May 28, 2026: Finding a fix for Colorado's broken child care system

Summary

---

Podcast Summary: Colorado Matters (May 28, 2026)

Episode: Finding a fix for Colorado's broken child care system

Main Theme

This episode delves into the broken state of Colorado’s child care system, focusing on the struggles families and especially essential workers face in finding affordable, reliable care. Through personal stories and expert analysis, it explores systemic flaws in policy, economics, and history, and considers potential solutions for the future.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Daily Struggles of Essential Workers

(00:04 – 08:47)

• Profiled Family — The Ferraros: James (firefighter) and Chelsea (nurse) juggle demanding shifts with raising two young children, Isabella (3 months) and Presley (3 years), with no family nearby.
  • Chelsea Ferraro on Exhaustion:

    “I tell James it eats at me because I'm constantly figuring out who's going to care for the kids and it's exhausting.” (00:12, 02:22)

  • Challenges include shift overlaps, limited off-hour child care, and costly daycare.
• Child Care Availability:
  • In some Colorado counties (e.g. El Paso), three children compete for every licensed child care slot.
  • Only 8% of centers offer care outside standard hours, while over 40% of children have parents working nontraditional hours. (02:32)
• Workplace Camaraderie:
  • Firehouse staff swap stories and often trade shifts to help each other cover child care needs.
  • Brandon Wingeier (firefighter) on cost:

    “It takes a very strong family to be able to do this... We pay $1,500 a month for child care, but daycare wants Monday through Fridays.” (04:28, 04:53)

  • Flexible schedules are demanded, but care providers require standard commitments.
• Impact on Family Life:
  • Shift work causes James to sometimes go a full day without seeing his kids.
  • The couple pays for more daycare than needed due to inflexible provider policies.
  • James Ferraro on shift work’s toll:

    “Around bedtime, you think about the bedtime routine. Wishing you could help as much as you can, but you can't do nothing cause you're here." (07:36)

2. Systemic Flaws in Child Care

(09:37 – 14:29)

• Elliott Haspel (Child Care Author & Expert):
  • Flawed Business Model:

    “We treat childcare much more like a private service... than as an essential piece of our social infrastructure, like schools or libraries or fire departments.” (09:51, also 00:35 in intro)

  • Childcare is “pay to play”—fees are out of reach for many, yet too low for providers to pay staff a living wage.
• Access for Low-Income Families:
  • Colorado’s CCAP (Child Care Assistance Program) is underfunded and overburdened. Waitlists and “freezes” in Denver, Boulder, and other counties bar new applicants, leaving more families without access. (10:29)
• Paradox of Supply & Demand:
  • Despite long waitlists, some providers have open slots due to two main reasons:
    1. Lack of families who can afford the high costs, especially in low-income neighborhoods and with CCAP freezes.
    2. Staffing shortages mean classrooms sit unused simply for lack of qualified teachers, as low pay can't compete with other industries (e.g. retail, fast food).
       Haspel:

    “You can only have one adult caring for four infants... If you don’t have enough staff, you cannot operate a classroom legally.” (13:05)

3. Regional Variations & Informal Care

(14:29 – 16:18)

• Suburban vs. Rural:
  • Suburban programs serving affluent families are more stable than those with mixed or lower-income clients.
  • Rural areas are “licensed child care deserts”; informal care by relatives and neighbors is vital, but economic pressures (fixed incomes, rising costs) mean even this is less available.
  • Haspel’s note on “child care deserts”:

    “Someone's caring for toddlers—aren't wandering around... It's where family caregivers, the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles...” (15:02)

4. Economic Realities & Market Failure

(17:07 – 19:45)

• Child Care Doesn’t Fit Market Logic:
  • The real cost is too high for most families, but provider fees barely cover costs without delivering living wages or benefits for workers.
  • Haspel quoting Janet Yellen:

    “Childcare [is] a classic example of a failed market. It doesn’t follow the normal rules of supply and demand...” (17:23)

  • Colorado spends $10–12k per public school student, but only about $1,000 per young child in care.
  • “The math doesn't work... No country has made it work without substantial investment from government.” (19:23)

5. The Role of Employers

(19:45 – 22:04)

• Employer-Sponsored Child Care:
  • Haspel advocates that businesses should push for public solutions, not operate their own care, drawing parallels to why employers don’t run elementary schools.
  • Quote:

    “The proper role of employers is to be advocating for public solutions...” (20:21)

  • On-site care can help, especially for parents with irregular hours (airports, hospitals), and is possible within a public system as in France.

