The NOICTSU Rundown - Episode 2: “Birth of a Broken System”
In the first episode of No One is Coming to Save Us, host Gloria Riviera explores the day to day realities of navigating our broken child care system by speaking with families and educators from our Neighborhood partner, Ellis. Spoiler alert… our current system is failing them, and everyone else. (Read the “Rundown” of episode one here)
In today’s “Rundown,” we’re breaking down episode two, which addresses the question: how did we get here? The episode explores the intersectionality and history of child care in our country, including how fifty years ago we came THIIIIIIS CLOSE to major reform.
Episode two will make you angry – but it will also show that we CAN get child care reform across the finish line this time, if the political will is strong enough.
Episode 2: Birth of a Broken System
“Why was she in the position of having to find a way? Did it have to be so hard for a young mother to find help for her baby in the early 1960s? It just seems brutal. It does not have to be like this.” - Gloria Riviera
In “Birth of a Broken System” host Gloria Riviera begins by speaking with her own mother about her search for child care in the 1960’s. When Gloria’s older sister was born, her mother had to resort to knocking on doors in their neighborhood to find someone to care for her child so she could return to work. Talk about going it alone! Why was it so impossible to get help then, and why is it still this way today?
To understand this, “Birth of a Broken System” goes back to the beginning. The roots of America’s child care system can be traced to the late 1800s when the idea of a woman working outside of the home was widely unaccepted, even shameful. Nevertheless, many women did have to work (if one’s husband was disabled or deceased, for example) and so, communities were obliged to set up day nurseries – places where a child would be changed and kept safe while the mother worked. These day nurseries weren’t exactly cozy, though, as historian and child care expert Sonya Michel, makes clear – and they definitely weren’t focused on education.
It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the study of child development and psychology emerged, and the idea of early education, not just child safety, came into the picture. However, the new early learning programs that resulted were not exactly a child care solution for working mothers. Mothers were expected to attend and participate in these early education programs and received parenting training while the children played and learned. As a result, these programs mainly benefited families of means and were inaccessible to poor families. Black families were excluded from these programs altogether, reinforcing a long and ugly tradition in this country of denying Black parents the same supports provided to White families.
As the episode makes clear, our child care system, like so many others, is rooted in systemic racism. Conceiving of early education and care as a public good, as something worthy of attention and investment, demands that as a society, we have great concern for who cares for our children. All of our children. But for Black women and their families, there has never been a concern for who cares for their children while they are working. During the slavery era, Black women had no legal right to care for their own children; Black children born into slavery were considered the property of their enslavers. Moreover, Black women were tasked with the education and care of White children rather than their own. This continued after emancipation with the advent of the image of the “Black mammy” and this legacy is still present today.
Black women, from the start of this country, have provided the unjustly free or low-wage labor upon which our child care system was built.
“When women’s work is valued – child care miracles magically happen.”
When World War II began, we find a bright spot when the labor of some women began – for a brief moment in time – to be perceived as valuable. Suddenly, in the era of Rosie the Riveter, it was a woman’s “patriotic duty” to go to work while her husband was off fighting in the war. So, for the first time in U.S. history, the federal government stepped into the child care business and created child care centers across the country. And the centers were world-class! Architects were commissioned to design thoughtful spaces; healthy meals were prepared for children during the day and ready for families to take home at night; classrooms were well staffed and fully equipped; and teachers were valued and supported. As Ruth Hoffman, a teacher who worked in the Maritime Child Development Center in 1943, explains, “Whoever had children who needed care, we took care of them. We had an art teacher. We had a doctor. We had a nurse. We had everything we needed to take care of those kids, and we took care of them.”
But these centers didn’t last long. Once the war ended, federal funds dried up as women were encouraged to head back home and unions fought to reintroduce men into the jobs held by women during the war. The result? The federally funded child care centers – and the government system that supported it – were shut down.
“That’s the sound of progress dying.”
The collapse of this utopian child care system didn’t succeed in forcing women to stay home, though. After the war, women remained an active and growing part of the workforce, and still very much needed child care. In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Bill – a bipartisan (wow!) effort to provide federally funded, universal, affordable child care to families across the country. Against all odds, this monumental bill passed in both houses and made it to the desk of President Richard Nixon, when… you guessed it, he grabbed his veto pen.
The episode includes shocking audio of President Nixon and President Ronald Reagan, then the Governor of California, discussing the legislation – calling the “piddly” child care stuff a “boondoggle” and dismissing it as unbelievable. It’s enough to make your blood boil. The podcast’s “Tell It Like It Is” Special Correspondent Kristin Bell goes back in time (she can do that) to set them straight: “Everything is unbelievable until you believe in it.”
“Welfare policy is child care policy.”
Think Nixon’s veto was a low-point? We’re just getting started… enter the attack on American welfare policy. Welfare programs in the early 1900’s had been established to provide support for struggling mothers who needed aid to care for their children without having to go to work. White mothers, that is - Black women were explicitly excluded from these supports. When the Civil Rights Movement made it BIPOC women’s right to access these supports, too, we started to see the concept of welfare stigmatized and attacked.
In 1996, we find ourselves at the heart of the “welfare reform” push with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act gutting federal aid for families with dependent children. Workforce requirements were added to welfare benefits, including child care subsidies. Now, parents in need of government assistance to house, feed, and care for their families were forced to go to work in order to become eligible for them. Systemic racism was – and still is – a huge factor in why our country yanked away what little support it had been providing to families with young children.
Dorothy Roberts, a scholar of race, gender and the law and social justice advocate, explains, “During the progressive era, mother’s pensions were put into place to allow White mothers to take care of their children at home and not have to work. Fast forward to 1996 and welfare restructuring – the point of which was to force Black mothers into low wage work instead of providing them with government aid to help them take care of their children.” The combination of public stipends and low-wages doesn’t quite cut it, as anyone who has ever footed a bill for licensed child care knows. In fact, these reforms have put low-wage mothers, particularly Black mothers, in a terrible bind of struggling to nurture and care for their children while keeping the jobs that put food on the table, with the ever-present threat of social service investigation and the possibility of someone taking their kids away.
The inequities we started with, at the birth of a nation founded on the basis of free labor, are still with us today. For many families, resiliency is the only option. But “resilience is not a child care system.” So, where do we go from here? How do we repair such a broken system, and what does an equitable, accessible, quality system actually look like?
The good news is, there are answers to those questions. And even better, the timing is perfect: we are once again at a pivotal moment in history. The pandemic has forced us to re-examine the fault lines and deep systemic biases imbedded in our current system and to recognize the essential role that women and child care play in our economy. Political momentum is growing around making early education and care accessible for all… will you join the movement?
Tune it to episode three, available on May 27th.