The 19th’s economy reporter, Chabeli Carrazana, unpacks America’s child care crisis and discusses her recent investigation into child care safety regulations across the country. She gives insight into the broken system and the impact child care has on the economy.
For further information, read Chabeli’s article on the 19thnews.org and check out our comprehensive guide on how to find and choose child care.
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On today’s episode
Our host
Errin Haines is The 19th’s editor-at-large and writer of The Amendment newsletter. An award-winning journalist with nearly two decades of experience, Errin was previously a national writer on race for the Associated Press. She’s also worked at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.
Follow Errin on Instagram @emarvelous and X @errinhaines.
Today’s guest
Chabeli Carrazana is our economy reporter. She was previously a business reporter in Florida covering the tourism industry for the Miami Herald and the space industry for the Orlando Sentinel, as well as labor issues and workers rights. In 2021, she was a national Livingston Award finalist for her coverage of the women’s recession.
Follow Chabeli Carrazana on Instagram @chabelicarrazana, LinkedIn @ChabeliCarrazana and X @ChabeliC_.
Episode transcript
Chabeli:
This is a system that we just have not invested in, in this country: child care. And when you don’t invest in a system, cracks start to open.
Errin:
Welcome to The Amendment, a weekly conversation about gender, politics and power from The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. I’m your host, Errin Haines. Just a quick reminder about why we’re here: It’s because this democracy is still unfinished business. There are still way too many people who are unseen and unheard in our politics, and we wanna bring them into this conversation. That’s what The Amendment is about, and that’s who The Amendment is for: Anybody who is still marginalized in our democracy. Together, we’re gonna get to a better understanding of why our democracy remains unfinished and what we can do about it. So, to that end, today I am so excited to be joined by my colleague, the economy reporter for The 19th News, Chabeli Carrazana. Earlier this month, Chabeli published a comprehensive investigation into the failures of national child care safety regulations.
In it, she’s unpacking the state of child care safety in our country down to the state level. She’s talking about the consequences of our national inaction — and even indifference — around this issue, and how parents can be better informed about the care available to them. Folks, this is an enormously important story and one that Chabeli was really uniquely qualified to tell. As soon as I read it, I knew that this was the perfect opportunity, not only to hear her thoughts on an issue that she has totally owned in her time in our newsroom, but how her lived experience and reporting expertise come together to really inform her approach to covering our economy in a way that empowers those that we don’t always include in the conversation on an issue that impacts so many Americans. I’m so happy to have you on The Amendment, Chabeli. We have a lot to talk about.
Chabeli:
I’m so excited to be here, Errin.
Errin:
Chabeli, you came aboard as we were building our small but mighty newsroom in those early days back in the spring, I think, of 2020? I just remember thinking that you were the right person for this job, not just because of what you knew about this beat, but because of who you are as a person. So, that’s where I wanna start. What can you say about how you came to your role at The 19th as our economy reporter?
Chabeli:
Oh, thank you for that, Errin. Right before I came to The 19th, I had been a local news reporter in Florida, and a lot of that work had focused on writing about economy from the perspective of low-income workers. That was really where a lot of my interest was, and a lot of that had to do with my upbringing. I’m a Cuban immigrant. I moved to the U.S. when I was five years old with my mom. I watched my family sort of struggle once we arrived here. My mom was an engineer in Cuba, but she couldn’t renew that title here, so she worked as a school crossing guard. My grandmother was a child care provider. And so all of that background really helped me sort of focus in on this swath of our economy, of our workforce, that is often not centered in economy news across the country. These are not the folks we’re often writing about and writing for in our industry, and that was really the kind of economy reporting that I really wanted to do and brought here to The 19th.
Errin:
I mean, look, folks might not immediately connect economics with child care, but it’s absolutely an economic issue. How are the two connected for you? How are you understanding child care policy and how are you using that to help us understand the economy?
