In this episode I'm joined by Emily Harrawood. Emily is an early-childhood educator and founder with extensive knowledge of the childcare industry. We discuss the current problems with the industry, how it originally came about, how to improve it, and what the future of childcare looks like in the United States.
William Jarvis 0:05
Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past, or it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.
Emily 0:37
Well, Emily, how are you doing this afternoon?
Unknown Speaker 0:39
I'm so great.
Emily 0:40
Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I really appreciate it. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 0:43
I'm really thrilled to be here. I can't wait to get into this.
Emily 0:45
It's nice to Nice to record in real life here down in in North Carolina again. Yeah, that's good. That's good. It's a rare treat for me. Well, Emily, do you mind giving a brief bio at some of the big ideas you're interested in?
Unknown Speaker 0:58
Yeah, not at all. Um, I am an early child hood educator, which is the title that has like a lot of different names. People talk a lot about the difference between preschool and daycare. And, you know, this is an industry where naming gets a little slippery and things slide around a lot people talk about what's the difference between a babysitter and a nanny and an au pair and a preschool teacher and a daycare worker and I am working on starting a preschool in Hillsboro, North Carolina. So I've spent like the last couple of years working on that to varying different degrees. And I worked in early childhood education before that full time as a preschool teacher. And in the pandemic I transitioned to, to private in home childcare. So I worked full time as a nanny for a couple of years, when a lot of schools shut down. And I am really interested in child care in a lot of different facets. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it. I kind of came into it in a sideways sort of way. I studied art history as an undergrad. And I know you have like some some thoughts about the humanities and the way they do and don't drive you and I kind of got to my junior year, and was looking for a way to kind of I'll say both legitimize and monetize in art history. And thought I would go into art conservation. Yeah. So when I graduated with my degree, I came back to Chapel Hill where I'm from, and did an internship with the conservation specialist at the Ackland Art Museum on campus. At Carolina. Her name is Lemkin line, and she's incredible. And I found the work to be so solitary. And I'm like a true extrovert by nature. And at the same time at the Ackland Art Museum, I was working as an educator with like field trip groups that would come in, I was a volunteer docent, and I loved it. And so I kind of had this moment where I decided I needed to shift from art conservation into education. But I didn't have a formal training, so I couldn't be a public school teacher. And as we can get into, I could just walk into a preschool and start teaching because I had my college degree. So I kind of slid sideways into the industry and kind of have been all in since then. So I've got my early childhood credentials, from Central Carolina Community College, and have been teaching and taking care of kids and babysitting and kind of all these different facets of the field. And I'm now kind of also facing down the administrative side of it as well.
Emily 3:43
That's really cool. It's really cool. The only one of the reasons I want to have you on it for many reasons. I think this is a you know, we live in a society where fertility rates are rapidly declining. Especially in the West, and you know, countries like Korea, and most of the developed world are experiencing like, you know, these huge collapses and fertility rates. And, you know, a lot of countries like Hungary have tried really hard to, you know, the all these, you know, pro stimulus programs, you're giving people money to have more kids buying the minivans, more free childcare, you know, all these different things. But I guess my question is, is about it. And what I found interesting, some things you mentioned, is like childcare, you know, as we have it today is kind of a recent developments, a new phenomenon. This is not the way we've always taken care of kids. It is a new development. Can you talk about like, you know, where we are now, how we got here, and how perhaps Child Care plays into, you know, the current collapse in fertility rates over time.
Unknown Speaker 4:53
Yeah, sure. So, just to clarify, when you're talking about fertility rates, you're talking about like, how many people are having kids? Yeah, Not necessarily like how many people are able to pregnant? So I want to go back to that for one second, because I have this interesting fact that I just recently came across on a podcast called no one is coming to say this. And it's, there are two countries in the world that offer no support incentivization of any kind from the government on any level. Yeah, the United States is one of them. No paid parental leave coming from the government. No. Child care, pensions, no. Support, no, like nothing, zero, zilch. And there's one other country in the world that's in the same boat. Do you want to guess what it is? Which one? Do I do? Papa New Guinea? Really? Yeah, I guess, US and Papa New Guinea, are apparently the two countries that have decided like parents, you are on your own if you make the poor life decision to have children. Good luck. Best of luck to you, but you're on your own? Yes. So yeah, I think that kind of sets up the problem, which is, is that we, you know, we decided as a society, that in the United States, it's in the best interest of everyone, people who have children, as well as people who don't have children, and never will, that children are cared for and educated so that we can have a functioning democracy and a civil society. And even 150 200 years ago, right. It was a family's job exclusively to care for their child until they were old enough to go to public school. And we have come to a place through a series of social changes for the better, where a lot of people want to have children, but they don't want to be solely responsible for caring for their child until their child can go to public kindergarten. And so we have this like, kind of quickly blooming need for a child care system, or infrastructure that doesn't exist. And so kind of to back up a little bit farther back from that. Do you want me to just go into kind of like the progression, or talk about some of the problems first,
Emily 7:18