6. Historical Roots of the Crisis

(22:58 – 28:23)

• Why No Universal Early Care:
  • Misunderstandings about child development led to a delay in recognizing the importance of care before age five.
  • U.S. mimicked European systems, which mostly started formal education at age five or six, not younger.
  • Early child care was historically stigmatized as charity for destitute, single mothers; nursery schools for the middle-class were intentionally set apart from “day nurseries” for the poor.
  • Haspel on gender, race, and class:

    “Which mothers did society want to be at home raising the kids? ...There is a racial component to this as well, and a class component.” (26:51)

• World War II — A Model for Public Child Care:
  • The Lanham Act funded high-quality, often free or low-cost child care for factory workers, proving what’s possible with public investment.

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• Chelsea Ferraro:

  “This is how people get divorced.” (03:14)
  — On the strain of alternating shifts and lack of family time.

• James Ferraro:

  “You get to see the raw emotion of your community.” (06:37)
  — On both the fulfillment and toll of his work as a firefighter.

• Elliott Haspel:

  “The math doesn't work. It will never work. No country has ever made it work without a substantial investment from government.” (19:23)

---

Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:04 – 08:47: A day in the life of the Ferraro family – balancing shift work with child care.
• 09:37 – 14:29: Interview with expert Elliott Haspel on systemic problems and the flawed business model.
• 14:29 – 16:18: Child care deserts, family and informal care, and regional variances.
• 17:07 – 19:45: Why child care cannot function as a normal market; analogy to public schools.
• 19:45 – 22:04: Employer roles and the example of Vermont’s payroll tax solution.
• 22:58 – 28:23: History of child care separation from K-12, impact of social norms, and example from World War II.

---

Conclusion

This episode paints a vivid picture of the personal and systemic challenges in Colorado's child care system — an essential service caught between underfunding, workforce shortages, and outdated public policy. It draws on the lived experiences of frontline families, the economic analysis of experts, and historical context to make a strong case for a publicly funded, comprehensive solution.

---

For Full Coverage: Visit CPR.org to explore the special “Raising Colorado” series.

Transcript

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

James is a firefighter and his wife Chelsea is a nurse. They have a good life, but they're trying to raise two young children without breaking the bank.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

I mean, I tell James it eats at me because I'm like constantly figuring out who's going to care for the kids and it's exhausting.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Few centers in Colorado offer off our care and some areas in the state have three children competing for one licensed. We get a handle on what's happening with our new series, Raising Colorado the Untold Story of a Broken Childcare System.

[Elliott Haspel]

The fundamental business model is flawed. We treat childcare much more like a private service, like a gym membership or a restaurant than we do with an essential piece of our social infrastructure, like schools or libraries or fire departments.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

This is Colorado Matters on CPR News and krcc. I'm Chandra Thomas Woodfield. Finding affordable childcare is a major challenge for most anyone, but it's an extra challenge for essential workers on 12 or 48 hour shifts. The system just isn't built for them. That's just one reason we've launched a new series, Raising Colorado the the Untold Story of a Broken Childcare System. It's led by CPR education reporter Jenny Brundeen. And today we're going to take a deeper dive into what's happening. Let's start with a visit to the home of firefighter James Ferraro and his wife Chelsea, a nurse. They're trying to balance work and two young kids with no family in town.

[Jenny Brundeen]

The 6am Quiet is cut by three month old Isabella. She's congested. But as James Ferraro removes his baseball cap to change her diaper, the baby beams back at him.

[James Ferraro]

She hates my hats, you know. She's a happy little baby even when she's sick.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Soon the rest of the house joins them. Three year old Presley comes downstairs with her mother, Chelsea. Chelsea heads straight for the gurgling coffee. She has one week of maternity leave left.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

So I told myself this is the morning I'm gonna whip it in shape.

[Jenny Brundeen]

But for a firefighter and a nurse, shaping a schedule is nearly impossible every day.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

I mean, I tell James it eats at me because I'm like constantly figuring out who's gonna care for the kids and it's exhausting. It's exhausting.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Chelsea's interviewing for a more flexible job than her previous 12 hour hospital shifts. Nationally, over 40% of children have parents working non traditional hours. Yet only 8% of centers offer off hour care. In El Paso county, three children compete for every licensed slot.

