By Kelley Cullen PhD and Dr. Patrick Jones
Access to child care has long been a barrier for working families and one that was exacerbated by the pandemic. COVID-19 restrictions greatly reduced the availability of child care, causing many parents to leave their jobs to care for their children, or to scramble to find temporary child care arrangements as they continue to report for work at essential jobs, such as nursing and grocery work. Likewise, with the transition to remote learning for students, many parents had to balance caring and even teaching their children while simultaneously maintaining their work responsibilities from home.
While schools certainly don’t function as babysitters, they do provide structured times where children are legally required to be in attendance. This allows working parents with children under the age of 18 an opportunity to work without having to worry about childcare. Thus, families with minor children were especially hard hit by the uncertainties created by the pandemic. Conversely, the return of schools and child care programs will facilitate working parents to fully return to work, and therefore will affect the speed and robustness of economic recovery.
To help gauge the importance of working families with minor children, Walla Walla Trends Indicator 1.3.8 measures the estimated total number and share of families having one or more children under the age of 18 where all parents in the family were in the workforce. Specifically, this means that for households with two parents, both parents are participating in the workforce; similarly, the sole parent in a single-parent family must be in the workforce. Data are provided from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) for Walla Walla and Columbia Counties combined (the metro area). Washington State and the U.S. are offered as benchmarks.
Working families with children under 18 are an important part of the local economy. In fact, according to the five-year estimates of the ACS employment characteristics of families, in 2019, of the estimated 12,482 working families in the combined counties, over half (54.2%) had children under the age of 18. Further, of this group of working families with minor children, over three-fourths (76.9%) would be considered “workforce strained” because all parents in the family were participating in the labor force as of 2019. Despite some annual variability perhaps due to smaller survey sample sizes, the share of workforce strained families with children has decreased slightly over time, from a high of 78.7% in 2013. Over the seven years, the combined counties have recorded fewer single-parent working families and more dual-parent working families.
The strain placed on working families is also felt across the state and nation as a whole. However, for the combined Walla Walla and Columbia Counties, the current share of 77% is greater than both those of the state or nation. In 2019, in Washington State an estimated 71% and in the U.S. an estimated 73.5% of working families with minor children had all parents in the workforce. In comparison to metro area where a flattening or even slight decrease of almost two percentage points in their share occurred, both the state and national shares have increased by two to three percentage points over the same time period. Washington State has increased their share from 68% to 71%. The U.S. has seen their share increase from 71.4% to 73.5%.
Yet, the estimated share of “workforce strained” families here is still higher here than elsewhere. The implication for the local economy is that these families are more dependent upon child care and schools to allow them to work than their counterparts in the state and nation. Obviously, an important part of the response to the impact of COVID-19 is recognizing and understanding the barriers or complications preventing working parents from reentering the workforce. It is important to create workable scenarios helping family members out of their homes and back into the workforce especially after the disruptions of the pandemic.
Setting aside even the impact of COVID-19, workforce strained families with children can impose significant direct and indirect costs on a stable or growing economy. A “Washington State Childcare Study” by Brian Kennedy & Dr. Patrick Jones was conducted for the EWU Institute of Public Policy & Economic Analysis and subsequently referenced in the Washington State Department of Commerce publication “The Mounting Costs of Childcare.” The study found that Washington businesses expended $2.03 billion in employee compensation in direct turnover costs associated with childcare issues in 2017. The research team also estimated that workers arriving late or leaving early due to childcare issues posed a direct cost to businesses across the state of $53.4 million in 2017.
In addition to the direct costs, the study found that, on average, each turnover a business faces costs them on average 20.7% of the employee salary and indirectly due to lost productivity, training expenses, and costs associated with finding a new employee. This represents a firm taking about 2.5 months to get a new employee hired and up to productivity levels matching that of the prior worker.
Employee turnover, such as when parents have to quit or leave their employment due to child care issues such as absenteeism, arriving late or leaving early can be costly for the firms that have to recruit, replace and re-train new employee. Improving access to affordable child care is one way that communities could help mitigate those costs, help support working families, and thereby promote economic growth.