Oregon child care shortage is impacting parents’ employment, survey shows

In a recent survey of Oregon parents, 40% responded that they or their partner had to quit, turn down or “greatly change” their job in the last year due to difficulty finding child care. It also found that families of color and those who speak a language other than English were more likely to be impacted. The findings reflect similar surveys from 2020 and 2019 which showed that the high cost and limited availability of child care slots in the state present major challenges for parents.

Katherine Pears is a senior scientist and science director at the Oregon Social Learning Center, a nonprofit research organization that conducted the survey. She joins us to talk more about the challenges facing both families and child care providers.

Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. In a recent survey, 40% of Oregon parents said that they or their partner had to quit, turn down, or greatly change their job in the last year because of difficulty finding childcare. The study also found that families of color and those who speak a language other than English were more likely to be impacted. It’s just the latest study to show that the high cost and the limited availability of childcare slots continue to present major challenges for parents in Oregon. Katherine Pears is senior scientist and science director at the Oregon Social Learning Center, that’s a nonprofit research institute in Eugene that conducted the survey. She joins us now. Welcome to the show.

Katherine Pears: Hi, thank you for having me.

Miller: Thanks for joining us. Can you remind us why the state asks you to do these surveys?

Pears: The state has been really interested in understanding what parents of kids who are aged zero to five really need in terms of childcare, whether they need it, what they want, as well as what kinds of barriers they’re experiencing when they’re trying to find childcare. So they’ve done a series of surveys starting in 2019. This latest one that we’re talking about today was done at the end of last year.

Miller: Let’s turn to this 40% finding, which is really one of the most striking ones. What are the questions you ask to get at the connection between employment and childcare?

Pears: Well really, you’ve said it right there. We were interested in knowing straight out, if families had had any sort of need to stop employment or not do another job that they wanted to take because of disruptions or inability to find childcare. And so when we asked straight up, and that hasn’t been a question that we’d asked before so this was new this year, we found that 40% of the families were really struggling.

Miller: What are the different scenarios that could all be included in this? For example, what might it mean for someone to greatly change their job because of a lack of access to childcare?

Pears: Well, I think we’ve heard from families that there are often times when they would perhaps have a job [that wasn’t] the 9:00 am to 5:00 pm that we think of, and the 7:00 am to 6:00 pm that a lot of childcare programs run. And so say they had a better paying job that happened to be shift work, but they couldn’t find care for those evening hours or for hours that are kind of out of that usual zone. And we know that work takes place outside of those hours, but there often isn’t care during that time.

Miller: How common is it for there to be childcare that would actually, say, be from 2:00 pm to 8:00 pm?

Pears: Awfully uncommon. The kinds of programs that are most likely to offer those sort of out-of-time times are home based and family based programs that are often run out of an individual’s home, and are more likely to have the ability to stretch those hours, or might be more likely to be willing to do that for sure.

Miller: How much of the employment repercussions is a question of the price of childcare as opposed to the number of slots or the hours for those slots?

Pears: That is a very good question, and I’m not sure that I can answer it definitively. What I can say is that when we ask parents to tell us what’s working well for them or what’s not working well, top on the list of things that are not working well are cost, for sure.

The second thing that comes up was the number of arrangements that parents need to get the child care they need. And so that means that parents could have an infant and a toddler and a five year old, and all of those kinds of care are very different, and there may be fine slots for preschoolers like a toddler and a and a five year old, but infant care is very hard to get. They may have to drop their infant off at one program across town, and then drop their other two kids off elsewhere. And so that puts a huge burden on parents and takes a lot of time. So that’s like the second biggest reason.

And when they’re asked about it, the third largest reason is the hours that care are available. Those are the three major big culprits, let’s say, in terms of being barriers for parents to have care.

Miller: So to zero in on the first one, on cost, what does the average childcare slot cost in Oregon right now?