let's talk about the progression. But I want to talk a little bit about what you just said. So it sounds like something where, okay, so you know, coming off of World War Two, everyone comes back starts having kids, everything's super, you know, norms around what you can do are pretty rigid. You know, everyone, you know, it's like picket fence, you know, everyone's getting married. A lot of like, a social pressure to do the same thing. You know, this, these things start to break down in the 60s. Yep, Woodstock, all these things start happening. And there's kind of a trade off, where suddenly we wouldn't start entering the workforce. And there's Yeah, going to college or college force. Yeah, they have a lot more flexibility what they can do instead of just being mothers. Or, like, you know, so this is a really good thing, like people have a lot more flexibility, they can do what they want to do. But perhaps this trade off against the fact that someone has to take care of the kids. And so suddenly, he creates a new industry, where, what do we do with children? You know, if both parents are working all the time,
Unknown Speaker 8:15
yeah, so that question kind of was posed societally much earlier than this much earlier than the 50s and 60s, you kind of like in the in the 1850s, and 1860s. You have, we have this realization in America, that there are some women and I want to be clear here that we're talking about white women. There were a philanthropist who recognize that some white women who were mothers had to work. And they were kind of like, for reasons that it was considered respectable for a woman to need to work. And that was if she were married, before she had children. So not having children out of wedlock, but she's married, she has children. And then her husband suffers one of what are called the Four DS, okay, he becomes a drunk, he becomes disabled, he dies or he deserts her Gotcha. So this is sort of like the, like, storm of circumstances by which philanthropists of the 1850s and 60s, look in societies specifically in cities and say, women, quite frankly, we could use them in the industrial workforce. And sometimes they have to work in order to provide food for their families. Their husband has suffered one of the four ds, and this is no fault of the woman. So let's help her out. Let's put together these things called Day Nurseries are very interesting. And so they were these very custodial, not educational programs that just kids could be dropped off in the morning and picked up in the evening and their mother could work to raise money to feed the family. And this was definitely not an enviable situation to be in as a woman, the mother child bond and was considered really sacred. And the idea that you might have to break that bond so that the mother could go to work was considered a bad thing. Gotcha. Because child rearing was done through through intuition through, like, what's the right way to say it? Generational habit. So you just raise your kids the way you were raised. And so the idea that a mother would be separated from her child was seen as a really negative thing. Yeah. Does that make sense? Yeah. So
Emily 10:30
it sounds like boy, do you think that was it was actually industrialization that drove the move to towards, you know, childcare, even existing, even more than, you know, the social changes that happen the 1950s and 60s?
Unknown Speaker 10:43
You know, I actually don't know that I can speak to what specifically? I mean, I guess timeline like time wise, you're definitely right. Yeah, I imagine they were like other social awareness factors that played a role there as well. But yeah, I don't know that much more about it. And then something kind of interesting happened. Kind of right on the heels of that, in the early 20th century, you have more white women going to college. And you have the emergence of the academic fields of child psychology, and child growth and development, sort of learning more about children's brains. And these fields grow really quickly in the early 1900s. And there's this major and pretty quick shift about the way people think about what best practice looks like when it comes to engaging with kids under five, it's there's this moment, like lightbulb moment of like, oh, like they can learn and they can be taught. And, in fact, they have like really spongy brains that can learn a lot really quickly. And they're, that's kind of like the beginning of what we now feel is true of about that period of time zero to five, which is like a really huge, a huge developmental period and a huge opportunity for learning. And sort of like an important formative period. And the early early child psychology and child development fields are the kind of the first academic fields that are pretty much exclusively developed by and dominated by women. Gotcha. And so like white women in academia, without a toehold into the academic world, and because this was a fairly new phenomenon, there was a really strong desire with the academic field and the educational research going on to distance themselves from the custodial Day Nurseries, to make this like strong distinction and contrast, like, we're not custodial. We're different. And so, in the early 1900s, you see the emergence of these, like, what became kindergarten, which then became tied to the public schools, these day schools that kids could go to, for socialization with peers, to be observed by psychologists to be taught by trained early childhood teachers kind of for the first time. And that comes along with this shift that maybe parenting by intuition, isn't the right answer, maybe just doing what your mom and dad did to you, isn't going to take us in a progressive direction overall, right. And so you see, these schools open up where kids would go for three to four hours, either in the morning, or the afternoon, but their mother would accompany them and stay with them. So this is not a child care scenario where the mother can then go to work, or even go to and carry out social calls or anything like that. This is an opportunity for the mother to then be further educated about how to best support her child during this time of growth and development. So it's sort of interesting that you have these two things, developing sort of around the same time, but really separate. And then the kind of the third thread, of course, is that we're talking only so far about white women and white families. So with the emergence of the Day Nurseries, we're still looking at the very end of of slavery in the United States. So black mothers are considered properties property of their owners, as are their children. So it's