The Importance Of Child Care
Affordable, quality child care was already a rarity before COVID-19, and it now seems even closer to extinction.
Ed. note: This is the latest installment in a series of posts on motherhood in the legal profession, in partnership with our friends at MothersEsquire. Welcome Elizabeth D. Reeths to our pages. Click here if you’d like to donate to MothersEsquire.
The daycare center my daughter attended closed on March 18, 2020. Two days into work-from-home parenting, my husband joked, “I used to think we paid daycare a lot of money. Now I think we maybe don’t pay them enough money.”
As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. For me, and for many other working parents, that village includes child care professionals. My daughter Grace was four months old when she joined the “Tadpole Room” at a local daycare center. She quickly bonded with her teachers, and I felt confident she was nurtured and protected when she was there. She was happy, and I was happy, too, secure in my ability to continue practicing law while ensuring the best care for my child.
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That all came to a halt in early 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept into the U.S., when Grace was 16 months old. Suddenly, we were trying to be full-time employees and stay-at-home parents, and it quickly became apparent that this was not sustainable. Meetings were interrupted by calls for story time. Writing was started, stopped, and started again multiple times a day. On one particularly memorable occasion, while my husband was in a Zoom meeting, and I was on the phone with a client, Grace found a box of tea light candles and sampled a few bites from several candles before I caught her. I felt like a failure. I began thinking, I just have to make it to naptime.
When daycare reopened in late May 2020 (much earlier than many other child care centers across the country), it was a relief, but I simultaneously felt I had to justify sending her back. “The pediatrician said it was okay,” I would tell people.
The truth was, we both needed daycare and always had. Part of me felt like I was supposed to feel guilty about daycare — maybe I was missing some sort of maternal instinct that would make me want to quit my job and become a stay-at-home parent. I have come to realize, and to accept, that I am a better parent because of daycare.
As a civil litigator, my schedule suffers from some unpredictability. There are out-of-town depositions and court hearings, motions and briefs that require frequent evening and weekend work, and of course the occasional trial that is completely disruptive to the ebb and flow of daily life. I need to be able to rely on daycare as a constant.
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I also believe Grace has benefited from daycare. She proudly shows off every art project, from special handprint Mother’s Day gifts to crayon scribbles on coloring book pages. She has opportunities she wouldn’t have at home — she gets to play on a playground every day, she goes on field trips, and she has made friends. She has learned to count, to say her ABCs, to sing silly songs. Plus, she thrives on the structure.
Unfortunately, what we have come to rely on as a constant is under ever increasing threat. Affordable, quality child care was already a rarity before COVID-19, and it now seems even closer to extinction. The pandemic exposed all the weaknesses in the fragile system that allows parents to work and children to thrive. It has been estimated that 20,000 child care centers have closed since March 2020 and that 1 in 9 child care employee jobs have been lost. There are countless news reports of mothers, including lawyer-moms, who have been forced to leave the workforce for want of child care. There are not nearly enough teachers and centers to meet the demand for infant and toddler care. Child care staff are almost universally underpaid and underappreciated. The system itself is a system in which no one is winning.
The other problem with the system of scarcity is that many parents are forced to choose child care based on some combination of availability and cost. While we toured a few different centers and asked questions about curriculum and child care philosophy, the ultimate decision was made for us, because only one of the centers we toured had a spot for an infant when we needed it. Don’t get me wrong; I love our center and the teachers there, but the bottom line is that we did not have much of a choice.
Quality child care is essential and should not so hard to find. The best child care providers are not simply babysitters; they teach, they encourage, they inspire. Sending my daughter to a child care center was and is the right decision for me and for my family. It has allowed my career to continue and flourish, and it has allowed her to learn important skills, make friends, and have fun. So while we do pay them a lot of money, it is also, at the same time, never enough.
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Elizabeth D. Reeths primarily practices in the areas of insurance coverage and municipal defense at a civil litigation boutique in central Wisconsin. She was recently elected Treasurer of the State Bar of Wisconsin and is also a member of the Wisconsin Defense Counsel. In her spare time, Elizabeth serves on the board of a community music school and is a founding member of her book club. You can find her on Twitter @elreeths.