Chabeli:
So there’s a couple points, right? When you think about just our child care workforce, that is a workforce that is 94% women. More than a third of it is women of color. So right there, that’s already an area that we’re gonna focus on pretty closely here at The 19th. But, also, the way that child care interacts with how you’re able to go to work, access work, access the workforce…that is a really critical piece, right? And we saw that during the pandemic, especially when part of the reason we experienced this “first women’s recession” — where women were really losing jobs in early 2020 — was because of child care. They did not have access to child care, and that was pushing them out of the workforce when they otherwise would not have made that choice. So child care is really fundamental in moving our economy forward and allowing people to work if they want to do that. And the fact that we have not invested in that as a country is one of the reasons why child care has become such a huge issue in the past couple of years; It’s because people have really realized, wow, if we want to get this economy moving, we need to look at this sector.
Errin:
And really you are helping us to understand that investing in child care is part of that unfinished business of our democracy, Absolutely.
Ok, so let’s talk about your project. I wanna know how this piece came to be and why child care has been such an important topic to you.
Chabeli:
So I talked to you about my grandmother, who’s an incredibly important person in my life. I grew up with kids in my house. She was an in-home child care provider. I saw how hard she worked; how difficult that work was; all of the other parents — largely Latinx parents — who were able to go to work and sort of achieve their American dream because my grandmother was caring for their kids and giving them that opportunity. And so I grew up with that, and I have always thought that child care providers are so important. The work they do is so important and it’s so undervalued. Also, in 2022 I became a mom, and I had to put my child in child care and had to experience firsthand a lot of the things that we were already writing about — about how hard it was, about how few choices there are, about how scary it is to leave your kid in the trust of someone else.
And so, thinking about that, about six months after my son started child care, I started to really think about safety and sort of obsess a little – which I tend to do – about safety and figuring out, okay, how are all of these child care programs doing on safety? Are kids getting hurt? It was kind of the first question. It was just a curiosity I had that was sort of picking at my brain. And I wanted to know what the data was. I work with data a lot, and I was just curious. So I started to try to find these reports on death and serious injury and abuse cases at child care centers in every state. And Errin, I couldn’t find them. I mean, they were so hard to find. I knew the data was supposed to be there, but I could not find them. I had a really excellent source that was able to kind of pull some of that together for me. They had already been kind of digging into it a little bit. So I was able to find the reports, and that’s where I realized, “Oh shit, there’s a story here.”
Errin:
Yeah. I mean, honestly, reading your piece, I was surprised to learn that child care regulations haven’t even been in place in this country for very long. Your story discusses how in 2014 there was legislation called the Child Care and Development Block Grant that passed. Talk to people about what this was supposed to do, who it was supposed to support, what states had to do in terms of complying with this law.
Chabeli:
Just to pan out a second, the Child Care and Development Block Grant is basically our funding mechanism, our national funding mechanism, for child care. It sends money to the states. The states use that money to make the care lower-cost for low-income kids. And in 2014 was the first time that we ever put health and safety requirements into that law, which said, okay, states, if you are going to receive this money, you have to hit all of these benchmarks on safety.
One of them was, you need to be reporting every year how many deaths, how many serious injuries and how many cases of child abuse are happening in child care centers. That was the first time we had required that. Only a decade ago. Which blew my mind a little bit because you can pull up inspection reports at food restaurants any day.
Errin:
Yeah.
Chabeli:
With the Airline industry, you can see whenever there’s a crash. And we just didn’t have it. We just did not know how many kids were getting hurt in child care. And so that was the requirement the states were given up until 2018 to come into compliance. There were a couple other requirements too, around background checks and those inspection reports. They had to post inspection reports online. And so what we did was, “okay, now it’s been 10 years since 2024, where are we on those requirements?”
Errin:
Yeah. So what did you find out in your reporting? What were some of the statistics that you were able to find and really what stood out to you?