a totally different world when it comes to the way that we as a society see the mother's role, right? And after the slavery Emancipation Act, any non white mothers were excluded, and any non white families were excluded, both from Day Nurseries as well as from the kind of burgeoning childhood development and education programs of the early 1900s. And something that developed alongside of the education programs in the early 1900s. Was this the the the essentially the welfare system. They were called mother's pensions a long time ago, 100 years ago, and And the idea of a mother's pension had a lot of bipartisan support. In its auspices, it was this really like, warm, fuzzy idea that poor mothers should get help raising their children, because that's just what a decent society was like, we all care about the children, it's important to everyone that they thrive. And so if a family is economically harmed up, the state should step in and help. And the the policies put in place excluded non white women, not directly, but they were kind of proxies in there. So the example that I like to use is when you look at New Deal aid, you weren't eligible for that if you are a domestic worker, or an agricultural worker. And so when you look at the sectors of the population that were like doing domestic housework, it was largely black women. So it was a way to exclude them without directly calling out their race and gender. And then in the, like 1950s, and 60s and 70s. With the civil rights movement. Black mothers were kind of at the forefront of demanding equal access to aid from the state to raise their families, and rightfully gained access. And at that exact time, you see this pivot in the public perception of the welfare program. Yeah. And where as 50 years before, that, it was this wonderful thing that everyone supported, because like poor mothers sometimes needed help raising their children. But then you have the emergence of this myth of the black welfare queen, and women who are specifically having children or having more children in order to get extra income from the state, which just looking at the math was literally not possible to kind of thrive by having tons of babies. And so welfare reform of 1996 kind of turned that on its head, and it absolutely took away the guarantee of aid for low income women raising their kids and, and kind of put us in this in this place now, where you really can't talk about childcare needs of the family, or childcare as an industry looking both at the consumers and at the employees and the owners, without talking about the politics of like the race and racism and sexism that kind of got us here. Makes sense. Makes sense. It does make sense. Yeah.
Emily 17:30
Absolutely. So that kind of brings us up to the current moment, I suppose.
Unknown Speaker 17:37
Yeah. Yeah. Kind of the like, the big hiccup between what I just went through in the current moment is the pandemic, okay,
Emily 17:45
the visit pandemic, messing everything up? We'll get we'll get to that. Can you talk about the current moment right now? Like, you know, what is the state of American childcare? Like, how would you grade us? And yeah, just generally, how would you grade state of American childcare at this point?
Unknown Speaker 18:02
Like a scale A to F? Yeah, absolutely. I would give us like a solid, D. D, can you get it as a D? Plus a grade? Absolutely. Sure. Solid D plus, plus? Yeah. Yeah, um, I think like, there are kind of three ways that the system breaks down and fails. But I don't think I would like put us squarely in the failing category. Just because from working within that sector, I just can't I can't bear to, I think back on all my co teachers that I've had, and all the families I've engaged with, and all the kids, and I have like such a positive, positive, joyful, encouraged, wonderful memory of that work, but I can't slap a big red F on it. But I think one of the most challenging things that people talk about when they talk about childcare now, is the way that it squeezes parents. Gotcha. So there are kind of three big problems. One, we have a what a lot of people like to describe as a very threadbare childcare system. So across the country, so in a lot of places, it's very, very hard to find high quality childcare. Once you find it, because it's in very high demand, it's really hard to get in. So you hear people talk all the time about like, my wife, and I got pregnant. Before we even told our parents we were pregnant, we called all the local preschools and got on the waiting list, because the waiting list can be nine months, 15 months, two years, and so you have to plan way in advance or you're totally shut out. And then the other big problem is that if you can find good childcare and you can get in then it's extremely expensive in most cases. And so that's tough, like it sucks in a bunch of different ways. And one of the things that I find really interesting is the like the the part of that But I think I have the most insight into is parents as consumers of childcare and how to know what good childcare looks like, right breaks? That's kind of a tough question. There's a lot of different factors, it's a really personal question, because good childcare looks really different to different people. Yes, maybe your Christian family who really wants to pick a childcare where your child is going to be taught every single day about our Savior, Jesus Christ. And that's like, the most important characteristic of a facility, or, you know, maybe your, your family has a really different philosophy that's important. And so because childcare is not public, the way that public school is, there, all of these different types of schools, kind of competing for parents dollars, when it comes to what the value systems of the families are, make sense. And so I think that, when you think about a parent being a consumer have childhood education, they're kind of a short term consumer, right when you've had your first kid, and you're like, looking on Yelp, and all the childcare facilities in your town and the surrounding areas, you maybe don't know what to look for. And so you go into a bunch of schools, and you're just kind of trying to get a feel for what a good school looks like. And so a lot of schools have relied on kind of like two specific things to draw parents in. And in my mind, the two things that they rely on or like, kind of capitalize on are really misleading. And the two things that people rely on are like having a really beautiful, top notch sparkling facilities, right. So like a really nice building that's just incredibly clean, and we throw away all our blocks every