Four Evidence-Based Reasons Why Increasing Child Care Ratios Would be Dangerous and Counterproductive

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Early care and education does not just serve the goal of school readiness for young children, it allows working families to go to work and ensures businesses have a reliable workforce. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the child care industry was greatly disrupted, exacerbating the longstanding imbalance between the high demand and relatively low supply of child care. Just three months into the pandemic, 35% of the early care and education workforce was unemployed. Many of these workers have since left the field altogether, finding more reliable and often higher-paying jobs in other industries. Although recovery has begun, the workforce remains depleted. There are just 970,800 early childhood professionals in the U.S., down from nearly 1.1 million prior to the pandemic. Across the country, early care and education providers continue to struggle to find and hire qualified, reliable staff.

States and municipalities seeking to accelerate post-pandemic economic recovery have been looking for ways to increase the supply of early childhood professionals—but they’re finding it hard to recruit and retain people in a field characterized by low pay, lack of benefits, challenging working conditions and hours, and lack of respect. Taken together, the inadequate workforce supports, high demand, and short supply of caregivers represent a child care crisis with far-reaching repercussions. When working families cannot find reliable child care, they are forced to make tough choices between keeping their jobs versus caring for their children. Many people, especially women, have left the workforce, and employers in all sectors are finding it harder to hire the workers they need.

States are trying to mitigate the crisis by taking steps to recruit and retain more early childhood professionals— enacting policies to increase wages, provide free child care, and create benefit pools for early educators and caregivers. Some states, however, are taking a different approach. Rather than increasing professional supports for the workforce, they are proposing policies that will lessen regulations regarding child-staff ratios in child care settings, allowing more children to be cared for by fewer adults. Applying this type of “cost-per-unit” approach to the care of young children raises numerous concerns. This policy brief lays out the concerns and explains why such policies would be ill advised.

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