Chabeli:
We found eight states are out of compliance completely with the law. Another eight we found appear to be also missing quite a bit of data, and are potentially out of compliance. And in the process of reporting this story, there were another six states who updated their data…
Errin:
Oh, wow.
Chabeli:
…because of the questions that we asked. They sort of realized, “Oh, we’re missing things.” So they updated it even before the story ran. What this all means is it has taken 10 years for states to get close to even start reporting this data and so many of them are still not doing it. What does that say about our priorities? What does that say about the reality of when we say “safety is the most important, safety is our priority in child care,” but are we really sticking to that? Are we able to do that?
The reality is: no, states have not been able to do that. And the other reality, too, is that a lot of people have not been focusing on this issue, Errin. I mean, we called more than 40 child care experts, child welfare experts. A bunch of folks didn’t even know what I was talking about.
Errin:
Wow.
Chabeli:
[They] didn’t even know that this was something the states had to be doing. And so the accountability piece, I think, is really important here because we kind of felt like some of that was missing. Who was making sure that the states were doing this?
Errin:
Yeah. What is the national picture in terms of our child care system and safety? Is this, generally speaking, a safe system for the country’s children? Or is there real cause for alarm that there could be real safety issue in our country’s daycares?
Chabeli:
I’m glad you asked that question because I think that’s a really important point to highlight here. You know, parents that might be listening and are worried, “oh my gosh, am I sending my child somewhere that’s not safe?” I want to really highlight and point out, yes, child care by and large is very safe. The number of incidents that are happening — serious incidents — is fairly low, right? The state that had the highest number of deaths last year was California with 10, Texas had six, Montana had five. We’re talking generally single digits in terms of the death cases. But I will caveat that by saying: child care is a system that we just have not invested in this country, and when you don’t invest in a system cracks start to open. We need to be very vigilant as to where those cracks are and how to avoid them expanding. And if we are not keeping track of when these serious incidents are happening, if we are not getting good data on the number of kids dying, we simply cannot improve something that we are not keeping good track of and we don’t know the data on. And so the reality is, yes, child care is safe, but this is an important piece of ensuring that it continues to be safe.
Errin:
So, Chabeli, you talked about cracks in the system and I wanna get into what it looks like when those cracks start to show and the system does fail. You have a story that talks about Cynthia King and her four-month-old son, Wiley Muir. Could you tell our listeners a little bit more about their story?
Chabeli:
Yeah. It was really important for me as I was working on this to help folks understand what does this mean? What does this mean for a family who might’ve experienced something like this? Through that process, I found Cynthia King, who’s a mother in Hawaii whose son died at a daycare four days into starting daycare in 2014 — the same year that this law was passed. At the time, Cynthia couldn’t look up inspection reports, she couldn’t see if this was something that was happening to other families in her state. She had no idea. The data wasn’t there, besides the fact that there were a lot of inconsistencies and sort of mystery around what actually happened to her son. In the years following his death, she spent a lot of time trying to uncover what really happened to him and finding that, in her view, the investigation into his death had not been thorough enough.
Chabeli:
The provider who was involved was shut down for a time but then got her license back, reopened, and eventually the state shut that daycare provider down because she was taking care of four times the legal limit. She was taking care of 14 kids, eight of them were infants. That’s illegal in the state of Hawaii and in most states. And so when Cynthia learned that, and this was about a year and a half after her son’s death, that’s when she really started on this crusade to try to uncover more of that story, but also to try to get legislation passed in the state of Hawaii that would prevent this from happening to other families, that would create more safety guidelines. And one of the laws she wanted to pass was a law that would require the state to track incidents and to post inspection reports. And at the time she was told, “We don’t need to pass this in the state of Hawaii. The federal government just passed a law like this and we’re gonna get this done.”
CLIP: President Obama:
One of my top priorities is making sure that we’ve got affordable, high-quality childcare and early childhood education for our young people across the country.Today, I am pleased to sign a bill into law that is gonna bring us closer to that goal. Uh, that’s the reauthorization of the Child Care and Development Block Grant program.
