![]() ![]() The other big center-based companies include private equity–owned Learning Care Group and publicly traded Bright Horizons, which together have capacity for more than 250,000 children at about 1,000 locations each. That emergency has fueled the Biden administration’s sweeping-if tenuous- proposals to overhaul the country’s highly fragmented childcare industry, which ranges from individual nannies and small, in-home or community-based operations to private equity–owned KinderCare and a handful of other national, for-profit providers of “center-based” care. households, and that created what the White House has declared to be a “national emergency” in women’s employment. Childcare is at the center of the larger caretaking crisis that has disproportionately hurt women, who still shoulder the vast majority of unpaid labor in U.S. Today, the crumbling of the nation’s childcare infrastructure-a crisis that has been exacerbated, though not created, by the pandemic-has become an accepted fact, recognized by Fortune 500 employers and top policymakers as well as the parents, caretakers, and childcare providers caught in the destruction. ![]() When I was working, I felt like I should have been a mother-and when I was being a mother, I should have been working,” Mendolia says. ![]() Those women who did manage to keep working endured an unsustainable hell of trying to meet deadlines while changing diapers or breastfeeding toggling between running Zoom meetings and assistant-teaching Zoom kindergarten and swimming through endless feelings of failure. Most of them still haven’t returned today, a year and a half into the pandemic, amid rising uncertainties about whether the Delta variant will continue to keep schools and offices closed this fall-and whether it will be safe for unvaccinated children to return to childcare centers trying to resume operating at full capacity. More than 2 million women left the paid labor force entirely, erasing more than three decades’ worth of employment gains. working mothers, had its fundamental weaknesses exposed in a massive, public implosion. And suddenly the system that had sustained Mendolia’s career, and that of most U.S. KinderCare-like most schools and childcare providers of any size- shut down many of its centers. “As a working mother,” she says, “this is necessary for me to succeed.” Then the COVID-19 pandemic came crashing across the U.S. ![]() It wasn’t a perfect solution: Mendolia says the staff turnover seemed high, and as time went on-she had a daughter, moved to Phoenix, and enrolled both kids in another KinderCare-she found herself paying more than $2,500 a month, or “more than my mortgage.” But it was a national company, which promised a certain standardized level of care, and for a while, it was the best option she could find. Louis center run by KinderCare, the nation’s largest for-profit childcare provider, which serves more than 126,000 children at its 2,000-plus locations. Eventually the couple found an opening at a St. “There were waiting lists for years,” recalls Mendolia, a fiercely practical MBA-holder and marathoner whose husband, an events producer who runs his own small business, doesn’t get paid leave. But many day-care facilities don’t accept infants and toddlers because it’s so expensive to hire enough people to responsibly watch them. After three months of maternity leave, she was ready to return to the office-if she could just find an affordable, convenient childcare center for her son. Louis in 2017, when she had her first child. Mendolia, a senior sales manager for a multinational manufacturing company, was 35 and living in her native St. Kate Mendolia’s all-too-common childcare problems started long before the pandemic. ![]()
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