 John Bridget Shulting, I'm a writer, journalist, and the director of the Veteran Life Lab at New America. We're delighted to have you all here where we're going to talk about child care in America. First, we want to thank our partners, the Royal Council of, the Norwegian Council of General, Ellen Lohm-Romley, Christian Roscoe, for their generous support and partnership for this and a number of other events that we've had. Particularly, we see this as an extension of another event that we have on paid family leave. We've just come out with our major new report where we've mapped out the infrastructure of child care in the United States, and we make the argument that paid family leave is really infant care. So I'm going to introduce our panel, and then we're going to get started. On my right, yeah, I'm a little flummoxed with the microphone. So on my right, I'm not even going to try. In my range, it's not even how you pronounce it. Very drunk yet. Better? Okay, no. She's an economist and research fellow with Statistics Norway. She flew in just this morning from Norway, and she's been doing some fascinating research on early care and learning in child care in Norway. So we're here to learn about the recent experience. Then we have Fabien Dusset. She is the Associate Professor of Early Child Medication and Program Leader of Child Medication New York University. Has done obviously an awful lot of work in early care and learning. So I'd like to hear from her. And then we have Alice Krojanski. She's a documented photographer. Every woman in labor. And if you've noticed as you were sitting here, it's her photos that have been flashed throughout. They're beautiful and amazing, and we'll keep flashin' them throughout the evening, and so please do pay attention and enjoy them. And then finally, we've got Huberto Cruz. He's a program on serve with the right to play. So we're very excited to hear about how funny is the work of child care. So since this is about making the case for universal child care, I'm just going to start talking a little bit about the care report. We've got care reports out there. Please take them with you as you leave. But what we wanted to do, we wanted to map out what we knew existed here as sort of the current reality in the United States of child care. I'm a mother of two, and I can tell you that it's just what turned my hair gray just trying to get my child care for two kids in the Washington, D.C. area. At one point, I couldn't find infant care, so I had my baby with the nanny share with the neighbors up the street. I had my two-year-old in the child care development center, and then I had to hire a babysitter because I could never get home from work on time. And if any one of those three things fell apart, my life was over. So child care is really tough. I experienced that personally, and so we wanted to see was that a universal experience. And what I can tell you, we looked at cost, quality, and availability of care in all 50 states in the District of Columbia. And when we came up with a cumulative measure, what we were able to find was that no single state does all three things well. And early care and learning infrastructure really work. It needs to be affordable. It needs to pay its caregivers and teachers well. It needs to be available. It needs to be accessible. It needs to be high quality. And what we did is we invited the states into quartiles and we visited one state in each quartile of the video crew. And if you go to our website, you can see some of these videos of stories of teachers and parents and providers. And Massachusetts was one of the best states that we went to. And we took out a caregiver who looked like all the other child care teachers and workers in the United States for less than $10 a hour. All we do is we're going to have our early care and learning teachers qualify for at least one standard for the early care. And this is really where quality comes from, having high quality early care and learning teaching staff. And it would make it very difficult for them. All forms of education in the United States are subsidized except zero to five education. It costs about $12,000 to educate a child from K to 12. And yet for the zero to five years, we expect parents to pay the bulk of that. What we found in our care report is that child care in the United States is more expensive on average than in-state college tuition. And you don't have 18 years to save up for it. We found that child care is very difficult to find largely in the rural western states. Say for instance in South Dakota, it's the state that has the largest percentage of children in families where all parents work. And it also is a very difficult to find quality child care. We also found that quality tends to be very low, only something like 11% of all child care family homes and child care centers are accredited by national bodies. So we have a long way to go here. And so what I'd like to do is turn it over to the panel at this point. Fabian, why don't you start and let's talk a little bit about what we know about the zero to five years. Why is it so critical when it comes to early childhood development? Sure. Well, during this period, children's brains are developing really rapidly and are forming all kinds of connections. And it's one of those critical periods during which all the things to which children being exposed are really impacting them. There's been a lot of attention paid to this lately. You may be aware of a lot of attention being paid to the stresses that young children experience and how these early stresses really have very significant long-term impacts. So it's really critical to be thinking about the early years and how the kinds of experiences and the environments and the opportunities and what we expose young children to is really significant. And on what you were just talking about with the care report, we corroborated those findings in, I was on a panel with the National Academy of Sciences and we recently issued a report last year on birth to eight. And it was a follow-up to the Neurons to Neighborhoods report, which was really focusing on this early childhood, the early years and the brain development, the rapid brain development in the early years. And we were really interested in the workforce and in what's happening with the workforce, trying to bring together the science of early childhood development with now what do we do about teaching and preparing the people who are going to be serving those children. And we found just like you did, there just really isn't consistency, even though the research clearly shows that paying teachers well, paying caregivers well, is extremely important to their well-being. That's something that, as a nation, we have not galvanized around. And