six months and buy new ones that don't have teeth marks in the books don't have any rubbish pages. And it's hard to keep your stuff and your place looking nice. zero to five. But I think that has a dazzle factor that's a little bit undeniable to parents or the consumers, right. And then the other thing that a lot of facilities rely on that's become increasingly popular is just like, the hyper communicative nature. So there are a lot of apps that you can use. One of the most famous ones is called Bright wheel, and parents log on and teachers log on, and it's way for them to interface throughout the day. Yes. And so they can keep track of like how often your child's diaper is soiled. And whether it's like poop or pee and how much of their snack they eat, and how much of their lunch they eat, and how much of their breakfast they eat. And you can upload photos of them from like, every period throughout the day. And so parents like that kind of attention, and that kind of that detail. They like getting that detail. And they think, Oh, this is a like this must be a really good school. Because yes, everything is legit. And yeah, and it's well organized. And they're sharing all this information with me. And there's this idea that the most important thing when you hand your child over to someone else is that you can trust them. And if you don't know them, how do you do that? Right? Well, you literally have them communicate every single thing that happens without your with your child throughout the day. And then you don't even really have to be able to trust them. You're kind of there by proxy. Right? Exactly. And I think it's really dangerous to consider those kind of the main two markers of quality, right? And so when parents come to me, and they say, you know, you've worked in a couple of different schools in the area, you've been in early childhood education for a long time, I'm looking for a school for my infant, for my toddler for my four year old, what programs are good, what should I look for? I give the same answer every time. And I'm gonna give you a little bit of background about why what I tell them to ask is, what is your teacher turnover rate. And I want to know how many teachers who work at the school have been there for a year, how many have been there for three years, how many have been have been there for more than five years. And it's a, it's an industry that historically has just rapid fire turnover. So you can't compare it to a lot of other job sectors where people might stay longer. And, and also, in general, our society is trending in the direction of people job hopping more frequently, here in the triangle that maybe even happens more than normal, because this is a transitory area with people coming through because of the universities. So you have to take all that into account. But the most important thing, bottom line undeniably about a childcare center being good or bad is that the child has to be safe, and they have to feel safe, nice, and those aren't always the same thing. In fact, they're often not the same thing. So for a child to be safe, you have to be in a well run organized facility, where the teachers are attentive where the environment is set up carefully so that there aren't a lot of hazards. There are a lot of pieces of environmental policy that go into keeping children safe, right. But for a child to feel safe, they have to have a bond Did in predictable connection to an adult who's reliably they're at the mercy. Gotcha. So even if your child, even if you're getting your Brightwheel Brightwheel update every day saying your child ate three crackers and pooped at 10am, if there's a different teacher, at the first of every month filling that out, because the teacher turnover is really high, then your child is going to have really negative developmental consequences from that inability to bond with an adult at school from the inability to have a predictable environment. And it kind of makes, it makes the entire program suffer the parents, the children, the other teachers, the administrators. So to me, teacher turnover, like having high teacher turnover, or low teacher turnover is the best predictor of quality. But it's something that's never easy to to really judge, all you can do is like ask a center and hope they're telling you the truth, you know. So I think that one of the reasons it's hard for parents to know potentially, how to judge a program is that they're short term consumers of child care education. So you have your first kid, you're looking around for a good center, this place down the street, you can get in, we all can afford it, they'll tell you how much yogurt your kid ate all the info you need. And if you if you think about the way consumers engage in other markets, you need a little bit of trial and error time potentially, exactly. And if you only are consuming early childhood education for like, somewhere between two and five years, right? The trial and error steps are unique a in that the consequences of the errors are pretty high. You if you put your kid in a center, that feels really wonderful, but ends up not being a great fit, right? You know, it's a little bit worse than like getting a breakfast cereal that you don't care for, and you put in the trash. Right, exactly. And also your capacity to change your mind once you've decided to sign up for one school or consume one product is low, because you often have to put down a big security deposit, which it's hard to get into other places. Yeah. So kind of once, once you're in a center, if you look around and go, Oh, the things that I thought were important aren't important, or the things that I thought were were valued here aren't as valued as I thought, it's, it's really hard to switch gears because it's a big investment, both in time and money to do so. That makes sense. Yeah.
Emily 27:30
So this actually sounds quite important, because, you know, what I remember from my developments, little psych days, you know, there's kind of these these three factors that play into, you know, outcomes, the end of the day. For kids, it's like, you know, your genetics, it's your shared environment. And then it's your, you know, your family environment. And it seems like shared environment genetics play, the biggest role in shared environment is the biggest, like, estrus I have where it's like, wow, that seems like a very difficult thing to quantify. But the shared environment is like your school like, like what's going on, like, in with your peers, with your teachers? So it sounds like having, you know, consistency is one of the most important things you can screen for and look at.
