Dinner Talk LEAPs Into Child Care Crisis

When Brittny Barnes had her first baby, child care came with sticker shock.

“It was like a mortgage,” she told the 20 attendees assembled at Taste of China for a conversation featuring Allyx Schiavone, executive director of the Friends Center for Children and a champion of affordable child care.

Hosted by Francine Farkas Sears of Branford’s Francine Collections, with light piano music by Andy Rubenoff, the dinner party was one of 19 gatherings around Greater New Haven last Thursday night to benefit the after-school and summer mentoring programs of the youth nonprofit Leadership, Education, and Athletics Partnership (LEAP).

The story of Barnes, a former employee of Farkas Sears and now regional coordinator for H&M Clothing, has a happy ending. She was able to secure child care — albeit with a 25-minute commute to North Branford.

That’s an exception in the New Haven area, according to Schiavone, who’s distinguished the Friends Center for, among other things, its sliding scale tuition requiring parents to pay 12 percent of their income, even if that income is zero; its emotional well-being program and, most recently, its teacher housing initiative that offers rent-free housing to teachers who need it.

“51 percent of our nation lives in a child care desert, and New Haven is a child care desert on steroids,” she said. For every 10 children in the city, she said, there are only two spots for licensed or registered child day care. 

That has implications, and it begins with brain development. 

“You’re born with all the brain cells you’ll have for the rest of your life,” Schiavone said. ​“What makes the brain work are the connections between those cells. What creates those connections is interaction. Early care and education teachers in high-quality programs know how to foster those connections.” 

There’s something else. ​“By the age of three, 80 percent of brain development is done, by the age of five, it’s 90 percent,” she said. ​“If we don’t make those connections, the pathways don’t develop, and it’s not something you can go back and fix.” 

That’s why, she said, ​“there’s nothing more important with regard to life outcomes than high quality early care and education.” 

“That’s where we’re coming up short,” she said. We are ​“messing up” natural brain development because, quite simply, we aren’t providing the opportunities for that development. 

The dysfunction doesn’t end there. 

“Parents pay too much, educators make too little, and providers can barely survive,” she said, adding that Friends Center subsists on a combination of public subsidies, private tuition, and continuous fundraising.

Then there are the parents tasked with staying at home. 

“You have an entire group of the workforce — and it’s generally the woman who chooses to stay home — that’s just disappeared,” she said. ​“That means businesses can’t thrive because businesses need employees and employees can’t work if they don’t have child care.” 

That means, finally, ​“the lack of adequate childcare for infants and young children is now estimated to cost the U.S. $122 billion in lost earnings, productivity, and revenue.”

That said, ​“There are ways to fix this. There just isn’t the will.”

Attendee Caird Forbes-Cockell highlighted one reason.

“Short-term limits have politicans focused on the short term,” he said. ​“What we’re talking about is a generational problem, and nobody in this country thinks 20 or 25 years out.”

With that, Schiavone shared some ideas. 

“New Haven right now is in this giant boom,” she said. ​“We’re hitting our stride in economic development. Why couldn’t the city create incentives so that someone who is coming in and doing a project that is over $100 million be required to put in child care infrastructure in their facility.” 

She cited the work of Nobel-winning University of Chicago economics professor James Heckman that showed comprehensive birth-to-five early childhood programs for disadvantaged children yielding a 13 percent return on investment per annum. 

“That means that for every one dollar Connecticut invests in high-quality early care and education, there is between a $7 or $8 return on that investment — and it compounds,” she said. ​“That’s a tremendous rate of interest.” 

Perhaps inspired by that revelation, teacher, author, and entrepreneur Sean-Michael Green suggested a business-inflected solution.

“Think about the stock market,” he said. ​“If you were only investing in four-year clips, everyone would be getting out right now. You need something longer term.” 

“If we think about child care as a long-term investment, if I could invest in a group of people and I’m prepared to wait 30 years to get that return, and I know it’s going to be a huge return, I’d put money into that.” 

Farkas Sears, the hostess, had a similar take. 

“I didn’t need studies to tell me the societal and economic benefits of investing in the youngest ages, but they are there,” said Farkas Sears, in explaining why she’s offered child care options for her employees from the time she started her first company 40 years ago. 

“A child is such a great investment,” she said. ​“We go to the stock market and we invest in these new companies whose value is unknown, but we have everything in a little child, we have the future of this country. We have a chance to do what Allyx is doing many times over.”

Farkas Sears isn’t alone in that conviction.

Earlier this month, U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro tapped Schiavone to be her guest at President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address in Washington, D.C. (She wasn’t the only New Haven guest attendee; U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy picked Mayor Justin Elicker to be his guest at the nation’s Capitol.)

See above for a summary and documentation that Schiavone put together about her trip to D.C. for the State of the Union, and click here for a video of Schiavone meeting the president.