so there's been some really fascinating work out of the Berkeley Center on early childhood workforce on depression among early childhood care providers. And considering the importance of, say, how young children pick up their cues from mirroring the visual expressions of the people around them, this is why we should also be really concerned about maternal depression and maternal health and well-being and young parents in general, their parents of young children is what I mean, parents of young children, is that their mental health and their well-being is significantly important for how their children are doing. So we really should care a lot about how all of the people who are involved on a regular basis closely in those everyday interactions with young children, how they're faring. So let's turn to you, Alice. So you're a mom, you, you know, with your work as a journalist and a photographer, you know, you are out there kind of cataloging sort of everyday experiences. Talk a little bit about your own experiences as a working mother, a working parent, and what you see out there, and, you know, particularly in light of how important having this kind of high quality experiences for little kids. So when I have one child who's in universal pre-K and also paid after school, and I have one child who's in a family daycare, and I think part of what is so important to do, which we've talked about, is it's important to talk about this and to change perceptions. So when I come to a panel like this, it's because I have a daycare provider and a partner who will help me to do this. And you mentioned it costs, I think you said $12,000 to pay for a child to be educated from K through eighth grade. That's approximately what I paid for one child in daycare last year out of pocket as a freelance journalist. When I started this project, it's called Women's Work. It's about middle class to upper class working mothers in New York. Because when I was going to have my first child, I was terrified because I thought as a journalist, how is this going to impact my work? I think it's going to destroy everything, and I needed to look at it, and I needed to look at people who are similar to me, who were, the reason I chose to photograph specifically middle to upper class mothers, I have separate bodies of work about working class parents is the inequality in this situation is so apparent that it would be, it wouldn't make sense to include these different situations in one project. Because while the middle class mothers struggle a lot with paying for daycare, and with as you mentioned the logistics of it all, we have a very different situation than our child care providers, who I know that women I've spoken to, as you said, living in New York City make $9 an hour to take care of children, and they have their own children. So the writer who worked on this piece, Alyssa Quart, talks about a chain of care, and so it's going from someone like myself, who can pay for daycare, to somebody who has maybe a unlicensed daycare, or something that's not really well-regulated, caring for their child, or free child care, one of the nannies that I photographed for a different story, her child had to live in Paraguay because she couldn't afford to have her child here, she was a nanny. So these are different situations, but to come back to women's work, I noticed that a lot of women, the woman who you'll see pumping breast milk in her office, she did receive paid maternity leave, but she also said that daycare was by far the most expensive thing they paid for, and, you know, she's paying for an apartment in New York City. She's, all of the women in this project work because we have to, but also because that formed our identity, and I wanted to look at the intersection of work, motherhood, and identity. The good news is coming out of this, I've realized that there's such an interest, and I'm so gratified to hear all these people studying this, it's such an important topic of conversation. You know, it's interesting you talk about inequality, and that's certainly one of the things that we found in the report, or, you know, we looked at a lot of the brain science that's out there, and you look at just even the language, you know, the language gap, what is it, the 30 million, was it, is that about right, 30 million word gap by age three, is that right? That's a little bit of a... Overstatement. Yeah, okay. There's a lot that's been made of that that isn't necessarily... There's a lot more to it, I think. Yeah, okay. We're not going into a whole... Okay, so we'll be careful, but there is, I think there's another piece of data that Jane Waldfogel and others have found that the majority of the achievement gap that you'll find for 14 year olds is actually present, the majority of it is present on the first day of kindergarten. So, you know, you talk about inequality and very different experiences. Umberto, let's talk to you. You know, you talk about, you know, you're looking at play. What are you seeing out there? What's the current state in the United States when it comes to kind of what children do during the day and kind of where do we need to go? Yes, well, it looks very different for, let's say, a family childcare provider, a group family childcare provider. I think they are very overwhelmed with everything they have to do. They're absolutely regulated. Yet, they're not given the right resources. So, I think their priorities to keep the children safe. Um, so I think the learning piece and playing with them is very secondary because they're trying to keep the programs clean in case the health department just pays them a visit all of a sudden. So, I think that is secondary in whether they maybe some of them are part of networks. So, they also have to do a lot of data reporting through, let's say, teaching strategies goal. So, they have to input a lot of data. So, a lot of people actually have assistants who can track the children and do that. So, I think sometimes they use games to track whether the kid is developing in gross motor or fine motor skills. So, that's what I've seen in the field with family child care providers. I think those who work at centers may have much more support, especially because children are the same age. So, you know that you have a standard curriculum that you want to use for your two-year-old. That is not the case for a family child care provider who may have two infants, two three-year-old, four or five-year-olds around, and it's a little bit more difficult. So, I think you have more intentional learning opportunities in centers because it's a little bit more organized. And what we're trying to do, for example, our right to play and our program here in New York City called Play at the Core is supporting all of these