Pears: It depends on the age of the child. Unfortunately, I don’t have that data right at my fingertips. But it’s too high for many parents to be able to afford. We know it’s in the thousands, and we hear a lot from parents who say that by the time they pay for childcare, it’s not worth them having the employment because the money that they’re getting from their employment is not covering the childcare.

Miller: Right, if it costs, say, $40,000 for childcare and you make $40,000, what are you doing?

Pears: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Let’s turn to demographics. What groups have been hit hardest in terms of access to childcare?

Pears: When we talk about whose employment is suffering, we definitely see families of color who have higher rates of saying that they’ve had to change their jobs, and families whose primary home language is not English, as well as families with children who have developmental disabilities or delays or chronic medical needs. So families who are already historically, due to systemic issues as well as other issues, at a disadvantage. And so having to struggle for child care is putting yet a further burden on them and their abilities to retain employment.

Miller: One of the new topics you looked into for this survey is expulsions from preschools or daycare centers, or kids maybe temporarily being told that they can’t attend these locations. What are the reasons that might happen?

Pears: The number one reason when you ask parents why their child was asked to leave care is that they were told by the providers that they could not provide them with services. And generally, that means that they couldn’t manage the child’s behavior towards children or adults. That’s the primary reason [and] about a third of all parents who had a child asked to leave care talked about that. And then the other reasons are things like not being able to meet their health or physical care needs, not being able to meet the children’s developmental needs. But when you ask parents, and when you ask providers themselves, it’s behavioral most of the time.

Miller: How common is this?

Pears: Well, if you ask parents, you find that about 9% of the children had been asked to leave care in the past year. If you ask providers themselves, which we’ve done in another series of surveys that we have done over the past several years, about 20% of programs will say that they’ve asked a child to leave. So those are slightly different numbers, but they’re high. We don’t want any child to leave, but bordering on 10% of children being asked to leave care, that’s high.

Miller: We’ve talked on this show, and I think there’s been a societal discussion about exclusions from K-12 school systems. But I feel like there’s a lot less attention to earlier exclusions like this. Why is this important?

Pears: Well, you’re absolutely right, there’s been a lot less attention, and in fact I’ve been told by people “preschoolers don’t get expelled.” And that’s wrong, they do. Sometimes, as you mentioned earlier, it’s under a different name like “oh, you need to take a break” or “oh, we can’t really meet your child’s needs.” But that is still asking them to leave care.

The reasons that it is not good for the K-12 level children are the same reasons that it’s not good for your preschoolers. You’re depriving them of having experiences of early learning experiences from which they might benefit. You are potentially labeling them early as being problematic, which is gonna then follow them. And you’re having the same kinds of effects on their parents that it would have on a K-12 parent, but probably in some ways maybe worse. We asked families, in about 25% of the cases where children were asked to leave care, the kids did not return to any kind of care. So then those parents’ employment is interrupted, they have to find another way to be able to work.

Miller: At the same time, I imagine that the people who are running these centers, whether it’s home-based or at a larger location, they don’t want to be expelling these young people from their systems. I imagine they’re saying “we did this because we don’t have the resources to assure the safety of the other young people or of our staff.” What did you hear from people who are running these centers about these decisions?

Pears: When we asked them about it, as I said, the biggest challenge is in children’s behavior. And you’re right, nobody is working in the early childhood education arena unless they have a passion for helping children and families. It’s not paid well enough. These providers really do care. And what we see is a need. Providers also know that they need help with challenging behaviors. If you ask them, about 50% of providers will tell you that they have in the past year needed help with behavior that they seem to be challenging. They’re asking for help, they’re not doing this without thinking about it.

I do wanna just say that one of the very interesting parts of what we found when we ask parents and providers about levels of expulsion is that family and home-based programs actually have much lower levels of asking children to leave. And yes, they’re smaller, but they actually often have smaller numbers of staff. That finding, we haven’t unpacked it yet, it needs to be unpacked a little bit more. But it does suggest that there’s something there to be learned from those programs that are smaller where providers might have more time to talk with parents, where they might have more of a relationship built up with parents, so they can address issues as they come up.

