Is it enough? This is a question The New York Times asks of presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton regarding improved child care in the United States.
Would Hillary’s plan to reform the childcare crisis throughout the United States be enough? Would it solve more problems than it creates? Would it be fair? Would it even work?
Clinton’s plan is threefold: improve home care conditions with “home visiting” regulations implemented to avoid damaging environments and abusive situations, boost the pay rate and experience required for child caretakers and facilities and use tax credits to max out the cost of childcare at no more than 10 percent of income per family.
Each of these parts respond to a correlating deficit in the American child care system and all three of them Clinton sees as necessary in order to propel improvements.
So how would these proposals induce improvements? According to a study from the National Institute of Child Health and Development, less than 10 percent of childcare centers in the United States are rated as high quality.
This deficiency in quality stems from a lack of adequate pay rates for employees, a lack of staff members to keep the doors open and a lack of resources to supply and maintain the operations of decent child care facilities.
If Hillary’s plans were to go through, the results would be twofold. Her plans could increase national debt with more money being poured into the child care system, but she could also be solving child care issues for American parents around the nation.
Men and women who make minimum wage cannot afford to spend over half their paychecks on child care. The Economic Policy Institute found that families in 33 states are paying more than a public university’s tuition on annual child care.
Trump, unlike Clinton, has not addressed any sort of reform for child care but has been quoted as saying that it is not an expensive endeavor for companies to supply their employees with child care. If only seven percent of American businesses provide child care for their employees, then perhaps the solution could be to improve incentive for these companies rather than depend on government funding.
The solution to this growing child care problem could be to combine Trump’s business views about company-funded child care along with Clinton’s plan to improve access and quality of care. A reform plan may be a starting place for struggling families, but is just the beginning of a needed revolution in the treatment of work culture and parenting.
