I have worked in child care for 40 years. On September 29^th, my friend and fellow early learning leader Angelia Hicks-Maxie shared a Seattle Times article from 1998 with the headline “The kids are priceless; the pay is $7.81 an hour.” I read it twice, because it could have been written this morning.

The article profiles Felicia Hollinquest, a lead pre-K teacher at Tiny Tots Development Center in Rainier Beach. After eight years on the job, she made $7 an hour. The center’s director, Angelia herself, was losing at least 40 percent of her staff every year and couldn’t raise pay. Child care workers at nonprofit centers in Washington averaged $7.81 an hour, and those at for-profit centers averaged $7.54. That was just above the federal poverty line, for work that shapes children’s brains during their most important years.

The state’s answer was a $3.5 million pilot to boost wages as workers earned college degrees. It was well intentioned, and I’ve watched versions of it come and go ever since: a pilot here, a grant there, a study, a task force.

Twenty-eight years later

The national median wage for child care workers is now $16.82 an hour, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Washington’s minimum wage is $17.13 an hour. In the Seattle area, the median child care worker earns $21.02 an hour, less than Seattle’s minimum wage of $21.30 an hour. In its 2024 Early Childhood Workforce Index, UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment found that no state paid early educators a living wage.

Parents aren’t getting a bargain either. In 2024, infant care at a Washington center averaged $21,348 a year, according to Child Care Aware. For a single parent earning the state median of $42,108, that’s 51 percent of income. Families are stretched to the breaking point, and the teachers caring for their children are stretched further.

Nobody in this system is getting rich, not the families and not the programs. The system runs on the sacrifice of the lowest-paid person in the room.

How did we get here?

We didn’t stumble into this. It was built.

Care work has always been the foundation under every other kind of work, and in this country it has been assigned, again and again, to people the economy chose not to value.

It began with slavery. Historian Sonya Michel, in her history of American child care, describes the two-sided reality of the plantation South: white planters’ wives kept watch over Black children playing in the kitchen yard while their mothers labored in the cotton fields, and enslaved mothers sang white babies to sleep while their own children found ways to comfort themselves.

The care enslaved women gave was demanded, never paid for, and never theirs to give to their own children.

Emancipation didn’t dissolve that arrangement. Care and domestic work stayed the work available to Black women and other women of color. When the New Deal’s labor protections arrived, domestic workers were left out. In the 1930s and 1940s, about 79 percent of the South’s domestic service workers were Black, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 excluded domestic workers by name. It followed the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which had already shut domestic workers out. Domestic workers’ advocates and legal scholars argue that this was no accident of drafting. Some domestic workers weren’t brought under minimum wage protections until 1974.

The pattern continued whenever it suited the country. During World War II, the federal government funded child care because it needed mothers in defense plants. Through the Lanham Act, $52 million in federal grants supported centers from 1943 to 1946, and Washington was among the states with the highest spending. The centers served roughly 600,000 children over the life of the program. Then the war ended, and so did the funding.

In 1971, Congress passed the Comprehensive Child Development Act, which would have built a national network of child care programs. It passed the Senate 63 to 17 and the House 211 to 187. President Nixon vetoed it that December, warning that it would commit the government to “communal approaches to child rearing.” The override failed.

Every time this country has decided child care was a public necessity, it has found a reason to walk it back.

The math that never works

The 1998 article said it plainly: the child care industry defies ordinary supply-and-demand economics. Demand was enormous. That year, 263,400 children in Washington attended licensed and unlicensed care. Yet wages stayed at the floor.

The reason is simple. Safe care requires small ratios. The article notes a 4-to-1 ratio for infants, compared with 25-to-1 in public school classrooms. Small ratios mean labor is the biggest cost, and parents can’t pay what that labor is worth. Someone subsidizes the system, and it’s the teacher, usually a woman, and disproportionately a woman of color.

Families get squeezed from the other side. At Kids Co., the program I founded, many working families earn too much to qualify for state and local child care subsidies and too little to pay full tuition. We close that gap ourselves through the Kids Co. Scholarship Fund, which means our program is subsidizing the system too..

What I want legislators to hear

If we want to rewrite this history, the fix has to be structural.

Pay child care educators as the professionals they are. Wages should reflect training, experience, and the developmental stakes of the work, not what parents can bear. Years of experience in the classroom should count as much as a degree. The state should fund programs at the true cost of care, so they can pay a living wage without passing the cost to families.

Fund the system publicly. We don’t ask the parents of six-year-olds to cover the full cost of public school. The years before kindergarten deserve the same commitment.

Stop treating pilots as policy. A pilot is a way to study a problem we’ve already diagnosed. We’ve had the data for decades.

Name the history. Undervalued care work isn’t a market accident. It has roots in slavery, in the exclusion of domestic workers from labor law, and in a century of decisions about whose work counts. Policy that ignores that history will keep reproducing it.

Forty years

I’m not writing this out of despair, though I’ve earned some. I’m writing it because Felicia Hollinquest deserved better than $7 an hour, and so did every teacher who came after her. Every parent who has gone to work knowing their child was safe did so because someone else stood on a playground, watching, patient, and underpaid.

Child care is the work that makes all other work possible. It’s long past time our laws and paychecks said so.

We can no longer wait for legislators to solve this problem. We need to demand that they solve it.

Before the Legislature convenes in January 2027, call your state senator and representatives, tell them what early learning educators in your community earn, and ask what they will do about it.