[Elliott Haspel]

I'll pick you up later.

[Firefighter Nate Smith]

Have fun.

[Jenny Brundeen]

After coffee, James drives Presley to a home daycare. Their quiet morning time together as the sun stretches across the mountains.

[Elliott Haspel]

Daddy, another pig. Another pig.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Presley goes two days a week. When Chelsea was at the hospital, the couple tried no childcare, switching off shifts, but they never saw each other.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

We were like, hey, this is not a long term thing. You know, this is how people get divorced.

[Jenny Brundeen]

James drops off his daughter. He won't see her for 24 hours.

[James Ferraro]

Thanks, Mo. Appreciate it. Of course.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

Ciao, Daddy.

[Elliott Haspel]

Make good choices.

[James Ferraro]

Ciao, ciao. Make good choices.

[Jenny Brundeen]

By 7:30, James is at fire station number nine. He's been a firefighter for six years.

[James Ferraro]

We check this every morning.

[Jenny Brundeen]

He checks the rig. Then he stirs eggs for a communal breakfast. As coffee mugs clink around the table, co workers swap stories about the same daily childcare scramble. Firefighter Nate Smith tells James about his child getting RSV.

[Firefighter Nate Smith]

It's like seesaw breathing. And he was breathing like 60 times a minute. Oh, man. So I took him to children's, and then it just kept progressing.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Smith's wife is a nurse, and they usually swap shifts. Luckily that day, grandparents were in town to help. Paramedic Ian Romero thinks their schedule makes it easier to be present for children 24 hours off.

[Firefighter Nate Smith]

It allows us to go to things

[Elliott Haspel]

like field trips and all that good stuff that not every other parent gets to go to.

[Jenny Brundeen]

But he has family in town. Firefighter Brandon Wingeier faces a different challenge.

[Firefighter Nate Smith]

It takes a very strong family to be able to do this. So I appreciate my wife immensely for everything she has to do just to make the household run. The hard part comes into play when your significant other is waiting on you to get off shift or something. And maybe you get a call, you get this or that, and now we're held over. So being flexible is a big thing.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Wingyer pays $1,500 a month for child

[Firefighter Nate Smith]

care, so it's hard to find a daycare that accepts our schedule because it's so flexible. They want Monday through Fridays. They want Tuesday, Thursday, or Monday.

[Jenny Brundeen]

The couple pays for a full week and eats the cost on Wingyer's day off. Still, James says co workers frequently trade shifts to support each other.

[James Ferraro]

Or if I have to ask, B shift, like, hey, I can't come in till 9 tomorrow. Can you hang out? My daughter's sick. We're trying to figure out this and that. They're usually good with it.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Then a call comes in. James grabs his gear, climbs into the driver's seat.

[Elliott Haspel]

See ya.

[Jenny Brundeen]

And Hits the siren. Meantime, Chelsea is at the pediatrician with Isabella.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

What brings her in today? She'll have like this like 10 minute spasm.

[Jenny Brundeen]

She could not manage this, she says, with her old 12 hour hospital shifts, nursing her first daughter was hard enough.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

Like I couldn't keep my supply up because you barely get breaks. So pumping was just like I pumped maybe once a shift was just horrible for your supply, you know.

[Jenny Brundeen]

She hopes a new job will offer her more room to breathe and and nurse the infant after a good checkup.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Hi, how are you?

[Jenny Brundeen]

Chelsea calls James.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

They said she sounds great. That those kind of random attacks should stop by Monday.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Back at the station, James shows off his locker between calls.

[James Ferraro]

I have a lot of my family photos right here. Yeah, that's at the sand dunes down.

[Jenny Brundeen]

James loves being a firefighter.

[James Ferraro]

It's the best job in the world.

[Jenny Brundeen]

While many calls involve minor mishaps, there's also trauma, suicides, car crashes, death. He relies on playing hockey and leans on his Catholic faith to cope. On his last rotation, a grandmother passed away.

[James Ferraro]

They saw us do our best work and even though it wasn't the best result, we felt their love and support. So I think that's part of the job that's special. You get to see the raw emotion of your community.