Miller: Is that your best theory right now? Your title is all about science, so I imagine you’re not crazy about conjecture not based on data.

Pears: Correct.

Miller: But what is your theory now? Because it’s a fascinating finding. I guess I might have imagined the opposite, that in a home-based center, a smaller one, there would be maybe less tolerance for behavior that falls outside of the established norms, and I can imagine people saying, “sorry, not at my home, I can’t have this here.” So why do you think it’s different?

Pears: I think there are a couple of reasons. I think that idea that there’s a relationship, that there’s just more time, smaller number of children, smaller numbers of families attending, and there’s perhaps time to talk with parents and share what’s going on, maybe more tolerance for being able to work out a solution together. When we talk to families about what happens in the process of leading up to having a kid asked to leave, we do find that a lot of times they feel like they were kind of blindsided.

The other thing that I think is really important to recognize in this is that when we talk to families of color and families who are speaking languages other than English, and families with children who are experiencing disabilities or chronic medical needs, they talk about a lack of being able to find programs that reflect their cultural or linguistic backgrounds, or are able to work with their children. And they in fact often talk about family and home-based care as being the places where they can find that kind of cultural and linguistic responsivity. And we know, and it’s in the data, that children of color are being expelled and suspended from programs at higher rates than white children.

And I think that, putting all those things together, families of color facing systemic racism, systemic discrimination, may find a place in these home and family-based programs where they find cultural responsivity, and where they might find folks who are able to work with their children because they share a cultural background and may be less likely to see certain behaviors as problematic. And I think that also may be a big driver of that particular statistic. All of that is worth exploring more.

Miller: You’ve done similar family surveys now in 2019 and 2021. Are there significant shifts that you’ve seen over the course of that time?

Pears: [Suspension and expulsions have] actually increased over time. Not by huge leaps and bounds, but these are small numbers. So even if you get a one or 2% increase, it’s big, it’s worth considering. Unfortunately, and as your listeners and a lot of parents probably know, there hasn’t been that much movement in things like are things getting better in terms of cost or availability. The same issues, cost, availability, keep popping up over time. So there isn’t a lot of movement yet in those particular issues.

Where we do see some good stuff happening, particularly since the pandemic, is that families are finding it easier to get services that they need. And one really interesting finding from the pandemic was that when COVID hit and centers closed down, families, particularly those families in most need, families with lower incomes, families of color, were getting a lot of services from their childcare program that they really needed. So they were picking up meals, they were getting supplies like diapers and other things. So that I think was just looking over time showing us how important childcare can be as a safety net for some families. It’s not all about the children, it’s about the families as well.

Miller: What’s happening at the state level in response to these, every two years, pretty stark and scary reports. Has it led to policy changes?

Pears: Well, the state of Oregon has been very good about putting money into early childhood. They certainly have the state funded pre-K programs. And one of the, I think, nice things about the Preschool Promise Program, which is state funded preschool/pre-K slots, is that’s a mixed delivery system. So the slots can be within center based care, or they can be within family and home-based care. They really are giving families options about the type of care that they want. And that’s not something that you see very often in state funded care. They also have a suspension/expulsion prevention program that they’re working on in terms of working on helping providers have the resources they need to be able to work with children and families when there are challenges.

I also think that one of the ways that we might be able to augment, there’s state and federal funding, but when we start to talk about employment, the folks using employees are also the corporations and a lot of private funding that could come in here and do some and do some good in terms of being able to subsidize childcare slots and get childcare slots available to their employees. And some of that is happening across the state for sure. In Lane County, the United Way of Lane County has funded a position with the Chamber of Commerce where they’re working to get businesses involved in funding childcare slots and in helping, in fact, accelerate small childcare businesses. And I think it’s time to get more of those employers involved in this as well.

Miller: Katherine Pears, thanks so much.

Pears: Thank you.

Miller: Katherine Pears is a senior scientist and science director for the Oregon Social Learning Center.

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