Connecticut Voices for Children (CT Voices) envisions a Connecticut where all our children thrive. As such, families need to thrive (since children are part of families) and ensuring a strong and equitable workforce is critical to this. One of the ways to support parents in the workforce as well as give children the foundational learning they need to succeed as future workers is having an early care and education (ECE) system that is high-quality, affordable, and accessible to all families.However, many parents in the United States do not have access to stable, affordable, high-quality child care. We define high-quality child care as places where trained early care educators offer care that prioritizes facilitating open and healthy interpersonal interactions, providing child-friendly and safe physical environments, and having stable program structural support and professional development opportunities.1 A 2023 national study found that around three-quarters of surveyed parents with children ages zero to three reported that access to child care poses a challenge, and over half said that finding affordable or high-quality child care was a significant challenge.
Historically, a greater percentage of children in Connecticut access early care and education (ECE) services before kindergarten than in the United States.3 However, the percentage of children in Connecticut who enter kindergarten without prior schooling increased by an estimated four percentage points over the past decade, a larger portion than the national increase of one percent.4 Connecticut parents echo national struggles accessing affordable or high-quality child care, contributing to reduced child preschool engagement.5 Indeed, the current state of early child care in Connecticut can be characterized by high costs paid by parents, low wages for child care staff, business insecurity for child care providers, and a significant shortage of slots available for children—particularly infants and toddlers and families who need more specialized care. As a result, parents struggle to work productively,6 children are missing out on high-quality early education, and the child care industry is depressed.7 These challenges are not independent of racial, citizen, and gender-based equity, as a disproportionate percentage of staff in the ECE field are women of color,8 many of whom are immigrants.9 Children of color and children without legal documentation are least likely to receive high-quality child care.10
The cost of child care for both parents and providers may contribute to the growing portion of young children not engaged in school. The 2023 Annie E. Casey Kids Count Data Book reported that at $18,156 per year for center-based care and $11,955 per year for care in a family child care home (FCC), Connecticut (reviewing data from 2017-2021) had the third most expensive child care for infants and toddlers in the nation, just behind Washington D.C. and Massachusetts.11 The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated Connecticut’s ECE sector challenges. Many providers were forced to shut their doors permanently, contracting the industry further and faster than in previous years. Connecticut policymakers recognize that Connecticut’s ECE system is in a state of crisis, contributing to fewer parents in the workforce, a rapidly declining early care and education workforce, and a growing population of children whose developmental, cognitive, and emotional needs are not being met by the ECE system. For this reason, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont called together a panel of stakeholders to propose sweeping changes and significant investments to stabilize and strengthen Connecticut’s ECE sector, called the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Care. The changes proposed by the Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Care are meant to increase the equity of services for families primarily locked out of accessing needed care, decrease the cost of care for families, raise the voices around policy-making tables to include more families, providers, and businesses, and continuously increase the quality of care that children and families receive. We applaud the work of the Blue Ribbon Panel on Child Care and also seek to extend that work in this report. Specifically, we advocate that by examining the needs of families who have the least access to care and who need the most support from the ECE system and investing in creating a system where these high needs are centered as targets to meet, we can make an ECE system that is flexible and responsive to Connecticut’s shifting family demographics. By prioritizing provider compensation within policies to develop this more responsive system, we can ensure an engaged, well-prepared, and robust workforce serving Connecticut’s youngest children and their families. This report extends and builds upon research we have completed over many years. We briefly review the background literature of ECE to parents, providers, the economy, and children. We then review annual data on Connecticut’s ECE availability, children served, and the systems and dollars that support State-funded care. To add context to these data and help to guide fiscal recommendations, we update our economic analyses from our 2020 and 2021 State of Early Childhood reports regarding the cost of providing care in a Family Child Care (FCC) setting and a Child Care Center (CCC) setting. Finally, we build upon our 2022 State of Early Childhood research, which examined barriers to accessing ECE for immigrant and refugee families, by exploring another group of families who struggle to access equitable early care and education: families of children with special needs. We define children with special needs to include all children who have behavioral, emotional, developmental, physical, and/or cognitive needs that demand training and support beyond what is typical of most child care providers. We close the report by offering policy recommendations to create an ECE system that provides high-quality care that is universally affordable and accessible to all families, especially those with the least access to care under today’s system.
