“Hiring and retaining good workers has been tough in the child-care industry for years, but it is escalating into a crisis. Pandemic-fueled staffing challenges threaten to hold back the recovery, as the staffing problems at day cares have a ripple effect across the economy. Without enough employees, day cares are turning away children, leaving parents — especially mothers — unable to return to work.” |
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who:
Heather Long, Economics Correspondent for The Washington Post
where:
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According to this article from The Washington Post, 1.6 million mothers of children under the age of 17 are still missing from the workforce after exiting during the pandemic to care for their children.
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The last week of September is dedicated for national diaper need awareness. Ohio Sen. Tina Mahareth is trying to pass legislation (SB 121) that would recognize it in Ohio.
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Columbus Monthly just featured a recently completed Crane Center project, The Kids in Columbus Study (KICS), and spoke to Crane executive director and principal investigator of the study Dr. Laura Justice. The study, in collaboration with Columbus Public Health and the Franklin County Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program, followed pregnant women, mothers, and children under 3 months old from low-income households until the children reached the age of four. Researchers were seeking to learn about families’ everyday lives, like support systems and neighborhood quality, and how that shaped children’s language development.
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The Los Angeles Times has an aptly named article, “Our collective amnesia about childcare,” showcasing one reporter’s admittedly newfound knowledge on what’s broken about the U.S. child care market. Child care is so expensive that many parents cannot or can barely afford it, yet child care workers also make so little - a key indicator of market failure that she implores readers not to forget about as the pandemic stretches on.
Cleveland.com recaps a webinar from The Hunt Institute which focused on child care recovery, specifically in Ohio, which featured introduction from Gov. DeWine and a dicsussion amongst panelists about the child care crisis and how the pandemic has exacerbated the issue.
Coinciding with National Adult Education and Family Literacy Week, volunteers put together literacy kits for 3-, 4-, and 5-year-old children in the Alliance City School District. Thanks to a community service project designed to help strengthen reading skills, each kit contains a book, crayons, a coloring page and other literacy resources.
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Bipartisan Policy Center is hosting a webinar, “Child Care in Rural America – What Have We Learned?” on October 6th from 2-3 pm. The webinar will discuss their new analysis of child care in rural areas across 35 states. Register here.
Our October Crane Research Forum will host Dr. Xin Feng, Crane Center faculty affiliate and assistant professor in the Department of Human Sciences, on October 13th from 12-1 pm. Dr. Feng will discuss her recent study of how fathers uniquely contribute to this development in 3- and 4-year-old children. Learn more and register here.
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This article in the Blog on Learning and Development (BOLD) describes research on babies’ and toddlers’ intuitive math understanding, which is more sophisticated than many likely give them credit for and which reflects “some truly astonishing number abilities.”
Research described here in The Conversation points to a type of inequity facing preschoolers that’s not commonly discussed, and it has to do with show-and-tell. Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Denver Casey Stocksill describes her comparative ethnographic study examining how often preschoolers from poor and relatively wealthier families have a chance to bring their personal belongings to school, which can be an important part of sharing, connecting with others, and experiencing joy at that age. Unsurprisingly, children from homes experiencing poverty had fewer opportunities to do so. As Dr. Stocksill describes, the implications for this matter immensely: “the disparity in children’s degree of control over property connects to other researchers’ findings that affluent children have more control over their experience within schools. From school uniform rules to how much of their teacher’s help they get when working on assignments, affluent children grow up expecting more special attention from authority figures.”
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This edition written by: Jamie O'Leary, Associate Director of Policy and Caitlin Lennon, Communications & Policy Specialist |
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