Chabeli:
So imagine her surprise when I call her at the end of 2023, and I tell her, “Hawaii is still not doing this. And in fact, Hawaii is the only state that is out of compliance on reporting, it’s out of compliance on inspection reports, and it’s out of compliance on background checks.” At this point, Cynthia has sort of moved on from her advocacy work. She’s had two other children. What she told me was that she was just completely devastated and shocked to learn that her state just still had not done the thing they said 10 years ago they were going to do.
Errin:
Yeah. Didn’t do right by folks like her, and didn’t do right by children like Wiley. Such an important part of this conversation about what are the consequences in the instances when this does happen. And I love that your reporting doesn’t just stop at this story, at these findings. Somebody reading this or somebody listening to us right now who might be alarmed or overwhelmed, to your point, by what you have found, can also be empowered by the tools that you’re providing to help them navigate this system. I just wanna mention on our website, at 19thnews.org, people can find this dashboard that you’ve created to see how compliant each state is and to get a guide for parents to better assess child care options. Talk to me about why you felt obligated to provide, kind of, these additional resources as part of your reporting.
Chabeli:
You know, I think we get the feedback a lot just generally as an industry, that journalism is really doom and gloom, right? Where we write about a lot of sad, dark stuff. And this is certainly that. I just don’t want people to have that as a takeaway. I want them to feel empowered. I want them to be able to look at the things that I was looking at and decide for themselves, and you know, know the questions to ask and know how to find these inspection reports and see their state’s, you know, these really hard to find reports…I just linked it for all of them. Look up your states, see how they’re doing, keep track of it. I think it’s just really, really important to give that power back in a system that sometimes can make people feel powerless.
Errin:
And even, you know, the explainer that you have too for folks who may be new parents or folks who may be new to the daycare system, helping them to even understand what to ask, what questions they may not have even thought about. How did you kind of come up with that list? Just give us a few examples of things that folks might need to think of that may not have occurred to them or may not be front of mind.
Chabeli:
Yeah, that was really the guide that I wanted to have when I started looking at daycare. I mean, so I cover child care, right? I covered it before my son was born, and I still did not know a lot of these things about basic questions that you should ask, how to find it. You know, the inspection reports I certainly didn’t know about. But for example, things like a wait list. When do I get on a waiting list? How early do I have to do it? So we talked to folks about getting on that waiting list when you’re in your first trimester because waiting lists across the country are months long, years long. I felt so silly calling a daycare and saying, “Hey, can I get on a waiting list?” And they said, “Well, how old’s your baby?” I was like, “Well, negative seven months. He’s not born yet.”
Errin:
Still on the inside.
Chabeli:
But that was the right choice and I didn’t know that. I only learned that from friends, right? There is no guide to child care. You don’t know about it until you’re in it, and you’re starting to ask folks and you’re realizing, “Wow, this is so expensive and so hard to access.” I wanted to answer those questions on the front end for folks who might want that resource when they start searching.
Errin:
I wanna circle back to a point that you were making earlier. We talk about child care. This is not just about the folks that are looking for care, it’s about the folks that are doing the caregiving. You mentioned women account for 95% of the child care workforce, a majority of those being Black and Latina women. They are paid low wages. This leads to high turnover. How does that play a part in this child care crisis?
Chabeli:
The stress on the child care system right now, and on its workforce, is sort of central to this entire crisis, right? You have daycares that are not able to keep their staff because — it’s honestly, I mean, think about — it easier to go get paid a little bit more at a Target or a Walmart or a McDonald’s and not have the stress of taking care of young children. I mean, it’s an incredibly difficult job. And so these workers are paid extremely low wages. These centers cannot keep these workers because they’re leaving. My son’s teacher is leaving this week and I’m destroyed about it because it’s so hard when you have to now meet a new person, now trust a new person. So these workers have no support, and that is creating a lot of instability in this system, and that instability kind of seeps into this story about health and safety.