teachers around New York City, pre-K teachers, to use intentional play as a vehicle for learning. So, before I turn to you, Nina, Fabian, do you want to talk a little bit more about that intentional play? You know, when we talk about pre-K or universal pre-K, one of the arguments is school readiness and there's sort of a feeling like, oh, where are the flash cards and, you know, aren't you going to learn your letters and, you know, here we are in the United States and we always want our kids to be ahead and, you know, what's the Apgar score? Well, mine was better. And, you know, can you talk a little bit about that kind of a, you know, how is play the work of children, so to speak, and then is there kind of a bit of a pushback about that and then we're going to go to Norway. Sure. I mean, I think Rumberto could probably also really speak to this, you know, play as children's work. But what we know about how the early brain develops is that it really, children are natural scientists. They're explorers. They're creative. And that's how they're learning. When they're playing, when they seem to be, you know, sort of just wasting time, quote, unquote, they're actually learning a whole lot. We tend to see the world through our own eyes as adults and we realize that, like, if we see the glass and we know that there's water in it, that if we pour, you know, tip it that the water is going to pour out and it's going to make a mess. Children don't know that. Or even if they've experienced it once, they want to experience it about, I don't know, 500 more times before they understand how about what happens if I do it from here? What if I do it from here? If I do it from here? If I do it from here? If I do it from here? That's how they're learning. That's physics, right? And many, many examples of the kinds of activity that children naturally engage in because they are natural born scientists and explorers is really significantly important for their learning. When they are given the opportunity to explore those things, obviously in a safe environment but also in an environment that isn't restrictive where the opportunities are being presented to them, I think the idea of intentional play is providing those opportunities for them to explore in ways that are safe but also that really kind of invite that exploration and invite the, you know, the multiple opportunities to figure out how something works or what would happen if that's vitally important, yeah. Okay, so Umbertra, is that happening? Yes. Is that happening enough? Yes, of New York City, let's say but I agree and I think what's so important about play in allowing children to play is that you're giving them their own ownership for their learning experience and that's how you start from a very young age to encourage children to learn and just be fascinated by things but again, I think because let's say a family child care provider needs to follow regulations you know, she may not afford to be wasting water or water on the ground may be a hazard because someone could slip, so I think and again, and it varies in New York City because you have family child care providers that may have the space to do that physical space to do it and others may have to go to the park but it may actually be dangerous depending on the neighborhood where they live to actually go to the park and actually for the children to get dirty and play with sand and get the ability to run around so it just really depends and I think especially in New York City it's a privilege to be able to do all the things that Fabian described to be able to play around and discover but at the same time, I think what we're trying to do at Play of the Core is allowing these communities to have that ownership and to create the space for children to have this experience of learning and discovering. Alright, so now I want to talk to Nina. Let's hear about the situation in Norway. We've been talking about play, we've been talking about universal child care and I think what I didn't realize until a couple years ago is that the United States actually bipartisan effort in Congress passed universal child care back in 1971 and it actually got to the White House and President Nixon at the time was planning to sign it. He actually had his cabinet members and what was then the HEW Health Education and Welfare working behind the scenes to help craft the bill and it got to the White House and there was a guy there named Patrick Buchanan and he was a rising star from the right and he was one of the speech writers and he had just returned and I talked with him for my book. I wanted to try to understand why my life was so miserable with child care. So I figured out he was really the person to talk to so I went to his house in northern Virginia where you walk in and there's a gigantic portrait of Robert E. Lee. It's like Pat, you grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland you know. At any rate, so you walk in and so I was asking him what happened and he said you know, the Soviet Union you got to remember, 1971 is the height of the Cold War and Vietnam's raging and everybody's, you know, a very scary time and he said he saw all of these little kids like the young pioneers marching around wearing the same uniforms and he was terrified. He thought that's what child care was, that we would be sending all our children into a factory and it would just destroy the American family so he convinced Richard Nixon to veto it and then Pat Buchanan wrote the veto language and described child care as basically you know, would make sovietize the family and when I talked to him he said, you know, we not only wanted to kill the bill we wanted to kill the very idea of child care in the United States that children belong home with their mothers for cake and pie at 3 o'clock in the afternoon. So that's what happened in 1971 in the United States and we never have talked about child care since this is the first presidential election ever where we've had two major party candidates actually put forth child care proposals however imperfect in 2016 it was different in Norway Nina, tell us what happened make us cry It's interesting, you could have been ahead of us, right? If we hadn't gone to the Soviet Union Yeah, so the expansion in Norway started also during the 70s driven by the feminist movement and so the first expansion of child care in Norway you didn't actually see there wasn't an effect on women's labor supply because they were already working but they needed to have proper care for their children so they had to kind of avoid what you had to do like having one paid nanny to do this and run around and so this was how it started and for a long time it was it was like children between three and six, Norwegian children start school