Unknown Speaker 28:09
That's, that's my opinion, for sure. And that opinion comes from my own experiences working in facilities that had both high and load teacher turnover, kind of seeing this systemic impact that those trends have
Emily 28:23
makes sense. Makes sense? No, it makes a ton of sense. I'm curious, when we look at the price of childcare now, what do you think the biggest driver of like, why it's so expensive is I knew, you know, just just hearing about and following your experience trying to spin up a preschool, the licensure requirements, and like this, the insane bureaucracy, that all goes into it, the amount of time it takes, that has to contribute something, but is it something else, maybe like a Bumbles cause disease or something like that, where it is just hard to get productivity gains in the childcare sector? Because people, it's not like, you can watch so many kids at time, you can't scale that. There's no way I can make you more efficient over a certain certain amount of the kids can take care of at any given point in time. Yeah,
Unknown Speaker 29:10
that's kind of exactly it right there. So for most small community preschools, the overwhelming percentage of cost goes to your personnel. And if you think about it, a high quality infant program will have four infants for one teacher. And when you do the math on like, how much you'd like at the top end how much you can charge for an infant, and then how much you want to be paying that teacher. There's not a lot of margin in between that. So if you actually look at the programs in in the triangle area, infant care is one of the most anemic offerings, because you really, basically can't make money on taking care of infants in the programs that have infant care. The reason they have it is because it functions as kind of a farm system for their three to five year old program where you actually can maybe make a penny or two. Something that's interesting that's happened In the last couple of years, which I kind of touched on earlier is that I don't think I talked about earlier think about I talked about before we were recording the, the big business chain company, childcare centers have grown, like faster and 2021, than pretty much ever before. And they are kind of taking advantage of a couple of different things happening in this moment. One of them is that like smaller childcare centers are closing kind of what's the word for when you cut the tendon on the back of a horse's leg just enough so that when it raises it fails, cobbled. So the community like smaller independent schools were cobbled by the pandemic, and then we're in this kind of weakened state, which let these larger corporations which are attracting a lot of interest of private equity companies to kind of come in and take them over. So I have this interesting statistic from a New York Times article that just came out really recently about that industry about kind of like the big business side of child care. And let me see if I can find it. I got these all out of order.
Emily 31:18
Well, in while you find it, it does does seem quite interesting. You know, in context, it makes sense that private equity has been able to sweep through and buy up, you know, a lot of practices and you know, childcare centers and put them roll them up. Because I have just seen you, you know, struggle with you know, how do I get capital to get started? Yeah, I have extreme ability to get a lot of leverage and a lot of capital and even at this problem.
Unknown Speaker 31:42
And so one of the reasons that that has happened is because of the pandemic, right, all of a sudden, we're talking about how how directly childcare impacts the economy and the job market, and it's sort of like, childcare is open, and people can go to work or it's not, and they can, and there's not. So the pandemic really highlighted the importance of predictable, dependable childcare exactly for like, kind of like for the broader economic success of the nation. So that was why you have all these investors and, and other sectors as well, not just private equity investors, but kind of other people, all of a sudden, looking at this small piece of our infrastructure, and realizing how important it is and talking about it a lot more and stuff like that. So the 50, largest for profit childcare chains, open door acquired 537, new centers, and 2022. Oh, wow. And like I said earlier, like the rest of the sector is literally withering on the vine, like the centers are still closing. There's this huge labor shortage where these like, so those types of bigger companies can. They can charge premium prices, and just simply because of their volume, they can weather something like a pandemic better. And then they also can react better to the to the labor market pressures than a small company. So something that's happening right now really frequently is that smaller scale 2345 classroom, single location centers are not able to compete with compete for labor, with companies that are charging, like living that are that are paying, you know, 2015 $20 an hour and offering really competitive benefits. And that's something that breaks my heart because that's the job I have and had and create that job for other people by opening a school that really elevates the early child, early childhood teacher profession, yes, make it into a career and makes it something that you could raise a family on. And I can't I can't balance my budget to make that happen. Right. Kind of just because of the of, of on a small scale, the way the labor numbers and the tuition numbers work out.
Emily 34:06
Right, right. And I know this is not your ambition. But do you think it is possible? Two might be ambitious, but you think it is possible to create childcare centers at scale that are that actually do a good job.
Unknown Speaker 34:19
Can you talk more about what you mean, when you say at scale? Like you're talking about like the nationwide Corporation? Could
Emily 34:24
you do a nationwide corporation that actually does a good job of the day? You know,
Unknown Speaker 34:27
that's such a good question. And I need to think about that for a second.
Emily 34:34
Because definitely that you know, like in context, like, what's private equity doing? So private equity sees this opportunity where they go and they say, okay, we can buy these firms, we can fire a bunch of people. We can clean up operational processes, we can squeeze more margin, we have cheap access to capital. And so we can kind of leverage that up and get better returns. But is there a way to do it where you know, you're, you're mission driven and like we really want to help the kids and we can do it Job, we can make it affordable. We can use economies of scale to actually bring costs down and make the math work. Is that possible? Yeah.
