of five of parents said that young children were less likely to get sufficient affection and attention from caring, well-trained professionals in a high-quality center than they would at home.

Parents overwhelmingly said they preferred parental care for their young children. Nine out of 10 said that if a family can afford it, it is almost always best for young children if one parent stays home with them full time; more than one-third said that for children under age 2 it is “absolutely essential. ” Eighty percent of mothers and half of fathers said they would prefer to stay home themselves to care for their young children rather than work full time outside the home. Polls by Pew and Gallup have yielded similar responses, even for parents of older children.

A surge of findings from neurobiological research has shown that the ongoing, nurturing interactions occurring within young children’s one-on-one relationships with their parents or other primary caregiver literally shape the rapidly growing brain, with powerful, enduring effects on all domains of development. Yet universal child care increases parental workforce participation by decreasing parenting—which is incompatible both with what parents want and what evidence tells us is generally best for young children. 

Policy Alternatives to Universal Child Care

Government policy should focus on strengthening the close, familial bonds essential to children’s healthy development. Federally-funded programs such as Medicaid and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) already provide services to large proportions of low-income mothers—and some fathers—during pregnancy and the first years of their child’s life—the period when parents’ understanding of the importance of responsive, nurturing interactions with their developing child is especially crucial. Although greatly underutilized, these existing programs provide significant untapped opportunities for interventions focused on strengthening the core developmental relationships between parents and their young children.

Rather than seeking to outsource young children’s care to paid professionals, policy should aim to better enable parents to spend more time caring for their young children themselves, especially in the critical first five years of life. As a starting point, some existing government-funded services and supports could potentially be redesigned to more effectively help families with young children provide the care they think best supports their child’s development.

One approach proposed in a new paper by Katharine Stevens and Matt Weidinger from the American Enterprise Institute is to increase flexibility of the federal Child Tax Credit (CTC) to expand parents’ options in caring for their young children. Currently, the CTC provides up to $2,000 per year to assist parents with the costs of raising a child over the first 17 years, promising a lifetime total of up to $34,000 of taxpayer support for each child. But the CTC’s design unnecessarily limits parents’ ability to concentrate the funds in their children’s crucial, first years when many families need those resources the most. 

Alternatively, Stevens and Weidinger propose a “Flexible CTC”: giving parents the option to pull up to $30,000 of already-promised future CTC payments into any or all of the first five years of the child’s life, up to a maximum of $15,000 per year. Because eligibility for the CTC is contingent on prior-year work earnings, the Flexible CTC would offer limited assistance to families with no work income. But a family of four with two children and an annual income as low as $36,000 could claim the maximum Flexible CTC, so it would help many lower-income families. And since this approach adds no new federal spending, instead just permitting a shift in the timing of an existing tax benefit, it is fiscally responsible for future generations.

Current federal funding helps lower- and middle-income parents balance the competing demands of work and raising their young children solely by subsidizing nonparental care. And, as Katharine explained last week, the Biden administration is now poised to greatly amplify that approach. Instead, our focus should be on strategies to elevate—rather than displace—the crucial role of parents in raising their own children, especially during the first, foundational years of development.

Jenet Erickson is a Research Fellow of The Wheatley Institution, and Katharine B. Stevens is a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, focusing on early childhood development and learning.

Distribution of children in kindergartens in the city of Orenburg

X
Go to big map The map widget uses JavaScript. Enable it in your browser settings.

• Main
• Distribution of children in kindergartens in the city of Orenburg

Dear parents (legal representatives)!

Department of Education of the Administration of the City of Orenburg in accordance with Administrative Regulations determined procedure for the distribution of children to preschool educational organizations of the municipality “city of Orenburg”.

The formation of lists of children wishing to get a place in kindergartens before September 1 of the current calendar year is carried out according to the data of a single database of the regional information system of preschool education (at the level of the municipality “city of Orenburg”) in the period from April 15 to May 1 .

When placing children in preschool educational organizations, the recruitment commission is primarily guided by the date the child was registered, the availability of preferential grounds for extraordinary and priority enrollment, the right of preferential admission to training in the main general educational programs of preschool education in which their brothers and ( or) sisters and the number of available places in desired kindergartens.

Consideration of lists for the observance of children’s rights, as well as decisions on the provision of municipal services or refusal is carried out at meetings of the commission until May 15.

After April 15, , only children with the right of extraordinary admission to kindergarten can be added to the list of children for a place in a preschool educational organization .