Today’s working families need support to help them build a life that enables them to achieve financial stability and helps their families to thrive. The direct care and childcare workforce play a vital role by providing daily assistance to older adults, people with disabilities, and children. Families count on them for essential care, for respite, and for the peace of mind that allows them to balance their own work responsibilities with family needs. People’s ability to meet their family’s needs is closely tied to their success on the job, making care work a critical pillar of both personal and professional wellbeing. Yet, despite this vital role, care workers and families continue to struggle thanks to a lack of policy investments at the state and federal level.
So, what does it take to push forward a policy agenda that champions both care work and family-friendly policies – one that acknowledges caregivers’ skills, recognizes the high value of their work, and contributes to building an inclusive economy through improved job quality and racial equity? Let’s take a closer look:
The care workforce has been critical to families for generations. Direct care workers—home care workers and nursing assistants—ensure that older adults and people with disabilities receive necessary daily support, whether they live in their homes, a residential care setting (like assisted living), or a nursing home. Likewise, parents nationwide rely on childcare workers to provide the care they need in order to remain employed, as well as early learning for their children to promote healthy child development. Care workers—direct care and childcare workers—are the front line of support for millions of people and their families.
Despite their enormous value to our country and economy, these workers struggle with various challenges, from inadequate compensation and benefits, limited training and career advancement opportunities, unsupportive work environments, and a general lack of respect and recognition by policymakers and industry leaders for their critical roles. All these challenges are rooted in a long history of underfunding our care systems and depreciating the labor of women, people of color, and immigrants, who make up most of these workers. As a result, too many care workers struggle financially and often leave these fields for higher-paying ones, further shrinking the care support workers and families across the country deserve. Family caregivers and parents experience firsthand the lack of support that comes from undervaluing care work.
More work is needed to transform opportunities for care workers to access quality and affordable skills training, career pathways, and credentials that lead to high-quality care jobs—in addition to improving compensation and job quality. Ensuring our postsecondary and workforce systems are responding to the needs of U.S. families and workers requires a revisioning of the care economy and workforce. This new vision should involve strong state and federal investments in education and training to fill high-demand care jobs, while also working to transform the care industry into one that truly values its workers and reflects their importance to U.S. society.
Work-family supports, like affordable childcare, direct care, paid family leave, sick leave, and access to public benefits, help working people—especially women and caregivers—achieve economic mobility and equity. They do this, in part, by making it possible for caregivers to pursue education and skills training, earn credentials, and enter good jobs. In the absence of policies that provide access to these supports, families—especially mothers and mothers of color—pay the price.
For example, mothers are less likely to participate in the labor force than women without children, given that they bear a disproportionate share of caregiving responsibilities within families. The high cost of childcare exacerbates this trend—the more expensive care is, the less likely women can afford to work when they have young children.
However, when policies explicitly provide families with adequate support for balancing work and family, they can empower women’s abilities to achieve their education and career goals. For example, parents living in states that chose to invest significant funding in childcare to mitigate the effects of the end of the ARPA Childcare Stabilization Funds were less likely to report lacking the childcare they needed, and mothers in those states were less likely to report forgoing work because of childcare needs. In addition, states with paid family leave policies see a twenty percent increase in mothers’ labor force participation in the year they gave birth as well as increases in the following years.
These supports also matter for parents who are interested in pursuing college and skills training to advance their careers. Roughly three million college students are parents of children under eighteen. (This estimate of undergraduate student parents is based on data from the 2019-2020 National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, compared with total undergraduate enrollment from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.)
According to National Skills Coalition’s analysis, most parents in college are women, and many are single mothers. Over a third of Black women and more than two in five Indigenous women in college are mothers. Access to affordable childcare, as well as other support and resources that enable people to balance family, work, and school, could make a difference in their ability to enroll and complete education programs and earn credentials, advance racial equity in educational attainment, and bring a significant return on investment to states and the federal government.
Given the urgent policy need to support care workers and families, how can we make meaningful progress in improving their circumstances? Here are a few directions.
Heightened attention to care workers. Society is increasingly recognizing the crucial role of direct care and childcare workers, especially as the demand for their services has surged in recent years, particularly among older adults. This growing awareness, driven by advocacy and narrative change organizations, creates an opportunity to push for stronger care work policies.
A unique role for workforce development and postsecondary leaders. Given the critical role that labor and education departments play in shaping workers’ training, advancement, and credentialing needs, it will be essential to move the needle on their support for care workers. Direct care and childcare should also be good jobs, an important North Star in workforce development and workers’ rights principles. In addition, the postsecondary system, including community colleges and other higher education institutions, plays a significant role in educating early childhood professionals, alongside the workforce system, and should be a key part of the conversation about building up the care workforce.
A unified voice on skills, care work, and family-friendly policies. The care workforce is integral to ensuring people have the support they need to care for their families, pursue education and skills training, and participate in the labor force. When care workers themselves are underpaid and lack benefits, work-family supports, and opportunities for professional development and advancement, they are more likely to leave the profession. This trend means that other families that need care cannot get it because there are not enough workers in the field to fill open jobs.
A stronger narrative on linking care work to broader workforce needs. Research shows that the public needs to learn more about care work, including the skill level required and the extent to which these jobs should receive professional-level treatment. Our experience shows that care work policies related to skills training, credentials, family supports, and other workforce policies also need attention, particularly in how they impact the entire U.S. workforce.
Transforming care work into a high-quality industry that values its workers as professionals and pays them accordingly is intimately connected to promoting thriving local, state, and national economies. Now is the time to take a bold step forward and support working families everywhere