at six that would be in child care but recently like from 2000 and onwards we have also expanded quite a lot for the youngest children so today most children are in child care actually from the age of one but then before the age of one we have the Brent leave so that's kind of we just talked about it that here in the US some mothers have to send their two weeks old baby to child care and I have a one year old at home I think it's hard to leave her now I can't imagine doing that when she was so small it doesn't really make any sense we were talking beforehand that there's one study that found that one in four mothers in the United States about a quarter of all mothers actually go back to work when their babies are two weeks old they don't have any kind of paid family leave they have to get back to work and I was on a radio show talking about the care report recently and one of the advocates there said that in 25 states it's illegal to separate a puppy from its mother before seven weeks and yet here we've got so many hundreds and thousands of women going back to work when their children are two weeks old I had to go look it up it's actually a true statistic it's really cruel back to Norway make us cry yeah well anyway but what's nice is that we now we can now actually look at how the children fare after these expansions of child care so we can and there has been studies doing this well published studies that looked at the expansion during the 70s the child care center at that time is quite similar actually to the child care center today you have kind of more or less the same amount of adults per child or children per adults and it's still very play-based because the Norwegian Child Care Center is very play-based and what we see now is that these children who are now adults they actually they find that they earn more and they have a higher probability of actually finishing high school and they actually also take more education so somehow even though they play it's not very formal learning they still seem to benefit and we must remember then that these children actually went from informal care with kind of more informal caregivers and kind of probably mothers being very stressed going from one place to the other not kind of feeling secure for their child and then to this more formal child care center setting and also what's very interesting is that we find that or this study that looks at the 70s expansion they find actually also that the effects differ by family background so for the children from families where the mother has no education they actually benefit more so in that sense it really levels the playing field which I find kind of very interesting that's very hopeful when I was reporting for the Care Index in Georgia and I talked to one at the Atlanta speech school where they talk a lot about language nutrition and really trying to have sort of a very rich language environment they do a lot of training for early care teachers and one thing they said is that by the age of five you've really gone a long way to determining that child's future so you said that you've also been looking at that inequality question what have you found in some of your research with can you expand a little bit more on that? We have a study also of the youngest children and there we find a similar thing we find that so we actually we have really nice research setup where we have this lottery in the municipality of Oslo and we can compare children who randomly was assigned to childcare because they applied to children who was not assigned because of a lottery so basically it was over subscription during these years and that's really nice so what we find is that the ones who got childcare at age one they're also doing better we can't really look at them for a long time because this is quite recent but they actually do better in first grade on these school readiness tests the ones that actually got admitted whereas the others that actually also later enrolled but they enrolled later they are actually faring a bit worse so we have a small sample here so we can't really conclude but we see that there are a tendency that also the children with lower educated mothers and low family income do better so that's also really interesting I find and I've also been looking at immigrant children so in Oslo we have a large share of children from immigrant families and quite a few of them do not speak a lot of Norwegian when they start school which really of course is a problem for the teachers when they're trying to teach the class and so what they did in Oslo was they gave these children free childcare so in City District with a high share of children with immigrant background they got a free childcare slot all children got this actually during these years and what we find is that especially the girls improve in school later on so they do better in quite a few subjects and I also think that is quite interesting and very important in Norwegian setting I think that's so interesting there's research here in the United States as well the Heckman research that if you for every dollar invested in early care and learning you have six, seven, sometimes eight you know in return over the life course and higher earnings and greater educational attainment and that still hasn't really moved the dial here what do you guys think about that what's it going to take to why hasn't it moved the dial and what's it going to take to move it here well this is you know I'm not speaking from data but I get to do that because I'm the photographer here so it's interesting to hear that so much of this came from our problems with you know national childcare came from feelings about women in the workplace and from what I've seen and experienced that our culture has a really conflicted idea about motherhood so we idolize this abstraction of motherhood as this woman who's all sacrificing and just wants to bake cake and pies at 3 p.m. which like I don't want to do first of all but also that we devalue caretaking but it's not that intentional play it's not you know inquiry based learning it's not you know these open-ended questions because they just I mean I don't know how they would have the time to figure out how to do that so it's a place like this it's already a center in the community that has that trust and that buy into families like think what an important conduit that would be for this single working mother who was an immigrant who wants to you know further education she could receive so much information through this place her children could receive so much additional education there's a question of why she has to work two jobs to barely make a living that's another story so there's so much potential in this and this is going to continue this is going to