Unknown Speaker 35:07
Okay. Okay. Yeah. I think, theoretically for sure. Definitely. It's not happening right now in any way. Yeah. And I think one of the really important things to think about here are the the, like, natural tension between education and business. Yeah. Right. So if you think about why it's really important to have a public education system, rather than a privatized education system for K through 12, there's, there's a really strong argument to be made there that you can't run a public education system like you can run a business. And I think a lot of those same tensions come into play when you're talking about these, like private equity backed large corporations, right, sweeping through the country, and like, vacuuming up all of these small community centers, and one of the things happening right now that's really problematic is that this exact development that we're talking about, with these big companies growing and small community schools feeling is that the bigger companies don't offer subsidized spots to students, because the, the amount that they can make on a subsidized tuition spot is far lower than what the parents are able and willing to pay. And so a lot of these like, top companies, some of the, the main ones that come to mind are Bright Horizons. There's a Primrose Academy Chang, there's Goddard school, all of those have locations here in the triangle. I'm not sure about Bright Horizons, but I know there's a Goddard and there's a Primrose. And from like a PR standpoint, they all talk about the importance of equity when it comes to early childhood education. But in practice, it's just not there. Right. And that's because they're their businesses that are driven on a national scale by the bottom line, and they will that will always always be at odds with the success of teachers and students, I think,
Emily 37:21
yeah, absolutely. I do think I do you think I would love Emily, I would love to see you. You try and tackle this problem? Because I do think there that there actually is an answer here where the problem currently, as I see it, and as you how you've described it to me, is that, you know, private equity backed childcare. It is truly like a spreadsheet game for the people who run these companies. Yeah. But I think a founder backed national chain, like an IT founder run for a long time, could actually solve a lot more of these problems, because you can put different things first, when you are when the founders of these organizations are still in charge, like this one startup plan, which is where I'm from, but you know, you can like when founders are still in charge, like the mission can still come first. That makes sense, in a way that it cannot win yet Professional MBA managers come in, you know, the Harvard, Stanford, Stanford, Wharton, the private equity folks come in, and they want to, what do they want to do? You know, it's all about squeezing process efficiencies. Today, the kid just gets squashed out of the equation.
Unknown Speaker 38:26
Yeah. Yeah, it's a really kind of interesting way to look at like, traditional market forces on a business because it doesn't quite fit the mold. Because the like, your if you consider a school, kind of like, analogous to a business, your customer is the child technically, right. Guess the parent hearing. So so you're trying to serve it gets, it gets a little bit murky, when, like the best interests of the child when they're at odds with the best interests of the company. Ran of like, exactly get steamrolled.
Emily 39:04
Yes, yes. Yeah. I do think you could actually get you could get past it if you are a founder led company, and you made these things explicit. And, but But you cannot with, you know, NBA managed, you know, massive childcare conglomerates,
Unknown Speaker 39:19
is what a lot of ways when you when you're talking about the economy of scale of the of like it's undeniably attractive, right? Because there's a stability to weather things with the size, and it just kind of opens up the door to more more potential resources. And you also have to invent the wheel fewer times. You know, one of the criticisms there was a comparison in this article in The New York Times about private equity in childcare, post pandemic, and they interviewed a woman in Maryland who runs her own small community based preschool and she has a 50% or more of her Students are subsidised students, so she has a really, she has a blend of students in her school that represents the like socio economic blend of her greater community. Whereas these are the schools that they're comparing her to in the direct area, which are these like Bright Horizons, Primos Academy schools, they just are like the whitest wealthiest kids in the area. And so there's a real value to that. But she was saying, if I were part of that franchise, I would have someone else doing my marketing, I would have someone else doing my bookkeeping, I would I would be able to do what I really want to do. As an educator specialist, which is focused on supporting the teachers focus on supporting the families focus on best practice about learning about, you know, how we can change our environment, how we can tweak things here and there instead of like, figuring out how to update to the newest version of QuickBooks. And so there's a way that kind of like sharing those resources on a large scale is really appealing for sure,
Emily 40:57
yeah. And you cut costs that way. And if you did it the right way, you can really make things make things better. Very covert, I want to talk a little bit now. This is an issue that is actually getting traction, kind of across the global political spectrum. Now, I think people understand that we've done a bad job supporting families generally, especially with you know, I think in the context of the Child Tax Credit, which has gotten good support from across the aisle mourn cast and, and folks like that, and I hear a lot of my friends on the right, who are like, actually interested in these kinds of family support programs now, I think, yeah, in context of the pandemic, and a lot of things happening. Do you Do you think there's a good future there for more federal support?
Unknown Speaker 41:39
Yeah, I do. And I think, well, I don't know. I really hope so. And I think that they're kind of a couple of things coming together at once we were at this point in time where there was there, there was and continues to be so much research coming out about the importance of the zero to five years, from simply a formative formative perspective, and how formative those years are, but also, in terms of what, like quality care, and quality support for a family during that time, can indicate way down the road for a child in terms of like life success. And so there was already this increasing interest, increasing funding kind of growing momentum in that field, pre pre pandemic, and then we have the pandemic. And there's like, even more attention to how important childcare during zero to five is for the nation. And it's sort of like, parents and providers right now are shouldering this independently. But the government through tax revenue and businesses, yes, through labor, labor forces that have the capacity to work because they have reliable childcare are benefiting from it. And so there's this idea of who's going to step in and help the parents and the providers because they're drowning right now. And, to me, the only way forward that makes sense is for federal and state funding to go into the system and to support it. And I think if you look at the political landscape of the last couple of years, we have, we got like, we got real, real close. And even looking back farther in history, we got really, really, really close. I mean, we had a federally funded child care system during World War Two when women had to go into the workforce. And it was amazing. And as soon as the war ended, and all the soldiers came home, and they needed to go back into the jobs, and they needed the women to vacate the jobs, it just kind of like, all went right back to the way it was more or less, but it was this time that we can look back at and say, this worked, and we can do it. And we did it once. I know we can do it again. And there was another time in the 60s, I think when there was a senator from heaven in my notes, Senator,
Emily 44:00
can you talk about the world war two example? Do you know much more about that?
