Our Committee on Child Care (CCC) is committed to learning about and improving the availability of quality child care to women with fewer means.
Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic identifies the lack of quality, affordable day care as “the most significant barrier to full equality for women in the workplace.” The barrier to full equality falls most heavily on women in underserved communities. In addition to the lack of quality, affordable child care, CCC is also concerned that, as a society, we do not accord child care practitioners sufficient pay or respect for the work they do. Explore CCC projects and resources below.
Documentary: Taking a Closer Look at Child Care
In this new informative documentary, we take a closer look at the pleasures and pitfalls of child care in Chicago, told firsthand by family child care providers, preschool teachers and parents of young children.
Parents express their genuine pleasure in seeing their children learn and thrive at child care while at the same time expressing concerns in coordinating schedules and facing the real challenges of being able to pay for these services within the changing state regulations on child care subsidies.
Caregivers recount the value of their work to both the children they care for and to their working parents. These concerned practitioners speak of the issues they face in providing the quality of the care that each child deserves. They also describe the difficulty of getting by on the pay they receive.
The stories of both parents and practitioners are embedded in the political and economic issues of our time. Information on the current child care situation broadens our understanding of the issues that shape what parents and caregivers experience.
Taking a Closer Look at Child Care (2016) was produced by WWHP’s Committee on Child Care in Chicago. This short documentary, under 20 minutes, is available for showing and can be used to broaden the understanding of child care in urban settings today.
Drama: Handle with Care
The two-part drama Handle With Care uses stories from CCC’s interviews to depict realistic child care experiences of parents, caregivers, and children.
Part I shows parent concerns about enrolling their children in child care, the joys of the children learning, and parent-child conversations about the child’s day. Part II reflects economic inequalities in our society as parents deal with the cost of child care and caregivers face low pay. The play closes with the many advantages the child gains from quality child care and the peace of mind parents derive from it.
This creative drama about child care was conceived by Tracy Walsh, an ensemble member of Lookingglass Theatre, with the support of the theater’s Civic Practice Lab.
These plays, performed before various groups of stakeholders, are used to augment conversations about increasing the availability and quality of child care in Chicago.
Child Care Interviews
CCC collected stories from parents of young children in child care as well as preschool teachers and child care home providers. The interviews, conducted individually and in groups, share the joys and challenges parents and practitioners experienced. Most of the participants lived or worked in undeserved communities.
Caregivers’ stories include
- supporting a parent to help her child speak
- the joy of hearing “I got it!” from a child
- the hardships of low pay
Parents’ stories include
- the satisfaction of seeing their children thrive
- the interest in seeing what their children learned at child care
- the difficulties of matching work schedules with hours of child care
The stories of these women (and a few men) are available both in video and as transcriptions. Please enjoy some excerpts of interviews prepared by our members below.
Parent Small Group Interview | Leonel: Tactics used to teach children
They take them to the library and show them. It’s amazing how a child . . . Little things that we don’t see sometimes, because we . . . As a parent I think it would be goo d for me to know the tactics to teach my kid. Some things are essentials to them. For an emergency . . . Like my daughter, she says, “Okay, when there’s fire we can use this, like, uh, milk. We cannot use water.” One of the things . . . Some of the things that they had little by little learn. Actually it was impressive, what they learn.
Parent Small Group Interview | María Martínez, translated from Spanish
For me, Amy, I believe Amy is more sure of herself. She loves to dance. She has self-assurance. She tells me, she does things she learns in the child care center. She dances. She tells me, “Mommy, when I grow up I want to be a ballerina.” It’s also very different at child care from when someone has them in a private house. It [the center] educates them, prepares them to go to school, as I said.
