Feb. 22, 2021
This piece was updated on Feb. 25 at 12:30 p.m. Eastern to reflect additional comments from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell on affordable child care.
Apologizing for the echoes of a tantrum in the background. Trying to negotiate deadlines with bath time. Taking a work call while anxiously eyeing a baby monitor.
A year into the coronavirus pandemic, this feels routine even as it has upended life for many parents. They’re the lucky ones: the parents who have been able to keep a job, work from home and find, however tenuous, some sort of patchwork solution to child care.
Child care workers, crucial to economic recovery, earn poverty wages in 40 states By Megan Cerullo Women lawmakers balance work & child care
Lavida Reaves spent more than a decade working as an early childhood educator at a daycare center, nurturing young minds and bodies day in and day out throughout most of her twenties, while the infants and toddlers parents earned livings in other professions.
At her peak, after earning an associate s degree in early childhood education, Reaves said she made $1,200 a month working for a small, community-based program in North Carolina. She loved the tightknit community her employer, Excel Christian Academy, provided. But she simply could not make ends meet, and pursued a bachelor s degree so that she could transition to working in the public school system.
By ANNE BRANIGIN | The Washington Post | Published: February 22, 2021
Stars and Stripes is making stories on the coronavirus pandemic available free of charge. See more staff and wire stories here. Sign up for our daily coronavirus newsletter here. Please support our journalism with a subscription. Apologizing for the echoes of a tantrum in the background. Trying to negotiate deadlines with bath time. Taking a work call while anxiously eyeing a baby monitor. A year into the coronavirus pandemic, this feels routine even as it has upended life for many parents. They re the lucky ones: the parents who have been able to keep a job, work from home and find, however tenuous, some sort of patchwork solution to child care.
For Joan Phillips, the hardest part was seeing her patients on a stretcher, the paramedics carrying them away, the doors of the ambulance closing behind them. When her nursing home patients got COVID-19, they couldn’t stay in the nursing assistant’s care they could infect others. They had to be taken to the hospital.
Phillips worried about who would coax them to eat or cheer them up. She worried that the virus could take them away in a flash. She always thought, as she watched the ambulance pull away, about holding their hands again when they returned.
But none of them did.
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