The state of the summer care gap

This blog post was written by our marketing intern, Pilar McDonald. She talks about the struggle parents experience in trying to find and afford childcare during the summer months.

School’s out! Scream and shout, and let it all out! And cry! and yell! At your kids, the government and your employer…

Summer is finally here. While kids celebrate the freedom and lack of homework, many parents are left to face the dilemma of what to do with their kids over summer vacation. In the United States, the majority of parents experience a lack of childcare infrastructure in the summer months - a void created by the cessation of the academic calendar and the American expectation that care for children is the responsibility of the parents and not of communal volition.

In the United States, each state determines the number of days a student is in school - regulations range from 160 to 180 days a year. This leaves upwards of 205 days where kids are not required by law to be anywhere - in other words, where they are the responsibility of their parents for all 24 hours of each day. The summer break - usually about 10 weeks - is the largest chunk of care time that parents are expected to cover. And they are expected to do it all on their own.

So how do different parents and families fill these gaps? Like a collection of damn puzzle-solving detectives - that’s how.

In 2021, New America’s Better Life Lab conducted a study through which they surveyed “1,335 U.S.-based online parents of children ages 4 to 14 and asked them several key questions about what their children did over the past summer, how much it cost them, and how easy or hard it was to find and afford summer care.” The study found that parents use a myriad of mechanisms to fill the gap; the largest portion (44%) of which is filled by care by a parent or family vacation time. See the graph of New America’s findings below.

*New America’s survey findings on type of care used.*

It is clear that summer care more often than not looks like a smorgasbord of options working to fill many childcare gaps. Beyond the difficulty of finding viable care solutions, New America found that almost half (46%) of the surveyed parents considered affording childcare to be a challenge. Further findings detail that “one in five parents paid $3,000 or more to care for their children over the summer in 2017.” For the average child’s 10-week summer, this results in about $60 a day in spending on care. New America writes, “an employee working full time and earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour takes home about $54 a day.” For many families, the associated costs make many summer childcare programs inaccessible, both preventing lower-income kids from having the same enrichment opportunities, and pulling many parents, often mothers, out of the workforce.

For Parents & Individuals

As we jump into summer, we are left with the question of what we can each do - parent or not. If you have extra time on your hands, reach out to a parent with young kids - offer to help fill some small portion of this large gap in care. Or talk to your neighbors and friends about sharing care responsibilities a couple of days a week. As we see above, the majority of parents fill the summer care gap with a variety of support systems, communities, programs, and individuals. Check out these unconventional childcare options and the different ways to support your community to get those creative juices flowing in the thought process of how to help caregivers this summer.

Here at Mirza, we do whatever we can to help you, so we’ve paired up with companies working to fill the gap. We work with Carefully and Abulé, who provide community-based childcare options, and we are partnering with Dailies this summer in our “School’s Out Campaign.”

For employers

If you are the supervisor or boss to a parent this summer, approach conversations around time off, meeting times, strict 9-5 schedules, and other patterns in the office that pose particular challenges to parents, with a care-first perspective. In the United States, these systems were not designed to support parents, resulting in a summer care gap that we should maybe start to call the “summer care gaping black hole.”

Since the cost of care is one of the biggest obstacles for families during the summer months, employers must consider subsidizing care for their employees with children. Providing financial support allows for employees to locate reliable care, whether through paying for an outside camp or enrichment program, compensation for a family member, friend, or outside care provider, or being able to participate in a community childcare program. After all, according to a survey done by the Center for American Progress, this gap in childcare “means that at least one parent plans to make a job change that will result in reduced income.” With these job sacrifices, employers are bound to lose valuable employees who will likely need to reduce hours or drop out of the workforce completely. On top of the disproportionate burden low-income families face as a result of these income losses, the economy suffers as a whole when parents are forced out of their jobs. One estimate finds that the “economy sacrifices $57 billion each year in lost revenue, wages, and productivity due to overall child care issues.” The void in summer care presents a particularly economically vulnerable crossroads for families and society as a whole.