For one, stop pretending we don’t need to.
To all the frantic parents who’ve survived yet another year of the summer-child-care shuffle: I salute you.
It’s a well-established fact that in the United States, finding summer child care can be hell. In a nation with lengthy breaks from school—and no guaranteed paid time off from work for adults—parents are left largely on their own to cobble together camps and other, frequently expensive, arrangements. New data confirm just how tough this can be. A recent Gallup poll found that nearly half of parents with school-age children “wished their children could have participated in summer programs, or participated more than they did.” By far the top reason for this unfulfilled wish was cost, followed by program schedules not aligning with job schedules.
Solving this problem isn’t so complicated; it’s not like, well, trying to coordinate camp schedules. Summer programs need more public funding to reduce prices for parents and increase the number of slots for children. (To quote The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey on the state of public investment in child care, in a line that should hang in the office of every politician: “The math does not work. It will never work.”) Barriers limiting access to summer care for lower-income families—such as a lack of transportation—also need to be broken down.