Child Care
WHEN TORI BOWIE'S autopsy report was released in June, the cause of death stunned many track fans. The 32-year-old sprinter had won several medals at the 2016 Olympics. On May 2, Bowie was found dead in her apartment; the one-time “World’s Fastest Woman” had been eight months pregnant and was in labor when she died.
Bowie’s tragic death caused renewed attention to an ongoing health crisis affecting Black women in the United States. Despite being relatively young and in presumably good health, Bowie’s autopsy indicated she suffered from eclampsia and respiratory distress, pregnancy complications experienced by Black women in the U.S. at much higher rates than other demographics.
In Pregnant While Black: Advancing Justice for Maternal Health in America, Dr. Monique Rainford addresses this troubling truth: Black mothers in the U.S. are dying. They face more risks in pregnancy than white and non-white Hispanic women living in the United States.
IN THE VAST and often overlooked landscapes of rural America, families face unique challenges. One critical issue stands out: the child care crisis. Our family-run produce farm in Ohio has been in production for 28 years. With three generations working to create a viable business to support our growing family, we know something about the need for child care in rural areas. The 2023 U.S. Farm Bill presents a crucial opportunity to address this pressing issue and foster early childhood development in rural communities.
The child care crisis is not unique to rural America, but rural Americans are more impacted by the lack of access to licensed child care. For example, 59 percent of rural communities are “child care deserts” compared to 56 percent of urban and 44 percent of suburban communities, according to a 2018 report by the Center for American Progress. In rural communities, families often struggle to find accessible, affordable, and high-quality options. Remote locations, limited infrastructure, and lack of providers exacerbate the challenges. The crisis not only hampers parents’ ability to work but also impedes the economic imperative to attract younger farm families to replace aging American farmers — more than half of whom are within a decade of retirement. The price of health insurance and the lack of child care make full-time farming out of reach for many younger Americans.
Healing from religious harm: Why compassionate community is part of the journey.
As congregations age and shrink across the U.S., churches find their sizable buildings often become underutilized. The solution might be found in addressing the child care crisis.
ENSURING THAT EVERY child can realize their full potential is a civic and faith imperative. Yet millions of children in the United States are having their futures sabotaged due to a lack of care, stimulation, and nutrition between birth and age 3. These three years, often referred to as the period of early child development, or ECD, are the most fragile and formative because most of a child’s brain is developed during this period. During the first few years of life, a child’s brain forms more than a million neural pathways every second and grows to 90 percent of the size of an adult’s brain by age 6. As a result, this period can determine whether a child realizes their full potential. The things young children learn, the experiences they have (and the amount of damaging stress to the brain they suffer), and the love and care (or lack thereof) they receive can all have an outsized impact on their lifelong mental, emotional, and physical health.
During my time working at World Vision and the World Bank, I became passionate about the crisis of ECD in low- and middle-income countries, a cause that remains urgent. However, I have become increasingly convicted about the imperative to also address the child development crisis in the U.S. Tragically, the U.S. is not doing well by its youngest generation, especially when compared to similarly wealthy nations. More than 9 million children in the U.S. face food insecurity, which hampers their healthy brain development, and in the last year, 1 in 7 children experienced child abuse or neglect. Without affordable child care, millions of children become at risk for “adverse childhood experiences” that could lead to debilitating impacts on their health and well-being.
Today marks one year since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic. As we enter year two of this pandemic in the middle of Women's History Month, we must reckon with the fact that women have disproportionately felt the negative impacts; the fallout of this inequity will be felt for years to come.
There’s no way I could imagine forgetting this baby nursing at my breast. Not only wouldn’t my body allow me that, feeding my son wasn’t an obligation or a duty. It was a time I looked forward to with joy. Even those middle of the night wake-ups were still one more opportunity to snuggle that sweet little boy.
Many people, both inside and outside of the church, spoke about the problem of child care according to the same reasons. They viewed it as a complex, local problem with complex, local solutions. A team of parents attempted to create a new center and soon discovered the massive amount of capital, time, energy, and attention it would take. Everyone involved insisted that some solution must be possible if only we could bring together various stakeholders in the community to find a way to provide child care for those that need it. But this obscures the truth about the problem of child care in capitalism: It’s not complex and local, but big and universal.