The federal government is trying to walk this line of regulating these daycares, regulating the states, but keeping providers open, keeping daycares open, because as it exists, parents have very few options. The options are all extremely costly. These daycares are losing staff by the day. How do you keep a system functioning and how do you keep it safe? How do you not overregulate it? Those are big, big, big questions that the federal government is wrestling with and it’s part of the reason these regulations have not come together in all of these years. We are not funding it. We are not funding it to make it less costly for parents. We’re not funding it so that providers earn more money, and we are not funding it so that we can get it together with some of these health and safety requirements.
Errin:
Yeah. When we talk about this issue, we’re not just talking about the politics of it, but we are talking about policy and what policies need to be enacted to really address this issue. Are there proposed solutions to the problems that you are talking about? And are there politicians that are backing those solutions?
Chabeli:
So two years ago we saw a $400 billion proposal come out of the White House to try to basically overhaul the national child care system.
CLIP: President Biden:
You know, under this order, almost every federal agency will collectively take over 50 actions to provide more peace of mind for families and dignity for care workers, who deserve jobs with good pay and good benefits.
Chabeli:
That had the support largely of a lot of Democrats. But we have seen some Republican support on this issue as well. Ultimately, look, it didn’t pass, but it did open up sort of this national conversation around child care. And we are sort of living in that moment now where there’s a lot more focus and scrutiny on this topic, partly because we saw that it’s really an economic issue. So you’re seeing proposals come forth. I mean, Elizabeth Warren has a large proposal, Patty Murray. Those are two of the senators that have been really at the forefront of this issue in bringing forth some proposals. What I think is important for listeners to understand is that as a country, we do not approach child care the way that most other countries approach it, right? We divorce it from K-12 education, and so kids under five, it’s considered a private issue. Because of that, we are not putting the resources into child care that we’re putting into every other form of education. This block grant that we’ve been talking about? Its budget was $8 billion last year. The Department of Education had a budget of $80 billion last year, 10 times. When we make that division, it creates an incredibly unstable system. How are you going to put these massive health and safety requirements on a system that is just trying to survive in the first place?
Errin:
What you’re saying about the onus being on families to kind of figure this out, uh, you know, until that they’re able to get into the public education system, we know that once they encounter this daycare system, they learn a lot about what they didn’t know. Now that we are all learning this new information about the child care crisis through your reporting, how can we steer our political conversations towards talking about this more specifically?
Chabeli:
This is an issue that, for the folks who are experiencing it in real time right now, it’s an enormous issue for them. It’s something that is hugely important. We are expecting it to be an issue that is going to motivate people to vote this year in 2024. We think it’s gonna be something that is gonna be on the ballot for folks because it is really important for them. And you know, what’s hard, and what we’ve heard talking about sort of the politics of child care is that it’s so acute when you’re in it, and then your child moves on to kindergarten and K-12 education, and we move on from it as an issue, as voters. And that’s what’s been difficult about getting political momentum around this subject is that the folks who are expected to really push on it have a lot of pressures on them already.
Chabeli:
What I would say is if this is something that’s important to you, I mean, vote like it’s important to you. I think it’s something that it’s really critical to talk to your elected officials about why this is something that is affecting you as a parent. It’s affecting how your ability to work, and really helping people understand the way that these things are intertwined.
Errin:
Absolutely. And might I add to your point about even the work that Cynthia was doing at the state level after Wiley’s death, thinking not only about the top of the ticket, but the state and local level as well. Chabeli, you have helped us understand how child care is political, how it is gendered, how it is an economic issue, it’s a quality of life issue. It is literally a marker of a healthy democracy and the extent to which our citizens can fully participate. Thank you so much for your insights. Thank you for your work. And we will definitely be staying tuned to see how child care is on the ballot and how you will continue to help empower folks who are navigating this incredibly complicated system that is so essential to who we are as an economy and who we are as a society. Thank you so much.
