Child care vital to parents, business

Half of Madison children attend city-accredited child-care centers, much better than the 8 percent of children nationwide who have access to accredited care.

Our community is ahead of the game, but we're not all the way there yet. Employers should insist that child care become a priority for public investment at all levels.

Why should business leaders be concerned about the quality of the Capital Region's child care?

• Because more than 10,000 Dane County workers rely on it to get to work.
• Because the employees we want to recruit are going to check out the child-care scene before they relocate.
• Because the quality of child care largely determines the quality of the public school classroom experience.

There's more:

• Child-care providers generate money for the economy. Parents spend about $105 million on child care in Dane County each year, according to Community Coordinated Child Care. Dane County centers employ more than 1,200 teachers earning around $10 an hour each, and there are nearly 1,000 family child-care providers. Nevertheless, child care is a very fragile set of businesses with extremely high staff turnover and a high failure rate. We all need to be concerned about the success of a business with this much impact on the local economy.
• Child care is basic infrastructure for today's economy. Our county has one of the highest maternal labor force participation rates in the country - around 75 percent. More than 10,000 parents rely on child care to free them for work each day. With today's labor squeeze, and tomorrow's shortage looming, we need to keep those women in the labor force. With women now more likely to earn college degrees than their male counterparts, they are very desirable employees in today's knowledge-based economy.
• Child care - its availability and quality - profoundly affects the productivity and reliability of workers with young children. If your employee has unreliable child care, there will be days when she won't be able to show up for work. Our county has only about 18 percent of the regulated slots for infants that we would need for women to continue to work after their babies are born. The unregulated, catch-as-catch can child care is notoriously unreliable. Even in the regulated system, about 50 percent of family child-care providers go out of business every year, leaving families scrambling.
• Child care underlies the long-term creativity and productivity of the work force. During the first three years of life, emotional and intellectual foundations are established.

Child care profoundly influences the characteristics you want in employees: creativity, emotional stability, problem-solving ability, and ability to get along with others.

If child care centers are stable, with a mature, well-trained staff and a stimulating curriculum, they give children a great start that lasts a lifetime - you can't redo the first few years of life.

We can't afford to allow a lot of children to show up at school unable to master basic tasks, unable to follow directions and without foundational experiences. They never catch up.

Child care needs support

Child care is so important - to the child, the parent, the schools, the employer, the business climate - that it deserves public attention and support.

Most industrialized nations treat child care as a public good and fund it accordingly. Young parents alone simply can't pay the price of a stable, high-quality system.

At the lower end of their wage-earning ability, it's unrealistic for parents to add $25,000 in child-care costs to the family budget.

Just as with health care, there is a lot of talk about having employers pay for child care. Employers should resist this push, and not just because of the cost.

Having employer-sponsored care will only increase the patchwork nature of the system. Some larger, profitable employers will be able to offer great care, and will siphon away just the parents who can afford the care we have.

The system will get weaker, leaving even more stranded in the unregulated system. But employers can't afford to ignore the issue of child care, either. They should actively advocate for public investment for this important service.

Child care should be addressed the same way we have addressed the need to educate the population. It's a public good.

After all, one of the chief functions of a society is care for the young.

Dorothy Conniff is the retiring director of Madison's office of community services.