[Jenny Brundeen]

But the shift work takes a toll. Earlier this week, he had a 48 hour shift that gave him only a few hours of sleep.

[James Ferraro]

Definitely a little tart.

[Jenny Brundeen]

At least there's the bunkhouse.

[James Ferraro]

That's my bed where I sleep. That's my little cubicle and it's very dark. And then we blast fans so it's really loud. It's the best. I sleep like a baby when I get to sleep.

[Elliott Haspel]

Say hi, Mama. Hi.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Later in the afternoon, Chelsea picks up Presley from childcare.

[Elliott Haspel]

Bye, Mel.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

Have a great weekend.

[Jenny Brundeen]

At night, they connect with James through a screen. Chelsea makes dinner. Presley watches a Taylor Swift video and the dishes pile up in the sink. The baby is fussy. Bath time turns into tears for both children. Eventually, everyone settles down.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

Oh, attack of the dinosaur.

[James Ferraro]

Around bedtime, you think about the bedtime routine. Wishing you could help as much as you can, but you can't do nothing cause you're here. And then you just hope the girls sleep all night.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Oh my goodness.

[Elliott Haspel]

Good morning all stations. The time is now 7am we have a staffing need.

[Jenny Brundeen]

James heads home Saturday morning as Chelsea cooks sausages. Enzo's the first to greet him. Chelsea has devised a tool to track their energy levels, asking each other what percent they're at.

[James Ferraro]

I'll say 80.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

80.

[Jenny Brundeen]

She's a 40%.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

I think once I have coffee, I'll probably be at a 50.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Today is a sprint. There's a landscaper to see and a possible new babysitter for both kids.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

A lot of daycares don't take them till they're 18 months, but I found one that will take infants two months later.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Chelsea has a full time job as a nurse assessor. She's thrilled to make her own hours, but their childcare plan fell through for now. A friend watches Isabella twice a week while they wait for a longer term slot to open.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

You roll with the punches, but yeah, at the end of the day, you're a team and you get through it.

[Jenny Brundeen]

I'm Jenny Brundeen. CPR News.

[Chelsea Ferraro]

Cause you're getting bigger and you're gonna jump out of here at me.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

After the break, a closer look at the child care landscape in Colorado and why the wait list for childcare is ridiculously long. I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. You're with Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. Welcome back to Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. Today we're focusing on a special series, Raising Colorado the Untold Story of a Broken Childcare System. Our education reporter, Jenny Brundeen leads a team of CPR reporters exploring the realities that parents face. She also spoke with Elliott Haspel, who wrote raising a nation 10 reasons every American Has a Stake in Child Care.

[Jenny Brundeen]

For all I know, you study childcare throughout the nation, but since you live in Colorado, can you give me a sense of the landscape in childcare? What are we seeing right now? What does it look like?

[Elliott Haspel]

So childcare in Colorado and across the country has struggled for a really long time because the fundamental business model is flawed. We treat childcare much more like a private service, like a gym membership or a restaurant than we do an essential piece of our social infrastructure like schools or libraries or fire departments. And so we have this pay to play system, right? You have to have enough money to afford high fees, but that's actually not enough money in most cases for childcare programs to be able to pay their educators well, to be able to keep the lights on.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Okay, so that's the predicament of middle class families. What about lower income families?

[Elliott Haspel]

For lower income families, there's this Colorado Child Care Assistance Program, or ccap, and that is every state has a version of a federally funded subsidy program for lower income families. So that's always been the situation where there hasn't been enough money in the system, programs have struggled and pay their teachers well. Parents have struggled to afford the programs. However, what we've seen since the pandemic is these cracks are starting to become fissures. So we are seeing prices of childcare have been significantly outpacing inflation. And at the same time, Colorado's CCAP allocation is not enough to cover all eligible families. And it's never been enough to cover eligible families. But it's becoming so difficult for counties to enroll families that many of them, including big counties like Denver and Boulder, have instituted a CCAT freeze. So what that means is that they're not taking any new applications into their programs. And that's resulted in even fewer families getting access to the care they need.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Elliot, it seems like we're in this paradoxical situation right now. So the narrative has always been, oh, there's these shortages, these shortages, these shortages, nobody can find a childcare spot. But we're also in this mixed situation right now where some providers have openings but they can't fill them. Can you explain that?