Unknown Speaker 44:04
Yeah, yeah. So um, so the Lanham Act, I think it was 1941. Let me find my notes. Yeah, the Lanham Act of 1941 put into place a system of federally funded childcare centers for zero to five year olds. And they were designed around shifts that their mothers would be working, going, like, you know, thinking of Rosie the Riveter flex bicep, like, that's who they're supporting. And they were comprehensive in a lot of ways. I heard an interview recently, between a woman who taught at one schools was really, really really old and one of her students who remembered going and there weren't a ton of them. And there were lots of different levels depending on like, what area of the country you're in and how close to like industry hubs you are. But this man had been a student at one of the them had really vivid really rosy memories of being a student at the school. And the schools were really well supported. They had doctors and nurses on site. They had developmental specialists advising curriculum. They, they trained teachers, so that they were not just kind of like a babysitter thrown into the room, but they were kind of like, supporting them and learning kind of best practices and tips and tricks. Some of the center's not all of them, but some of them included a meal service as well, so that when a mom went to pick up her child, she could also pick up a meal to then take home as warm and serve her family since she's not at home. Five years earlier, she would have been. And so it was this like kind of idyllic, really beautiful, expensive, but unnecessary, exactly deemed unnecessary support that families got in this time when kind of like, coming together as a nation. So it felt really important and was supported, of course, in a totally bipartisan way. Yeah.
Emily 46:07
Well, and I bet, I wonder if you have the figures, but I'm sure it was probably not as expensive as, as we would imagine, you know, just looking back at how how cost diseases affected our society, just, you know, even in transit costs, where things just cost, you know, 100 times what they did just to build during the 1940s. You know, I bet it was probably surprisingly cost effective at the end of the day.
Unknown Speaker 46:32
Yeah, I don't know, really anything about the budget numbers and what they looked like. But it was done really quickly. And really successfully. And so that's not to say that it was done with ease. But yes, I think there's something there's a takeaway there and sort of looking at how quickly the Act was passed, and how quickly the schools materialized. Yeah. And then unfortunately, how quickly they laid Exactly. Poof of smoke. Yeah,
Emily 47:01
but it is a good reminder that we do have the ability to do things like this. And it doesn't have to take long, but we have lost a lot of state capacity, a lot of talent or something, or something weird is going on where our government is just not as capable as it used to be, you know, in the 40s. And the 50s.
Unknown Speaker 47:17
In terms of like, getting shit done. Yeah, just generally. Yeah. So there was actually another moment since those World War Two schools where we got really, really, really, really close. Yeah. And it's, it's kind of like an interesting anecdote, this guy, Walter Mondale, who OH, YES. Jimmy Carter. Yeah. So he, as a senator proposed a bill in 1971, called the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Yeah. And it was a reaction to this really big news story that made news nationwide. In 1968, a child in Washington DC had been had been walking home, during the middle of his school day, he was a public school aged child, he was walking home to, to his, to his house by himself. And he was hit by a truck and killed. And the media picked it up and wrote stories about him. And when they're kind of digging into his background, it came out that the reason he was walking home, was that every day he left school in the middle of the day, during his lunchtime to walk home and check on his toddler baby brother, oh, well was left at home alone, because their mother had to work and couldn't afford childcare. And so this child, I think he was six or seven or eight, would walk home every day, share his lunch with his baby brother, check on him, and then walk back to school. And so the senator Mondale was kind of like, looking for some policy to get it to get kind of like to get going and to kind of get traction in this particular area. And that story was, was really attractive, because it kind of made it really, really clear was this sad anecdote that crystallized this idea that like, what are we doing as a country like we need to fix this. And so the the, the, both the Senate and the House were in democratic control at the time, but they did pass the bill. And the Nixon administration signaled that they would sign it. And then there's actually audio recording of a phone call between Ronald Reagan who was a senator in California at the time and Nixon, and it's impossible to say specifically that that interaction or that phone call is what is what caused Nixon to ultimately veto the bill but in this phone call that you can access, he's saying this is a really big problem. This is a this is people who want the child the state to take over the rearing of the child which should be something that mothers do and sort of this kind of anti in my mind, it's like this anti progressive reason to to kill this bill. But you know, that's another moment we look at the World War Two schools we look at We look at kind of the the, the mother's pensions and the Day Nurseries and all of these steps that we've taken along the way to say this is something that as a society, we think is really important that we think we need to do, and we need to provide. And kind of since the 70s, we've just been sleeping on it. And nothing has really happened until, you know, you would never hope for a global pandemic to highlight something like this, but it has put a lot more eyes on the issue for sure made things much more clear. Yeah, yeah, made things much more clear to a lot of people for whom they weren't already clear. Because there were a lot of people who were already really aware of kind of how challenging a lot of things were from a lot of perspectives.
