Journalist Chabeli Carrazana covered the economy when she first joined The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom focused on gender, politics and policy. But it didn’t take long before she noticed a pattern when reporting on the intersection of gender and the workforce: Child care touches on nearly every aspect of American work culture.
“We look at fields where women and LGBTQ+ people are overrepresented or underrepresented,” she said. “Child care is one of those industries because it’s around 95% women and it’s really rare for a single industry to have such an enormous concentration of workers one gender.”
As a result, The 19th formally added the beat to her title, making Carrazana the outlet’s economy and child care reporter. She joined a growing list of reporters who cover child care, an area for which there is no shortage of stories.
First, there is the sheer number of people doing child care work: State-funded preschool enrollments of 3- and 4-year-olds reached an all-time high during the 2022-2023 school year, according to the National Institute for Early Education Research; in 2023, there were 92,786 licensed child care centers in the United States, according to the organization Child Care Aware of America. However, child care coverage encapsulates more than the visible child care workforce.“It includes informal caregivers — friend, family, neighbor care and home-based programs,” said Jackie Mader, the senior early childhood education reporter at The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit media outlet covering inequality and innovation in education.
Then there is child care’s role in allowing millions of American parents to do their own work, which became clear during the pandemic. “We saw how quickly child care could crumble, and then the ripple-down effect of that was you had this enormous swath, millions of women leaving the workforce,” Carrazana said. “Some of that was specifically because of child care, because it was just too much to juggle both work and care.”
Child care, of course, also affects the children being cared for. “A lot of reporting is on the employees, and the access and supply, but I don’t feel like there’s enough focus on the children themselves and the impact on them when we’re talking about child care policy,” Mader said.
While many journalists I spoke with didn’t start out on the child care beat, the topic has become a key issue for workers, families and policymakers. Here’s why coverage is growing.
Child care issues didn’t just start during the pandemic
The reporters I talked to made it clear: The child care crisis in the U.S. predated the pandemic, but lockdowns and remote work made it more visible to millions of Americans. Carrazana pointed to the familiar sight many remember: children running around in the background of Zoom meetings.
At the pandemic’s start, nearly 13,000 day care centers closed and 53,000 reduced the number of employees throughout the rest of 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Schools across the country also shut down, leaving parents without child care while they were supposed to carry on with their normal workdays. While the industry has since bounced back a bit thanks to the $24 billion investment from the 2021 American Rescue Plan’s Child Care Stabilization Program, that funding expired in 2023.
“Child care was one of the things that wasn’t working great prior, but the pandemic threw fuel on the fire,” said Shannon Pettypiece, an NBC News senior policy reporter who sees child care issues as a through line in her beat. “It just took a system that was already fragile and just put even more severe cracks and fractures in it.”
These cracks showed journalists there was a plethora of child care issues that had been undercovered until then — an underpaid and often undocumented labor force, women disproportionately quitting their jobs to shoulder child care duties and the unaffordability of day care and preschools for many Americans. A 2023 study published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies found that prior to the pandemic, over 31% of child care news coverage centered around scandals, like St. Louis day care workers being charged with child abuse, but during 2020, over 40% of coverage shifted to child care policy, like funds to support free prekindergarten for all children in the 2021 Build Back Better Act.
“The sheer amount of attention and coverage that child care gets now has changed exponentially,” Mader said. “There has been a really strong link, tying child care and the necessity of it to the economy, which is true, but I fear what gets lost is we should also care about it because these are children. This is the future of our society.”
Child care is becoming a political priority
During the June debate between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, moderators asked both then-candidates about how to make child care more affordable. While neither candidate really answered the question, with Biden only briefly addressing the child care tax credit, nearly all the journalists I spoke to for this piece said the fact that the question was even asked on a national stage demonstrated how important child care issues have become.
“It’s starting to become more of an issue the candidates are talking about, but I don’t think it feels like it’s the top issue, at least at the national level,” said Pettypiece, who has covered the Trump and Biden administrations and their various child care policies, like Ivanka Trump’s proposed $500 billion plan and Biden’s child tax credit.