Practitioner Interview | Tyler
So in following an emerging curriculum, a lot of times when we talk to parents, explaining the Reggio Emilia approach, uh, it’s not as cut-and-dried as, “Here’s the thematic unit that we’re using and it’s winter and we’re learning about things that have to do with winter, snowflakes and those kind of things.” So when talking to parents kind of about what the child’s done for the day, we recently have finished a study on sharks. And so within that study there was a big interest for the students in creating stories. So we talked about different parts of the stories, and characters and setting and all those kind of things. But they really wanted to write or draw the stories. So a way that really connected with them was they created these stories that were based on this interest in sharks but also based on their interest in super-heroes. So they created these, like, super-heroes, Batman, Shark-guys, and Spiderman Shark guys, and all of these different figures, and, uh, you know, kind of like action figure kind-of things, that they would draw, relating these stories and they would draw and they would cut out and they would play with, they would dress up as. And it was fun and they were interested and they were engaged, and it was something that went on over, since the beginning of the school year, so months. But what was so powerful was within that, all of those academic pieces were, were happening. So we were, like, telling stories and that whole they started out creating these books themselves and then by the end they had created these books with two or three students.
Practitioner Interview | Virginia Creative curriculum [08:00]
Since we work on creative curriculum, we do a lot of hands-on activities with one activity I can think of that I would say really amazed me the last couple of weeks: we bring in snow. And I personally . . . The teacher brung in snow ‘cause I was being the assistant in the classroom at the time and I never really thought about bringing in snow from the outside and having kids put on gloves and let them just experiment with playing with snow and talking about, “Is it cold? Is it wet? What will happen when it gets warm?” and letting them just understand, like, how water change. And that was with our two-year-old classroom and . . . So that things that in everyday kids come in contact with , how much they can learn from it.
Practitioner Interview | Meredith: Being a professional [07:09]
And this is a profession for me. I’m not a babysitter. Ah, nothing against babysitters, I used to be one, but that idea of I need to be there for them and I need to be professionally prepared for them, academically, and going to take coursework and keeping up with the field. But also that professionalism comes out in my relationship with their families, my relationship with my co-workers and in my relationship with my kids. So I’m constantly making sure with them that I’m asking questions about, “Well, how were the kids doing today?” “What happened while I was gone? Were there any parent concerns?”
Parent Interview | Maria: Teaching more than abc’s [23:55]
I would say that one of the things that actually I like a lot about the daycare that my daughter goes to is that they don’t just focus on, you know, learning your abc’s and your numbers and those things that they’re going to have to know in order to start going to pre-K and . . . But they also work with them in other ways, like, you know, teaching them empathy and be good to one another.
My daughter tells me now, “Mom, do I recycle this?’ And, I mean, she’s three. And part of it has to do with what we do at home, but also that those kind of values are getting emphasized in the day-to-day teaching that they have at the daycare. So I think that’s some of the things that I would love to see happen in more daycares.
More Research Collected by CCC
Union Support of Child Care
In CCC’s interview with Katie Jordan, head of the retirees of Workers United, formerly the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, she recalls a model child care facility run by her union between 1969 and 1983 in Chicago. (Transcript and video interview available by request from childcare@wwhpchicago.org.)
The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) contributed to bringing women’s issues onto the labor agenda. As both a labor and a feminist organization, CLUW lobbied for national child care legislation, formed a Child Care Task Force that visited other countries who had these services, and encouraged labor and management to negotiate child care programs in their collective bargaining agreements. CLUW framed its support of child care as a commitment to family life rather than as just a benefit to women. [For a good discussion see pp. 142-144 of Silke Roth’s Building Movement Bridges: The Coalition of Labor Union Women (2003).
Resources: Benefits of Quality Child Care and Consequences if It Is Unavailable.
- “The Benefits of Early Childhood Development Persist Over Generations” – By John Pepper
- Cohn, Jonathan. “The Hell of American Day Care: An investigation into the barely regulated, unsafe business of looking after our children,” New Republic, April 15, 2013, https://newrepublic.com/article/112892/hell-american-day-care
- “When Brain Science Meets Public Policy: Strategies for Building Executive Function Skills in the Early Years,” Institute for Child Success, January, 2015. https://readynation.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/brain_science-1.pdf
- Bradbury, B.; Corak, M., Waldfogel, J., Wahsbrook, E. Too Many Children Left Behind:The U.S. Achievement Gap in Comparative Perspective. Russel Sage Foundation, September, 2015. https://www.russellsage.org/publications/too-many-children-left-behind
Contact jackiewwhp@gmail.com for more information on any of these projects.