[Elliott Haspel]

You're right to say it's a paradox. We have these two truths at the same time. One is that there's an enormous scarcity of childcare spaces and it's really hard for families to afford them. And on the other hand, there are actually a lot of programs that are under enrolled. And so why would a program be under enrolled? It's for one of two reasons. Either they can't find anyone, a paying customer essentially in their location. If you're in a lower income neighborhood, no one can afford to pay 10, 15 plus thousand dollars a year, which again, these program owners are not getting rich off of that. That's just what they be able to pay their teachers half decent wage and keep the lights on. And so no one can pay that unless they have C cap. And so if there's no C cap, then that program is going to sit with open slots because no one geographically wants that to send their kid there. And those who do want to send their kid there can't afford it. So that's one. The other issue that we're seeing is around staffing. So in childcare in Colorado and every other state, there are maximum child to adult ratios. You can only have one adult caring for four infants, one adult caring for.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Yeah. And these strict ratios are one of the factors that makes childcare so expensive.

[Elliott Haspel]

Yeah. And this is in place obviously because just from a health and safety perspective and a quality of early care and education perspective, when you have too many kids and one adult. It just becomes unreasonable and unsafe at a certain level. However, because of that, if you don't have enough staff, you cannot operate a classroom legally. And so we actually see programs that are saying, I have a wait list, would love to take families that are beating down my door for a spot. And I have a classroom that is sitting dark because I don't have a teacher who can actually be in that classroom and therefore serve children. And that again goes to the economics of childcare because in order to be competitive, that program would have to raise rates yet higher. It's worth noting childcare educators make a median wage around 14, $15 an hour, often no health insurance or other benefits. And so in an era When Target and Buc EE's, you know, are offering significantly better compensation packages, which I'm glad, I mean, they offer for the sake of those employees, it's become increasingly difficult for child care programs to be a competitive employer. And so the child care staffing shortages are a really significant issue that again, the market can't solve that. It's going to require public funding to solve that.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Can you give me an example of how shortages might vary across the state?

[Elliott Haspel]

The suburban childcare programs not doing great, but by and large are a lot more stable. So if you go and look at a program in Aurora or Cherry Creek or, you know, some of these places that are serving upper middle class families, they're having an easier time of it certainly than programs that are serving mixed income or programs that are serving more exclusively lower and moderate income.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Yeah. And if you look at a map, the childcare desert, it's pretty intense in rural areas.

[Elliott Haspel]

Yes, exactly. Rural areas. That's right. And so that's the, you know, and we should say too, this is, this is where I get into Lorena Garcia, you probably know, like the representative talks about how, you know, it's not so much childcare deserts as it's licensed childcare deserts because someone's caring for toddlers aren't wandering around the streets by themselves. But often that's where family members come in. It's where family childcare homes come in. And so that's a part of this too is we've been talking a, about child care centers, but it's also family child care homes are struggling. And in rural areas, family friend and neighbor caregivers, the grandparents, the aunts, the uncles, the neighbor down the street, because of the broader affordability challenges the state is facing and the country is facing, it's harder and harder for them to provide care as well. And so you might be a grandparent who's on a fixed income and you'd like to take care of your grandchild on a more regular, recurring basis. But actually you need to go work at Walmart as a greeter. You need to go work at the Dollar General. You need to supplement your fixed income because everything's getting more expensive and gas is getting more expensive and now you can't provide that care. So I think when we talk about the solutions, it's not just about these formal licensed child care centers. It's about the child care system writ large and the childcare options that families have.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Elliott Haspel is the Denver based author of raising a 10 reasons every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All. He's speaking with CPR education reporter Jenny Brundeen for our series Raising Colorado when we come back. Why don't the laws of supply and demand apply to childcare? And what if employers sponsored it? I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. You're with Colorado Matters on CPR News and krcc. This is Colorado Matters on CPR News and krcc. I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. Colorado's child care system is broken. That's why we've launched a new series called Raising Colorado led by CPR education reporter Jenny Brundeen. Let's get back to her conversation with Denver based childcare expert Elliott Haspel.

[Jenny Brundeen]

I want to touch on why child care is so expensive. So in a normal market, high demand and high prices would lead to more supply, but there's a limit to what parents can pay. Why doesn't child care function like a normal market?