Since that debate, Vice President Kamala Harris has become the Democratic presidential nominee, choosing Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate. During Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate, the question of what to do about the “child care crisis” came up again. Walz, who made paid family and medical leave one of his signature pieces of legislation as governor, said he and Harris support a national paid family leave program; on the question of whether companies should be made to pay for workers taking time off to care for their families, Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s vice-presidential running mate, said it should be a “choice”-based model “because a lot of young women would like to go back to work immediately.”
Harris, too, has talked about the need to alleviate the child care crisis, saying in September, she said she wants to cap child care spending at 7% of a family’s household income. In her Democratic National Convention speech, she also mentioned several of the nonfamily caregivers she had while growing up, including Mrs. Shelton, the day care provider who lived a floor below her and “became a second mother.”
“Harris mentioned her own early educator and child care provider, and the struggle she had, calling her a small-business person, and that’s already a huge step forward,” said Mark Swartz, an author and columnist for Early Learning Nation, an independent magazine covering the first five years of a child’s life. “It’s huge that it’s being talked about and that these professionals are being talked about as professionals, and not as babysitters.”
The beat touches every facet of society
Baltimore Banner columnist Leslie Gray Streeter writes about many aspects of life in Maryland’s largest city — from local angles about TV shows to commentary on Harris’ campaign. Some of her most popular columns talk about her life as a single mother. Child care isn’t technically her beat, but she sees it as a natural part of her cultural and political coverage.
“One of the perspectives that I like having as a columnist is that I can write about whatever the factors are of being a woman, including parenting,” she said. “I like to do it in a way that takes those things seriously, that doesn’t think of them as a niche, that doesn’t think of them as isolated to specific sections or to specific subjects. Everything is about parenting.”
Many reporters I spoke to agreed that parenting, child care and family touch most aspects of American life. For a story about the Farm Bill, a piece of climate change legislation recently introduced in Congress, Carrazana found that child care for farmers was a huge priority, as they often live in rural areas without day cares or other child care services nearby.
Swartz pointed out that housing is a child care issue, too, because families want to live near day cares and that can drive up housing costs. Mader called her early childhood coverage a “whole world of intersecting beats,” which has included covering recess, safe sleep for infants and childhood necessities, like food and play.
Many reporters emphasized that child care greatly affects the economy. Due to the expensive costs of day care, many parents — especially female-identifying ones — exit the workforce. Over 2 million parents in the U.S. made job changes due to child care issues and only 67.8% of children under age 6 have all parents currently working, according to an analysis by the Center for American Progress.
“I hear it come up over and over again, especially in the context of the labor market that child care continues to be a barrier keeping women out of the workforce, and I think that touches areas that people might not expect, like a lack of teachers, an inability to find nurses and higher prices,” Pettypiece said.
The child care beat is growing
With more eyes on the child care industry than ever, there are more reporters covering the beat, too. In 2023, Report for America selected a reporter to cover child care at the Post-Crescent in Appleton, Wisconsin, and the Los Angeles Times launched its early childhood initiative, a two-year series covering child care, health and other issues facing kids up to age 5. Meanwhile, Rebecca Gale writes about child care for the Better Life Lab at New America and has a Substack on the topic. “When You Care” author Elissa Strauss also explores the book’s themes of caregiving and parenting in her Substack.
While some reporters on the beat worry that these new roles are temporary, Mader said it feels like a step forward. “We have good momentum going,” she said. “I’m hopeful that even these temporary reporter positions will either become permanent or maybe news leaders will understand how important they are and at least fold them into regular coverage in other areas.”
For a beat to continue growing, there needs to be interest. All the journalists I spoke to who cover child care are parents, but they encouraged young reporters — whether they have children or not — to explore the beat. The decision not to have kids, and the politicization of that decision, is rarely divorced from the costs and burdens of child care.
“There aren’t a lot of people who are writing about child care, so you have so much that you can talk about and really get into the nitty-gritty of because you’re not competing with a thousand other reporters on the same story,” said Carrazana, who started covering the beat before she became a parent. “You can make it your own and really pull out stories that other people aren’t writing about, making the possibility for impact even greater.”