continue to grow the workforce there will be more and more of us who are freelancers with unpredictable schedules there are many people who have these automated schedules and they'll need this kind of flexible childcare and so these people are also they have children too it would be such a good as you were talking you know an economist this investment it seems so obvious but I think what's so difficult is that this is such a sensitive topic because all education but especially early childhood education asks the culture what do you need to be a person and our our culture obviously has a lot of a complex reaction to that now when we were when I was reporting in Georgia where the infant care the state did its own studying they found that 70% of the infant care was actually considered low quality you know so when we were asking people about that they said well most of the policymakers are these kind of older mostly white guys they grew up in breadwinner homemaker families that's what they have and the view is babies need to be home with their mommas you know pre-k okay because three-year-old four-year-olds are kind of getting ready for kindergarten but anything lower than that there's a real discomfort about thinking about it sort of systemically you know Fabian what what have you seen you know over the over the years you know we're talking about you know this is a looks like a great you know potentially great place for kids but you've got care workers or teachers who are exhausted and not trained well and the whole idea like the serve and return kind of interaction that warm interaction between the caregiver or the teacher and the child is really the key to quality you know what if you this really just brings me back to my like graduate school readings about women and the workforce and and this conversation that we're having is just really about kind of like the anxieties of I think a very very unequal society where some people have access and other people don't and some people have privilege and other people don't and it reminds me of my like first feminist you know class on we read this article I wish I could remember the name of the author it might be Higginbotham but it was we were never on a pedestal and that title was about women women of color immigrant women who never had the luxury of being on a pedestal from which they could be knocked down these are women who've always worked these women who a lot of times like especially in the case of enslaved women who worked without pay and these are women who could never afford the luxury of a breadwinner homemaker model and that's our history and the idea that that that sort of this breadwinner homemaker is kind of going back to the good old days really has been debunked by historian Stephanie Coons in talking about the way that we never were we have this fantasy about how we were we never were that was a very small you know maybe five of us were that way but really looking at things from a more realistic point of view about whose experiences are being lifted up as the standard whose experiences are being lifted up as the norm whose experience are being lifted up as the way that we should be or the way that we are when in fact that represents such a tiny tiny slice of our society we have to have those conversations and I think part of making it real I think from Bertels point is fantastic about how do we make this kind of accessible and why should everyone care I think part of that is recognizing that more of us share these issues than don't and I think that's one of the biggest efforts as a society that we need to make and in thinking as we were talking before about what are we going to do on Wednesday how are we going to get over regardless of what the result is how are we going to get over this we're in a rough time how are we going to get there and I think part of it is recognizing that we share more than we don't share we share more of the difficulty and the complications and how can we make it work and all of these things than what we don't share and I think that's where maybe the conversation can begin and helping us to get to seeing seeing one another as more alike than different good point Nina I want to ask you one last question then we're going to open it up for questions you know from the kind of across the water across the pond sort of perspective from you know Norway or other countries when you look in at the United States here we are one of the wealthiest countries on earth you know and you see the situation with working families with childcare or the fact that we have to leave you know what do we look like to the rest of the world I just think for the entire globe here I just think that it looks very hard so there are so many people that has to work so hard to be able to support their family and then again have to kind of rely on unreliable childcare and trying to make this patchwork of different arrangements and I think that that sounds not only very hard but also quite inefficient so in that sense I do think that I mean the thing is that the Norwegian Child Care Centre is not really perfect in the sense that you only have a lot of very high skilled workers there you have a lot of assistants that don't have any education so basically I think it's not that I think it's probably more or less the same people in Norway that will take care of the children as it would be kind of here in the US but they would be nannies maybe just taking care of the children in one family whereas how it's organized in Norway is that you would have typically like you will have one childcare teacher and then you will he or she would work with two assistants and then kind of so you will have quite a lot of low skilled work there but it doesn't really need to be that expensive although I would love for them to earn more but they don't it's not really a high income occupation in Norway either so somehow it just seems to be a bit about how you organize it and then you have to acknowledge that this is really making things really hard for many people especially of course the more low income families so yeah well at this point I'd love to open it up for questions so yeah good evening and thank you as you were speaking I kept having this this this remembrance of the of Walmart and those scenarios that that we've seen I'm curious because in a lot of ways we're speaking to the choir or the converted here and what I would like the panel possibly introduce is what how might you present this argument to those who don't who have a dissenting opinion about this issue in a way that doesn't allow those to then offer to make you lessen the demand or the need for because too often we're having to settle or we're having to scale back this is an issue that has you know too many