Every day, more than eighty percent of the nation’s preschool-aged children are cared for during the day by someone other than a parent. The increasing need for qualified daycare workers has produced an industry where the hands-on workers who provide the actual services are in high demand. Yet, the childcare industry boasts some of the lowest paid workers in the country.
Even more important, the people who spend the day with our children are responsible for imparting a wealth of information that was once the sole territory of one or more of the child’s parents. Where Sesame Street and Romper Room once taught basic skills and manners, overwhelmed and underpaid workers are juggling an entire room full of active toddlers and preschoolers, leaving little time for any real and meaningful interactions with any of them.
Child daycare centers are luring more working parents with the promise of social interaction and structured environments for their kids. How can an industry, which pays its workers little more than minimum wage, produce the next generation of fine, upstanding citizens? The truth is; it can’t.
The average child care worker earns less than $20,000.00 per year. Because of this, and the lack of benefits and incentives for industry workers, child daycare organizations experience an excessively employee turnover rate and have witnessed the education level of its workers steadily decline. In essence, child daycare industry jobs are better suited for high school dropouts than educated and knowledgeable providers. And, many of the higher-skilled workers who are working in these low-paying positions are only doing so as part of an early childhood education program that they, themselves, are participating in and they leave for better paying positions as soon as they finish their own education.
In a cruel parody of the nation’s educational crisis, qualified child daycare workers can’t afford to remain in these low wage positions, but our children can’t afford for them to leave.
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