[Elliott Haspel]

The former Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called childcare a classic example of a failed market. It doesn't follow the normal rules of supply and demand because the actual true cost of care is so high that the vast majority of potential customers can't bear it. And one way I like to give this example, right? So if you think about the public education system in Colorado, which is certainly underfunded, right? We're one of the lowest funded states in the country. But Colorado puts in 10 to $12,000 per every public school child. And that is what lets us have free public schools for everyone. It lets us, our teachers, at least get middle class salaries and health insurance and retirement, it's at least a marginally functional system. If you total up all the money that goes into early care and education in Colorado, you're talking about maybe $1,000 per kid at most. And so if you imagine how well, the Colorado public school systems would work if we took 10% of the amount of money we are currently spending in public dollars. It would break apart overnight. We would end up with teachers getting paid minimum wage. We would end up with having to charge parents fees to send their kids to school. There would be widespread closures. The system would fall apart. And that is the system we have for childcare in this state and in this country. So you have to ask yourself, okay, there's not enough money in the system. Where is the money coming from? There are only a couple of options. One is parents. Well, parents are already overburdened, so asking them to pay more isn't a valid option. You can ask the private sector, I suppose, but running healthcare through employers hasn't gone particularly well, nor is the private sector and employers in a position to put enough money into the system. Or you can look to the government, which is what we do for our schools again, for our libraries, for our fire departments, like all of these public services that wouldn't work as a market. We look to the public money to stand in the gap. And so, yes, that is the only way it works. The journalist Andy Lowry has a quote that I use a lot. She says the math doesn't work with regards to childcare. She says the math doesn't work. It will never work. No country has ever made it work without a substantial investment from government.

[Jenny Brundeen]

You mentioned employer sponsored child care. That hasn't worked so well. Why do you say that? There are several examples here in Colorado, spurred and assisted by the group epic executives Partnering to invest in children.

[Elliott Haspel]

And I should be glad, and I'm very friendly with epic. They do great work. So the question is, what's the proper role of employers in the child care system? Where I come down on is the proper role of employers is to be advocating for public solutions and to really be using their political muscle to get public money into the system. Again, we don't ask employers to provide an on site elementary school.

[James Ferraro]

Right.

[Elliott Haspel]

We don't ask them to provide a stipend for their employees to be able to send their kid to the fifth grade. That's just it reads as an absurd suggestion part because we say the role of corporations in our system is to pay taxes and then the government's gonna roll up those taxes and use it to create a system that works for the like. Can employers help? Absolutely. We've actually seen this in states like Vermont. In Vermont, they have the nation's first payroll tax that helps fund massive childcare expansion there. It's made it much more affordable. But you actually have businesses going to the Vermont legislature and saying in as many words, if you need to tax us, tax us. The benefit that we get from having a functional childcare system and us not having to worry about it, frankly, because our business is, you know, running a ski resort or running a factory or whatever it may be is much more worth it to us than the small amount that we're going to end up paying. Now, I should say a word here, which is on site childcare, the idea of there being, you know, you have a two year old and they're literally at a center that is at the same spot at your location can make a lot of sense. I mean, lots of parents want that. I think the planned, you know, idea of let's have a childcare program at the airport where parents are working very irregular hours makes all the sense in the world. In other countries like France, childcare that's based at an employment site is part of the publicly funded system. On site childcare and publicly funded childcare are not mutually exclusive. You can just wrap it into a publicly funded system. That's where I come down. I absolutely think employers have a role to play. I just think their proper role is in advocating for and helping to fund a public system.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Elliott Haspel is the author of raising a 10 reasons every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All. He's speaking with our education reporter Jenny Brundeen for our new series Raising Colorado. When we come back, how history has shaped childcare in our state. I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc. Chandra I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. Today we're highlighting a new series from CPR News called Raising the Untold Story of a Broken Childcare System, featuring the reporting of our education reporter Jenny Rendin, who's leading a team of reporters on this effort. Jenny also spoke with Elliott Haspel, the Denver based author of raising a 10 reasons every American Has a Stake in Child Care for All.

[Jenny Brundeen]

I want to go back into history a bit. Why has this country bifurcated K through 12 from preschool so it developed a public kindergarten through 12th grade free system? Why didn't it also include birth to 5 years old or even free universal preschool for 4 year olds?

