My boyfriend and I had just hired a nanny to spend three days a week caring for our baby, to do a kind of work that I’d been shocked to find intimately rewarding but also far harder than anything I’d ever tried to do for eight hours straight. We could afford to do this because a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a... See more

If you think about it, this work of caring for our children as nannies, or our aging parents as homecare workers, is some of the most profound and important work in our lives. We call it the work that makes everything else possible, because it makes it possible for all of us to go out and do what we do every day, knowing that some of the most... See more

It’s estimated families without access to affordable care forgo $29 billion in wages annually.

Experts estimate there’s a 3:1 ratio of kids needing care to kids in care. The highest quality options often have waitlists of a year or more. This lack of supply primarily impacts women, and specifically those with low incomes, single parents, and people of color.

US child care is a $57 billion market (60% in-home, 40% in-center). An additional $22 billion is spent via government subsidies, and the amount of time spent and forgone wages by parents and family members providing unpaid care is orders of magnitude larger than the actual dollars spent.