Brown: Child care is expensive, but no one is getting rich from it

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In the lobbies and lounges of our state’s second-tier country clubs, you’ll find people who built generational wealth running assisted living facilities. But you won’t find a child care tycoon.

Nobody gets rich on day care, for reasons parents well understand: Children are deeply unprofitable. They’re not team players and seem wholly unconcerned with PTO policies at Mom or Dad’s workplace. Despite this, children are, if Whitney Houston is to be believed, “our future.” Worst of all, we love them so very much.

Medicare and Medicaid don’t fund child care like they do senior care, nor do children or their parents have a life’s savings to dump into the enterprise. County and state funds help low-income families, but not nearly to the same degree they do seniors. That’s why senior care facilities are often part of massive corporate networks with names like “Esperanto” while child care facilities are usually run by one highly caffeinated individual.

That means if working parents want to pay their bills in an increasingly expensive world, they must pay for their own child care. And they’ll pay dearly. According to Child Care Aware of Minnesota, families pay anywhere from $152 per week to $388 per week, depending on the age of the child and type of facility, with higher rates in the Twin Cities metro area. That means up to $21,000 per year in Minnesota, one of the highest rates in the country. For these prices, parents might rightly assume that someone’s getting rich.

But it’s certainly not the employees. A preschool teacher in Minnesota earns an average of $15.85 an hour, according to the Early Childhood Workforce Index. A child care worker makes just $11.48. My teenage sons made more during their summer jobs last year. Child care employment also comes with training requirements that workers typically pay for themselves.

Child care centers aren’t making big profits, either. Whether private, nonprofit or public, most facilities make just enough to get by, which is why you don’t see Amazon or Walmart rushing to compete with them.

“Parents sometimes don’t understand that these high rates don’t go into our pockets,” said Beth Lindquist, director of the Open Arms of Grace Child Care Center in Hibbing. “Everything goes into food and payroll.”

Lindquist said her biggest challenge is finding people to take on this important work for such low wages.

My mother spent two decades caring for toddlers and infants at northern Minnesota child care facilities, including Open Arms of Grace. I helped do her taxes all those years, often incredulously. How could a woman make so little to care for the children of much wealthier people? She would even spend her limited funds on classroom supplies, likely ingesting more glitter than steak over the course of her career.

“Early childhood education is looked down upon and it shouldn’t be,” said Heather Pinkoski, assistant director at Open Arms of Grace. “A doctor can’t treat you if they can’t get to work. A banker can’t give you a loan if they’re home with three kids. A clerk at the store can’t serve you if they don’t have child care.”

The high cost and low availability of child care force some families into difficult decisions.

For Randali Watson, having three young children meant putting her career on hold. Child care was just too expensive. But a few years later, she started exploring job opportunities. After using an occasional drop-in child care service at Milestones Child Care Center in Virginia, Minn., she approached the owner about a job. Soon, she was the manager.

“The lack of resources and funding puts constraints on what we could offer families,” said Watson. “Everything from the licensing requirements and restrictions down to the funding and requirements for teachers. It’s important, but you have to help them afford it. You can’t pass that along to the families.”

Watson left to become a pediatric nurse. Now she’s going to school to become a physician’s assistant. Though her children now range in age from 8 to 12, she still needs child care services to complete her goal. And it’s an important goal. Rural areas desperately need medical providers. Here we see that the availability of child care has a multiplying effect on society as a whole.

So, to recap, here’s the situation. Parents pay lots. Providers earn little. When the Legislature spends freely, like it did in 2023, it can make an impact, but the crisis remains. The fact is, it would take an unlikely fortune to meaningfully improve our current system. What do we do?

On Monday, child care providers across the state will participate in “A Day Without Child Care,” shutting down their facilities to lobby the Legislature and hold awareness events in communities across the state.

This will build awareness of the problem, but even the providers know that solving it won’t be easy.

Legislators from both parties currently have several bills in the hopper.

State Sen. Grant Hauschild, DFL-Hermantown, released a slew of proposals. One bill allows for tax credits and savings plans to cover child care expenses. Other proposals include allowing providers to exclude some of their own children from state limits, creating variances for some regulations, and property tax relief for eligible child care facilities.

A bipartisan group of senators proposes easing staff licensing requirements for certain busy times of day. A House bill by state Rep. Paul Torkelson, R-Hanska, would overhaul staff qualification requirements.

State Sen. Julia Coleman, R-Waconia, wants to create a skills path program to make it easier for high school students to go directly into the workforce, including child care, with on-the-job training.

Ultimately, there’s widespread bipartisan support for reforms, but politics is the art of the possible. Not all these proposals will become law, and few create new revenue to support living wages for staff.

Another more direct approach doesn’t require government action. Employers, especially those who pay lower wages, should invest in child care for their workers. At minimum, they could allow space for child care centers on site, though this doesn’t guarantee providers will be any more profitable than off-site child care.

Better yet, employers could invest in child care subsidies for their workers. Doing so would attract desperately needed workers, aid productivity and reduce lost-time absences.

We see examples. In Fergus Falls, the PioneerCare assisted living facility also operates PioneerKids, a child care center for the dependents of employees. Many community and technical colleges house child care centers on their campuses.

After all, someone does financially benefit from the high cost of child care: employers. Their cash-strapped workers arrive every morning, a little frazzled sometimes but nevertheless able to generate profits and productivity for their bosses.

Those employers would enjoy even better results if they invested in making their employees’ lives easier. They’d attract and retain the workers they say they need.

Not everyone can afford to leave the workforce when they start a family. Many people really do want to work if they can actually take home the money they earn to a family that’s well cared for. The lack of a social contract — whether provided by government or responsible businesses — got us in this mess. Getting out of it will require public and private solutions.

Children cost money, whether they are raised entirely at home or in a community of care. The people who provide the care aren’t in this for the money, but they deserve the same reward for their labor as anyone else. These kids aren’t some social burden, but rather the badly needed workers, creative problem-solvers and Social Security-funding taxpayers of our not-too-distant future.

I asked several providers what they would do to solve the problem if they were all-powerful. They struggled to answer the question. The problems are clear, lack of funding chief among them. But they share reservations about excessive government spending.

At the same time, this expense cannot be borne by families alone. For those who balk at public intervention on this cause, consider that the nation’s biggest employers could do more than anyone to solve this problem. That is, if they considered child care the value-added investment it really is.

Aaron Brown is a contributing columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune. He focuses on the people, news and culture of the Iron Range and northern Minnesota. He can be reached at ironrangewriter@gmail.com.