American society has changed dramatically since the time that the public school structure was first created. It is within the last 50 or so years that there has been a shift to both parents working outside the home to keep their lives in balance, whether it was a financial necessity or a psychological one, where both men and women wanted to use their educations as springboards into full lives of work, service and family life.
This is the reason that high quality child care centers are so critical to the health of any community. Those young children, who should be seen as our most important resource for the future, are not given the primary thought in the United States that they should be given, left out of the public school structure supported by taxes and state and federal funding. Studies keep finding that those early years are extremely important to the development of any person, yet they are too often an afterthought here when it comes to finding them revenues and funding on a consistent basis to keep them afloat and thriving.
In other nations across the world, early childhood education does find universal strong support from consistent and reliable streams of funding, as in the Nordic countries and especially Sweden, for instance, building systems that put the needs of children and their families first. In the U.S., the struggle to find such funding continues, with too much of the burden being put on the backs of young families, who are just starting out their lives, and the educators who choose to take on the important task of teaching these young children.
If you missed it, do go back and read the story in this newspaper last week by Elias Sorich on child care centers and the staffing and funding shortages they face, not only in this region, but across the country. There is only so much young families can afford to pay for early childhood care. Child care centers, mainly nonprofit, strive to supplement tuition with fundraising in their communities, yet with shrinking staffs to keep the centers operating, less time can be given to these initiatives. If you are thinking their missions don’t touch your lives, if you don’t have young children or grandchildren in the area, think again.
Think about those essential workers and volunteers who do have children younger than school age, who fill positions in your community that are critical to its healthy functioning. Take an interest in the child care center that services the families in your town, and find out how many families they affect, giving them safe, fun and high quality child care while they work. The benefit to having centers that cover your local region is that the students become familiar with one another and become friends, sometimes lifelong, and wind up attending school together. Their annual appeals are mainly going out to their supporters now for the end of the year giving opportunities, so it’s a good time to be very aware of their needs and support them as much as you possibly can.
