Chairman Clyburn’s Opening Statement at Select Subcommittee Hearing on Supporting Families and Caregivers through COVID Child Care Challenges

Washington, D.C. (March 2, 2022) – Below is Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Chairman James E. Clyburn’s opening statement, as delivered, for today’s hearing on “COVID Child Care Challenges: Supporting Families and Caregivers.”

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Chairman James E. Clyburn 
Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis Hearing 
Committee on Oversight and Reform 
Hearing on “COVID Child Care Challenges: Supporting Families and Caregivers” 
March 2, 2022

The coronavirus pandemic has put tremendous strain on America’s families and caregivers. Many of us have seen firsthand—in our own families, with our friends, and among our coworkers—the difficult challenges that parents, teachers, and other caregivers have faced in the last few years.  During the first several months of the pandemic, families and child care providers were largely left to face these challenges alone.  As a result, many were forced to drop out of the workforce or to close their businesses.

Approximately 60 percent of child care providers closed in the spring of 2020.  These closures led to over 375,000 child care workers losing their jobs.  Although many of those child care providers were able to reopen, thousands of providers had closed permanently by 2021, contributing to a shortage that persists to this day.

These sudden closures forced many parents to make difficult choices between keeping their jobs and caring for their children.  Without the necessary support, parents with young children dropped out of the work force in the early days of the pandemic at alarmingly high rates.  Now, nearly two years later, men with young children have returned to the work force at pre-pandemic rates, yet the labor participation rate of women with young children has not fully recovered.  In January 2022, the most recent month for which data are available, more than 1.1 million women left a job or lost a job due to the need to care for young children.  This disparity threatens to exacerbate longstanding gender-based economic inequality.  

Families paid high costs for children even before the pandemic. With the onset of the pandemic, child care became even less affordable to parents, with prices rising by more than 5 percent in 2020.  At the same time that child care costs for families are increasing, child care worker pay remains troublingly low. In most states, the median wage for child care workers—who are disproportionately women and minorities—was below the state’s living wage. This combination of low wages and high costs is unsustainable and puts a great burden on child care providers and families—while slowing our economic recovery. 

Congress has taken decisive action by passing three federal pandemic relief packages that each included funding specifically for child care.  Most significantly, the American Rescue Plan included a historic $39 billion investment in child care. 

This investment has already had a positive impact on child care providers.  Early evidence indicates that these pandemic relief funds have helped child care providers stay in business and raise wages.  Forty-six percent of child care providers surveyed in the summer of 2021 said their program likely would have closed without help from pandemic relief funds.  Encouragingly, many recipients of relief funds also reported that their child care workers had received increased compensation.    

The American Rescue Plan also gave financial support directly to parents and families to offset the rising costs of child care.  It temporarily expanded the Child Tax Credit and delivered advance monthly payments of $300 per young child from July through December 2021.  American families have put these funds to good use. Census Bureau data shows that between 5 and 7 million households used Child Tax Credit advance payments to help cover child care expenses.  The American Rescue Plan also expanded the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit, providing additional assistance specifically for care. 

Although pandemic-related relief programs have helped families and providers cope with the immediate effects of the coronavirus, sustained federal investment is still needed to aid recovery and address problems that existed before the pandemic. The Biden-Harris Administration’s Build Back Better agenda includes comprehensive proposals to improve the quality and affordability of child care while delivering the compensation that child care workers and educators deserve.  Continued investment in the child care sector through existing federal programs and the extension of American Rescue Plan provisions would also support access and affordability.  Extending the expanded Child Tax Credit, with its advance monthly payments structure, would continue to aid the millions of households that have used those payments for child care expenses. 

When we support American families and invest in the professionals who help to care for our nation’s children, we are making an investment in both our present and our future.  The time is now to invest in child care providers and families, so that we can build a better, stronger and more equitable economy. I would like to thank our witnesses for being here today.  

I look forward to hearing more about what more we can do to give families and child care providers the support that they needed during the pandemic and beyond.