Child Care in Peril: How COVID-19 is Pushing This Essential Sector to the Brink of Collapse

The Committee on Education and Labor held a virtual Member briefing to examine the challenges facing the child care sector amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Over half of child care providers have temporarily closed their doors and those that continue to operate are doing so with significant financial challenges. According to an analysis by the Center for American Progress, as many as 4.5 million child care slots could be lost permanently without adequate public support—disrupting parents’ ability to go back to work and preventing our economy from fully recovering. 

The briefing featured expert testimony from Hannah Matthew, Deputy Executive Director for Policy at the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), and Mary De La Rosa, a child care provider from Los Angeles, California. The two panelists discussed:

• Temporary closures of and decreases in enrollment and attendance in child care programs; 
• The rising cost of providing child care safely during the COVID-19 pandemic; and
• The importance of federal support to help child care providers survive the COVID-19 pandemic so that they are ready to care for children when parents go back to work.