Emily 50:37
That's great. That's great. Very cool. Very cool. Well, Emily, is there anything else we haven't covered that we want to cover?
Unknown Speaker 50:44
I wanted to just take a minute to talk a little bit about why I think this is a really important field. Because we've kind of spent the last little bit of time trashing it essentially, and talking about a lot that's wrong with it. And, you know, my experience as a preschool teacher, when I, when I worked before the pandemic, when I worked full time, as a teacher, I worked really hard, I worked full time hours in the classroom. And then I also had, I had, I was really lucky, I was at a job where I had paid planning time, and I had benefits, and I made a living wage. And that put me in a pretty elite category when it came to daycare workers and childcare providers. Yeah, for children under five. And that, honestly, taking that job was the first time that I thought maybe this can be a career because I had worked in preschools before. And thought this is just something that some women because I've only ever worked with women, some women do, until they're 2526. And then they have to get a real job because you can't support you can't certainly can't support a family, but you can't really support an individual adult on the money that I was making at other centers where you're making eight 910 $11 an hour. Um, but i i So I think of this joke that sort of knocked around in the industry, which is why did the preschool teacher cross the road? And the answer is to get to her second job. When I was working full time, I just poured myself into my job I worked so hard, I was young, and I didn't have a family, I didn't have a lot of other things that I divided my time between. But before and after work, I coached classes in a CrossFit gym for extra extra money. I played drums in a rock'n'roll band, which was an extra source of income. And I did a lot of like babysitting nanny and house sitting on the nights and on the weekends. So that I could kind of cobble together what felt like an income that I could live the life I wanted to live on. And most people could only do something like that at a certain point in their life, you know, that's not something you can kind of carry on long term. That's not true. It is something that lots of people carry on long term and do forever. But that's really unfair. And so I kind of got interested back then looking at myself, looking at my coworkers looking at the way all of these centers were designed, which is you, you build a center, and then you hire people who are young and don't have a family or who have a partner that makes three times more money than and those those are the only that's the pool of people you can hire because that's what you can afford to pay, or what you're choosing to pay. And so I felt like there just had to be a different model to, to work from or because I think that this is a job that's really, really, really important. Yes, and really fun. And I think I put this in my notes, but I hate using the word rewarding because it's so like, I teach because it's rewarding. It just sounds really trite, I think but what I mean specifically is that when parents have one children, child or two children or three children, under the age of five all at once, that's the rush hour of their life as a family like it's crazy. Yeah. And the needs that they have always outstrip what two parents can provide, right kind of no matter what. So, and also, the things that you have to worry about, generally as a parent are very big in scope. So to feel like you can step in as an expert in zero to five year old children, and be a sounding board for a parent and be a safe place for them to like, take their kids on board during the day while they're going to work and be a person that they trust to take care of their kids like that's a tremendous, tremendous bowl you over honor for a chat for a parent. Most parents, their children are the most important things in their whole entire life. Exactly. So for them to come to you and say, Here's my child, my life, Mike everything. Please take care of me while I go to work. That's a really, really big deal. So to get to do that, and to get to be a support system. to a family that's in this period of time, that's just insane where things are crazy is feels like a really valuable worthwhile thing to do. So that's kind of what I mean when I say that it is like a rewarding job to do. And it's also just really fun, really dynamic, really hysterical. And I have done lots of different types of jobs and lots of different types of industries, and just love this the most. And it makes me feel really sad that this is a job that we can all agree as a society is a really important, valuable, unnecessary. And it's a job that people want to do. But there's not really a workable way to make money doing it. And that that seems crazy to me, because all the all the ingredients are there to make this like an elevated career option. And we're just not there yet.
Emily 55:55
Definitely Delhi. Well, you're working on solving that. It's good. It's good. It's really good. No, it's It's inspiring,
and I'm glad you're admiring the problem and working on ethical, definitely get there. Where can people find you? Where should we send them?
Unknown Speaker 56:08
You know, I don't have any social media. Nice. So I guess, if someone like, I love talking about this stuff, and I love, like, if anyone has any questions about anything that I talked about, specifically what my resources are, oh my god, I would love to talk more about that. If anyone is listening to this and going. I can't believe she didn't talk about this particular study or this particular social initiative. Like I wonder if that's on her radar. I would love to know that. And so the best way to get in touch with me is just email. And my email is Emily day@gmail.com. The
Emily 56:41
deal? Yeah, I'll put a link down down in the show notes. Yeah. Great.
Unknown Speaker 56:45
Thank you. Thanks, Emily. Thanks so much. This was fun. It's awesome.
Emily 56:52
Special thanks to our sponsor, Bismarck analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence grade analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck free and brief dot biz market analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work in music at Donovan dorrance.com
129: Emily Harrawood - The Past, Present and Future of Childcare