ramifications you know for the benefit versus the loss and to frame the argument in a way that makes it not just palpable but makes it you know not not even something that you negotiate on but but a demand and something that everyone can appreciate we're all children and those children who have had access to have benefited and that benefit has benefited writ large so that's my question one thing that I think I mean the reason that I'm a photographer is that I think photographs can work on your thoughts but they can also work in your guts and so this conversation sort of largely focused for a while a lot on like Marissa Mayer's in office nursery and like corporate women and typically very privileged women who noticed respect to their battles they were fighting and so I think that's the one thing that might be a model is the success of universal pre-K here in New York City because it wasn't marketed as like you know something that would address poverty our country has a there's a tendency to be pretty vicious and about programs targeting low income people and whatever I think the fact that UPK was was their slogan says pre-K for all and so it came across as all these middle class for families were families I don't know if that is a helpful way of sort of bundling these sort of programs that like they will benefit many families and also to me it's important that we continue to talk about this in ways that are both you know very factual and also work sort of on an emotional level I could just add that I think that it has been a discussion in Norway that universal programs has its own kind of there is something about them that makes them kind of stable in the sense that because everybody actually has access to this although so like for instance we all pay a quite low fee although we have of course very different salaries not as different as in the US I might add but still but there is something stable in that because that means that like in the elections everybody will support it because it won't only be for the low income families it will also be for the high income families and somehow that is some of the idea of the universal thing right that it also makes it kind of interesting also for the middle class I think Nina makes an excellent point and there's been research that shows that you get a lot more buy in when you do have universal programs you know back in 1971 the universal child development fund it was envisioned to be open to everyone on a sliding scale and so it got a lot of buy in both for Republicans and Democrats at the time there were Gallup and Harris polls that showed widespread support among Republicans and Democrats men and women so I think that that's a really good point and I think Alice is right if you look at the history of the way we have designed or actually really failed to design well programs that are directed at low income or families in poverty for instance just trying to get a child care subsidy to I've interviewed people who had to start standing in line at three in the morning and then like lost the job that they needed the child care subsidy for so we design programs very not only inefficiently but very cruelly and so the more that you can bring that out of the kind of the stigma of poverty and really make it for everybody again on a sort of a fair sliding scale I think that is probably the best thing to do next question anybody yeah I'm sorry there's no comparison between the United States and Norway we don't believe in social social democracy we have a very pluralist population whereas Norway is much more homogenous the exception of the immigrants but we we believe in individualism and we really don't care we don't need the lowest two-fifths of the labor force and we're trying to figure out what to do about that you couldn't get social security passed today much less universal child care you know we've got people with little affordable care emerge from Obama's program we have people who want to eliminate that and and those conflicts are not going away and so we have a much more complex problem here some people have said we should give this to the churches and let them deal with it but you know one of the realities is that if you are in between a hundred and as a total family income you have between a hundred and fifty and three hundred thousand dollars a year you can afford child care you can afford housing costs and all of that when you're below that level you're in a fairly desperate situation just paying housing costs is enormous and figuring out what to do with your kids is even greater crisis and so you put your kids wherever you can and stories are coming out these kids are being heavily abused black kids are being abused more than white kids but we don't care about that and and these are the complexities of the issue you know it's easy to pull on people's heartstrings and talk about people making you cry and all this stuff but the reality is that we have a social culture that is unique in the world and we have to figure out how to address these problems within the context of that culture and none of you are talking about that so I wish you would thank you alright well let's talk about that within the unique American culture we have the Affordable Care Act and I stopped counting at about 40 when the Republicans in Congress tried to keep voting to overturn it we could never get the social security pass today or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act no doubt you know sort of the underpinnings that we do have today what do you think about that the current reality it's not easy I mean I not gonna say that it's something that can be easily addressed I mean to me one thing that I noticed in the photographs that I take is all these women work really hard they're very devoted to their careers that's a very American thing to be ambitious and you know very single not single focused but very driven in your career and looking at they also didn't want to take time off neither did I because of the economic cost like there is a part of this it's not just about like peace love and understanding it's about a career focus thing and so my job is to document what I do is they comment on the culture also and so I can't say that they're gonna change I don't think that a politician is gonna see a picture I took and have a change of heart but that's the method that I work in through photography and education and I think that those are the you know effective tools that I have so I don't have a sweeping solution to it and I share your frustration but I think that the work that we're each doing in our own fields is an important part of making the change the best thing we can do is do things like this have conversations you know we're trying to avoid that that's a new tagline