For a long time, people who run preschools and daycares have been in a strange professional middle ground. Under most state laws, they are not quite teachers. They are not doctors, even though science has known for a long time that a child’s first five years affect his or her health for the rest of their lives. Many policymakers see them as babysitters—a temporary fix for parents who need to work—not as an important part of public infrastructure. It has been a long time since the CDC made it clearer that people who work in early care and education are also public health workers. The question of whether it means anything real is another one.
It seems almost silly to have to make this argument in the year 2025. The research on how young children grow and learn has been settled for decades. A child’s brain is most flexible in its first five years. This is when language, attention, feeling good about yourself, and social behavior are all being built. Quality early care during this time has been shown to help adults live healthier lives, earn more over their lifetime, and go to jail less often. That’s not something to talk about on a parenting blog. In this case, longitudinal data shows how things change over generations.
But the people who provide that care are some of the worst paid in the country. A lot of them get paid so little that they have to use the same public assistance programs that their employers help families get. A moral contradiction exists in that arrangement, which most people can see but rarely say out loud: we have decided that the work of making healthy people is not worth paying for.
The effects on the economy go far beyond the finances of just one family. About 27 million Americans need child care in order to be able to work at all right now. Access to child care has been named by employers in all fields as a direct barrier to hiring and keeping employees. Parents, and mothers are more likely than fathers, cut hours, turn down promotions, or quit their jobs when they can’t find affordable, reliable child care. The effects are real and can be measured; they cost the economy of the whole country billions of dollars every year. We talk about this as if it were a family matter, but in reality it’s a matter of the economy as a whole.
At its best, the CDC’s way of framing forces a new way of framing. Early care workers are not there to help parents who work. They are doing a public health job by keeping an eye on kids’ developmental milestones, finding early signs of learning differences, and giving kids whose home lives may not be stable or nurturing a safe place to be. In places where there isn’t a lot of child care, the child care center may be the only place where a young child is always supervised by an adult. No, that is not a coincidence. That’s what infrastructure is.
The real worry is that this recognition, no matter how nice it is, will stay empty. Federal funding for early childhood programs has always been all over the place. It goes up when both parties are excited, and then slowly goes down over the next few years. Families who can’t find child care don’t hold press conferences. When they’re in trouble, things usually get better behind closed doors: a grandmother steps in, a job is quietly quit, or a waitlist never moves.
When you look at this policy window, you get the sense that the moment is real but short-lived. There is political will in some places. Polls make it clear that voters of all parties want to put real money into early childhood care. It’s still not clear whether Congress sees that as permission to act or just background noise.
What is clear is how much it costs to keep not funding this work enough. The kids in those classrooms don’t wait for the government to catch up with science.
