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During her convention speech last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren, sitting in a now closed child care center, spoke about the critical role informal, home-based child care played in her story. She spoke about her Aunt Bee, who stepped in to take care of Warren鈥檚 children when she was juggling a full-time teaching job in Texas. Without Aunt Bee, would Warren鈥檚 story be one of transformative community impact and personal success?

There are , often their nieces and nephews, grandkids or neighbors. They are the backbone of the American child care system 鈥� largely unseen and drastically under-resourced. Caregivers like Aunt Bee, mostly motivated by love and familial or community duty, are the care and education infrastructure that is keeping our country afloat.

During this pandemic, with most child care centers closed, it has been often unpaid relatives, friends and neighbors who have come together as an informal network to ensure essential workers can be on the frontlines. These Aunt Bees are themselves essential workers 鈥� heroes who have risked their lives to ensure the livelihoods of their loved ones and a semblance of economic activity in this country.

It’s time we see them, lift up their stories and invest in them as a part of our critical childcare infrastructure. This infrastructure must include both the informal care of the Aunt Bees just as it does the licensed care of the Springfield childcare center from which Senator Warren made her remarks.

Family, friend and neighbor child care providers, a category that includes Senator Warren鈥檚 Aunt Bee, are the largest group of child caregivers in this country prior to the pandemic. (For comparison, there are .) .

In-home caregivers are the mainstay of child care for . These caregivers are mostly women () of color (); and those that are paid despite working long, irregular hours. These caregivers go by many names: family child care provider, domestic worker, nanny, au pair, childminder, mommy鈥檚 helper, and so on. But mostly we know them as Abuelita, Granny, Mom-Mom, Nana and of course, Aunt Bee.

With health and safety concerns affecting center and school schedules, we anticipate that reliance on this form of care, along with the licensed version of this care 鈥� referred to as family child care 鈥攚ill persist for the foreseeable future. What support do they receive? It varies.

• A small number of family, friend and neighbor providers can access public child care assistance funding through a 鈥渞egulation-exempt鈥� status;
• Some may have access to minimal health and safety training in their state;
• created a web-resource to help essential healthcare workers identify and compensate relative caregivers;
• allowed families to use state child care assistance for in-home, regulation-exempt child care.

These caregivers want and deserve access to financial and programmatic supports to ensure that the children they care for learn and develop. Creating and financing an effective child care system will require us to compensate caregivers fairly, provide appropriate supports (e.g., training, coaching, curriculum and learning materials) and facilitate connections to community resources like health and mental health services to ensure children and their caregivers thrive.

Senator Elizabeth Warren has brought awareness to the critical need to bail out our failing child care system and rebuild a new system that recognizes and supports all the caregivers who love and care for the diverse families in this country.

In an extremely divisive time, child care is a bipartisan issue supported by all parties as an essential service. This issue not only crosses party lines, it crosses the urban and rural divide as well. Child care is essential. Senator Warren joins a bipartisan group of lawmakers who have to address this pressing need.

This story originally published on Early Learning Nation and is now archived on 麻豆精品. Learn more here.