maybe for the work that we're doing avoiding street urchins street urchins yet yeah okay over here I actually do have a question but I just wanted to respond to that I think that as we especially with the election tomorrow as we tend to see more and more people coming into office and getting elected into office who have faced these struggles I would imagine that we're also going to see that change I would bet Pat Buchanan never worried about $20 for his babysitter when he was stuck in traffic when he made that decision so I think as we're seeing more and more young people both men and women who are young parents who have faced these struggles that we'll see more change address to that and I think that sort of gets more to that point of like how do we balance that with our sort of unique standing as Americans what our beliefs are but my question is about quality and I wanted to ask a little bit more about the report if you could talk a little bit more about what did you look at when you were looking at quality what did that mean how did you define it a little bit more about that that was actually one of the biggest challenges that we had in the report is how do you define quality and what are some measures that you could use since we were looking at it state by state what were some measures that we could use that we could actually use to compare state by state so there are a number of states that are moving to something called the quality rated system and some of that is great some of it is sort of like safety and make sure you don't spill the water so that children slip and fall which is really sort of like setting the table but not really getting you know getting the meal the best indicator of quality really is it's like there is a measure it's called class where you really look at the you observe the warm interaction between a teacher and a child well that's subjective it's incredibly expensive to do and so not a lot of states are doing it or they don't have the same standards so we initially wanted to kind of reward states for doing that kind of observational you know look at real quality but we just weren't able to so what we did is we looked at national accreditation data for family homes and also for centers again it's imperfect and you'll see in our methodology we learned about all of that we felt that it wasn't a perfect marker but it was a marker to show that providers had gone through some steps had taken some effort to meet some standards and again a lot of it is sort of like setting the table but not necessarily getting the meal so it's an imperfect standard but really the best quality that the research will show is that warm relationship that a child learns when somebody who is memorable who cares about them and knows them actually pays attention to them they call it the serve and return kind of interaction and so for a parent that's what you want to be looking for when you go in and the only thing I'll say about Pat Buchanan he didn't have any children oh yeah okay next question I just in the gentleman here was asking so how can we make this something that more of us care about I'm not an economist obviously so maybe this is a question for Dr. Jang but it strikes me just hearing that data about the number of child care providers who are receiving public assistance the American taxpayers essentially subsidizing those low salaries so I wonder if there's a way to call if there are tweaks there if there's a way to call attention to the fact that we are actually paying for it one way or another whether we're paying for it in food stamps or whether we're giving people higher salaries that will enable a greater degree of self-respect and maybe make them less likely to be depressed while they're caring for our children yeah I just I don't know enough about the hard economics to have a sense of what those answers might be but I wonder if there are answers in that I'm not an economist either but I really don't think I think that one of the things that has been revealed very clearly in this political climate is that people are very motivated to believe what they want to believe necessarily to be compelled by facts so that I think that there is a ton of wonderful economic research there is a group of economists in Chicago who are doing fantastic work showing all of these things people have been talking about the sandbox investment for years and how the importance of investing in early childhood only has positive returns and at the end of the day people are stuck with their ideologies and I think this speaks to this point that you were making people are just wedded to their ideologies and they will not be swayed by fantastic well-conducted research that shows if we do this the return is better we're paying more money folks paying more money having folks in jail we're paying more money by not investing in childcare we're paying more money by having these low incomes we're paying more money when people are depressed but mothers should be home with their children it's sort of like people are going to just stand and die on that hill and until they're willing to step down off of it it's sort of like well you know what I mean I mean that's why I believe so strongly in the power of narrative what you said about we were never on a pedestal is such a good point and I also think that's why we as journalists we don't just give you when we write a piece or do a photo story we don't just give you facts we need those it would be nothing without the work you do we have this conversation we're all going to get together and I bet the first thing that's going to come out of our mouths is either a personal story about our own struggles with childhood or a story about someone we knew and that's what ends up happening in our political conversations too is that this is pinned to narrative so it is about shifting the narrative and I also wanted to bring you in on this too because I think there is a lot of privilege and inequality in who gets to play freely I mean children in private schools are encouraged to be you know play with manipulative to explore the world and have this privilege to say to those children this world is yours to explore and make of it what you will where lower income students are there's a lot of controversy over the charter school movement which I can't speak to I'm not an expert in that at all but there's a tendency to focus on pretty binary metrics like test scores and that kind of stuff and so changing that narrative also and this goes back to the way we measure quality for example I can say that here in New York we do it through the classroom assessment scoring system the class which kind of like are you familiar with it? Yeah and then we also use environment rating scales like the Eckers, the