Chabeli:
Thanks Errin.
Errin:
Chabeli, if people wanna find out how they can read more about this series that we’ve been discussing, how they can continue to follow your work on this important issue, how can they do that?
Chabeli:
Keep up with us at 19thnews.org. I think we’ll have a couple follow ups on this project that are upcoming. We’ve got a lot of child care stories coming for you this year. You can find me on – what are we calling it? – we’re calling it X now, X, formerly Twitter. Fun stuff on Instagram as well, @ChabeliCarrazana on Instagram. You’ll get baby pictures from time to time on there too ’cause my kid’s just so cute.
Errin:
The Jack content is premium people, it’s premium. I’ll also say that that is premium content. And what’s your X handle again, just for people who need that?
Chabeli:
It’s @ChabeliC_. ChabeliC was taken, so rude.
Errin:
So rude.
Errin:
Okay, so my 19th Hive already knows this, but in case you are new to The 19th or new to The Amendment, we have an asterisk in our logo. Why do we have an asterisk? It’s there to signify the fact that while the 19th amendment granted some, but not all women – hello? — the right to vote on paper, that really wasn’t the whole story. The asterisk really reminds us that our work is far from finished in this democracy. That is the journey that we are on. So thank you for being on this journey with me. To end each show, I’m gonna give you my asterisk on the news.
This week I wanna talk about something that’s made headlines, which is the Alabama Supreme Court decision ruling that embryos could be considered children. This has put the future of in-vitro fertilization in that state in jeopardy.
Errin:
And also raised questions about what this could mean for other states going forward as we’re continuing to kind of contemplate the unintended, well, maybe unintended consequences of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision two years later. Now, there’s been a lot of attention on this issue, and rightly so. But what I wanna put an asterisk on this week is really the racial dynamics of how this whole conversation about reproductive rights and access is playing out. And I mean, forgive the pun, but I really do feel like Alabama is fertile ground to look at this issue because it is a place where we know the fight for reproductive rights was long being waged by Black women, particularly around the issue of maternal mortality, which disproportionately affects us and was a tragic reality long before the fall of Roe versus Wade. And while maternal mortality is being increasingly discussed — it’s a priority, for example, of Vice President Kamala Harris’ — it’s not nearly the topic that it should be in our country, given the life or death stakes that this also poses for so many people.
Meanwhile, we have seen a ton of coverage around the issue of IVF already, and I have to think that part of the reason for that is because of who is being impacted. And I’m talking about namely white people. White people are 78% of the folks that are using IVF to try to have a family, and that’s compared to only 3% of Black people. To me, it seems like reproductive rights and access has come much more into focus, not just because of the landmark Supreme Court decision, but literally because white people now have skin in the game. So I think it’s worth considering in this moment, and as we continue to watch the fallout from Dobbs, who we are making the face for reproductive access and why. So, that’s my asterisk for this week. Uh, and that is this week’s episode of The Amendment, which is also a newsletter, by the way, that I write. You can subscribe to it for free by going to 19thnews.org. That’s also where you can find all of our great journalism around gender, politics, and policy. For The 19th and Wonder Media Network. I’m Errin Haines. Talk to you again next week.
Errin:
The Amendment is a co-production of The 19th News and Wonder Media Network. It is executive produced by Jenny Kaplan, Terry Rupar and Faith Smith. Our head of development is Emily Rudder. Julia B. Chan is The 19th editor-in-chief. The Amendment is edited by Jenny Kaplan, Grace Lynch, and Emily Rudder, and was produced by Adesuwa Agbonile, Grace Lynch, Brittany Martinez and Taylor Williamson with production assistance from Luci Jones. Our amazing theme music was composed by Jlin. Are you headed to South by Southwest Edu? I’ll be there too for The Amendment’s first ever live show! So come through the podcast stage at 10:00 AM on March 7th to see me and a special guest.
