Perspective | It’s time for parents to use our outside voices to support child care and early learning

“When my son was born, we were very excited. But being a working mom and having to secure child care was very overwhelming. We couldn’t find anything that was affordable.”

“Our little kids will become our future leaders. We’ve got to invest in what’s important and what we value here in this community.”

“Early education teachers and staff deserve better.” 

These are excerpts of stories we recorded earlier this summer at, “Time to Use Our Outside Voices” in Winston-Salem. Hosted by MomsRising, Smart Start of Forsyth County, and the M.A.L.E. Initiative, the event brought together moms, dads, and community members to discuss the urgent challenges facing North Carolina’s child care sector, and take action to boost the investments communities need.  

The evening featured meaningful connection, lively discussion, and powerful advocacy — and it was just one in a series of gatherings across North Carolina this spring and summer coordinated by MomsRising. Parents are showing up in force because they know firsthand our state’s child care system is broken, plagued by long waitlists, prohibitively high costs, and low wages for providers. And they know the harm it’s causing.

We organized this series because it’s more important than ever to engage parents and amplify their voices so policymakers will understand how important child care investments are for our children, families, and economy. 

What’s at stake?

The stakes are high. After decades of underinvestment, North Carolina’s child care sector would have collapsed without emergency federal funding during the pandemic. Those funds helped shore up our state’s early childhood workforce and raise wages for early childhood educators to roughly $14 an hour, still far short of what someone needs to support a family and what they could make in fast food or retail.

Now that COVID relief funds have expired, child care programs have lost the support they needed to pay their staff and keep the lights on. Many have been forced to raise tuition even higher or shutter classrooms entirely, leaving parents scrambling for care. Last year, 300 child care programs closed for good. Without increased investment, the Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE) estimates we could lose 1,500 more. 

That would be a disaster for parents, who need quality child care to hold jobs and access critical early education opportunities for their children. Our families can’t afford to stay silent — we need policymakers to hear us. 

Bringing dads into the conversation

One goal for this event series is to lift the voices of fathers in this conversation. Often, when we highlight parent perspectives on child care, the focus falls only on moms. But dads have a lot at stake, too. 

That point was illustrated beautifully by Derek Miller, one of our panelists in Winston-Salem. Derek holds a master’s degree in international development focusing his studies on youth education, and he is passionate about his career engaging and supporting fathers to support their children’s growth. His wife is active duty in the U.S. Army and they have three children, including twins enrolled in early childhood education. 

Since his twins were born, Derek shared, he’s felt caught between a rock and hard place, eager to continue his important work but struggling to find and afford the quality care he needs to do so. He detailed the many iterations of work and care he’s tried — from being a stay-at-home dad, to paying $2,400 a month for care so he could work full-time, to scaling back to a part-time role. No matter what he’s tried, the numbers never seemed to work. 

Derek’s story resonates with families across North Carolina — moms and dads alike. Every day, our organizations hear from parents who are facing these kinds of impossible choices: Between the cost of child care and the cost of groceries, between showing up for their jobs or caring for their families, or between their children’s education and their financial security. 

State-level, sustainable investment

Children and families deserve better, and there’s good reason to be hopeful. Over the past few years, cities and counties have recognized the need for action, utilizing emergency COVID funding to lower costs for families and support providers. But looking forward, we need sustainable funding at the state level to build the strong, reliable child care sector North Carolina needs. 

Critically, we need to increase child care subsidy reimbursement rates to be closer to what it truly costs to provide care and create a subsidy market rate floor to ensure consistency and stability for providers, regardless of county. No business can survive if it is only paid for part of what it costs to provide its service.  At the same time, in a state where child care costs more than college tuition, parents can’t afford to pay more. 

Instituting a statewide subsidy market rate floor would keep child care programs open in both rural and urban areas, ensuring that families across the state have access, and all local economies are able to benefit. In Forsyth County alone, creating a new subsidy market rate floor using 2023 rates would increase subsidy payment by $559 per month ($6,708 per year) per child, providing essential funds to help stabilize our community’s child care providers. 

Parents are using our outside voices to highlight the need to invest in child care. We’re speaking candidly about the enormous stress, sleepless nights, and real hardship the child care crisis is causing. We’re sharing our hopes and dreams for our children’s education and our families’ futures. We’re standing side by side with child care and early learning providers, underscoring the need to pay them the living wages they richly deserve. Now more than ever, we are counting on policymakers to listen.