Feckers, the Edders and I think a lot of the teachers make it very intentional to hit every single point in those rating scales and then they forget about interactions and they forget about how to support the social emotional development of their children so that's where we're kind of like missing the mark so it's an investment Do you feel like these tools actually measure quality? If our full set of standards there's 75 standards in four different areas so they're looking at things like the environment they're looking at things like teacher qualifications and experience they're looking at management and leadership and so there's a lot of different parts of what makes it good quality centers how to sort of figure out how to be really good at each of those four different centers there's a lot of ways to do that but we lack not only the funding but some of the infrastructure in New York State and to make sure that there's access to good quality professional development for all the children providers who are out there no matter what they're sending so that's something that we continue to work on wait, but hold on so what do you think it's missing? because you just said it measures some aspects of quality so what do you think it's missing? from like yes but they do receive that training sometimes it's part of when they renew their licenses every two years they have to have at least how many hours of training Madeline? is it three hours of training on business? no, I know but it's like, yeah one more question I'm sorry about the timing of this question because the conversation had shifted since a little bit but it still relates to culture I was just struck by what was brought up earlier the culture of individualism I come from Europe, from a country where we get paid maternal and parentally for three years and there's a public system that starts at three years of age which is of pretty good quality but it also happens to be one of the most secular countries in the world if not the most secular country in the world and I wonder what is the panel's opinion on how big of a role does religion Christianity play in this because as an outsider my perspective has always been that it's not really the individualism it's the high regard incredibly high regard in which heterosexual married couples are held in this country and the implication that if you strayed from this model God forbid you got divorced or you did not get married you kind of deserve to be punished or it's actually okay to neglect you or to neglect your family or the needs of your children because you had strayed and while I'm from the Czech Republic and that country is in many ways imperfect one of the reasons that this system exists is actually individualism and the fact that it's nobody's business it makes no difference whatsoever and I wonder if you think that religion plays a role in this love to hear from the panel yeah I do and I so I think that there is a very puritanical notion of family and a very puritanical notion of motherhood in particular that has shaped a lot of not only in child care but actually a lot of my research is around the relationship between families and schools and how the role of a good involved parent is framed and who is a good involved parent a good involved parent is a heterosexual white middle class mother who is available to bake cookies volunteer come to the school that's the good involved parent anyone else is a deviation from that and that's based on a completely puritanical heteronormative approach to families it's not reality once again so I think that it's absolutely 100% dead on I also think that in terms of the individualism it reflects I think that we're really deeply conflicted in the United States that our culture reveals many many conflicts about so we want the complete independence I think you were talking about this the idea that we want hands off unless it's about our uteruses right so it's like we're really deeply conflicted about how much of the government's involvement we want how much of the church's involvement we want how much of independence and individuality we want there are so many unresolved questions about about what it means to be this union or whatever and I think that's reflected in all of these policies and I think that's why our policies that's why you have such a patchwork approach I think the patchwork approach is a perfect reflection of this patchwork of values or ideas or ideals and goals and objectives I mean I think it's sort of what we're living is a reflection of all these unresolved questions do we have time for more or is it time to just one more okay here hold on one second ma'am and remember we'll have hors d'oeuvres and wine so we can continue the conversation more informally in the US are there employers who provide child care for the mothers and the children all sponsor schools who do it there are the families in work institute is probably the best source of data that we have in society for human resources management on what's available out there and there are companies that offer onsite child care there are 7% of all companies and that's down from 9% a few years ago most companies they'll offer what they call it's like a dependent care savings account but that really doesn't cost them anything it's you provide money and they'll hold it for you and then you can pay up to like $2500 per kid in pre-tax dollars but that's again, they're not spending any money on that so some companies do, Patagonia has wonderful onsite child care the founder, Yvonne Chauhanard when somebody said what's the best thing Patagonia makes he says it's the children in our early childhood development center so there are companies like that but they're very few so this is a comment so we're able to have great hors d'oeuvres thank you so much but let's be clear we're framing it under the middle class parameter but it needs to be spoken for individuals who are on or below the poverty line of course Buchanan was never having a conversation or conflict about $20 an hour for his child care one, because he probably wasn't paying his child care $20 an hour but he didn't have kids but ultimately we need to really look at it from the perspective of the individuals who are actually performing the job, performing the service and then what is that conversation like and how do we move those individuals who are in positions of power and privilege so that they can actually appreciate what it actually means I think that's what the whole conversation has been about I think it's been very much about looking at this universally in terms of the children as well as looking at the caregivers as really part of the solution as well thank you all so much for coming this has been a fantastic conversation thank you so much