[Elliott Haspel]

So there are a couple of answers to that. One has to do with misunderstandings of child development that go back through the beginning of the country until really 1920s, 1930s, young children were Thought of somewhere between half human, not fully developed creatures, or very little adults. This idea of very young children are learning from birth, babies who can't talk are actually gaining language skills. That was not widely understood until relatively recently. And even more so with the brain development revolution, once we started to get MRI machines, that was really 1980s, 1990s. There's a landmark report called Neurons to Neighborhoods that came out in 2000. That was the National Scientific Council basically saying for the first time, hey, look at these little kids brains. There actually really is a lot going on there. Rob Reiner, actually the late Rob Reiner, was really instrumental in helping teach the country about early childhood development from those that were zero to three. But again, that was the 1990s.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Okay, so part of it was child development. We just didn't understand that 90% of brain development goes on in a child's first five years.

[Elliott Haspel]

And then some of it was also this sense of we followed Europe in a lot of ways, right? And so Europe, you know, when Horace Mann went over to like learn from the Prussian education system, which became the basis for the US education system, they were starting right around age five. And so kindergarten came over and Frederick Foebel from Germany, again, this was sort of age five, age six, that was what they were doing in Europe.

[Jenny Brundeen]

And we follow Europe.

[Elliott Haspel]

That's part of it. Then there was this interesting moment as the nursery schools started coming over. This is Maria Montessori. Now we're into the 1910s, 1920s. And there was this interesting moment in American history where we, at that point, the idea of childcare was very low quality in the country. It was sort of seen as this very reluctant service that we provided to unfortunate families where usually a father had either abandoned the family or the father had died. And so you had either a very, very poor widowed woman. And so the idea had to work. And so there were these things called day nurseries and they were usually funded by charities and they were, I mean, we're talking like one woman, 40 kids. The only thing they were better than was the alternative, which was literally locking 2 year olds in apartments all day or bringing them to dangerous workplaces with the mother. So they were poorly regarded, no one liked them. And so there was this push when they started bringing in the nursery schools to cast that much more as early childhood education, as much more through universities. It was more for middle class clientele. And historians tell us it was a very intentional effort by the backers of, of nursery schools to distinguish them from the day nursery. So you had childcare on the One hand, which was this thing for poor people that no one liked. It was poorly regarded. And then you had nursery schools, which are the forerunners to preschool, which is sort of, this is educational, this is uplifting, this is supplementary. And we've really been living with that divergence, artificial as it is, for a very long time.

[Jenny Brundeen]

Yeah, I would also think. I think at the same time there was a predominant view that the best place for a child is at home with the mother to do the nurturing. I would think that would play into it as well.

[Elliott Haspel]

Yeah, no, the gender norms absolutely play into it. And I think we should also probably nuance that by saying which women or which mothers did society want to be at home raising the kids? Because some of the first non kin childcare providers in this country were enslaved black girls and women who were their own children were taken away in order for them to care for kids of their enslavers. Right. Immigrant women, you know, were often forced to work and no one really cared about that. So there is a racial component to this as well, and a class component. So I think that's just important. We talk about kind of the way gender norms played into this. Like they definitely matrix with class and race.

[Jenny Brundeen]

What happened in World War II when women worked at the factories? Did the nation set up a universal childcare system of sorts of.

[Elliott Haspel]

Yeah. So World War II, when all the men went off just to fight, obviously we needed more workers, particularly in the factories that are producing munitions, planes and ships. And so in a bill called the Lanham act, which was named after a congressman, Fritz Lanham, they tucked in a provision that did fund childcare centers at these locations. And they were really high quality. They were either very low cost or free for families. And they were really, really successful. And so this is sort of the Rosie the Reservator's kids were going to these childcare programs. And what happened is there's this wonderful example of again, when you put public funding into a system, you can compensate your teachers pretty well. It can be high quality.

[Chandra Thomas Whitfield]

Elliot Haspel is the author of raising a 10 reasons every American Has a Stake in Childcare for All. He spoke with my colleague, CPR education reporter Jenny Rendin, for our new series, Raising the Untold Story of a Broken Childcare System. You'll hear more stories in the weeks ahead and you may also Visit our website, cpr.org to read and listen to all the coverage. I'm Chandra Thomas Whitfield. This is Colorado Matters from CPR News and krcc.