With low childcare supply, long waitlists, and very high costs, families are struggling. Compared to 2019, millions of women remain out of the labor force. And we all pay for families’ problems, personally or collectively, through lost educational or economic opportunities–and slower economic growth, now and in the future.
But these struggles to find and afford child care are not new. They are decades old, and they are a consequence of our collective failure to invest in early education–making our current choices more critical. Recognizing the inflection point our society is staring down, more than 120 of our nation’s leading economists and policy experts are sounding the alarm about the urgent economic case for building a child care system that actually works for families.
The above excerpt was originally published in Inside Sources.
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